Wendy Zuckerman

Yes, lead.

And then people would be injecting it into themselves.

Not great.

Now, this is, of course, just Drub's experience.

Maybe he got unlucky.

We don't have studies analysing what's contained in the peptides that people are buying online.

Researchers are on the case, though.

But what we do have are studies on a similar illicit market, anabolic steroids.

One Australian study of more than 100 samples found that 22%, so one in five, were mislabeled.

And they could also be contaminated with heavy metals, from lead to arsenic.

I asked Dhruv what the lab he tested his peptides at was seeing.

Broadly, what did they tell you about how many of the peptide samples that they test have issues with them?

It's just like a box of chocolates.

Basically, in this unregulated market, these peptides are coming from factories where the quality control is not up to snuff.

Now, this may change in the US soon.

The FDA is meeting in July to talk about letting compounding US pharmacies make a handful of peptides, including MOTC and BPC-157, and then sell them directly to the public.

Of course, that's not going to make them effective, just less likely to have lead in them.

But there is one more risk that we need to talk about, and that is around cancer.

Like I mentioned, some peptides are supposed to work by encouraging blood vessels to grow.

And this, in theory, could increase your risk of cancer because giving cancer cells a blood supply gives them the nutrients to survive and spread.