Marnie Chesterton

We started with a shortage of a delicious kind of mango. And we've finished with some pretty strong global predictions for a super El Niño coming everyone's way. I'm going to ask you both to pick your top fact from the show. Sandy Ong in Singapore, top fact that you've taken from today. Oh gosh, it has to be that sea cucumbers expel their internal organs. Yes.

Michael Kaloki in Kenya, same to you. That was exactly what I was going to say, because that's super strange. Thank you both so much for joining me for some juicy chat. I'm Marni Chasterton, the producer was Sophie Ormiston with Lucy Davis, Alice Lipscomb-Southwell and Robby Wojciechowski. Join us next week for more Unexpected Elements. Bye!

This week I've been reading a very entertaining book by Mary Roach called Replaceable You. It's a whistle-stop tour through our attempts to enhance our bodies, usually because a bit of it has failed. Roach points to a pattern throughout history where first off the replacement is a separate thing, like a wig. Then comes complex ways of attaching that wig, then comes hair transplants and genetic tweaks to stop baldness are currently in the pipeline.

Joten yksityinen, integroitu ja lopulta saa elämään itsenäisen version. Ja nämä tehtävät tehtävät ovat mielenkiintoisia. Aloitettavasti suurimmat tieteelliset tehtävät kasvavat tehtävät ja tekevät taas implanteja, joita on tehty, ja tekevät tehtävät ja tekevät tehtävät ja tekevät tehtävät.

Yes, before false teeth. If you had bad teeth and money, you could get a gadget like several pairs of scissors glued together that would pre-chew your food for you. A gentle reminder that millions of years of evolution have already designed some great implements for your mouth and all you need to do is clean them regularly. I'm Marni Chasterton from the BBC World Service. This is Unexpected Elements.

So welcome to this science forum slash tea party where a couple of science journalists from different countries sit around a theoretical round table and chat. So let's meet them. Katie Silver from, I don't know Katie, Mexico, Australia, Singapore. You're currently kind of geographically just around the corner from me in North England, right?

That's right. Hi, Marni. And I know we normally try and say hello with a local greeting, which AI tells me is, you're right. That's my North England attempt at a local greeting. You're right. You can probably do it better than I can.

And in Bucharest, Romania, it's Andrada Fiskatan. Hello, hello. Hi Mani, happy to be here. This is a science show that takes its inspiration from events in the news. And what we do is we take a headline that appeals to our scientific sensibilities and we use that as our touch paper to explain.

Explode a load of vaguely related science facts into your ears and we'll all bring stories, we'll hear from listeners, we might chuck in some choice archive audio and we're definitely going to have a well-informed guest dropping by for a chat. But what is the news that's going to start all of this off? Well, take a listen to this.

Yli 1 miljoonan dollarista on valmisteltu jokaiselle maailman rekordille. Olin uskonut, että tämä valmistelu voisi välttämättä välttämättä välttämättä välttämättä välttämättä. Olen todella ylpeä. Olen todella ylpeä ottaa asioita. Yli 1 miljoonan dollari on valmisteltu jokaiselle maailman rekordille. Olen todella ylpeä ottaa asioita.

Yes, it is the inaugural Enhanced Games this week. Not the two weeks that you get with the Olympics. This is a three-day sporting event, also dubbed the Steroid Olympics, where athletes are allowed to take the sort of performance-enhancing drugs that might get you banned from the regular sporting versions of competitions.

Taking place in Las Vegas, this event has been billed as the next frontier in human performance by organisers and grotesque by critics. Now, that's our starting point. Katie, where do you want to take us from here? Well, Marni, if you've spent any time on TikTok, you've probably heard of peptides. Take a listen.

I had to jump on the train, and yes, I am now on my peptide journey. This is my nightly peptide routine. I used to think peptides are cheating. Now I think they're the future. So basically, they're all over social media, and interestingly, since I've started researching this topic, they're all over my algorithm as well. I can't see anything but peptides. But basically, influencers and athletes are claiming that they help with a host of things, like recovering from injuries, losing weight, or even slowing down aging. It's basically another form of enhancement in a way.

Okei, niin olen kuullut peptiideja. En ole todella liittynyt siihen, mitä he tekevät. En ole varma, onko minun pitävä rauhoittaa heidät, syödä heidät tai tuottaa heidät. Kati, takaisin periaatteisiin. Mitä ovat peptiideja? Ne ovat lyhytlaatuisia aminoasioita, ja monet tapahtuvat luonnollisesti terveellä. Kuten insulinin, joka tietenkin säästää syödäntöä. Ne auttavat paljon asioista, kuten syödäntöä, vettä ja käsittelyä. Ne voidaan myös usein luoda, kun syödään proteiiniin ja se on käsitellyt.

but now there are these synthetic versions of peptides. So some of them are legal, highly regulated, think Wegovi for example, the weight loss drug that mimics the GLP-1 hormone, or Munjaro, which is of course another weight loss drug that mimics both GLP-1 and GIP hormones.

Okei, niin nämä peptidiitit ovat, joo, löytyneet elämässä, myös jotkut niistä ovat asioita, drogeja, joita ihmiset ovat hyvin ymmärrettyjä. Mitä se on peptidiitit, joita näemme ihmisten injectoimaan itseään nyt? Onko nämä myös säädettäviä ja turvallisia?

Joten siinä on ongelma. Ne ovat paljon vähemmän säädettäviä. Noin 15 vuotta sitten ne olivat suurin piirtein ympäristöjä, jotka otivat näitä syntetisiä peptiideja. Ne suunnittelivat, että ne stimuloivat muskulaisen kasvun, ruokapainon ja vahvistivat negatiivisia vaikutuksia tai rikkoja, jotka olisivat tullut ulos steroidista.

But now there are a host of other ones on the market, and they've been made very popular by people, celebrities like Joe Rogan. So one, for example, is nicknamed the Wolverine Stack. It's a combination actually of a few peptides, and allegedly it helps with recovering from injury, and others say that it helps stop aging, and others that they build muscle. Lots of advice online about how to get them, and generally it does seem that people are injecting them in terms of how they administer them.

Is there any evidence these peptides are actually doing anything? So according to academics, there's not much evidence. There was a study published earlier this year in the Journal of Sports Medicine, and it looked at a specific peptide, that's BPC157, which is sold or marketed as a way of improving musculoskeletal repair. Now there was evidence in animal trials that it does repair tendons and muscles, but these findings haven't been proven in human trials, and they've also looked, for example, at TB4,

and another synthetic peptide TB500. And they found that there are certain benefits in cell and animal studies, but nothing yet in humans. And it's hard because without this kind of evidence and study, those who are trying to self-administer don't know how to dose, when to dose, when they should stop dosing, all of these sorts of things.