Today's Flex Diet Podcast Episode is a re-broadcast of a great conversation I had with Dr. Ryan Greene and Dr. Andy Galpin about peptides for performance and recovery, who can use them, how they're regulated, and more. Check it out! Sponsors: Tecton Life Ketone drink! https://tectonlife.com/ DRMIKE to save 20% Dr. Mike's Fitness Insider Newsletter: Sign up for free at https://miketnelson.com/.
Today's Flex Diet Podcast Episode is a re-broadcast of a great conversation I had with Dr. Ryan Greene and Dr. Andy Galpin about peptides for performance and recovery, who can use them, how they're regulated, and more. Check it out!
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Dr. Greene is D.O. (an osteopathic physician) specializing in human performance, sports medicine, nutrition, and cutting-edge recovery methods. Dr. Greene’s principal belief is that integrating a constantly collaborative, holistic, evidence-based practice amongst health and wellness practitioners is crucial for an individual’s sustained success.
Dr. Greene is the principal medical advisor at Monarch Athletic Club in West Hollywood, the first private, sustainable health and wellness facility delivering traditional training services combined with physician-directed, evidence-based integrative medical intervention. Check them out at https://www.instagram.com/monarchclubs.
Dr. Andy Galpin is a Professor of Kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton, and one of the foremost experts in muscle physiology- how do you increase strength, hypertrophy, and endurance performance. He has published numerous studies and works with several elite-level athletes across many sports, from UFC fighters to Olympic weight lifters. Check out all of his info below. http://www.andygalpin.com/
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[00:00:00] Speaker: Welcome back to the Flex Diet podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to improve body composition, add strength and performance, to more muscle, and do all of it in a flexible framework without destroying your health in the process. Today, I have a rebroadcast of a little bit older episode that I wanted to run again about peptides.
We got a ton of new listeners, which is super awesome. And peptides are one of those things that keep coming up in the media. And I still get a fair amount of questions on them. So I wanted to make sure everyone had the opportunity to listen to this podcast here about peptides. On the bleeding edge of performance with my buddy, Dr.
Andy Galpin and Dr. Ryan Green. Even though this is a little bit older episode, it, all the basic concepts and the background and everything else is still as valid now as what it was when the podcast came out. By my little tracking thing here, this was the. So far to date, the second most popular podcast I ever did.
So since we have a lot of new listeners, I wanted to make sure they also saw this one and decided to do this as a rebroadcast of this episode. So if you want to learn about peptides, what they are all that kind of stuff, check out this podcast here. My good friends, Dr. Andy Gelpin and Dr. Ryan green.
Enjoy the show.
[00:01:42] Speaker 2: Hey there, what's going on? It's Dr. Mike T. Nelson here, and I'm actually recording this little intro from a hotel just outside of Spokane, Washington. I'm getting in my car, the rented vehicle here, and driving out to the mountains of Idaho in just a couple hours to help out with the Special Forces experience.
I'm one of their helpers there with the process, which is an eight day A high stress event for all the candidates coming in. They spent about nine months preparing for it. And the goal is to stress them out in a very intelligent and progressive manner to facilitate post traumatic growth. And I'll have a full update probably later once I get back, but the reason I wanted to get this audio intro out to you is I did an amazing podcast coming up here with Dr.
Ryan Green and my good buddy, Dr. Andy Galpin. Andy was on a very early podcast quite some time ago now. And I heard Dr. Ryan Green on the great Barbell Shrugged show, which I've been on a few times. Shout out to my good buddies there, Doug and Anders. If you haven't checked out their show, highly recommend it.
And it was great. I've at a periphery followed some stuff in the peptide space, but I haven't taken any real deep dive into it at all. I was unimpressed by most of the information and the so called experts I saw online. But once I heard the episode, I reached out to Andy and said, Hey, if you and Dr.
Ryan Green want to ever do a super deep dive into. Peptides, let me know. You have an open invite to come on the show whenever you want. And both of them said, yes, they would love to do that. So I'm super stoked to have them here. And if you have no idea what a peptide is or a hormone or SARM or any, anything of these weird technical terms, that's okay.
We had Dr. Ryan break down the difference between them, what are peptides, which are these kind of, small molecules you can potentially use for health, longevity maybe some muscle gain, faster recovery. We go into all of the pros and the cons of it. What do you need to do beforehand?
Newsflash peptides won't solve all your issues, but in some cases they can be very effective. We also talked about who can use them. Are they regulated? What is the status of that? How does this fall in terms of drug tested athletes, and much more. Enjoy this episode of the Flex Diet Podcast, and this one is brought to you by Physiologic Flexibility.
One of the things I did with the PhysFlex cert. Which actually, by the time you're listening to this, just closed yesterday, but you can still get on the wait list for next time, is setting up ways to precondition or apply a small amount of stress to your body. And this will hopefully add more robustness to you and increase your chance of post traumatic growth instead of maybe PTSD or other negative things when you encounter a future high stressor event. So I'll have more experience with that coming up very soon afterwards, but you can go to physiologicflexibility. com for all of the information there. Any questions, you can drop me an email. I will get back to them as soon as I am back in communication to the land of the internet again. So enjoy this podcast here with Dr.
Ryan Green and Dr. Andy Galpin, all about the world of peptides. Hey, welcome back to the Flex A Diet podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. And today we've got two special people on the program. We've got Dr. Ryan Green and we've also got good buddy, Dr. Andy Galpin. And today we're going to be talking all about peptides.
And if you don't know what peptides are, then perfect. If you do know what they are, I think you'll probably learn some new stuff in this episode. Dr. Ryan, do you want to start it off with just a little bit of your background and how you ended up doing peptide stuff?
[00:06:22] Speaker 3: Yeah. Originally trained in the ortho sports space thinking surgery was going to be my future working with athletes quickly appreciated my time and effort in the hospital system would be working with people that missed many opportunities to find, optimal health and avoid surgery.
And. Looking at what my quality of life would be like and the ability I would have to impact patients for a long period of time, I decided my road needed to move more towards the preventive space. And so I took a detour at the Mayo Clinic for a fellowship looking at clinical research and contributing to that sector.
And I enjoyed it, but I realized, not working with patients. Was something that was not what I wanted to make my practice long term. So did an extra fellowship in what's called integrative medicine through the university of Arizona with Dr. Andrew Weil and rounded out my scope from the complimentary alternative nutrition and preventive space.
And in that period of time, I came up with the idea. With some partners for what is now my startup in Los Angeles called Monarch Athletic Club, which is a one stop shop, comprehensive wellness offering. So every member gets preventive medicine, nutrition physical therapy, and strength and conditioning to create a lifestyle modification program.
That can be tracked in real time, modified and is ultimately significantly less costly than if you tried to do all those things independently, and you can also leverage the traditional insurance system. So I'm taking a little bit of everything that I learned and I just pulled it all into one spot so we can create.
An opportunity for people to literally just show up. And as long as they do that, they should achieve reasonable health promotion and during that period of time, just working with my cohort of people in Los Angeles, anti aging longevity is a huge topic of conversation and people kept talking about peptides, growth hormone optimization.
So I started to look into it a little bit further and I to introduce things that help the body. Do what it's already doing versus supplementing or replacing. And that's where peptides became a large area of emphasis for me, just because we're using what the body already produces and supplying it when needed to help just optimize our physiologic function versus introducing things that are masking some of our less.
Efficient health behavior. So that's what brought me to this space and uh, I'm happy to discuss and teach and educate more about it.
[00:08:54] Speaker 2: Thank you. And tell you a little bit about yourself there, Dr. Andy Galpin from California.
[00:09:00] Speaker 4: Think I've, uh, I've been on this program before.
[00:09:03] Speaker 2: Yes, you have. That's right.
A
[00:09:06] Speaker 4: few times. So I'm a full professor and scientist at Cal State Fullerton in the areas of human performance. And, I've been out here for a decade or so. So I run the center and we, perform research in any area that we feel like could potentially, benefit from it. Aid in human performance.
So this is classic exercise physiology stuff to even some slightly cuckoo stuff, like breathing, what we thought was cuckoo at the time, but that's not so much cuckoo,
[00:09:33] Speaker 2: you mean it's essential and important. What are you talking about? How crazy is that?
[00:09:38] Speaker 4: Turns out to a lot of different areas. And then I also work directly.
With a lot of professional athletes across a lot of sports in a combination of roles, everything from strength and conditioning coach to kind of director of high performance consultant sort of thing to nutrition, blood analysis, interpretation, et cetera, all over the place. Say a number of years back, I don't know how many years back Ryan and I crossed paths through a very good mutual friend. I can't remember that dirtbag's name, so I'll just leave it out, but anyways. It's not important. Not important, not important. Who was part of helping Ryan get going with his stuff. And so basically Gabe said, you got to meet this guy. And I didn't think Gabe says 10, I think is complete garbage.
But I reluctantly met Ryan and found out, actually, Gabe wasn't totally wrong about this one. So I've been fortunate enough to to work with Ryan together with athletes in a few different scenarios. And so, recently I was like, man, tell him some colleagues of mine, like you got to get sky your podcasts, those really good stuff.
And he's a really smart guy. And so we did that. And then you listen to that podcast, Mike, and you hit me up and you're like, you got to get them on here. I said, all right, we'll do that. So that's the background of me as well as why we're both on your show today.
[00:10:46] Speaker 2: Excellent. Yeah. And if people want a little bit more background, they can listen to the barbell shrugged episode, but Dr.
Ryan was on that's originally where I heard about them and was like, wow, this is cool because I'm pretty much a walking idiot in terms of peptides. I don't know much of anything. So this is. Perfect to answer some questions and it's anything I think that's on quote the bleeding edge is always Interesting, but at the same time you're always trying to balance like what data do we have?
Is it efficacious versus you know What is all the hype and everything around it because everyone's always looking for The next shiny new object. And yeah, a lot of times there isn't anything really new, but sometimes there is stuff that does actually work. So you can't really just throw it all out and go, Oh, it's all garbage.
It's no, there's some stuff that actually works. It's how you sift through all of it to figure out what is potentially efficacious and what of it is just bunk and trash and don't waste your time on. And it's this podcast. So Dr. Ryan, how would you describe for people listening? What is a peptide?
And the follow up question is. The difference between a hormone, a SARM and a peptide. Cause I, I think a lot of people mix those three terms up and use them unfortunately interchangeably. And they're all different categories.
[00:12:01] Speaker 3: Yeah. Peptides to answer your first question, we've been using them for a long time, 50, 60 years, insulin's a peptide.
Dr. Galpin heard me talk about this before it's we've used this science for a long period of time, but it was for more. Acute life threatening health conditions such as diabetes. Since then, the discovery of more peptides specifically for human performance, longevity, anti aging, inflammation, tissue recovery have been discovered, synthesized, and intermittently have become available for use and now more regularly in the U.
S. Peptides for the most part are secreted gods, meaning they're being introduced to stimulate the body to produce something that will allow us to heal tissue, reduce inflammation, recover from, movement things like that. Basically help us build resilience against stress and things that can contribute to the aging process.
So some peptides can be hormones, but most are like pro hormones. They're stimulating the body to produce. Which is different than if someone was prescribed HGH, which is very common in L. A., which is a synthetic non bioidentical compound that is similar enough to bind to. and contribute to growth. But it's not with it not being bioidentical.
Essentially, if you're taking it to help with muscle recovery or weight loss, for whatever reason you have heart inflammation or you have some sort of tumor growth somewhere that you may not even know is present, the body's going to take that compound and use it wherever it needs to be used. You don't get to direct where it's going to go.
And that's where the potential risk for adverse effects, which is commonly seen with growth hormone can be problematic. The other thing that peptides traditionally are different than in terms of hormones is there's really no negative feedback loop. So for instance, testosterone is the most commonly prescribed hormone.
If you're taking it, the body knows that you're getting testosterone, so it decreases its own natural production. Which if you need testosterone or you're not producing it, you have Kalman syndrome, something like that. Then it's reasonable to continue to take for the rest of your life. If you're just using it for anti aging longevity, potentially some sort of tissue healing issue, typically you can't stay on, or you shouldn't stay on testosterone for a long period of time, which then requires when you're completed with your course, you need to essentially reinitiate your own physiologic mechanisms to start producing your testosterone again.
And a lot of people don't know that they're not monitored well, or they're going to clinics that are. Not overseeing their patients as well as they probably should. So people get meds, they take them and then they just stop and they wonder why they feel like garbage, especially when they're not on the hormone.
And while it's because you basically told your body for the last three, six or however long, you don't need to do this anymore. So your machinery, the factory shut down and it takes a while to reengage those components if they come back at all. Usually they will, but sometimes, it may take a long time.
So peptides. Bioidentical stimulate the body to do certain things that will help with recovery or a multitude of things. Of positive physiologic outcomes. If they're not going to be used because they're made up of strings of amino acids, the body can break them down and use them for other things.
So the potential adverse effect and risk profile significantly lower than if you were to use a synthetic. Growth hormone or something like that. And again, there's no negative feedback inhibition for the most part with many of these peptides in terms of SARMs. Those are essentially just molecules that bind to receptors that either are agonists or antagonists, basically making something happen or not happen, depending on what you're trying to achieve, whether it's, stimulating muscle recovery or stimulating a testosterone effect or preventing the breakdown of testosterone, whatever that's doing.
They're all similar, but there is a difference in terms of all three. And I think peptides in terms of longevity, safety, efficacy I like to think that they are one of the healthier things that you can introduce to help optimize human performance. With a fairly low risk. And also from a cost standpoint, they tend to be significantly less in terms of overall costs, very rarely or anything in those realms that we talked about, hormones, peptides, or SARMs, are they covered by insurance?
So the other thing people have to think about is if you're going to do this. Are you going to be able to do it effectively for the treatment course that's required and are you going to be able to afford it, which sometimes people can't and then they, it's you're doing half of a treatment protocol, which isn't going to elicit the outcome you want and may actually introduce a little bit of risk.
That's peptides from a macro level and their difference between those other. Those other components you mentioned.
[00:16:55] Speaker 2: And they've been around for quite a while, but is one of the reasons we haven't heard a lot about them, because from what I, my understanding is that they're not necessarily patentable pharmaceutical compounds, so they exist in this limbo land of, it might be efficacious who's gonna pay for the research to look at it because if I'm a big pharmaceutical company, I can't patent it, so there's not a lot of.
Incentive to run a whole bunch of trials on it. Because at the end of the day, we all know someone's got to pay for that. And if they're paying for it, unless it's just NIH funding or something else, then they want a return on their investment then.
[00:17:35] Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly correct. So it's essentially like something that goes straight generic and from the pharmaceutical standpoint and.
The goal of a pharmaceutical company is to make as much money as you can while you have the patent on it for its proprietary value. And then, inevitably it's going to go generic. So because it's bio identical, because it's something your body already produces, it cannot be patented.
Thus, The research, at least in the U. S. To demonstrate efficacy as rigorous as we would do with randomized control trials for other medications or phase one, two or three studies. I don't know if they'll ever be done. Maybe someday, but for the most part, we're essentially amalgamating case reports, retrospective analyses, things like that, that smaller entities are doing independently.
And then we'll may do meta analyses here and there to pull as many studies as we can together and try to make a determination of are these things efficacious or not. And for the most part we're seeing a shift in, at least in the medical side with plastic surgeons, orthopedic surgeons who are acknowledging their efficacy.
And some independent practitioners are starting to recommend utilization of peptides postoperatively because they're seeing benefit in terms of tissue healing, recovery, time, recovery, efficacy, their outcomes are getting better. People are able to return to a similar level of performance as pre-injury versus in, in many cases you may only get 80 or 90% back to where you were after an injury and a surgical intervention.
So it's it's one of those things where it's gonna be a little bit of a grassroots campaign to get people to better understand what we're doing. But literature and, academic and clinical study is going to be necessary and it's just gonna be smaller. In size and scope. But with the work of you and Dr Galpin trying to increase awareness, I think people will then have the opportunity to evaluate or at least seek some sort of clinical guidance in terms of could this help me?
And the next part from my end is educating other practitioners in terms of what should be used. When should it be used? Why should it be used? And then how can it be used effectively? Yeah, it's not gonna be as robust a roll out as Viagra because we don't have the funding that those entities do, but we're moving in the right direction.
[00:19:47] Speaker 2: So I'm not going to see peptides being advertised during the next NFL season. Definitely,
[00:19:52] Speaker 3: definitely not in pro sports, one, it's a good point because we're seeing this movement. In social media, where essentially like it's not illegal to seek teleconsult and if someone says, Hey, C. J.
C. Hippomoreland would be great for recovery for you like you may never meet a practitioner, but all of a sudden, it ends up at your doorstep. Are you doing it appropriately? Are you doing it for long enough? Is anyone following you and guiding you to make sure like it's working? Probably not. And they don't have to, and it's, we're seeing that in erectile dysfunction.
We're seeing that in the hormone therapy. And I'm, it's a little bit off putting because I think we're creating a narrative for a lot of people that certain, these things may not be as effective as they could be because they're not set up for success. They're just like, oh. I have low energy.
I think I might need testosterone. And then I got this online prescription and it showed up at my door. So that's where it could go. I hope it doesn't. But it's not impossible. So hopefully we can generate more awareness, education, and understanding before businesses recognize the opportunity for profitability.
[00:21:00] Speaker 2: Nice. Two more questions. And I have some stuff for Dr. Andy because of that. So you're saying that. My fear is that people will try to, especially in the fitness realm, self medicate themselves and go Oh, look at this website. I'm going to order blah, blah, blah. And it'll just be shipped to my door.
I, because. I highly doubt they have the training to know one what protocol to do. And my limited understanding is that there's probably a lot of shady companies that are trying to make money off of peptides. And if you're not really being followed by a physician, they haven't checked the background of manufacturing, et cetera.
How would you know, like you don't have the equipment in your home to test it. You do not.
[00:21:42] Speaker 3: And I think that's the knock on the peptide space to date. And Dr. Galpin can either confirm or deny, but It seems like peptide pharmacies are shut down every day in terms of they used to be able to produce something.
Randomly their websites gone and you're like, all right what happened? Why did it get shut down? And should I actually be using the stuff that I got from them? So it's it's becoming a little bit more complicated, but there are. You know, validated certified places that are producing high quality products.
You just need to find them and find who works with them because technically you can order these things over the internet. But what I would do is work with a practitioner that's been trained in, peptide therapy and cellular medicine. Yeah that's where we have to do some work in terms of building that network and allowing people to gain access to people who You know, for a reasonable cost.
Because the other thing too is, anti aging longevity, like the cost associated with these things is astronomical. And it doesn't need to be like the cost of peptides is for all things considered relatively reasonable, a couple hundred dollars a month. For the most part, and you're seeing people paying multiple thousands of dollars a month.
And I don't know, I don't know why other than, you know, added costs for who knows what.
[00:23:00] Speaker 2: And in terms of the FDA, it seems like the FDA has looked at them as again, this sort of gray area and does the FDA sort of frown? on peptides or because I know there's sites that say it's a research chemical.
It's for your lab rats at home and you've got legit sources that are through a physician and it seems a little bit more Wild West y to me.
[00:23:25] Speaker 3: Yeah, it's mixed. So there's about 60 ish FDA approved peptides for introduction into, the human system, there are plenty that are not technically FDA approved, but you can get from third party sources that are technically designed for laboratory or research use.
So you have to be careful where you're ordering, who you're ordering from, you have to ask and inquire with your physician, like, where are you sourcing this from because they may be pulling from a third party source. And then, again. It seems every month, different states, boards of pharmacy, medical boards are either allowing things to be used, or then all of a sudden they're prohibited to be sent into the state.
You don't really know what, why or the rationale behind those decisions, but it is a little bit of a moving target. We are not in a space where I would be confident that anything is going to be available for any period of time, but there's a handful that are pretty well, Documented in terms of their efficacy.
And for the most part, I don't think anything's going to change in terms of access to them, such as. CJC, Ephemeral and DPC one, five, seven, a couple of things like that. Yeah it's, we're still very early in the space, but a lot of exciting stuff to come from it.
[00:24:36] Speaker 2: Awesome. Any comments on that?
Dr. Andy? No, no question for you. Is that I just
[00:24:45] Speaker 4: want to reiterate that
if we're going to get to a lot of this stuff, details here in a second, but if you go down this route, friends at home, just please don't do it until you get it through it. Somebody like Brian.
[00:25:00] Speaker 2: Yes.
[00:25:01] Speaker 4: That's the only, I'm going to say you really and if you're paying 26 for the month supply or something, you just, you better know what you're getting and it's not what you think you're getting.
So just please do whatever it takes to find someone who's qualified. Just work with Ryan if you want to and, but go that round. If you're going to go to peptide, it's, you're not playing games here. There can be serious consequences on this. If you've taken normally, it's it's actually. Super safe.
Generally a lot. Most peptides are very safe. As Ryan talked about earlier my buying things on the internet from, who knows where better expect you're playing with hormones and hormone like things in this case, peptides, but still they work.
[00:25:42] Speaker 2: Yeah. I always get nervous when I see companies and this has happened in the supplement world to pop up, try to sell something that's super sexy and then they just all of a sudden disappear again and then another company pops up and disappears.
I always think I'm like, okay, so what is the incentive for said company to go through all the hoops to make sure it's legit, to make sure if it's an injectable, it's sterile, like that costs money, right? So if you're doing it legit and you've got a brand name and people are associated with it, you've got something to actually lose.
If you screw up, if you're a brand new company that just pops up, you don't really have a lot to lose. And it just makes me nervous. Like you guys were saying, when you see companies show up, they disappear. God knows what's in that vial. You're not going to be able to test it. And a lot of them are injectable.
So if it's not sterile, you're going to run into those issues. Plus what are the contaminants that they put in it? Like maybe you get lucky and it's just sterile water and it doesn't do anything, but it could have God knows what in it. So yeah I agree a hundred percent.
[00:26:42] Speaker 3: Yeah. And Andy, are
[00:26:43] Speaker 2: these, go ahead.
[00:26:44] Speaker 3: Good. Yeah. I was going to say same thing with the nutraceutical space, like the threshold for Any company to participate is participate. Is it GRAS generally regarded as safe for human consumption? And as long as they pass that, minimum required barrier, like who knows what's in it. I don't, I like to believe in the best of humanity in the sense that like companies aren't going to send out cyanide, but you may be getting, like you said, sterile water. Great. You've spent a couple hundred bucks a month for nothing. I, most people don't have a mass spec to test their products.
[00:27:16] Speaker 5: Yeah.
[00:27:17] Speaker 2: And that might be even on the nice side, right? You could have heavy metals in it. You could have contaminants.
It may not be sterile. It's like. Who knows? Who knows? Yeah. I agree. And Andy, are these, if someone is a professional tested athlete, I'm assuming these are on the banned list of compounds, correct?
[00:27:35] Speaker 4: No, they aren't. So this is where they're not, okay, I get lost if they
[00:27:40] Speaker 2: are or not all the time. So that's why I'm asking.
[00:27:42] Speaker 4: It's because it's a moving target. This target moved on us a couple months ago. It depends on also what professional organization. So the PGA tour other folks that are under USADA or WADA, it's a different thing than major league baseball, CBA, NBA, CBA, NFL, CBA, and then UFC, et cetera. So number one answer is it highly depends on the sport and their testing battery NCAA I don't think has.
Any legitimate testing for most of this stuff which is, my subtle way of saying, take whatever the hell you want. It will get caught. Just kidding. I'll do that. Kidding kidding. And then it depends on each individual one. So actually that's one of the first things I was going to ask I know that PPC one, five, seven, let's just put on the list for you. Sodom and Lodom. But do you happen to offhand some of the more effective ones that are generally legal and we'll start there or maybe which one do you want to start? Generally?
[00:28:34] Speaker 3: Yeah, so unfortunately I'll start with the illegal.
So anything that's a growth hormone secretagogue. So anything with the suffix Morella and epimoralens for Moreland those are all out. BPC is going
[00:28:46] Speaker 4: to be the same boat, right?
[00:28:47] Speaker 3: Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. So CJC. So those are. The common ones that I mean, those are probably the most well known, most efficacious and commonly used.
And those, unfortunately, if you're a WADA, USADA whatever testing agency, those are out. BPC 157, unfortunately, just fell under that realm, which is unfortunate because again, like most people are using it for, injury healing and instead of anti inflammatories, opiates, things like that, like this is far more safe and
[00:29:17] Speaker 2: they can still get a cortisone
[00:29:18] Speaker 3: shot.
You can still get a cortisone shot and you can still take opiates and you can still, they're still doing toward all
[00:29:25] Speaker 4: toradol, yeah, something you can light up on Toradol
[00:29:27] Speaker 3: all day. Yeah, going out of style. And that's a hundred, Toradol is a hundred percent illegal in most professional sports, but it's still happening all the time.
It's just, they're not testing for, anti inflammatory utilization. So unfortunately the ones that are most efficacious, the Morellons, PPC, out, some of the newer ones, Epidilon, Thymosin Alpha Beta GHK, CU, which is like a copper. Supplement used for tissue healing, hair regrowth those are still technically legal because I just think they haven't gotten to the point to, to make them banned in sports.
Some of the newer ones that help with. Potentially energy, cognitive function, inflammation, other than BPC one, five, seven, you're probably still okay based on my most recent research. But the ones that are most commonly known these days are unfortunately not available for use legally
[00:30:20] Speaker 4: for athletes on that note, then For the non athlete, maybe I'm assuming people to listen to Mike's program are athletes, but not pro athletes.
So they're, like they train hard, they work out and they compete maybe, but they're not pros. Are there ones that you'd say again are generally safe and generally not going to ruin your entire endocrine system, but are generally effective for performance enhancement for non performance athletes.
[00:30:44] Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the two that I used most frequently are C. J. C. Ipomerolin. So C. J. C. 12 95 Ipomerolin is great for tissue repair, muscle recovery, body composition improvement, helps with sleep which is, usually a huge issue for a lot of people getting good quality sleep. BPC 157 was initially isolated in gastric juice, and it was identified as something that can help with intestinal epithelial repair.
So basically individuals with irritable bowel, inflammatory bowel issues. It can be administered orally to help fortify the body's ability to repair inflammatory related issues of the gut, but systemically used. It's been wonderful for tissue healing. specifically ligament and tendons or areas that are notoriously poor for blood flow and healing time.
I've actually started with my patients who are doing BPC. The traditional guidance is just, injecting belly fat and let it go where it needs to go. But I've actually found a little bit more of a localized administration. So if you have. rotator cuff tendinopathy you're injecting in the delt.
If you have a knee issue, we're going into quad. So a little bit more localized administration I've actually found is a little bit more efficacious in terms of healing. But that's great for individuals that are dealing with chronic inflammatory issues, especially of musculoskeletal tissue. An interesting one now that's, I, man, I don't think it was as relevant as when we were on barbell shrugs, but semi glutide.
So I don't know if you guys have been following that, but what is that? Okay. So semi glutide is, this is legit
[00:32:23] Speaker 4: actually, like this is a real legitimate. It's yeah, exciting thing.
[00:32:27] Speaker 3: Yeah. Semaglutide is a molecule that helps with weight loss essentially. And the FDA approved a couple of different things, but the most the notable one was on in June of 2021, we go V, which is the uh, The brand name of semaglutide essentially is a GLP one agonist that helps with regulating appetite and food intake, excuse me.
And so basically the study showed that if you're taking this GLP one agonist, in addition to monitor diet and exercise, people are losing a significant amount of body fat and keeping it off for a long period of time. My. Question with the data is these people that were doing it also exercised and ate a little bit better.
So is there a confounding factor of just like better lifestyle optimization? Probably, but semi glutide alone now is available with many peptide pharmacies and the, we go V, which is the brand name is roughly 1, 300 a month, and you need to do it for 12 months, a three month course of semi glutide from a reputable peptide pharmacy is around.
400 a month. So it's almost, 20 percent the cost of what you would be getting if you had it prescribed and got the brand name. So that's pretty exciting because when used appropriately, which is once per week, again, for a three month course, and then if you need to cycle You know, multiple times you can it is pretty effective when paired with diet and exercise modification.
So that's when I'm starting to use a little bit more because it's very helpful with weight loss.
[00:34:02] Speaker 4: That's a new England journal of medicine stuff too. So that's not when clinical journal club stuff.
[00:34:08] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. That's the GLP. I have a lot of patients that are medical professionals that are docs that are just like, they're critical care attendings.
They're like, I work 24 hours on 24 hours off. I never sleep. I having a hard time maintaining body weight. So they're starting to look into this because, it's helping amplify the results that they're appreciating from the, limited exercise and dietary modification that they can sustain based on the stress of their job.
So that's pretty cool. And then the other one is MOTS C M O T S dash C, which is. Similar to a growth hormone like substance. Essentially it's improving insulin sensitivity to help with blood sugar, metabolism lipolysis and fat utilization for energy. And that's usually paired with B12, which people have been using B12 for.
Energy and weight loss forever. So it's essentially amplifying the synergistic effect of B12. Those are like the four right now that I'm using pretty regularly. I do have some patients that are using thymus and alpha and thymus and beta. And without getting too far into the weed. So your thymic.
[00:35:11] Speaker 2: You can go in the weeds. That's why Andy's here. He's going to ask you all
[00:35:14] Speaker 3: sorts of questions. So your thymus is essentially an organ that dissolves or becomes inactive roughly around the time that you complete puberty. And its purpose is to essentially produce immune cells to grow them and then release them into the body.
But once you're an adult, your immune system for the most part is fairly competent. Okay. We have found over time though, with the amount of inflammation and general lack of health that we're experiencing as a population, we start to have immune cells that are less than functional may become problematic in terms of leukemia, lymphoma, and things like that.
And so essentially what you can do is stimulate your. The re initiation of thymic activity through thymus and alpha and thymus and beta and individuals who have chronic inflammatory issues, gut issues, things like that tend to see a resolution in a lot of those inflammatory issues. Cause basically what their body's doing is like, sending in new soldiers that are better, higher performing and more effective than the current population that we have.
So I have a lot of people with Crohn's ulcerative colitis. Those are, they see some impact, inflammatory bowel issues seem to be prodigious amongst especially high performing individuals, because there's a direct link between stress systemically and gut health. So those things can be effective too.
There's probably about six that I use pretty regularly. So that actually, so the gland doesn't completely disappear then, right? They can still be. Stimulated with the peptide to work again for oversimplistic view.
Yeah. Yeah. And some people may not, reinitiate it's production, but for some people it does.
[00:36:57] Speaker 2: Very cool. And the GLP 1 agonist you were saying, is the peptide version, is that literally the same as a pharmaceutical version? Or is it just doing the same thing? Same exact
[00:37:08] Speaker 3: thing. Literally. It's exactly the same. Exactly the same.
[00:37:12] Speaker 2: Huh. Interesting.
[00:37:14] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[00:37:15] Speaker 4: Yeah. If you want to pull up some numbers on that, because I think this is actually relative.
I pulled up that paper in the background. I'll put it this way. Like we're all on the same page here. I should suppose we should have started it in terms of lifestyle is King, whole food, nutritional factors. It's these are everything, right? These are real systemic data, all that stuff true.
And all of us are as anti, diet and a pill, as you could possibly imagine, right? This is the first thing I've seen where you're like, Oh shit. Like we may have stumbled upon something that actually might work. And I have all the same concerns that Ryan has. Like we need replication, we need stuff.
But there's a reason why a lot of people that I know in the space. have started using it with their general weight loss populations, especially the really obese ones. Like the power. So here's basically like some numbers again from this single study two groups, lifestyle, same one got placebo, one got the treatment, right? You're talking 2000 people in the study, something like that. And they did 68 weeks. So there's not like a six week trial, right? Like at these fun. So is it all right? How many participants lost 5 percent out of 5 percent weight reduction or more right. In the treatment group, about a thousand patients in the non treatment group, about 200.
So about a five X increase in my, who just lost 5 percent of body mass. The amount of the last 10%, about 800 versus 80. So you're talking like a 10 X and then the other one, 15 percent or more, 600 people versus 28. And so in terms of the actual amount of weight lost, you're talking about 15 kilos versus two between the groups.
So
[00:38:58] Speaker 2: yeah, it's significant.
[00:38:59] Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:39:00] Speaker 2: No, that's very significant.
[00:39:02] Speaker 4: You can see why people got so ultra excited about this because it is something that Ryan, maybe. I don't remember the dosage is, but it's a weekly shot.
[00:39:11] Speaker 3: It's a weekly shot. So the typical recommendation is like 12, 12 and a half units, the first week, weeks one through four, then it bumps up to 25 units.
Then it bumps up to 50 units. The only downside I've had some people. Got a little aggressive and bumped up their dosage because they were excited a little too quickly. And it can cause a little bit of, uh, diarrhea. Some people get hypoglycemic. So it's not, completely devoid of potential adverse effect, but it is effective.
And, again, like in terms of people that are, definitely as Dr. Galpin said My takeaway from the study is yes, it's effective, but it was also effective because people were actually changing lifestyle for a year. I don't know how many patients you guys work with that can commit to anything for a year.
And it's not a lot. Most people don't even stay a job in a job for a year. That's where, The work needs to be better described and explain to patients in terms of this will work, but it works if you do these other things and you cannot cut corners. And that's, I think, I, an analogy I was thinking of before we jumped on here is think of it like golf, right?
If you suck at golf and your swing is terrible, it doesn't matter. If you have the best technology, you're not going to hit the ball any further or any straighter. And that's how we have to think about like peptides. If you're not doing the base groundwork, these things are not going to contribute to the.
the efficacy and impact that you're looking for. Like you have to have the foundational elements dialed in in order for these things to be as effective as they can be. And that's the conversation I unfortunately have to have with a lot of people, which is just because you have money and you can pay for it, doesn't mean it's going to cure all your ills.
So yeah that's the other thing about peptides is like they are super effective when used appropriately in an environment that's conducive to your intended result, which typically includes some lifestyle modification as well.
[00:41:06] Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't ever see myself asking someone to go on or looking for someone to prescribe anyone I work with semi glutide.
I got this is never going to happen. For the general population, this is much more like in line with what they're after, but just in case people are interested, I don't even have a clue. Do you have a rough idea of what, like a month or let's say like a five or six months or whatever what would that cost someone?
[00:41:30] Speaker 3: So yeah, like a vial right now, which is a three month supply is roughly like 400. Okay. So that's, yeah, that's not bad at all. No, it's not bad.
[00:41:41] Speaker 4: Some of the other properties we'll talk about maybe are. Yeah,
[00:41:45] Speaker 3: yeah, it's a little bit more expensive, but yeah, for the most part, if you're going to do the brand name, I know it's 12 to 1300 plus And insurance usually is not covering it.
So it's a significantly greater expense. It's almost 10 X the cost of all things.
[00:41:59] Speaker 4: I actually see this has been one like I think insurance is gonna jump on this one pretty quickly.
[00:42:03] Speaker 3: Yeah, you would think they would, right? It's Yeah,
[00:42:05] Speaker 4: we'll see.
[00:42:06] Speaker 3: Yeah, you think? Yeah, that's a conversation for a different podcast and why that may not happen.
But yeah.
[00:42:14] Speaker 4: All right. Fair,
[00:42:14] Speaker 3: fair fair.
[00:42:15] Speaker 4: Okay. So maybe when we're here, is there any other ones for general health? For like the, Oh, we just get this part. I can feel like people don't want to hear about
[00:42:25] Speaker 2: it.
[00:42:27] Speaker 4: Yeah. Any other general ones? Like for the average person. Okay. They're going to commit. They're going to work with you.
They're going to work out a couple times a week. They're going to eat better, but you want to just give them some shit to just boost the results a little bit. Some good types of clear one, anything else, or is it, I
[00:42:41] Speaker 3: mean, that's, that's, for the most, for the average American, like body composition, obesity is a pretty common issue.
I think sir, Moreland is great in terms of not only muscle recovery, but also body composition improvement. The one downside was Sir Moreland, although it's effective in terms of those two things I mentioned there is a little bit of an issue in terms of hypoglycemia associated with administration, meaning when people take it.
You're producing insulin growth factor. Your insulin sensitivity is, it is increasing. Thus, people's blood sugar tends to decrease. And if you don't take it right before you go to bed some people develop a hypoglycemic state, which is essentially low blood sugar. And unfortunately people then run to their pantry and start to eat stuff that's, yeah, that's not going to contribute to the result that we're looking for, which is usually a decrease in body fat.
So I have had some patients that after a month, they're like, how am I gaining weight? And I'm like are you taking it at the appropriate time? They're like, yeah, but sometimes I get really hungry. And the next thing I've had a whole. Bag of chips. I'm like then, some more than may or may not be the best thing for you, especially if we can't get past that, or you can't control yourself to not eat when that happens.
For the most part right now, I think the, the Morellon family is great. And then most people have aches, pains, they're constantly dealing with injuries that they've, even though they're not severe, little little bumps and bruises that they've. Introduced through the weekend warrior syndrome that they have.
So BPC one, five, seven is one that I'm for the most part, I'm like, pretty much everyone should be doing this. All
[00:44:17] Speaker 4: cool. So let's leave those ones and go to more of a, I want to talk more about kind of performance enhancement stuff. But before we get there, like maybe the injury one's pretty cool too.
So let's say somebody is going to go in for a procedure. Even if it's a small scope or something on a knee or whatever, or to a big one. You've talked about PPC one, five, seven, if you're not a professional athlete, you're still good to go there. And I actually, I know a lot of surgeons who are not just making that kind of common practice.
They're just putting it directly in post surgery or doing something differently. So can you talk a little bit, one, a little bit more about PPC five, seven, one, five, seven, again, what's the kind of cost, what's the risk and then any other ones?
[00:44:58] Speaker 3: Yeah, relatively low risk, all things considered. Essentially it's just helping. College and repair and tissue repair specifically of ligament and tendon. Um, the administration is typically in the morning it's an insulin syringe. You don't even feel it. You're doing it Monday through Friday. Typically I tell people, two to three months is the minimum time that you want.
You're going to want to do it. It doesn't magically
[00:45:20] Speaker 2: fix you in two weeks. That's what they told me.
[00:45:24] Speaker 3: Some people experience an impact pretty quickly, but yeah, it's usually two to three months is the timeline where you want to use it and then reflect back and say, Hey, how frequently am I feeling inflammation?
How much pain am I feeling in the joints that initially I was using this to treat? Is it completely resolved? Is it reduced, a certain percentage? So that's typically what I tell people is if you're going to do this, commit to two or three months of use, and then we can gauge efficacy.
And the cost per month is. Usually around 200 to 250 per month all in. So again
[00:45:58] Speaker 4: which is not honestly bad if it saves you.
[00:46:01] Speaker 2: Compared to surgery, especially if you're doing it in place of something non invasive to test out first.
[00:46:07] Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's one thing to consider. And then two.
Again, you have to look at the big picture, right? So, there's a really good book for people listening called the price we pay by Marty McCary, which talks about everything that has to do with costs of medicine, both from the hospital side, also from the patient side, people do not understand how much money they're spending or losing in terms of doctor visits, PT medications they're taking regularly and what that, accumulates over a long period of time.
So if you have the opportunity to try something that can help effectively heal, these common musculoskeletal issues, tendinopathies, inflammation, things like that gut health issues, whatever, and you're spending 700 bucks over a few months, and then you get years and years of higher level performance with, minimal issue that makes more sense to me than paying, 50 to a hundred bucks for Anti inflammatory meds or pain meds or whatever that looks like, or even over the counter stuff.
In addition to a crude cost of doctor visits, physical therapy, insurance costs, and things like that. Yeah,
[00:47:13] Speaker 4: yeah.
[00:47:14] Speaker 3: Like what's the opportunity cost of not being able to play a sport that you love being able to put you, you love playing, into your fifties, sixties and seventies. And that, that, those things aren't necessarily quantifiable, but it's a quality of life issue.
So I think there's two things you have to consider like. What are you willing to give up to potentially completely heal? And what does that mean to you? What's that, what cost is associated with that? And I, I can't force people to think the way that I think, but in my mind, investing in doing it the right way, the first time will always save you money in the longterm versus trying to find shortcuts and cutting corners, I guarantee you'll end up spending.
More money, more time trying to piecemeal things that are less efficacious. That's how I frame it for most people. And again, reminding them that. If they're dealing with issues that have to do with, just the generation of the body you're not sleeping, if you're not cutting down on alcohol intake, if your diet's still garbage, again, these things aren't going to be as effective as they could be.
So you might as well give yourself 60 to 90 days to really dial it in. Because what's the worst that can happen other than you completely change your life and you have, decades of higher quality living.
[00:48:24] Speaker 4: Any need to take the BPC before the surgery?
[00:48:28] Speaker 3: Essentially what we're doing now, and I'm working with a group out of LA and we're creating a program called Surgery as a Sport.
And in brief, some of the work I did as a resident was regarding this pathway called ERAS and has enhanced recovery after surgery. Because what we found is people are showing up for elective procedures and not understanding the physiologic and metabolic impact that a surgical procedure has on your body.
In brief.
[00:48:57] Speaker 6: Yeah.
[00:48:57] Speaker 3: So being in a hospital terrible for recovery, terrible for your HPA access stress. Yeah. Even if you have to have an elective procedure, people need to understand the metabolic impact of tissue manipulation, surgery, healing. It's like running a marathon. And if I told you, hey, you're going to run a marathon this weekend, you'd be like, nope, like I haven't trained for it.
I haven't done the right preparation. But if you did on the back end, you'd probably in complete disarray, your body's going to break down. You'll feel terrible. So people understand that surgery is basically the same thing. So if you have to have a procedure and you are not preparing as though it were a race or an athletic performance.
your outcomes may not be as effective. They may take longer. So a lot of practitioners in the group we're working with is basically saying, okay, if you have to have an elective orthopedic procedure, we're not going to do it unless you come to me, get pre op labs done, optimize nutrition, make sure you're getting enough protein, make sure you're monitoring inflammation, potentially starting peptides prior to.
procedures so that you can, have that process already in place postoperatively, so that your healing, both tissue and otherwise is more effective and can be, shortened potentially so that you can have a better chance of a high level outcome which is great for the patient and also the practitioner because practitioners are graded based on patient outcomes.
And if they're showing up in a bad state, it reflects poorly on the practitioner, even if their skill and their technique is top notch. They're at the behest of who are they operating on and what are they doing on a daily basis. There's some interesting things that are happening in that space.
And in terms of essentially treating surgery, like you were going to run a marathon or a half marathon, but you have to think about it similarly. In that case, Dr. Galpin, yes, I would say some people should think about starting prior to a procedure just to get that, healing process going.
[00:50:48] Speaker 4: But you would probably be talking Like a few days or like weeks. Yeah, I
[00:50:52] Speaker 3: would
[00:50:52] Speaker 4: start,
[00:50:52] Speaker 3: yeah. A couple of weeks before, because realistically, like if someone tears their ACL, they're not going to want to wait six months to get an optimization program really dialed in. We have to be reasonable with what patients are willing to do.
Usually we start four to six weeks in advance and just say, Hey, like you want a great outcome from this procedure. I don't think anyone goes in and says, yeah, I don't want the best possible outcome. If you want to do that, you need to dial in. movement, sleep, hormones, supplementation diet.
Yeah it's a pretty cool experiment that we're running and hopefully it's something that we can then expand to other practitioners. That's really
[00:51:25] Speaker 4: interesting. I know a lot of folks who are actually looked at that same space and be like, man, why are we not doing this? Why do we not have pre surgery?
Totally. It totally makes sense. Yeah, so for
[00:51:37] Speaker 3: instance I'll just give you a brief example. If you were to have a surgery the typical protocol says don't eat, 12, 16, 24 hours before a procedure. Then you have your procedure. It lasts a couple hours. Post operatively. You don't really feel like eating.
You're coming off of anesthesia. So realistically, we've introduced a significant metabolic insult to your body. And you've also been in like a fasted state for 24 hours, right? And then you're might be nauseous. You may not be eating a lot. You may be on pain meds. Your bowels aren't moving. So a lot of people get Terrible nutrition for a couple of days, after a procedure, why would you expect that your body's all of a sudden going to be like, yeah, we're going to opt, we're going to function at peak performance, but you haven't been sleeping.
You've been in pain. You haven't really felt like eating. You showed up in a Because
[00:52:23] Speaker 4: fasting is anabolic.
[00:52:25] Speaker 3: Yeah, sure. Yeah. But a lot of these things that we're doing on the medical side are, Somewhat archaic and were introduced, a hundred years ago. And everyone's that's what we've been doing.
So why would we think about it differently? And we're seeing in Europe and other places. especially from the surgical side, they're like, is it actually good that these people haven't eaten in 18 hours before surgery? Is it good that we're giving them pain meds and not encouraging, efficacious bowel function and real reawakening of the gut tissue after these surgeries.
And you're up there a little bit more advanced than we are in the U S but we're trying to usher in a new thought process in terms of, What happens for people that do need procedures? How can peptides play a role? How can other, lifestyle optimization practices take a role or play a role?
We're moving in the right direction but it'll just take some time
[00:53:14] Speaker 2: and hospital food is just so nutritious, right?
[00:53:17] Speaker 3: I think I saw a stat that like 40 percent of all hospitals have fast food locations, like on site. And that's basically what people are able to to order. So
[00:53:28] Speaker 4: I didn't intend to go this route, but since we're here, I feel like People listening would be like, what the hell?
Do you have any best practices then that you're willing to share of what should they eat? Should they try to have as much protein as possible? Should they try to get collagen in anything like that?
[00:53:44] Speaker 3: Vitamin C, vitamin D are super important. Caloric intake is important. You essentially have to appreciate that your metabolic rate's going to increase like one and a half to two times.
It's normal level. after a procedure because the body is going to try to heal tissue. So if you're not changing your caloric intake, protein and collagen obviously are super helpful for tissue recovery. Those are the two areas where I try to work with people the most, which is like understanding, okay, how much do you eat normally?
What's that quantity and how much do we need to increase it to match what your body is going to be asking for postoperatively from the supplement side, vitamin C, glutathione, turmeric. Or curcumin, whatever you want to use. Vitamin D is very important for inflammation and tissue healing. Dr.
Galpin's. Been beating on that one for a while now in terms of vitamin D's role in inflammation. So those are the areas that I typically work in optimizing for people and then creatine. So creatine is another one. That's been recently pretty well elucidated in terms of its impact on, muscle protein synthesis, muscle maintenance, even in elderly populations that aren't moving a ton.
Creatine looks like it's pretty effective for almost everybody. I try not to bury people in like supplementation and things that they have to do, but. Yeah, I think those are pretty simple to administer and introduce.
[00:55:06] Speaker 4: What about like a greens drink or anything like that? Like use Yeah,
[00:55:11] Speaker 3: I try to get people in all honesty to, to work on reestablishing healthy gut function.
Because anytime You're under anesthetic taking pain meds which is inevitable for the most part, your gut function is going to decrease and your gut is essentially one space for digestion and absorption. So if things aren't moving, you're not digesting well. And two, it's also excretion, right?
So you want to get out the waste products that you don't need and you don't want them sitting in there ruminating and stewing for the, the potential re exposure of these things that you don't need. So green juices like, okay, in terms of, I understand like the delivery of, vitamins and nutrients, but realistically we want to get people trying to reawaken gut activity as fast as possible.
And the way you're going to do that is reintroducing foods that, are in their more natural state, higher in fiber, as long as they can tolerate it.
[00:56:06] Speaker 4: Lovely. So then maybe if you're okay, we can venture down into peak performance stuff.
[00:56:12] Speaker 3: Sure, sure.
[00:56:12] Speaker 4: Yeah. So yeah. Anything you want to add or anything that you can contribute?
[00:56:16] Speaker 3: So I think there's a couple of peptides that are pretty interesting in terms of the peak performance space. Like obviously the ones we've talked about, CJC, BPC are helpful. There's a couple that are coming into a little bit more. Awareness and understanding amongst practitioners and then hopefully patients that have to do with like cognitive function immune function neuro regeneration.
Things similar to anti aging recovery, like epitalon. I don't know what Dr. Galpin, if you've ever heard of epitalon, but it's basically like a pineal peptide that helps improve resilience. It's an antioxidant. It's been shown in some studies to help maintain telomere length. If believe in terms of aging is actually just the degradation of your DNA.
It helps with immune system function, prolactin levels, pancreatic function. So insulin sensitivity, blood sugar control and some studies show that it may help with melatonin production. natural melatonin production, because it's coming from the pineal gland. So to help promote healthier, more efficacious sleep, especially as people get older, because we know the pineal gland decreases function as you age.
And as part of that, people, when they get older, they tend to sleep less. That's one of the things that accelerates aging. So a Pitalon is a pretty interesting one. It's not inexpensive. It's 300 ish dollars per month. So it's definitely one of the higher price peptides. And then the other one is C max S E M a X, which it's a it's an adrenal corticotropic hormone.
So basically it's like supporting your HPA access hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access. So it's helping manage stress. It's helping immune function. A lot of people in the peptide space are using C Max as a nasal nasally administered spray, because there is a correlation with these types of hormones in terms of neuronal protection pain control.
In terms of people that are dealing with chronic pain, because again, pain is literally just a signal that's being interpreted by the brain. And if we have the ability to modulate, the severity of these
[00:58:29] Speaker 5: pain
[00:58:29] Speaker 3: responses sometimes that can be helpful. So those are pretty interesting ones.
Epitolons and injections, C max can be an injection. It can also be administered nasally because it gets into the. Venus plexus in the nose, which then circulates through your cerebral circulation. So those are pretty interesting ones in terms of quote unquote peak performance. And there's another peptide and I just want to make sure that I have this right here.
So I'm going to pull it up, but it's called a muscle growth factor. Which, as the name would indicate muscle growth factor helps with, um, muscle recovery. So it's a variant of IGF one, and it's very specific for facilitating repair and hypertrophy of specifically musculoskeletal tissue.
It's already expressed in. myocytes in terms of repair muscle cells facilitating growth of new cells. So it's very similar to an IGF one response. But it, it does. It's half life is very short. And it does oxidize pretty quickly. So that's one of those things where if you're getting MGF from a peptide provider, like you want to make sure it's fresh, that it hasn't been stored for months on a shelf because if you're getting it, months after it's creation or it's synthesization, synthesis, I don't know how, what is that word?
Synthesizing
Yeah, it may or may not be. Synthetization. Yeah, I don't know if that's a word. We may have just made one up there. That's all right. So those are a couple MGF, CMAX, Epidilon. And then there's also like GHRP6 and GHRP2, which those stand for growth hormone releasing peptide number six and GHRP2.
They're growth hormone analogs that cause your body to more growth hormone. They're usually paired with a CJC or an Ipomoea or a Sir Moorland, but especially for people Who have issues with tissue healing, ligament healing for some people like scar formation can be improved, especially if you're taking these GHRP six and GHRP two those are all things to think about.
There's those are a couple for peak performance that I think are reasonable, especially for people that are looking for more longevity. You may want to think about, an epitalon or a C max, something like that.
[01:00:42] Speaker 4: What's the status going back to that muscle one? I'm not heard of that one.
[01:00:46] Speaker 3: MGF. Yeah. Yeah. Any human trials. It's more,
it's more animal stuff. The tough part with MGF is it breaks down very quickly. So realistically, like people are making it and using it right away. So what's the applicability from the human standpoint, like if you're. You're getting it and it's for instance, like a lot of peptide manufacturers will make something and they'll freeze it and then they'll thaw it and send it to you and you need to use it pretty quickly.
If the practice controls are not as efficacious as they should be in terms of quality control, you may be getting something that is essentially inert and it's not really going to impact. Sometimes I use peptides from this group in South Carolina, Craig Conover is a physician that's been using.
Peptides for a long period of time. He worked with on it and Aubrey Marcus in that group. And they work with a group actually called peptide sciences who makes all their peptides and they're pretty good about. freezing, thawing, sending and using right away. So, yeah that's where I get most of my MGF, but yeah it's definitely on the newer side of the peptide.
[01:01:54] Speaker 4: You've had good experience with it so far. What would you say is the most. Benefit for it. Yeah. What's the biggest thing you're seeing out of it?
[01:02:05] Speaker 3: Recovery and performance, right? So the reason it's illegal in pro sports is you can, if you're using it consistently, you can basically get up day after day and hit two days and not be as debilitated or sore as you would if you were not using something like this.
So in terms of training volume, it can definitely increase your capacity for training volume. Is that necessarily a good thing? Is it too much? Like Dr. Galpin came up and spoke to my team. It was like, there is a point of diminishing returns in terms of how much you're training, how you're training.
So for some people, they assume like if they're doing it and they feel great, they can work out three, four or five hours a day. Is that actually good for you? Maybe not. But I think for people that typically, Aren't as consistent and they hit, hard workouts. And then they have a couple of days of decreased activity because they're sore.
This allows for the opportunity to continue in terms of training intensity and volume a little bit more regular which can, will then lead to muscle growth. Greater strength, better performance,
[01:03:08] Speaker 4: any potential concerns that one that I'm not really,
[01:03:12] Speaker 3: yeah, no, not really again, like it's a compound your body's naturally producing at the musculoskeletal level to help with tissue healing and growth of new muscle neurons.
So like again, I think over time as we gather more data, I don't suspect that it will contribute to tumor growth. But it's something that if you're going to do peptides, you want to monitor with a physician by checking your blood work regularly. And if something doesn't feel right, obviously being able to consult with somebody to try and troubleshoot, I have seen patients not on, on my watch have developed.
Malignant neoplasm secondary to long term use of growth hormone that just wasn't monitored well. And it's unfortunate because then you have to go down the road of treatment for that, which is not easy.
[01:03:57] Speaker 4: Yeah, but we known that with hormone for a while though, like you, we have, we know that one's coming.
[01:04:02] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And it's one of those things where you don't think about it until it happens and you're like, shit, I probably shouldn't have been doing this, but if people can get it and they have the money, they're going to do it. So it's, you need a voice of reason, which is where a physician who can guide you on utilization is helpful
[01:04:18] Speaker 4: actually pays attention to you over time.
[01:04:20] Speaker 3: Yeah, we try. I try.
[01:04:22] Speaker 2: Is that one specific to skeletal muscle, not cardiac or other types of muscles? So it's skeletal muscle only. Correct. That's correct. That's correct. Nice.
[01:04:30] Speaker 4: And that doesn't need to be local injection. I assume.
[01:04:33] Speaker 3: Nope. Systemic. So you can just put it in belly fat. Yeah. That's the other thing too, right?
And that's, it's the same conversation I have to have with people that are looking to do PRP stem cell stuff like that is If I'm going to do PRP on a patient and I know it's going intra articular, meaning in a joint, I have reasonable belief it's going to stay there. It's not going to seep out and then go somewhere else.
But with stem cells these days, man, there's clinics everywhere. It's if you do an IV of stem cells, like we guarantee it's going to help with your back pain or your muscle recovery. Like you have no idea where the cells are going to go. Once they're in your system, they're going to go wherever they get called.
So that's where peptides can be a little bit more beneficial versus a growth hormone, meaning growth hormones, synthetic commercial grade is going to make anything that needs to heal. That could be skeletal muscle. That could be heart. It could be tumor. It could be bone. But peptides tend to have more specific localization to certain tissue types, whether that's gut, brain, skeletal muscle.
I think the safety profile is a little bit better. But again, if you're doing these things for 10, 15 years at a time, Like we just don't have the data to understand what's, what are the potential ramifications?
[01:05:37] Speaker 4: That one in particular, we don't, but we generally know it's probably not going to be a good idea.
[01:05:42] Speaker 3: Probably not. Probably not. So yeah, I try to get people on for three to six months and then have them taper off for a while.
[01:05:49] Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. What I asked you this kind of on a verbal front, but I always think it's interesting for the other ones are there any ones other people are really excited about that.
Use a lot that you're just like, I just don't think this one's very good. I don't, you talked on the barbershop about some of you discontinued and why, but as many ones that are popular, but you just don't, I haven't seen work well for your patients.
[01:06:08] Speaker 3: To be honest, not really. Most people that are coming to me who have. Any knowledge of peptides whatsoever are usually talking about the common ones that I kind
[01:06:21] Speaker 6: of
[01:06:21] Speaker 3: spoke of before. The only variation I've experienced is the localization of use of certain things such as, um, localized BPC.
One thing I guess that I would say is I have a fair number of people that have found BPC oral. Tablets that they can get for 60 or 90 mail order. We know almost unequivocally, anything that's PPC, that's going in your mouth, it's not going to get into your systemic circulation. It's going to stick with your gut because that's where it was originally identified and.
And acknowledged as its place of initial physiologic use. So like when people do that, they're like, I'm on a BPC oral supplement. I'm like, yeah, it's probably not doing anything for you from a tissue healing standpoint. So if you're going to do BPC, you should do it systemically administered.
But other than that For the sake of
[01:07:10] Speaker 4: tissue healing, unless you're trying to heal
[01:07:11] Speaker 3: gut, right? Unless you're trying to heal gut. Yeah, for the most part, peptides are so relatively new in the space. The only thing that people really talk about are like this for more on zip and more loans, BPC, thymus, and occasionally most people don't even know what's available.
And that's where, I have the opportunity to educate them on some other things that may be helpful for them. But for the most part, it's like such a novel space that there's really not a lot of people are just seeking out and ordering from, a Russian lab and they're like, I got, Clambuterol from Russia.
But that's not a peptide either.
[01:07:44] Speaker 4: Yeah. Cause there's a, like you said at the beginning, there's peptides are not, it's just these kinds of applications are new, but.
[01:07:51] Speaker 6: Yeah.
[01:07:52] Speaker 4: Insulin, we can give you a hundred examples of things that people have heard of. You're like, oh shit. I didn't realize that was a peptide.
[01:07:57] Speaker 6: Yeah. I've been
[01:07:58] Speaker 4: around for a truckload of years. So these are not like I think it's one of the reasons why the safety profile is generally pretty good in these actually. Yeah. They've been around for a long ass time. It's just like creating new ones and trying to make it more relevant.
Any other use of peptides besides we talked about fat loss, like we talked about muscle recovery and regeneration. Is there any, like you talked a little bit about kind of. Maybe some sleep aid stuff and yeah, inflammation,
[01:08:25] Speaker 3: cognitive function. Yeah, sleep. That's where like the Cmax may be helpful.
Mentioned sleep. Yeah, the longevity one, like the, a epi on is an interesting one and, like the sense of like potentially reducing DNA degradation antioxidant impact. There are a couple zinc related peptides and copper related peptides. Again, I mentioned one called G H K dash C U, which is to use the periodic table for copper that has some potential benefit for inflammation, muscle pain, nerve pain, potentially muscle recovery.
There's a couple of zinc peptides that have been hypothesized when they're they're usually there. It's like a cream for the scalp can help with potential hair growth for hair loss. I haven't seen a lot of efficacy in people that have used that. So I don't really. Toss that out first, but it's out there.
So some people are using it. But for the most part I try to keep my peptide protocols relatively tight with the things that I know are effective and again, only try to introduce them. When I know that someone is also doing the other components, that's going to optimize, basic health and wellness.
[01:09:38] Speaker 4: The vast majority of these are going to be injections, right? Like you just mentioned one is a cream, but unless the BPC,
[01:09:44] Speaker 3: for the most part Conover has a couple of transdermal patches where you can get a couple of their peptide formulations administered transdermally for people that are completely adverse to injections.
But you're looking like. 100 a patch and you need to use a patch a day again for a month. So like I tell people like, let me teach you how to do this injection. I guarantee after one, you'll be okay with it. And then it'll also save you a significant amount of money. There are a couple other options.
There's some sublingual sprays that may be helpful. I'm just not a huge proponent of things that have to be orally administered because you have no idea how it's going to be processed, digested, or absorbed. So if you're going to do something, if you're going to spend the money on something. In my opinion, it needs to be subcutaneous intramuscular or intravenous.
If you really want to gain maximum impact
[01:10:31] Speaker 2: and most of them, the injection is just a small insulin needle, right? So for weirdos like me that hate needles it's not a big needle.
[01:10:38] Speaker 3: It's three 16th of an inch. Yeah, you don't even feel
[01:10:42] Speaker 4: it. It's what, like 30 gauge or something. Smaller?
[01:10:45] Speaker 3: 31 gauge.
It's very small. Very small.
[01:10:48] Speaker 4: Tiny amount. You have to be a little bit of a chemist yourself. Gotta fill it yourself and inject. It's really
[01:10:52] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. It's, I think people think it's cool. Like they think they're doing something cool. They're Drawing syringes, injecting themselves.
So it's pretty cool.
[01:11:03] Speaker 4: Nope. Anything else that like you thought about or I think it's interesting in the, I
[01:11:09] Speaker 3: think it's just one of those things where these are absolutely supplements that are effective in the right individual who's doing the right thing, so it is not a cure all. It's not a panacea for your bad behavior.
If you are not participating or at least trying to improve other aspects of health that have contributed to the conditions that You're trying to treat, it's not going to change a lot, right? So if you don't change your diet, you don't change your sleep habits, movement, hydration, all those different things, like these are not going to cure all of your ills.
If they were, we would have known about them a long time ago. So I think they are most effective in people that are also engaging in improving lifestyle behaviors. And if you can do both things, you will see a significant positive result. And if you don't. You may get a little improvement.
[01:11:59] Speaker 4: Actually, my sort of last question here that I wanted to ask last time, I forgot. Most of these things have a direct effect on a cause. You take BPC, the tissue is going to heal. Correct. They're not actually solving They're not enhancing physiology, physiological ability, right? They're just directly causing a solution to a problem.
Are you aware of any of that outside of hormone, of course, that are actually going to enhance physiological state? Like it would, if you had a micronutrient, like if your carpet was super low or zinc was super low and you improve that status, you would see this as rounded improvement in hormone profile and sleep and recovery and growth.
Are they fixing anything or are they just kind Just filling that hole that's there.
[01:12:38] Speaker 3: I think they're supporting. I think they're supporting physiologic function in the I don't want to say this. They're supporting physiologic function within the scope of other lifestyle improvements. So I think it's not a long term solution.
So for people that may have inflammation tissue healing issues, potentially cognitive dysfunction, like people with concussion, traumatic brain injury, CMAX, things like that can help. Support with neuro inflammation and regeneration. But again, like none of these things are meant for long term use.
So I think if you're not removing the variables that are contributing to your detriment then you're going to probably have to use these things for a longer period of time. But yeah, so it's nothing like, a vitamin D deficiency or something like that, where it's going to hopefully correct.
And then your body, maintains some sort of, ineffective hormone production. Yeah. Or like an iron deficiency where you have low hemoglobin and you take iron and all of a sudden your body produces more hemoglobin than you're good. It's nothing like that. They are absolutely an adjunct component that can, Can help facilitate a more efficacious recovery or whatever result you want, but it's nothing that's going to change physiology.
[01:13:55] Speaker 4: Yeah. Okay. My true last question. I forgot about this. Anything, any contraindications, not necessarily like with disease patients, there's always that, but just in terms of Oh, if you start taking these peptides, you don't want to also take creating, or you don't want to also take. No magnesium or like any other stuff where it's you got to take care of.
[01:14:14] Speaker 3: Nope, nope. There's nothing that's been so significantly notable that it's basically be become applicable across the board. For the most part of these things, do what they're meant to do and you can introduce them in addition to other things that you're trying to improve but yeah, there's no significant contraindication.
It's not like. Taking antibiotics and not drinking alcohol because you're going to decrease the efficacy of the antibiotic. It's nothing like that.
[01:14:41] Speaker 2: Yeah. That's awesome. My, my only last question is not necessarily a peptide, but more of a curiosity, do you use as a supplement NR or NMN and if you do orally or by IV, because I know if I don't ask, there's going to be. Tons of people are going to email me like, why didn't you ask him? It's not a peptide, but
[01:15:02] Speaker 3: yeah.
So I personally use true Niagen, which is nicotinamide. I have a side. Yeah. Has it helped me? I don't know, to be honest, I just take it because I get it sent to me and it's not harming me. Yeah, I'll be completely honest. Have seen patients where we've administered NAD intravenously, notice improvements and inflammation.
NAD
[01:15:28] Speaker 2: direct.
[01:15:29] Speaker 3: Yeah. But again, that's not a comfortable process and it's also very costly. I am not a huge proponent of anything that's administered orally. I just don't think we have the understanding in terms of is it really being converted? Is it being digested, absorbed processed appropriately once it gets through the liver?
I think in animal studies there, there's reason to believe that it might, but again You're looking at a population that's in, in an animal model, that's pretty controlled and it's pretty regulated. Humans are a completely different beast pun intended. So I'm not a huge fan of those things.
I have noticed some people appreciate some benefit from like transdermal NAD patches because it's a little less uncomfortable than an NAD IV, but again, cost is a factor there. I'm not a huge. Unless you're doing it intravenously
[01:16:20] Speaker 2: and intravenously, would you be looking more for potentially after TMI or TBI or just general
[01:16:27] Speaker 3: people with chronic inflammation, chronic pain issues associated with addiction.
Yeah, things like that. That's where I've seen it more, more beneficial. But again, it's not comfortable and it's also quite costly. So
[01:16:40] Speaker 2: what is about an average cost for one session? I have a five 500 idea what it is for people listening. So yeah,
[01:16:48] Speaker 3: five to 700 usually.
[01:16:52] Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I 350 was the cheapest to 750.
That was per session, so to speak. Yeah,
[01:16:58] Speaker 5: yeah,
[01:16:58] Speaker 2: that's about
[01:16:59] Speaker 5: right.
[01:17:01] Speaker 2: Cool. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for all your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Andy, for all the great questions. So we'll start with Ryan first. Where can people find out more about you? Because you said you. Do this as telemedicine now too.
So people don't necessarily have to be in California to work with you. Correct?
[01:17:18] Speaker 3: Sure. Yeah. The easiest way to find me is Instagram. Dr. Underscore green with an E at the end. Underscore do dr. Underscore green underscore do our facility websites Monarch, we ho w e h o. com. So those are the two best ways to reach me.
And from there I'm pretty responsive and we can set up consultations and things like that. Dr. Andy Galpin, if people want to find you, or maybe you just want to stay hidden and they should just follow your educational stuff, I don't know. It's, uh, to plug plug, plug away for himself, actually.
[01:17:54] Speaker 4: Um, he mentioned this, but I the approach that Monarch is taking, I think it's fantastic. I think that represents the best blend of scientific best practices while also Trying to push the forefront, right? It does not just work out neat. Like we know that's true. It's also not just, here's your 1, 000 Ivy, but that's going to reverse your telling your life, right?
So it is, it's a great model. Having been in their facility a lot of times, it's, it is like they push the training. The lifestyle stuff, the checkpoints very hard. And it's not just lip service in terms of him saying yeah, you got to do this stuff lifestyle. That's a core of their practice.
And this stuff just gets the attention and gets a lot of people in the door. But that is really what they're going after. So if you are in you guys are in, of course we're at West
[01:18:41] Speaker 3: Hollywood and then we have Brentwood opening in the summer. So we'll get east side of LA and west side of LA and then beyond.
[01:18:48] Speaker 4: And then your telehealth stuff there that they can, Yeah, but I'd say don't reach out to Ryan. If you're just going to reach out to him and ask him if you can order a VPC, whatever, right? That's not that's not the model he uses. Nope. You really want to make a change. Great. He can lead you through that, but he's just not your guy.
I was going to sell everyone who wants a GH he's got a very large insurance policy behind him, but still,
[01:19:10] Speaker 3: yeah, I practice what I preach long story short, if you're not going to do the simple things I'm not going to waste your time. Money doesn't look good on me. It doesn't look good on you.
So I'm not going to waste anyone's time.
[01:19:19] Speaker 4: Yep. I didn't want anyone walking behind the scenes being like, Oh, okay. I think what they're saying is this guy will just clear to your audience. That's not what you do.
[01:19:28] Speaker 3: That's perfect. Appreciate it.
[01:19:30] Speaker 4: Yeah, you can find me everywhere. Instagram, Twitter, all that stuff, the website, handy gal.
com. That's the best places.
[01:19:38] Speaker 2: Awesome. Thank you guys both again for all your time today. I really appreciate it. And I would encourage everyone to check out both of you for all the great stuff that you put out. Thanks again. Really appreciate it.
[01:19:47] Speaker 5: Appreciate it.
[01:19:53] Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to this podcast as always really appreciate it if you want to help us out as you've noticed so far to date. I don't take any other sponsors or outside ads. I've had a few requests now and so far i've turned them all down. I'm not saying that i'll never do this, but right now the only sponsors I have are programs that i've created myself or for things that I do So not against any other sponsorship, but if I ever did one would have to be A really good fit.
So if you want to help us out in the meantime, you can get on the newsletter list via physiologicflexibility. com. All the information about the course there the main website with everything is MikeTNelson. com. If you liked this episode give us a review, even a short. A few sentences makes a huge difference with the old iTunes and podcast algorithms.
Subscribe to it and send it to someone who is looking for information about peptides. So one of the things I want to do with this podcast is have a constant free reference. So if you have a buddy or friend who is Hey, what are these weird peptide things? And you can send them this episode and if they want to go down that route or discuss the pros and cons.
I'd highly recommend that they contact an expert like Dr. Ryan Green. And the goal is to have high quality references that are free for you. So any comments, place them below in your favorite iTunes or podcast player. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it. Any feedback for the show, let me know.
We will talk to you all next week. Big, huge thank you to Dr. Ryan Greene for taking time out of his day. Be sure to check out his information there. And like I said, if you are looking at using peptides, I would highly recommend you get In touch with him or at least another physician who is up to date in that space And they are out there, but they're really hard to find for great educational material Check out dr.
Annie galpin. He's got wonderful stuff also for free on his youtube instagram everywhere else Thank you so much. I will talk to you next week
[01:22:16] Speaker 4: don't think this show is suitable for children.
[01:22:18] Speaker 3: I don't think this show is
[01:22:20] Speaker 6: suitable for anybody.