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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Tell Congress, stop the Durbin Marshall money grab for corporate megastores. Paid for by the Electronic Payments Coalition. Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, May 31st. I'm Alex Ocele for The Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news.
On the show this week, we're talking about peptides, the drugs that have taken social media by storm for people who say they help them look and feel better.
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.
But taking the drugs comes with more risks than some users may have bargained for. Peptides are having a moment. If you spent time online, you've probably seen posts from users who say the drugs can do everything from improve their skin to helping them get better sleep to simply just feeling good in their bodies.
Hey, so I take peptides and I have since November and I have four kids. I have never been this confident, felt this good, looked this good. Not since I was at least 19 years old. Let's go over GHKCU, otherwise known as the pretty boy peptide. This is known to give you the glass skin effect that everybody's been talking about.
For the top five peptides, I'd recommend to get jacked and shredded before summer and flex on your ex respectfully.
But it's not just influencers who are into peptides. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also touted their use and vowed to make them more accessible. Here he is on Joe Rogan's podcast earlier this year.
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Chapter 2: What are peptides and why are they trending?
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.
So when someone on social media is talking about all their peptides and their peptide stack, do they mean something different?
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.
Right. And just to clarify what unapproved means, there's off-label use for many drugs, and then there's using a straight-up illegal drug, and there's a lot of stuff in between. Where does this fall?
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. Now, under the Trump administration, they have moved a lot of these peptides into this regulatory limbo area where they may soon become available for compounders to create again.
There will be a hearing in July where they'll discuss the status of a number of these peptides And many are hoping that this will become the beginning of making these widely available through compounding pharmacies again, which people see as safer because these are drugs that you're injecting into your body. So they need to be sterile and the ingredients need to be known and vouched for.
Who is primarily buying these drugs and who's selling them?
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Chapter 3: What benefits do users claim peptides provide?
online sellers. They're buying them from various websites that they're finding on places like Reddit or TikTok, and they're being sold largely and labeled as for research use only, which is a legal loophole that sellers are using because they're They very well know that these are not approved drugs and that you cannot sell a drug without a prescription from a doctor on the internet.
But because of the way that everybody else is buying them and talking about them, people know that this is how you get the peptide. They would be perhaps safer if they're produced from compounding pharmacies, although we still don't have the answers to the safety effectiveness questions.
How much does it typically cost to buy these drugs off social media?
Yeah, it can cost anywhere from like tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars per vial of peptide. And then some of them are sold individually. And then there's also like peptide stacks, which is maybe a combination of three different peptides that is sold as things like a Glow stack and Wolverine stack to kind of like brand them in an appealing way.
And those might carry a higher price tag because they have multiple ones within a vial.
Coming up, the risks that unapproved peptides bring and where they go from here. That's after the break.
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I know that you said that the FDA hasn't approved these drugs for some of the things that people are taking them for. But that doesn't mean they don't do that. Do we actually know that any of these peptides as ingredients do some of the things that are promised?
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Chapter 4: What are the risks associated with using unapproved peptides?
Will that take away the gray market research use only peptide marketplace? Even if some of these peptides would become more widely available, does that answer the questions around safety and effectiveness and all that? Whether there will be more data presented to prove that case?
That was journal reporter Sarah O'Brien. Thanks, Sarah.
Thank you.
And that's it for What's New Sunday for May 31st. Today's show was produced by Danny Lewis with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Alex Osola, and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show. Until then, thanks for listening.
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