Wendy Zuckerman

Are there any downsides?

Well, if you try this, you will be injecting yourself.

So you need to be careful because you could get a nasty infection.

And there is the odd case report of bodybuilders using unclean needles to inject steroids and then getting infected with hepatitis C or HIV.

And on Reddit, you will see people injecting themselves with peptides and then some body parts swelling up like mad and needing antibiotics.

Also, if you're giving yourself repeated injections, you need to worry about lipohypertrophy, which is a buildup of fatty, rubbery lumps under the skin.

Away from the needles, another issue is, how do you know what's in the vial?

Right now, in the US, you can't buy a lot of these peptides at a pharmacy.

You get them online, right?

And Dr. Javkula, the physician at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, recently bought some peptides to find out exactly what was in them.

It was for an article that he wrote for The New Yorker.

Oddly, just as an aside, on one of the websites, they gave him a little bonus.

No matter, within a week, the peptides started arriving.

What did it look like when it arrived?

All right.

He took these peptides into a lab that tested what was inside.

And the results found that one of the vials had the right peptide at the right dose.

Another vial contained endotoxins, which are bits of bacteria, possibly from contaminated water in the manufacturing process.

Another vial had less than half the advertised dose.

And?