Sara Ashley O'Brien

It's the sort of promise that people always want, like you want to not get the sun exposure, but you want to look tan and glowing.

Peptides are short chains of amino acids.

They act as signaling messengers that help your body regulate different functions.

They might work in one part of the body and they signal things to other parts of the body as well.

Insulin is a peptide.

So insulin helps your body turn food into energy and manages your blood sugar levels.

Now, if the body doesn't make insulin, that's where a synthetic insulin injection would come into play.

GLP-1 is the next sort of obvious one.

Now, GLP-1 is a peptide that exists in their body.

It's also the basis for pharmaceutical drugs like Ozempic.

And what it does, it sort of triggers the feelings in your body of being full, and it shuts down your hunger signals.

A synthetic GLP-1 drug like Ozempic is engineered to basically last a lot longer than the natural GLP-1 does that exists in people's bodies today.

So that's why people tend to eat less and they tend to stay full for longer when they are taking Ozempic or one of the GLP-1 drugs.

The term is very broad, as you've kind of alluded to.

People are injecting peptides that they say are for everything from like muscle recovery to hair growth to making their skin glow, a lot of physical but also aesthetic benefits.

But the ones that people are often talking about on places like TikTok and Instagram that they're injecting at home are

unapproved drugs.

So a lot of them are based on anecdotal evidence, but they have not gone through the same lengthy approvals that a drug like Ozempic has to go through, like the clinical trials and all of that to prove the safety effectiveness and the manufacturing process for the drug.

In 2023, under the Biden-era FDA, a number of these peptides were banned.

Compounding pharmacies were no longer able to legally make these peptides, and that sort of created this gray market online.