Estrogen is Critical for Men Too - Here's Why Your Peptides Fail Without It with Sarah Morgan

0:01 you Hey everybody, this is Hunter Williams. I am here with my wife, Taylor and our lovely guest, Sarah Morgan. We actually just got it from the airport and have been geeking out. So we're like, okay, we got to turn, turn on the cameras and let's get rolling.

0:34 Um, Sara, first of all, thank you for coming here and being with us. This is actually the inaugural podcast in our studio that just finished. Uh, so really excited for that, but how you doing today? Great. It's so fun to break in the studio with you. I know. Yeah. Hopefully we don't have any tech hiccups so far. So I think we'll be good. But if people don' know about you, which they should, in my opinion, Sarah is one of the best voices in peptide space that people do not know yet.

1:07 And she actually just launched a course called Amino Academy, which we'll be talking about. But why don't you just give people a background of kind of if they don t know you, who you are and everything, how you got into this space, because I always find it interesting. We all kind come to this place from different various kind wild stories. So how did you get into the whole peptide world? Yeah, I come from a family of cardiologists, so I was going to go to medical school. I was smart to actually get some real life experience. So I worked in a neuropeds and trauma floor with a hospital system associated with the Mayo Clinic.

1:39 And I don't want to do this. I just saw the brokenness of our health care system before I invested all the time and money into medical school. so I made a really brave step to not go to school and then I'm like, what am I going to? Which is very scary to I realized that I love nutrition. I loved foundational aspects of health. So I found a program really teaching biochemistry, and it was a master's degree in nutrition from the University of Bridgeport.

2:13 And I worked in clinical practice for, I still do a little bit on the side, for about 20 years. Ten years ago, one of my very dear friends, who's a board certified cardiologist, introduced me to peptides. And I started CJC Epimerela and I was like, I feel like a Greek goddess in the gym. This is amazing. And, you know, as a college athlete, actually, a lot of people are like what? You played hockey? That's awesome.

2:44 It was very fun. I start as figure skater and then I went into hockey. I was sold. I always tell people, if you're new to peptides, one, welcome. It's a new space. And two, get your own story first. So that's what I did. Then I just, I'm a learner. It's interesting you bring up the hockey aspect.

3:14 I think a lot of people that come from the athletics world, I know I did because I obviously played football. And when you like, that's how I solved my own problems. Cause I had all these problems that I didn't really know were problems from playing sports. something's wrong with my health. And that's what thankfully brought me into this world. But I think there's so many athletes out there. It's kind of weird, the journey of an athlete, figure skating to ice hockey, that you go through this and you kind get out of that and your like,

3:47 what do I do now? And I thinks some of the best people that do really well with peptides and bio-hacking and whatever, come from that world and it's like man, if I only had access to those things, when I was playing how much better I would have been. So that's pretty cool. I want to get into the overall state of where we are with peptides. As we were talking earlier, good guys, bad guys of we have the legacy medical system of the way things have always done and been done.

4:24 You've seen that much more firsthand than we But then also this whole like fringe peptide world, which kind of like came almost out of the underground. And now it's becoming, there's like this tidal wave of information coming out about it. Where do you see kind like the state of this system? And is there like a balance of power shifting almost? Yeah, I think there's a lot going on. It's really dynamic situation. So first and foremost, you know, if we zoom all the way out I really believe in the idea that truth is expansive.

5:01 And if you let it be that way, it really aligns with science a little bit better than our Western thinking of truth as static. Because we're always learning. A lot of times, our culture is really uncomfortable when it's like, But I don't know everything about this. And it's like, welcome to digging into the details, right? So I think what's happening that I see is, peptides have been around for a while, people are like oh, they're brand new.

5:31 I mean, over and not in the United States, humans have using peptide for over 50 years. So the data that we have in the United States is not amazing, but we a lot of data and we're talking about maybe there's some strategic ways that can collect that more for the benefit of everyone as humans. But what happened if we look back in terms of peptides and how they were used, they mostly category one, according to the FDA.

6:02 So they were, you know, back in the day, like when I first used peptides, they we're through compounding pharmacies. And so they're a prescription. You know I really believe peptide aren't medications. They're naturally occurring. Our body makes 7,000 of them every single day. they work really different than like a traditional pharmaceutical drug medication that we classify them as. So what happened is we tried to do bulk approval of a lot of these different peptides.

6:33 And the FDA was like, wait a minute. We don't know a little about these. So they actually decided to put most of them on a category two list. What that means with the FDAs, they're actually not allowed to be compounded. The distribution of peptide changed. where a lot of these pharmacies that were kind of doing specialized protocols with these doctors that we're pretty advanced in the space, that shut down overnight. And then we were left with this like, well, they're cool tools.

7:04 People were learning more about them. They wanted access to them and the way that they were able to get access is through this kind loophole. I mean, it's creative, I think creativity is good. We gotta be in this world. Yeah, we do. So it really became this research use only category for people to be able to get access to peptides. And with that, I think we're just in this place of we don't have a lot of classification and clarification of what peptide are,

7:38 what bucket they should belong in in terms of a regulatory category. If you look at how pharma operates, It's really kind of an archaic system that doesn't work with our advancements in information and technology today. So we're in a really interesting place. I actually think it's sort of like where dietary supplements were in the 90s, not that long ago, before Deschetes laws. A lot of people don't know or have the context that even in 90's, it was like, Hunter, be careful.

8:13 If you take a probiotic, that's bacteria and you could get really sick. Don't take vitamin D because it could cause liver toxicity, right? And again, the FDA is designed to first and foremost look at safety for the population, which they do their job that way. The problem is we're not set up for what happens when we have new information. How do they integrate that in a way that is at the pace of what the world wants because there's such a delay there. So I really believe we should have a dishe law for our time to qualify and have conversation about a category that peptides exist in and a bucket they exist.

8:57 That's different than pharmaceutical drugs, as we traditionally call them. It's difference than dietary supplements. They really deserve their own place. I've always kind of thought, basically you have the hump of the injection with peptides. If you could get the same efficacy out of them without it being injected, I think people would be like, well, then that's the exact same thing that I'm taking anyway. It's just because it's an injection and it in a different form.

9:31 Actually, not to my knowledge. I don't think that there's anything actually that you can buy that's over the counter injectable these days. Maybe insulin. But if you want to inject it all of a sudden now, it's like controlled and stuff. So it has always been, I think for people that are on the outside looking in, they kind of see injections as like a fear thing. But then it is when they use it like, oh, that's really not that bad.

10:01 And what I'm actually taking, like you said, a lot of the peptides are endogenous to the human body. We're literally taking something that we're either deficient in or that could use more of to help heal or use in a different way than it would be normally used in the body to heal. I've always kind thought that with injections. One of the humps to get more like mass adoption that we have to give over But then I almost think to whether it's like Big Pharma or whoever they kind of like use that Against the peptide industry to scare people of, like, oh, yeah, it research use only you've got to like stay away from some of those

10:36 things so I don't know I've always kind thought like if there was like And we'll get there at some point, but like if people didn't have such like a preconceived notion about injecting on their mind of like, that's so much more dangerous than taking a supplement. Like you can go on Amazon and buy a bottle of caffeine pills and literally like harm yourself in five minutes from taking too many caffeine bills. But you know, God forbid you want BPC or TV 500 or something like that. It's, it's. So normal.

11:06 Or an energy drink and all these kids do it all the time. Oh my goodness. Do you have any favorite energy drinks? No. I'm not an energetic person. Yeah, I know you wanted to bring something up. No, I think going on top of that is kind of shifting a little bit to like the hormones. Like seeing the side of like hormones, especially like, we're seeing so much now, like peptides and hormones are a very hot topic, but I feel like especially for women, hormone replacement therapy still is behind.

11:43 And yeah, want to get your thoughts. Yeah, absolutely. I think hormones are a really great thing to talk about because it's sort of what I hope will happen with peptides eventually. So if we look at hormones, bioidentical hormones right, they're what our body makes and we know that as we get older our levels naturally decline. And they are not just for reproduction, they're for vitality, 100%. And the data is really clear on that.

12:13 But what happened with hormones is we had the Women's Health Initiative, which was this large study, and they basically said, if you use hormones, you might be more likely to get cancer, heart disease, all these things that scared women specifically. And so we put this all over the media, you know, if you go back and look in like the 2000s, this was all Over the place and women were like, who are on hormones are calling their doctors and like I need to get off. I'm done.

12:44 And then what happened is we continue to collect data and we did other retrospective analysis of the women's health initiative and They were wrong. And we were also looking at non-bioidentical estradiol. That's not what a lot of these women were taking. There's all kinds of confounders in there that made it inaccurate. But we created this fear story. It's very similar, Hunter, to what you said. Then we learned more recently that hormones are your heroes for health.

13:21 They're not villains, they're heroes. So estrogen for women is how we keep our brains nice and plump, you know? I want a big brain that's beautiful and functions well, and it's good for your heart, it is good your bones, your skin. It's not just about sexual wellness, though that is important. You know, and then you look at things like, so many women have UTIs as they get older. And it is actually the number one reason women end up in a nursing home is because they go on these different medications that help them with their bladder control.

13:56 They fall and they're going to nursing homes and die. It's so preventable with hormones. All these women walking around who have anxiety, they have issues with infertility, we were talking about this, right? It's clues, hormones have personalities and there's so much personalization that we can do to free women. And we now know that, I mean, literally, a couple of months ago, so almost 30 years later, They're like, whoops, sorry, We're going to remove the black box warning, actually hormones are good.

14:28 And that's how long it takes us to go from this like, I don't know, it's scary to, wow, maybe these are actually some of the best tools for your health and well-being. We even know estradiol. Yes, there's a really interesting and complex story there. But women who have more robust estridiol levels as they get older are less likely to get a lot of different cancers. So it's more complex than we made it. And I think we're going to see that with peptides.

15:00 They're not going away. The science is going go forward, and we just need to figure out what that looks like in a responsible way. We educate and use them and personalize them in the way that they're powerful tools that we are not afraid of, like hormones. With the hormone equation, obviously, Like I kind of go back and forth because some people could benefit so much from peptides. Like if you like work with a lot of people that are just like broken physiologically.

15:30 It's like, man, if this person could just get a little bit of a GLP or a bit like an anti-inflammatory peptide, it would help them massively. but then sometimes too, I'm like, man, if I had my Rathers, like I'd love to be like well, get your blood work done and get hormones optimized first. I would say like the hormones are the foundation of the house and then the peptides are like nice decorations inside. And you want both. You don't want an empty house, but you also, you don' want to have a like a house that's crumbling from the Foundation and have nice furniture inside of it.

16:00 Around that, What should people be looking for? So I think what, and I'm probably one of the people to blame for this, people just will willy nilly get on peptides. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but we were talking earlier about like what people can look at before They go to peptides because it is more than just like, Oh, I'm going to buy this online and then like shoot myself up. And everything is miraculous. It's going happen. What would you say are like some of the best things, whether it's like blood work or different testing that you can have done before you get into the peptide world.

16:34 Yeah. I mean, good health, like how many people like get on peptize and their, their gut is completely wrecked and they don't have the response they think. they're supposed to have because of that. Do you kind of have like some categories you'll go through before to like look, okay, let's address these things first and then the peptides are going to work better after that? Yeah, yeah. One, this is so important for people to hear that peptide are not magic bullets. They're not a one size fits all solution. they should be personalized. The need to be integrated into your entire health story and they're not a replacement for healthy lifestyle, right?

17:10 Like you need to sleep well, you to move, You need a nourish your body with the right food. And those are all things that are going to be incredibly important. We need do explosive movement. I'm such a fan of that. Don't care if you're 60 years old. You should sprint, Right? Yeah. That's the athlete in you. Not to interrupt you, Taylor and I have actually, this is a funny story. Well, it's not funny because like Taylor kind of got hurt a little bit. Yeah. I was like one day, like, let's go do sprint training, a football player, not with pads, obviously.

17:41 But I said, Let's get some cleats. So we went to Dick's and got Taylor some soccer cleat. It's like let go to the park and like do some like old drills or whatever. Cause I've, so I always had this theory that those type of movements compared to, now there's anything wrong with like zone two steady state cardio. compared to that, there's something that happens. Okay. This, this will sound weird. There's, something happens to your digestive system and your brain that you cannot get out of like lower steady state cardio that the explosive done in

18:14 the right context. I'm not saying like, you know, if your knees hurt to like go play basketball for three hours, but to do those movements in a very controlled way that actually like affects gut motility that affects like brain health, because it's like moving, whether it was like lymph fluid or something more in the brain is getting more oxygen into the. So talk a little bit. I know that's not a peptide thing, but talk about that. Cause that one thing I've always like speculated, you know, and I don't think people realize how important that is. Yeah, so this is everything can be medicinal if we use it properly, right in terms of tools.

18:48 So explosive movement. I'm such a fan of like I did a high intensity interval training as a hockey player before it was cool and people are talking about it. It was our dry land is what we called it Explosive movement is absolutely medicinal. So one, when you sprint and you do something that is requiring your muscles to work very intensely in that moment, you're actually going to have growth hormone released, right? It's a way, it's almost like a sacretagogue as a peptide, just from something you are doing with your lifestyle.

19:20 And you can see the bump from that. youthful, right? So because growth hormone starts to decline by 15% every decade once you are 30. So it's really significant. Like how many of us are sprinting when we're 40, when were 50, or 60? There's not a lot of A lot of us are scared to do it. Yeah, yeah. Or like box jumps, right? Like things that are a little bit hard to. And then the other thing is mitochondrial health. So these are the little energy buddies I like to call them, and one neuron maybe has one to two million mitochondria.

19:57 In the eyes, another really cool place where it's very dense in mitochondrion. But when you do explosive movement, you actually increase your mitochondrile density in your muscles. And then you're helping build your muscles, which we know in the age of GLPs, please preserve your muscle and build muscle. It is your longevity organ, right? So explosive movements, amazing. Yeah. Taylor, are you fan of explosive movement? Actually, I am now.

20:27 did not like, like last year I finally added HIIT cardio to my workouts. And I noticed the biggest difference in my physique and how much more fat and leaner, how quick, I got lean so much faster and nothing peptide hormone wise changed. But adding that in made such a huge difference on my physique. Those nights I slept so better. And that is, again, the growth hormone factor playing into it.

20:59 Yeah. It's one of those annoying things because like, I mean, Taylor's very active, but she would, her cardio was like more of just like treadmill stair master, you know, like stuff in the gym. And even changing up, even if it's something like I love to do jump rope, doing jumprope where you're like quick twitch is engaging. I think there's probably like a neuromuscular thing that makes sense with the mitochondria in a brain that it would be that of like days that I do that, I feel so much more engaged mentally.

21:29 And it's kind of funny because like when we played football in college, so like I would always joke, like my grades would be, and I got good grades, but I was like, my grade would so be much better if I didn't get hit in the head all the time. But one of my friends always had a point, he's like, you know, we say that, but the structure of like what we go through as an athlete actually I think makes us better in the other like intellectual pursuits because your body is kind of adapting to things in a way that wires neurons more efficiently because

22:02 you have like the state change of doing that. But now understand we understand that like think of, I just realized that with like mitochondrial density in the brain, how much those type of movement patternings would affect that. And again, it's like take all the SS 31 or Matzi in what they're going to do compared to the actual like human experience of doing those things. And it can be simple. Like I'm a mom, my daughter plays soccer, so I'll go to her practice and I am the lady like doing my hit training in the field.

22:35 Oh, I love that. I do sets. I mean, I get my heart rate going. I'm, you know, burning my muscles out and, people look at me, and I live in Colorado, so like a lot of people are fit. And I even invite the moms and like, for a little while, one of the seasons I got all of us to do it. So there's ways that you can do where it's practical to start in your life, right? If you're really intimidated by explosive movement, I get it, especially if you haven't done it in a while.

23:05 Maybe you like ran when you were like 13 years old, it was the last time you did a sprint, but just start, try. And you might be a little sore, But it really is incredible for your longevity. Yeah. It can be really simple. I noticed when I was doing more HIIT cardio at the end of all of my training, you don't notice my brain function was so much sharper with it. And it's kind of a therapy. It's like learning.

23:36 You're basically learning a new thing going back to brain. I love learning and I think new movement, your body's doing new movements is another really great way to learn. I started playing soccer on a bad mom's soccer league two years ago. I was a hockey player. But I will not miss my games if I'm in town because it is also truly therapy, right? It's a way you discharge stress. things that are just you need to let it go and when you do explosive movement to I think it There's really no other option than to be present.

24:10 Yeah. Well, okay, so it's tied back to peptides See what people are gonna say is like I can't do explicit movement because my knees or whatever are going to hurt Well that's the beauty I wish When I was an athlete, that was known like even remotely anything about peptides for recovery. If you had like, okay, let's say I'm going to go start doing like playing soccer, doing some sprint training, do a box jumps. Would you have some peptide that you would at least have on hand or like use in conjunction with that? Because I think people were like scared, like what if I get hurt?

24:41 And it was like. Sometimes I almost feel, I mean, thankfully, like I don't have any injuries, but sometimes I always feel spoiled because if I tweak something when I'm training, literally take some peptides and in like two or three days, you know, God forbid it's like a bad injury, something that's pulled muscle here, do this here. And I feel spoilt sometimes because like what would have taken me I know when a week or two. I remember I played a game against Boston College and I literally pulled a muscle in my back in warmups.

25:12 And I was like, how am I going to get, somehow I got through, I didn't play very well, but it's like if I would have had some of that back then. So do you have any peptides that you would say go in tandem or like work really well with the explosive training? Yeah. Yeah, We get weak before we really realize we get week. So that's another thing. Like you have to, if you haven't done it in a while, you need to build up and it's not just muscle. It's actually your connective tissue. Its the tendons and the ligaments. Do you do you to kind of work yourself into that? One. Two, I love BPC.

25:43 Taylor's looking at me like you got to work your way into it. We can't just go practice like it is. Don't make me go do sprints and I haven' done in awhile. Yeah. And then I really like thymus and beta-4. The shorter analog is TB 500. That one, you really only use it for a short period of time. It's really important you do that. the other grouping of peptides that not a lot of people know about for cartilage is the secretagogues. They're actually very protective from further cartilages destruction.

26:15 We still have this like, oh, it's wear and tear of my joints. No, it's not. It's actually inflammation and destruction of the tissue due to, again, the metabolic approach to health or disease, all the way down to what's happening in your joints. Even a lot of orthopedic surgeons are starting to do that, where we see if you get your metabolism in a better place, we get growth hormone optimized. A lot of these things can actually get better and then you're less likely to injure yourself or if you are injured to your point,

26:49 I've done the same thing. I have sprained my ankle in soccer and I'm playing the next week because I know which peptides to use. So there's a lot tools and again, it's comprehensive approach. That's what I think we're entering this next phase with peptide where people realize they're really powerful tools but you need to us them with everything else. Yeah. I want to ask you, cause I get asked this all the time and I think you understand it much better than I do. Can you just tell people what the difference between thymus and beta four is the full things like 43 amino acids along some longer one versus TB 500, which

27:23 is 17 to 23. They get, it's scary enough for a lot of people buying peptides, but then they see that and they're like, Oh my goodness. I've been buying TB 500. And I just wasted all my money because did you know there's times in beta four and it TB 500 is like not even a fake. It's like the synthetic, like faker. Can you explain people? Cause I like even I need help understanding. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So thymus and beta 4 is the full peptide that basically it is same thing our body makes.

27:53 So it does have to do with healing and repair. We hear that a lot. Thymus in beta four also has a a of immune modulating properties, and it's incredible also for hair growth. That's another really interesting thing that we're going to see more and more. The data on it, if you dig into the literature, is really cool. I would say you want to use thymus and beta-4 in much more severe healing situations. So someone had a stroke, thimus in beta 4 is the full peptide, works incredible in the brain and the vascular system.

28:27 It has a lot more activity there. A lot of cardiologists who really know their stuff love thymus and beta 4. For someone who's had a stroke, a heart attack, they have vascular disease type of thing, their recovering from a TBI, you want to use thimus in beta four. TB 500 is just a portion of thymosin beta-4. So it's not bad. It's another option. And what's interesting about thymus and beta-4 is it has different parts of the peptide that actually have different involvement in gene activation and

29:04 different pathways. So it's a selection that does more tissue healing and repair. But what I like to tell people about TB500 is It does tissue repair, but it's really great at preventing scarring. That's the thing to really think about that compared to BPC 157. Do you have to combine them? That is another thing. It doesn't work if you don't combine. I'm like, yes, it does. You can do Bpc by itself. 500, you can do thymus and beta four, there's a lot of flexibility there.

29:37 But that's the big difference is like, it's like a heavy hitter. Thymous and Beta four is also a whole lot more expensive to synthesize. And it is not as common in the marketplace. The bigger the peptide gets, it's a little bit more complex to make it, to synthesize it. So sometimes these analogs are really nice, right? They're just shorter sequences. It's the same thing with the secretagogues or some of these other peptides. Its parts of growth hormone, that we're selecting for certain benefit.

30:08 Yeah. On that note, well, one, let's talk about this first. You said you don't want to stay on it forever. And there's the whole, again, I'm probably as guilty as anyone for perpetuating like cycle on cycle off peptides. I think it's a lot more contextual. Like, you know, like, okay, if you just broke your leg, probably want use them until you're getting close. If not all the way healed. Um, but can you talk about why more, especially specifically with like BPC and TB 500? Why is that? Cause a lot of people get into it. They start taking those and like, Oh my goodness, this is my daily multivitamin now. Right.

30:38 I was like injecting those for life. So why would we want to cycle, specifically those two specifically? Because I think those are more like gateway peptides. Why would you want cycle those? And not be on them, uh, forever, like in purpose. So there's a couple of reasons why cycling is really important. So BPC, TB 500, thymus, and beta 4 will start there. But in terms of peptides as a whole, cycling as important because the way a peptide works is it's actually going into the bloodstream and it is going to

31:09 act at a receptor level to signal something to occur in a cell. If you do that all the time, nonstop, you can create receptor resistance. And we now think even with this is interesting with GLPs that potentially this like, go up and dose, keep going higher and higher, and I'm not noticing anything. One, I was just talking to this doctor who's done GLPs for like 15 years, and he said, one, you can get more receptors, right?

31:39 The higher dosing, You get all these receptors on the surface of your cell. Then you go off of it and you're like, ''I'm going to eat my arm.'' You're so hungry that the signaling is even more intense. The other thing we're finding is maybe those receptors invert into the cell membrane. So you have to take a break for a while then to bring those back out. So the big thing about peptides is they are different than a supplement. You want to pulse them. I really like everything's a little bit different, but five days on, two days off, if we think about a week, that's not because of the mechanism of action

32:16 in terms of tissue healing. It's you want maintain sensitivity. And then peptides are different too, because you wanna use them to accomplish a certain purpose. So that's the other thing is when you start a peptide, you want to say, why am I starting it? Not just, it's fish oil, It's a multivitamin. It'll take forever. That's not how peptids are used. And I think that where a lot of the misunderstanding is. BPC TB 500, The big thing there is it's part of the way that it is helping with tissue repair and healing.

32:51 I think about like a hurricane came through the area, right? You have like all this destruction, devastation, and you need to come in and clean up all the debris and all of that nasty stuff that's there. And then you bring in all those contractors, all their supplies and build things back up. That's what those peptides are doing in terms of an analogy. you don't want to do that forever where you're building and building, and, building building. Because it's basically, what it what is called is angiogenesis.

33:21 Now, the big thing there is, can these peptides when used long term cause cancer? That's the biggest concern. What I would say is we don' fully know yet. I think it is responsible uses. You want a screen people before, you want use it in active cancer, long-term because of that. But the other thing to note is tumor angiogenesis is not the same as physiological angiogenesis, meaning at a tissue level where there's injury to your

33:51 point of like if you have a fracture or you tore your Achilles or something, your body is making these peptides as signaling molecules to do repair, and it's going to it more and longer in an acute injury situation. That's the big context that you need to have. And yes, you're right. don't just use it forever. And this is where education is so important, and we're all kind of catching up on that. Yeah. Also, as we were talking about that, there's been a lot of How would I call it?

34:24 I think confusion. Right now, like the big thing we've gotten asked a ton of questions. Can you have BPC and TB 500 stable together? Or can you BTC, TB500, GHK or even KPV? Cause that's like everyone's favorite thing to buy is glow and clow. Uh, can explain to people and whether it's not like you can't or you and then maybe just like a very lay explanation to like why that would be. Yeah, it's like twin daughters that like don't like each other and start fighting, punching each when they're in the same room too long.

35:03 Yeah. So the idea here is for a while, you know, with peptides, their amino acid sequences, right, and they have different charges, they different Dalton size, different pHs that they like to be at in terms of their personalities, all of them like a little bit of an acidic pH. So it's, in general, that's the case. I think if you would talk to a chemist, which I'm not a chemistry, I will profess that, but could these amino acid sequences interact with each other in

35:33 a solution? Absolutely, right? They're going to do multiple things. Have we studied that extensively? No. So I'm more of a puritist at heart where if you're going to use a peptide, one, I think starting with one or two max at a time is really good practice because otherwise you don't know what's doing what. And if have anything occurring that maybe is not beneficial or it's a question mark, then you're able to backtrack and figure that out a lot faster.

36:08 So I don't think it's great. Now, we know that some of them are interacting because in a vial, they'll actually get gel-like. They completely change, right? And some are more problematic than others. But I actually like keeping them separate. And I think in the short term, they're probably okay. But if you're gonna let them sit together for a while, those twins are gonna- Yeah. Interacting. Yeah, like you said, I thing until there's actually studies on the stability, we don't really know.

36:43 Maybe they are stable, but maybe they interacting in a way that's like not the intended. not in a bad way, but maybe it's just not working as effectively. I tend to lean to that too, I'm not saying one way or the other. Um, like you said probably like in the short term, probably okay. Like what if it was in fridge six months, is that the case? I'll say this, this might be like kind of an unpopular thing to say in peptide world. Let's take all those, so like BPC, TP500, GHK, KPV.

37:14 I would actually prefer, if I'm using those for a certain effect, to rotate through them almost like I am going to do BPC, maybe even if it's just like a weekly thing. Bpc for week, then TB next week and then GHK the next weekend and KPV the week. And I also think to the receptor attenuation point, you're actually extracting more net healing because you can run a little bit higher dose probably in

37:46 a shorter timeframe without the down, like the attenuation down regulation. And then you look at four weeks and it's like, oh, wait a second, I was able to like actually kind of slide more TB 500 in, slide my PPC in without same consequences opposed if I were injecting all of them together, you know, at a pretty decent sized dose for a month straight. I call it turbo dosing. It's a great way to do it. Pulsing it kind of at a higher dose and then you pull back. And you don't want to that with all of them. If we could just talk for a second, secretagogues, I see so many people overdose.

38:20 You don t need a really high amount. For example, like CJC, you have receptor saturation around 100 to 150 micrograms. So when you do more than that, you're actually causing more receptor resistance over time. And again, it's this idea, peptides work differently than other tools that we're using, right? It's not like vitamin C. I mean, do the same kind of thing actually with flooding that your body with vitamin c, but more isn't always better.

38:53 Yeah, I don't think a lot of people realize that there's like a saturation point beyond which it doesn't really matter how much you take. And actually, it could probably be the inverse. It could actually probably have a negative effect. One thing I wanted to ask you, because you're the best person I've talked to about this, or at least knows the most. So let's say like CJC, IPA, Tessa Morella, and any of those. why do people have immune reactions to those seemingly above and beyond like some of the other peptides?

39:23 And is, is that like indicative of, the end user or is just like, Hey, you're kind of like GHK burns. You're like ghk if you inject it burns, it's like kind stuck with that. Like most people where that's going to happen with the secretagogues. Is it more of an end-user issue or it like a problem with a compound itself? Yeah, that's a great question. So one, when people are thinking about using secretogog, it's really important to know that there is a demographic of individuals that can have an anaphylactic

39:55 response to secretagogs. If you are new, please go very low dose and have Benadryl or some kind of antihistamine close because I've had people who This is compounding pharmacy. It's prescribed and it's happened. Yes. We've had that happen to somebody who was getting a peptide from compound pharmacy and went into total anaphylactic shock and they ended up in the hospital. Yeah. So this is a category I think that to your point has like the highest amount of reactivity of the popular ones that are on the market.

40:31 If you get more of a flush, so you might have like heart palpitations, your ears get really warm. You kind of all of sudden are like, it's like I had, you know, what you feel sometimes with red wine. People also like that feeling. Yeah. That's also, yeah, that's interesting because it is vasodilation. I like the feeling from redwine too. And I have nitric oxide. bad genes that I don't make nitric oxide well.

41:01 So it's interesting, again, like everything is a clue if we look at it. And this is the clue with secretagogues. If you get that reaction and you have a lot of irritation at the injection site, I'm assuming it is good quality peptide. Yeah, assuming that it isn't something in the peptides. Here's your clue. you are a high histamine individual. You maybe have even all the way to mast cell activation syndrome, which these are the people that could go into anaphylactic shock that we just talked about.

41:36 So it's when I see that, what I say is one, Maybe we should pause. And the big thing to know, mast cells are part of your immune system. When they get kind of freaked out, they release a bunch of histamine and all of these other cytokines and chemokine that cause more inflammation. What you need to do first is we go back to things like gut health. We go to how do we stabilize the mast cells and balance immune system function.

42:07 A lot of times it's actually a clue that there's something with your immune that's imbalanced. I love thymus and alpha 1. It is absolutely an immune modulator for autoimmune, for deficiency, it has been studied as an adjuvant in cancer therapy. But you got to go back and fix some of that. And again, this is where the personalization and adding in the layers of understanding your story are going to help you get the most benefit from peptides

42:40 without the consequences that you hear of these stories because we don't understand these pieces that are nuanced about it. Should we talk about mast cell stabilizer? Okay, so this is, I think so much of the population has histamine issues. A lot of women have histamines issues, also here's a clue. If you're a high estrogen dominant woman, not enough progesterone, you are going to be more reactive in terms of your histamin response. Hi. Me too. This, I was told as a kid, i was partially allergic to the sun.

43:12 I would go out and I'd get hives in the Sun. Yes. The kid who is like always red. My nervous system was totally dysregulated. That's what always get red if I wasn't nervous. Yeah. Same. I can't do this and I'd flush and yeah, all the things that, you know, at the time I had no idea. I was just, I'm very Irish and have lots of histamine issues in my genes and now I know all these things and it's solvable. That's what's so cool about all this.

43:42 So KPV can be helpful for mast cell stabilization. The really big hero here that I've seen for several years now is triseptide. It is incredible because as we activate some of those pathways in the body with GLP-1, GIP, there's a lot of immune modulation that occurs. And I have seen miraculous things happen. Also after infection like COVID, if you've had really bad influenza, it's common that you'll kind of almost get this even transient histamine intolerance

44:20 where you're like, what's wrong with me? Do you think that's what people that can't smell or taste is going on with COVID or is that something completely different? I think it's mostly neurological inflammation. It's so much inflammation to the nerves. You know, it is such a stressor to immune system. The COVID infection and then we have T cell deficiency for about 90 days after that infection. Any really severe infection, you want to make sure you're helping recover your immune systems, your T cells. Thymus and Alpha 1 is incredible to use during and after a severe infection to really get your immune system back into a good place.

44:58 Otherwise, it's interesting, you talk to somebody, they're like, I got this really bad COVID, now I have long COVID. I had this illness and I've never recovered. You talked to them five years later. It created this imbalance in their immune systems they've ever recovered from. Yeah. That's so interesting hearing this and, think about like everything with mitochondria uncoupling being so popular right now is that it's almost sounding like,

45:28 you know, let's more so use like something like thymus and alpha one prior to ever using that. Cause you don't want to spin unhealthy mitochondrion. And this is, that's, yeah. I would say we wanna let the body uncouple as the bodies see fit. We don't wanna force it, especially as kind of your first thing that you're gonna go after and do it. Now, I think looking at mitochondrial function as a core starting piece can be really good and you'll have better response to things over time.

46:01 That plus modulating inflammation because here's another thing I see all the time, people are like, well, that peptide didn't work for me. It didn't do anything. And I'm like, that's a clue. It doesn't mean it was a bad peptide or it doesn' work for you. I means you probably have receptor resistance all around, just like insulin resistance. About 75 to 80% of the population has that. You can get insulin resistant just from stress.

46:31 Yeah. It doesn't have to be obese. As I always see so much like PCOS being so popular now in the younger generation of women. Absolutely. You can totally induce that with stress. And I think the other thing is so many of us are walking around inflamed. I mean, I look at pictures of myself from several years ago and I'm like, Was so cute, but I was so puffy. Yeah, same. Yes, and I'm like I wasn't totally inflamed and in a state like that Peptides aren't gonna work optimally. In that situation.

47:01 At least until the general inflammation is under control. I think that goes back to to the hierarchy of peptide use is like people They'll hear stuff and they're like, okay, I'll go buy all these and start using them at once. someone like you said should have a defined goal, and there should be like periods of goals. Even if you feel like, you're at the point that you are really healthy, of like okay, what hierarchy do I work in? Like, if my foot's broken, that's probably the first thing I need to fix.

47:31 But if your not injured, like maybe your 100 pounds overweight, That probably would be a good starting point. Or maybe you have autoimmune disease. that probably would be a good starting point. And so I think people get like information overload. You don't need that many peptides at one time. A lot of people are taking nine, 10 peptide all at once time, at that point it's like, how do you know what's going on? What is beneficial or what is not working? Because like maybe you take all those and it doesn't work.

48:02 Would you say you kind of like to work in that manner too of I guess what's like a good rule of thumb number of the peptides that someone should be on at any given time? Cause I've talked to people that are taking literally 18 or 19 peptide at one time. Oh my gosh, that's too much. Please stop. One, please stop I really like maybe one to two, especially for new. And then the other thing is cycle them to your point, right? I just did this really cool mitochondrial stack for eight weeks and it was four different peptids.

48:37 but they're all synergistic and I had intention with it and then I was done. So you can stack a few more, but I mean, more than that is just too much. I think especially when someone goes beyond five, you think about it like as a math equation, like how complex something gets after there's like one or two variables involved. Once it's beyond 5, it is kind of like all bets are off because that becomes like millions, if not billions of possibilities of what could happen from there. And I to your point, doesn't mean that that has to be like three months of you only using one.

49:11 It could be a short window of your doing one, but a lot of people It's like mixing color, like after a while, you keep mixing and adding more and more colors, eventually you're just gonna get black. You're gonna just get a mud out brown. Well, I think too, it takes away the awareness people have of their own body to really... Like when people say, Taylor and I call them like the, it doesn't work for me people, like nothing could work. Like you tell them to do something like, nothing can work, It kind of like takes that away.

49:42 Cause it's like okay, what didn't worked? Did you, did the peptide not work or did you just not respond to it? Or were there like severe stress in your life to like where the peptide probably wouldn't have done anything anyway. So I think if people had like a better understanding of how do we move from this into the next thing, it would make it a lot easier. I think people that are like the awareness that they have isn't enough, like their own body to know what's going on.

50:13 So one thing that's been going around is like, GLP microdosing doesn't work. One, I don't think we have a parameter understanding of like, what is a microdose? What's the dose of a microtose is that hunt 100 micrograms or is it one milligram or two milligrams versus a lot of people run 15 milligrams a week of. A GLP. But in terms of the actual concept of micro dosing, can you explain why that's different? First of all, from someone that is diabetic that needs to lose a hundred pounds, like how could someone, that it's relatively fit,

50:44 but maybe they have some of these autoimmune or mass cell issues. How would they approach the microdosing conversation and kind of go down the road because I think that looks a lot different than someone that is in a metabolic emergency that needs to Exactly, and I think it's the, what does it mean it doesn't work? What does that mean? I'd think people would say like, if it, doesn' t turn me into a supermodel in three months, then it does not work. Yeah, yeah. And I thing that's, the whole thing of a microdose is there's a completely different reason that you're using a microdose.

51:16 I do want to give a shout out to Dr. Tina Moore. She is the queen that has been talking about this for years. So she has incredible information on micro-dosing and what we actually mean by microdosing, because it doesn't mean like, I still want to lose weight, but I take less of a dose. At that point, what were doing is these are receptor agonists, right? So they're kind of going and stimulating the receptors. And what they are doing, we think about the GLPs for weight loss, for type 2 diabetes, at a higher dose but we have these receptors all over in our body

51:51 right so it's not just insulin sensitivity the brain to body you know chatter back and forth food drive it also regulates to your point of what you're saying immune system gut function cardiovascular benefits modulating neuroinflammation there's incredible mechanisms of action from these peptides that we're learning When you use a microdose, the whole point is you a small enough amount where it's going to stimulate some of these pathways in a very micro way,

52:22 micro environment. And it is going give those benefits to the immune system, let's say if you have autoimmunity, to gut, cardiovascular system. without turning off your desire to eat, because you don't want that long term, right? You need to be able to, eat we want to maintain muscle mass, we need the drive. And also people at the end of the day have to learn that they have a relationship with their hunger.

52:52 You can't get rid of your hunger, there's a reason for it. and I think in our society we have this like food obsession and you know there's so much food addiction and i really like low dosing because it makes you have to address that and develop some of those healthy habits but at the end of the day it's kind of like a low dose naltrexone So for a long time, functional medicine doctors have been using LDN to manage autoimmunity because it modulates inflammation at this cellular level.

53:28 And now we're learning like, oh my gosh, GLPs do it even better. So what is a micro dose? A microdose is dose that you get the benefits, but you still have an appetite. It's literally as simple as that. What is the dose depends on who you are. The other thing is please know that when you go higher and higher in your dosing, there is much more likely that you're not going to be responsive to a low dose over time. It might backfire and it's just not the best approach to your overall health.

54:03 Those are the people who are going be more like to gain the weight. they're going to have issues with their pancreas, their liver, or their gallbladder. It doesn't have to be that way, especially if you use more responsible doses. One thing we get asked a lot is hair loss on GLPs. What do you think is going on there? I've speculated, I don't really know. I think it's a thyroid slowdown because people are starving themselves because of the GLP. Major shift in energy level, digestion.

54:35 Yeah, but even if someone's like on thyroid or desiccated thyroid, or thyroid by regulator, I still think it's not meeting the demand. It's kind of saying, well, have gas in the tank, you're still running out of gas, even though you put gas and the What do you think is going on? Because I think to your point of the GLPs, one, I love the idea of like, it's a dose that doesn't cause you not to eat because eating is important. Like we've kind of, like you said, we have this food addiction. So we got to the point like oh yeah, just don't eat. And that's what's, well, that how's that different from anorexia?

55:05 You know, obviously some people do need help with their appetite because the food that we had is so addictive. There's so many chemicals in it. Well, GLP's can help the addiction Yeah, they can help with addiction too. We'll talk about that. But like, to the concept of like actually having an understanding and a relationship with yourself around hunger. Hunger is a signal. And so people will be like on two milligrams of it. And I'm getting hungry again. And then they get physically scared because they're now like, it's like I've not going to be able to control the addiction anymore.

55:37 When in reality, that might actually be the best thing. Because if you have dieted, you actually need to kind of refeed and reverse diet back into a point because otherwise your metabolism is just going keep falling off a cliff. Cause the body's going get normalized. Like, Oh, give me a 1500 calories. I'll normalize that you give you 1200. So that now. I think people get into chasing the dose. And then it becomes this conversation of like, now I've wrecked myself and then we blame the drug.

56:10 Yeah, but with like caffeine, you could wreck yourself if you take too much caffeine. It doesn't mean that caffeine is bad. Around the microdosing, I wanted to ask you, because I don't think anyone's really Dr. Tina has, but like, do you think that that is a long-term solution, much more so, meaning that like could someone stay on that, like with intermittent breaks for like a pretty good period of time and use as a tool, or would you still be more of the opinion,

56:40 you really want to cycle it and like kind of harness the benefits out of cycles? Or is it something that if you're doing a really low dose, say it's like 500 micrograms a week, is that something that you could stay on for longer without having to worry about some of the side effects of them? Yeah. I think when you microdose, you can use it long term and you're going to maintain sensitivity much better. Everybody's going be a little bit different. And then I the idea with what's your protocol for micro-dosing? Some people are going do it weekly. Again, if you have an autoimmune condition that's more severe and it is managing it, maybe you need a weekly dose.

57:14 But if you're someone who's like, I was a little puffy, had a insulin resistance because I'm going to do a microdose once every other week to once a month, that can be a strategy too. So even the dose and the timing and frequency is really personalized and you can kind of play around with that to get the most amount of benefit. And on the note of hair, just going back to that because as a female, hair is a big deal. I mean, it's a good deal for men, but it is crushing when you lose your hair.

57:46 Like I got COVID, I lost like 40% of my hair, and I had a really high fever. And I have like a lion's mane. That was like, what's happening to my head? You know, It's just devastating. There are a couple of things. When you loose that amount of hair on a GLP, you're losing weight too fast. One, and you are starving yourself, not only of calories, but of micronutrients. So you have to have adequate micronutsrient for your hair to grow because it's kind of a icing on the cake.

58:17 And your body's like, if it starts to shut down, it is not going to prioritize your hairs. It's, like I don't care if you bald, we're going keep you alive. Yeah. You know, there's people on GLPs, these high dose that are literally presenting with scurvy. I was having some conversations with medical doctors. Because they're not eating. Yeah, it's like this is not a strategy. So also, please use a multivitamin. Yes, when you're on a GLP. It's going just back to the basics, a good multavitamins with minerals.

58:49 is really helpful so you prevent some of that. But yeah, microdosing is creative, it can look different. Yeah, yeah. It's funny to that point. People, I think the GLPs are like almost like a godsend for people to like where the population as a whole has been. Then it's almost we forget some the basics and you kind of stop yourself and like, wait, should be taking a multivitamin anyway. But if you're like, oh, I'm taking GLP. I don't need that. Or even eating. Like how many people I think, and again, i'm not a diet adherent to like any specific diet like heat or whatever.

59:22 i think if people just ate whole unprocessed food and you tried to minimize like the amount of processed food you eat, you probably gonna be okay. And you stay hydrated and whatever you could get into like different macros or whatevers. Carbs are a big one. I see a lot of it with women, like women are so carb phobic and even like, especially with the paleo and keto diet, just how damaging that is on the hair, on when I was doing hair, when paleo was so big and popular, I mean, it was just like, literally like women were coming in and their hair was like dissolving

1:00:00 and it not having nutrition. Not having the right nutrition, a lot of women still are so carb phobic and I think having carbs is still so important with GLPs. Yes, it actually makes your GLP work. You have to eat carbohydrates for your glp to work properly, because it's dependent upon glucose response. And here's the other thing, your microbiome, which is a key piece of human health, is two to three pounds of who you are when you step on the scale that's

1:00:33 not you. It's a healthy bacteria. it needs to be fueled and it uses all the fiber in our plant foods and our carbohydrates to keep it healthy. So we and we see this actually with people who go low carbohydrate long term, or they starve their microbiome and then their bifidobacterium levels are so low. And then all of a sudden, it's like, now I'm sensitive to this. Now I have this food sensitivity now. I can't tolerate that. It's It's because you're starving your microbiome and your micro biome will literally start to eat your intestinal wall,

1:01:06 the mucosa lining to stay alive. Do you think that has a lot to do with like the gene? Like with, like, M? MTHFR? Yeah. Like how much that plays. Yeah, I think so everybody has Mthfr. I was the gene queen, so I love genetics. There's actually a reason why some people have higher food noise and why GLPs work so well for them. Yeah, no.

1:01:39 The reality is no, so it's a nice like, you know, identifier that we like to give cause to, but no there's really not a correlation. But I just want to share this really cool fact about if you have really high food noise, right, and food drive, like the volume in your brain is turned up really GLPs are awesome. So here's what's really cool about some of the genes that can be, you know, not dysregulated, but just your variation.

1:02:10 If you walk throughout the day, and you get movement throughout So like a walking pad. I'm like, and I did this way before there are GLPs and we were using them when I was in clinical practice, I'd see that and i'd say, are you hungry all the time? They're like yes I am sir. i'm hungry. All the I need you to like if they had a desk job, i need to walk throughout the day. And it would change their life. They are like I don't have the same hunger signals I had before.

1:02:41 So just know again it's going back to peptides are part of an overall personalized plan for your health. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's huge around Taylor. And I have jokers who were always like talking about like, you know, business tools, how to help people. I'm like maybe we should do a GLP one cookbook. Like, okay, what would we put in? It's like oh, actually the same foods that you would eat if you were not on a job. You would be like Oh, well I might have GLp now. It almost is like a catalyst to be okay now it's time to like clean up the act when in reality like you should be doing that anyway.

1:03:14 That's super interesting about the walking things like Taylor and I always joke like I love food but to me broadly speaking I'm more of like if I didn't have to eat it like, if i'm like really focused on what I am doing I don't want to eat because it's like, just give me fuel and I'm good. Like if you put it like into take a little tiny thing, I just like pop it. I'd be good that I had to Eat. Whereas Taylor enjoys the experience of food much more and she gets much More like food noise.

1:03:48 to where it's like, I would say like I have a little bit of food noise. If anything for me, probably like growing up, like food was a system. And so like. I like to like cash like oh, there's a big football game on I associate like foods like going to eat food with that or like being an athlete. It's. Like you go out and you play your game and it' like OK, you're going like celebrate with food. Enjoy the food With the food noise and walking, I think if people even just took like a 10 minute walk after their meals. I know Taylor and I, that's kind of like our nightly rituals. Like we eat dinner and then we take the dogs for a walk.

1:04:19 And if we don't do that, the dog are going to get mad at us now. So we have to do it. They refuse to go to the bathroom outside if they don' walk them at night. They won't even go out there. We're not going to go there, but if you walk us, then we're going go. I think to that point, the addiction component around GLPs and mental health is going be huge. Maybe scratching the surface of that now clinically, we are seeing that obviously in the research world a ton now.

1:04:53 Can you just talk about what's going on with that mechanistically and how that's playing out in people's lives? Yeah, I think one, we don't fully know, to be totally honest, it's gonna be something we're gonna learn. But we know it works. I mean, i've talked to so many doctors that are like, Sarah, used to have a drink every night, and it was just part of my routine as a way I would come down from my day. I started a GLP and I drink maybe twice a month socially now. And that's so freeing, it's beautiful.

1:05:26 What I love to talk about in terms of addiction too is I'd love reframe this and really understand there is a physiology to addiction. It's not just something people are choosing to do, there's actually an imbalance. I'm excited about peptides, I think they really are going to give new tools for addiction and we're seeing that I mean they're being used quote unquote off label for that all the time. I think it has to do with insulin neuroinflammation and dopamine and serotonin regulation so it's helping from all of those fronts and then again just

1:06:00 like food noise. If you talk to people who, whether it's everything substance wise, right, it could be alcohol, marijuana, shopping, gaming, the drive for something to give you a hit. It's scrolling on social media. The same mechanism that your using in your brain to kind of get that hit. And it's showing that something is in balance and probably you have some dopamine deficiency that you're trying to bring up.

1:06:33 Yeah. It's pretty amazing. I mean, I've talked to so many people that their lives have completely changed from food addiction, alcoholism, drugs, shopping, different habits they were doing. They're like, this was so unhealthy for me and it totally reset my brain around it. Do you think so? I've always, cause this is happening like in real time. And so like when you talk to people about it, they're like, yeah, it's like I literally cannot get excited about shopping anymore or gambling anymore.

1:07:03 Do think the people that report that they have depression on GLPs, It's actually modulating some of those neurotransmitters or something in the brain to like where they don't get the same high anymore? And then they are forced to reconcile their lives because sometimes their these things and then you don't have that anymore. I mean, imagine if your whole life was like gambling on sports or something or playing video, like think about playing games. Like I haven't played video games since I was 18 years old, but like I would say like video game's like, they just don' do it.

1:07:40 And nothing wrong if you play video but I couldn't like in good conscience sit and play a video. Knowing when I had like a purpose in the world of like no dude, you need to like There's time for relaxing, but like in front of a screen playing a video game is probably not the best way to relax. But do you think like some of those things, like what it's actually doing is like helping so much that it forces someone to look at their life and they're like, Oh man, maybe this wasn't the thing. Yeah. I also think that here's what's really fascinating. There are, there's a very real response to GLPs where people are wiped out, fatigued.

1:08:12 Yes. Yeah. No, they literally call it and it seems to be more with Reda that I'm hearing it more, but it still happens with Seema or Terz. What is going on there? Because like that's one of those things too. I think even Obviously, if someone's obese, that's probably going to happen. But I think the people that are microdosing still, I've heard people doing a small micro dose and still getting wiped out. So what's going on with this severe fatigue? It's not like a fatigue that they've experienced before, If that makes sense.

1:08:45 Totally. So one, you have to make sure you've electrolytes and you're eating, right? That's like the simple solve for some people. But the other piece of it is fascinating that, and this is where I think I wanted to connect it to the depression. Because we now know a lot of times depression is neuroinflammation, we're thinking about it differently. It's not just, I'm bummed out and life is hard. Your brain is on fire and it's dysfunctional. And I think we're viewing mental health differently now that we understand more about cellular medicine and what's happening in terms of systems biology,

1:09:23 right? What happens with GLPs is you're literally moving yourself into a healing crisis if you are really sick. And so we have, we now know that the ATP go into place of massive repair and also your metabolism. So you, and then also immune imbalance, right? Like when you balancing your immune system, those are systems that use massive amounts of energy.

1:09:54 Right. So when you're sick and you mount an immune response and get a fever, you are using 70% more energy for your immune system function than you were just on a daily basis. I actually see it as a sign of, For me, as a clinician, when I go to my clinician brain, I say, you're sicker than I realized, right? Or here's what I would say to someone, there's more work to be done at a cellular level.

1:10:25 And a lot of times when it's that intense and they can't function, because some people literally can go work, their brains don't work. It's like so debilitating. You need to decrease your dose to a place that you can still be functional. And then you slowly titrate up a little higher. Maybe you stay at a lower dose, right? You don't need go up. Yeah. You are healing your metabolism, your immune system, and your nervous system function by using these peptides.

1:10:55 So it's a true healing process. It's not that anything is wrong. it is just extremely energy intensive to heal. Yeah. What's kind of like, if you think about it, like think, about like a house that needs repair. Like if we just have a dilapidated house just sitting there, there's no energy moving around. All of a sudden now you came banging out walls like you're repairing stuff. That is super intensive in the body. There is going to be a blowback. from doing that. Like you said, it's almost like an induced healing crisis. Not that it is happening, but it was almost a Herck's reaction, even though that's not what it doing.

1:11:29 It's like a detox of the body saying, okay, you're forcing me now to slow down. Probably from a nervous system standpoint too, or someone's nervous systems is redlined. And all of a sudden it says, hey, slowdown, we're actually going to go into repair mode now. So I've never Thought about that, but now that I think about. And you know, what's crazy for me is like when I've cycled on and off GLPs, even like say I'd been off for like eight weeks or something, I go back on. I'm much more of the opinion now. I want to say like on a low dose as much as I can.

1:11:59 It doesn't mean I would be on all the time, but a load dose, because for me, my cognitive clarity is so much better with the GLP. it's almost like having a nootropic and you don't realize it. Cause like, I don, think like Oh, like I have brain fog. And then like if I've been off of a GLPs, start a little bit of dose and like man I am on it today. and it was like yeah, it wasn't bad before, But it like. Having an effect like that. But I notice. even like a low dose, like reintroducing it, I'll have like two or three days where I'm tired. Like I am pretty tired, man, nothing is debilitating, but I never thought about that.

1:12:34 It literally is like creating the cascade that is healing mode. And it's like, not that I was unhealthy before, that's how powerful it is, even at a Yeah, all of a sudden you push those pathways of healing and repair so much harder. And we know going to brain with that, I have so many people are like, ''I am so sharp. I haven't been this sharp and I like remember things, my word recall.'' And, we now know that these peptides, the mechanism of action in the brain literally

1:13:07 prevents Alzheimer's and cognitive decline because it's stopping the entire inflammatory cascade that causes cognitive the decline. It's so clear. There's papers on it. They're amazing. they're in my course because I want people to read them. But that's the other piece of this is we have so many cool new tools for the biggest things that plague our world. Switching really quickly back to BPC on that note. Do you know what the number one cause of disability in the United States is?

1:13:37 Disability, I'm going to say maybe arthritis. You nailed it. 20 million people can't move around. They don't have good quality of life. And you think about the tools they have, like NSAIDs, right, ibuprofen, they go on steroids that actually inhibits healing. It's amazing. And if you use BPC, you can get around that because this is another really cool thing about peptides. Again, they're complementary tools, but corticosteroids, right, we use them a lot for all of these different inflammatory issues.

1:14:12 They inhibit the ability for all the little workers to drag around their supplies in the cell to bring all of the healing and repair in. So corticosteroids inhibit healing all they way, right? They reduce inflammation. If you use BPC with a cortical steroid, you can get full tissue healing, and it mitigates the issues with it. Just arthritis, like cool new tools, right? Giving people their quality of life back.

1:14:42 That's a huge one. People are terrified to lose their brains, going back to dementia. Yes. It's actually how arthritis is what got me down the journey of understanding and using peptides is because I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. And that's where I went down, the peptide route. Yeah, all those years of doing here. Yeah. Plus probably like all the chemicals, plus your salon for a while was right next to literally a radiology device. The other side of the wall was a radio like with like an ultrasound thing on the other 3D ultrasound in the office.

1:15:18 Cause it's like in office building with You're like, I'm glowing in the dark. But to the point of GLPs, we're going to see them beyond so much of what people now know them for. And then you throw in a BPC. That's crazy. I didn't realize that about the corticosteroids, because how many people are on those? And literally, if you took that, it could mitigate and actually get you to where you want to go.

1:15:48 Do you wanna know one more other cool thing? People who hurt themselves. This is from Dr. Elizabeth Yearth. She's a genius. I met her and I was like, you're my girl crush. But she is so adamant about this. And I want If you injure yourself, do not take NSAIDs, ibuprofen, for three days because you want some inflammation. It's actually how that tissue initiates healing and repair and all of that signaling.

1:16:23 Then you can start modulating the inflammation, so again, how we use these different tools, whether they're over-the-counter meds or supplements or peptides, it matters in terms of using them strategically and intelligently. Yeah. One thing I wanted to, I have seen more of this just in like feedback I'm getting from people. I haven't realized, brain fog and the fear of dementia for someone in their late forties and early fifties is becoming a massive,

1:16:55 that's much more than like the mass consciousness right now of what I've seen from. People. It's a couple of things. My grandmother passed away from dementia a few years ago. I think a lot of people at that age, their parents are starting to have it happen and they're like, okay, this is happening to my parent. Either I want to help them or they like that's the path I'm on. And in 20 years or 20, 30, you know, thirty years, that where I am going to be. I wanna make sure that is not happening. Obviously cerebral lyosin is great. That is much more of a sledgehammer that someone that, like I was saying, people can't use it.

1:17:28 But I thought a people that I talked to, 40s and 50s, something is wrong with my brain and I need cerebral isin, I needed a big dose of cerebral. That may be the case, but I think there's so many more things. Do you have someone like, let's say they're like going through that. Maybe they have a parent that has dementia. They're kind of concerned for themselves. What kind. How would you think about that in terms of a solution with. Yeah. Yeah, it's really the metabolic approach to health and disease, right? So what's happening in a brain that's inflamed and you see, you know, cognitive decline.

1:18:00 First and foremost, they probably there's inflammation, there is insulin resistance, and we want to do all of the beautiful things like hormones hunter. That's what I'm telling people is like, I think for a lot of people, if you're relatively healthy, like let's say you don't have a TBI, you Don't Have Early Onset Dementia. I don' know. It's bad, but I Don' Know That Cerebral Iosin Is Going To Solve The Hormone Equation. Sure it's not going to solve the metabolic. equation, it's sure not going to solve the inflammation, the rest of the body, maybe a little bit in that part of equation.

1:18:36 And I think to that piece, I feel like my grandmother passed away from dementia. I mean, she was five to maybe like 90 pounds. But she was probably diabetic, if I had to guess, because she smoked a pack of Marlboro Reds every single day, ate fast food every day. Drank Diet Coke, like six Diet Cokes every, single, day for 80 years. I mean, at some point, that's going to come back to get you. And so I think about that, If she would have had hormones and everything, obviously, our existence here is limited.

1:19:09 But how much better? Because it's really sad to see someone go through that, because you see it kind of happening years before. You're like, oh, they're just getting a little bit older and all of a sudden it's like more and more. And then before you know it, like you have nurses in the house and everything. So I think people, if they just understood, it'd be like if you get someone before, in school it would be with kids on a football team. If you could get them when they were like 13 before they get exposed to like gangs or something like that, you could really do something with them.

1:19:43 It's almost like with hormones for people in their 40s and 50s, it's like, hey, before we really have to resort to all these crazy things, let's just get the foundations, especially for brain health. Yeah. So hormones, exercise, detox, because in modern world, we're just exposed to a lot and it absolutely impacts the brain. And cognitive decline is literally the brain starting to shut down. And it's not functioning properly. In a situation, I hear your grandma too, and it is like smoking, vaping, let's bring it up.

1:20:18 You are absolutely compromising microcirculation. you're restricting that. And that is one of the best things you can do is keep your circulation and microcirculation in a good place. Nitric oxide, it's why I love BPC, not just for repair. It's incredible for the whole cardiovascular system and all of a tiny little capillaries everywhere that right that we want that good circulation, blood pressure, all those things. So I think GLPs We age in a nonlinear format.

1:20:52 This was from Stanford's omics data. It's in really cool paper and published in November of 2024. We have a massive aging event of our metabolism at age 44. So we stop metabolizing alcohol as well. All of a sudden people are like, why am I so hungover from one drink? I feel horrible. It's because it's actually a sign of metabolic aging. Same thing with carbohydrates about age 44. That impacts your brain, right?

1:21:23 If you become more insulin resistant, it's going to start affecting the system. So I really like to get ahead of that and have people start to be really picky about their insulin sensitivity in their 40s. And then we want to think about hormones right around the same time because for women, estrogen gives you your insulin-sensitivity. And estrogen pumps up your brain. We know that when women go through menopause with functional MRI imaging, you lose brain volume.

1:21:53 Your brain shrinks and it's like, Uh, what was I gonna say again? I can't remember everything starts to slow down. That's not just like ha ha funny No, that's your brain shrinking. that is your not functioning the way that it should. I'm gonna be really picky about that And then around age 60, here's another interesting call out that we learned. We have a massive aging event of our immune system And you think about all the different diseases that really start to progress in our 60s and 70s.

1:22:27 If you can get ahead of that with something like thymus and alpha 1 once a year cycle. Again, it's this really strategic using these tools in a really intelligent way, understanding where somebody is in their situation. I have a bunch of dementia in my family, I'm really worried about my brain. Personally, I've had three TBIs. I know you and I are, you know, we've got our heads knocked a few times. And like I don't remember how many I have. Like I understand what that means for my risk.

1:22:58 So I'm really on top of anything I can do for our brain, whether that's hormones, peptides, again, explosive movement, all these things that I could do. It's, it's all together is really important. I think it's interesting, one thing that like I'm noticing, I feel like lately that has been popping up. I like, think of things almost like a trend. And last year, and it is still very common, everybody's very worried about dementia. What can I do to prevent dementia? But what I am noticing now is more Parkinson's coming up and that's, very interesting.

1:23:33 and I kind of noticing that more so I kinda think about like our grandparents, had dementia and now I'm kind of noticing the generation of like our parents that and my parents are in, well, my parent are late 60s and early 70s, and that kind grouping of people noticing more cases of Parkinson's coming up. Yeah. Do you know that if you live on a golf course, you significantly increase your risk of Parkinson's? So there's environmental.

1:24:04 Yeah, her parents literally live like right on the golf. My dad works at a golfer. Golf is like my dad's life and explains why he had COPD. Yeah. He had really bad last December. TB 500 that, I mean, he was in a hospital for seven days with COPD and gave them some TB. 500. I, mean we had a little bit of other stuff, like gave him a, a lot of 37 cause he said he hadn't an infection. Um, not a ton. And then, uh, bronchogen, which is like the bioregulator for the lungs.

1:24:36 But I think most of it was the TB And that will prevent scarring again going back to mechanism of action because it's so important even like after just COVID any kind of upper respiratory infection it is incredible with BPC for rescuing the lungs so you get your lung function back faster because sometimes it takes a month to recover your lungs after some of those infections. Yeah. I wonder with the golf course and Parkinson's, if it's like the chemicals that is driving some sort of neural inflammation.

1:25:10 Plus their water source too. Wow. Yeah, because that's going into the community well. It's poison to the energy buddies. The little mitochondria. Well, actually that brings us back. Because you said you went through a mitochondrial stack. How do you approach, there's so much information about mitochondria, I think more or less everyone's mitochondrion can be improved, even younger people, how do approach like building a stack around mitochondry and is it something you do all the time or is that more of like a short term

1:25:40 thing that will kind of propel you for months? Yeah, it's a great question. I was just talking to somebody about this. They're like, when I take Matzi, I feel horrible. And it so it is always going back to what's the mechanism of action? What are we trying to accomplish? Right? And what what is going on for you that we want to do? Well, this person that said that one is high histamine to She's been super stressed out for five to seven years. Matzi is naturally produced in your mitochondria in response to stress.

1:26:15 So I was like, maybe you didn't need MOTC. This is just me theoretically. But again, it's kind of you think about their nervous system, like it is going to do something that will give you energy. Think if you've had your foot on the gas for that long and then you just try to push it down even harder, the body is gonna blow back. Yeah, exactly. So what do we want to with a mitochondria? And do you actually think that's an issue potentially? Is it neurological?

1:26:45 Like is it, you know, something more significant with like low muscle tone? Is that an athlete? I think you want to look at the person too. Did they have a lot of oxidative stress? is that something where like their mitochondria really beat up by toxins? They live on a golf course? Yeah. I would use human in a situation like that because it's more the bodyguard for your mitochondria. I call Matzi the energy coach, right? It's like telling your body how to utilize the ATP, the Energy that your Mitochondria makes.

1:27:15 And then SS31 as a mitochondrial peptide is, you know, it is kind of the repair, like, oh, we got an issue here, We got a leak there. We gotta catch the drywall here. Yes. If you think there's something structurally going on with the mitochondria and it's kind of leaky and not working well, then it is a great place to start. So for me, I was like, pretty sure I have all of those because I beat myself up pretty good. So I did a stack. I also tolerate things really well.

1:27:45 It takes a lot to tranquilize me. So, I know I have decent tolerance to things, so I wasn't afraid to do that. But someone who's more sensitive, would actually start with one, do it for a week or two, add in the next. The other thing is some of these mitochondrial peptides are such small molecules and they have longer half-life, So you don't use them every day. You don' use as long. They're so potent. You actually have to be careful to not overuse them. Yeah. Yes. I think that's a big one, particularly with MOTC.

1:28:17 Motsi is much more of a strong chemical signal that is more like a jackhammer, whereas like SS-31, it seems to me relatively like the doses people use. to be much more of like, you're not going to like put yourself in a really bad spot. Now I've heard people getting pretty fatigued with SS-31, but I think it's similar to the GLPs. It's probably inducing a healing environment and it is going make you slow down. I Think a lot of people just, they're like oh, MOTC fat loss, got some red, I got MotC, let's gas it up and go.

1:28:47 And it like I don't know if that's always the answer. There's a big debate over whether like, should you use SS31 first and then Matzi? That's what I've always kind of defaulted to because I think it's like use, SS 31, create the environment that's better for the mitochondria. And then it will probably, Matz will work better at a dose that doesn't cause you to like have to have a histamine or anaphylactic reaction to it. Do you have any philosophies around that? Like, is it better to use one first?

1:29:17 Yeah, I kind of like human in, because if somebody's been under stress and they're inflamed, which is most of us, yeah, think that's going to kind take some of the stress signal off the mitochondria. Then maybe some SS 31, then MOTC. The other thing, just as you're talking, like, OK, let's talk about RETA and Motsi. What is that doing at a this is like the everybody asked me about this like I have to stack it together. So RETA is a glucagon agonist added to the GLP1 GIP and that is going to upregulate ATP production by your liver, right?

1:29:54 That's a beautiful thing sometimes in the right individual. And then at the same time, you're like, hey, make more energy over here. Then you add matzi, that's like driving that signal even harder at that mitochondrial level in someone that may be nutrient deprived, stressed out, sleep deprived. And they're, like let's go. I mean, it's kind of a, well, we're going to crash and burn. You're gonna feel horrible. Yeah. And then people wonder why their HRV is like two and their heart rate is 100 at night.

1:30:28 It's like, I think everyone on a GLP is going to have an increase in heart. Now, some people, they get a little fearful of that, but it's in reality, let's ask ourselves, what are we doing to the body? We're upregulating, even with RETTA. We are up regulating energy. Obviously that's going to be there. I think in some cases, a low heart rate or low average heartrate is not always as good as people think it is. Meaning if you're like a 38, you actually might be like some of those people like super fit, but it might one of these things like you are kind of like

1:31:00 under nutrient, nutrient deficient and everything. So I if someone goes from like 42 heart rates to like It's like, okay, like there's way worse things that could happen. The body will kind of like adapt and normalize. But that's just with Reto. Let's talk about Reta plus MotC. Like you're going to be like through the roof. I've even noticed for me, when I use Mot C, I can't do it every day. Like I have to use it, I'll either use like on weightlifting days or I just alternate, like Monday, Wednesday, Friday or like Tuesday,

1:31:30 Thursday, Saturday. I can go hypo sometimes with it. Yeah, don't make me go hypoglycemic even with like a low dose. If I do it and then go to the gym and I'm like strength training, even carbs and everything. seeing stars and everything. Um, so I think it's one of those things people just like jump on and it like, well, let's ask ourselves like what we're really doing. And also they get addicted to like the idea of like oh, I need more. I'm going to get more fat loss. Am I going get, am I gonna get gains the more I add? Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, someone might argue like well it worked for me, but it also too.

1:32:02 It's not sustainable. yeah. and It is the awareness part of the equation of why are we doing this? And if it is like okay, we really want to focus on mitochondria. let's like actually do that rather than just say Reta Matzi, NAD. Actually that makes me want to ask you, what is your approach to N.A.D.? Because there's big debates over like, you're gonna get cancer if you take N A. D. To like I'm gonna use N D every single day and never take a day off because it makes feel so good.

1:32:33 And then some people take 25 milligrams and they're like have like their heart rate is like over a hundred. How do you think about NAD and what is the best approach? Because I'm not someone that uses it every day. I think I can use it to achieve a certain outcome. But honestly, I don't really use that much, but I also don' t feel the need to. My style has a lot to do with it. Whereas, if some people are drinking three or four times a week pretty heavily, they'd probably feel better. So how do you think about NAD in all this? I think it's like anything. One, we don't follow trends.

1:33:03 Don't following trends about your health. Follow your personalized needs and be smart about what you're going to use, right? And do it in a really strategic way and take your time. You have your whole life to figure things out, and your heath isn't going get fixed in one day. So that's number one. N.A.D. is, I smile because it is absolutely a can of worms. And everybody has an opinion about it. I do not profess to be an NAD expert. There are some scientists who absolutely are NADA experts.

1:33:35 Can it be helpful? Absolutely. Just like any tool, if it's used in the right scenario, it is very beneficial. But if you're going to abuse it, could it drive cancer, in my opinion? Absolutely. And if we look at what does NAD do, right? Again, we need to understand mechanism of action. When you think about all these tools, you want to dig a layer deeper and say, OK, what is this do in the body?

1:34:05 And then let's figure out, is that a fit for me? So when we think of layers, if have a lot of inflammation, you are going to suck all of your NAD into a black hole of inflammation that's never going give you benefit. So you really need to fix inflammation for NADA to be utilized and give your benefit well so that you can look at CD38 is really important in terms of

1:34:36 getting that balance with inflammation before you just go hog wild on NAD. NADA is really great for DNA repair and sirtuin activation, but it's not necessarily going to do that in somebody who's really dysfunctional, right? Yeah. So I think, again, it's a tool. Here's what I do think about NAD. I used it during my mitochondrial stack, and I did it because I thinks it makes the mitochondria peptides work better. Yes.

1:35:06 Really like that. And I've never thought about it that way before, but I really like it, because it is kind of enhancing the energy cycle within the body. Do you need to do that at all times? Probably not. It would probably be a bad thing to but it kind of layers in to make those better. I've been a big fan lately. I don't know. I guess if you're talking about cancer stuff, if we look at it, it's like, well, we know that high NNMT correlates more with cancer.

1:35:42 That's that pathway, right? Yeah. Exactly. And so it was like okay, there's evidence that it does suppress tumors. If you are using five-amino, at least wrote it evidence that does suppress tumors. It's just like, okay, I feel probably a little bit better around that conversation with that, you know, cause we really don't know. But I also like how it feels probably little better than NAD, but I'm also not going to use that too much too, because then you get in the same thing with hot C. And it's like now you're just Loading it up and like hoping that you can just like, you know, blast yourself off to the moon or whatever So,

1:36:16 I don't know. I think it's one of those kind of like open-ended things I probably think people like overdo it with an ad because It's it''s easy for them, You know it´s like oh, this is like an easy one It´ve been around at the clinics like the IV clinics for a while, but I Think it is one I think that a lot of people that are using NAD are, using it as a crutch, more than a tool, like in a mitochondria stack. So there's like, okay, it's a to help these agents work a little bit better to restore myself to a point.

1:36:46 Whereas like they're either probably drinking too much, they are insulin resistant, so like their whole N.A.D. cycle is going to be off. or it's one of those things to like where their lifestyle or their hormones are not proper. Like, I think a lot of people lean on NAD because they're hormonally deficient and the NED gives them a little bit more energy. So they like, oh, now I'm good. Whereas like that's covering up. It's their energy drink. Yeah, exactly. Literally is for people. I just think it is one those ones that like I am not like a huge user of it.

1:37:21 like in the right context, but I don't know. I think I'm still- That's the principle, the takeaway of this whole talk. Yeah. It's like, use it in right contexts and also to like build goals around it. Like I've dabbled the idea of like it's, it would be so individualized, like can you create a calendar of months one to three? I focused on this. And I like a lot of people, It is going to be different because some people like their weight is their main issue. their autoimmune disease is the main issue. But it's like, okay, when someone's within like 90 to 95% of where they want to go, how do you structure throughout the year of like this section is like

1:37:54 a mitochondrial kind of phase. This section might be more of an inflammation management phase and then move throughout that or even use like some of the bioregulators, you know, like let's talk about like epitalin because Taylor and I just recently ran a cycle of that really for fertility because there's evidence to show it helps with fertility. So, hey, we're covering all the bases, right? How do you think about epitallin? Do you like it? Is it good? I think there is also a lot of confusion around that one of like, can I use that all time or is it like a short cycle thing?

1:38:29 So how do approach? Yeah, I think it's a fringe peptide, as what I would call, it is not one that should be in a core protocol. If you're a newbie doing peptides, don't even worry about this one. Yeah. I didn't really think we would even use it at this stage of our life. It wasn't until learning. People have a problem with things they can't feel. And if you don't feel some effect, it doesn't mean that it's not working.

1:39:01 It doesn' mean it is working, but it does mean its not. And I think if people take something and they're like, Oh, I just got scammed because I took this. You can't feel your telomeres. I feel so great. Yeah, I think it's a really powerful tool. You know, if you look at the data that is coming out of Eastern Europe or longevity, it is pretty clear that it can help you live longer. But you only need to do like 10 days of a cycle per year.

1:39:33 And as people get older and they have more circadian rhythm dysfunction, or if you're younger and you have a more circuitian rhythm disfunction and with that HPA axis dysfunction. then it makes sense. Again, it's going back to what is it doing? What's the mechanism of action? And then what's application I'm using it for? Then it gets really fun because Albert Einstein said it so well as creativity is intelligence having fun. And we need to do that more with peptides and these tools for health.

1:40:04 So that makes in your situation that you used it. I wanted to ask you, are there any peptides that you don't think enough people know about that, or even maybe people who know them, but they don' really know how to use them? What do you think are some, I've told Taylor and I have come to talk about this, like our theme for this year, let's put some other peptide on the map or at least like reframe some peptids that people don''t know or maybe like using wrong. Is there anything that your a fan of that doesn't get the attention Thymus and Alpha-1.

1:40:39 I believe this will be a hero peptide in the next three to five years. We absolutely underutilize it. So it is so versatile and so many of us have immune dysfunction that we don't connect it to immune disfunction, but it absolutely is. And it I've seen it be life-saving and life changing for people. Personally, I'm really interested in brain and neurocognitive peptides.

1:41:10 I've just started experimenting a little bit with dihexa. That one though, again, it's like as I say it, i want to be cautious because it has a super long half life. of you know around what 10 days and this is not a like to use it. I found that out the hardware I used a product that had dihexa in it and I use like every day and then I find myself like staying up until two o'clock in the morning just like sketching and drawing and like time went by so quick but it was just I wasn't I didn't feel like jittery or anything like that

1:41:45 it's just That is being used for Parkinson's. That's also how I bring it up in terms of the motor function. So I think dihex is really interesting. I'm more conservative, but I thing about that as being responsible. We're lower dose, pulsing it for a period of time. I've had TBIs, so I'm really interested in, you know, we think it has six times the power of BDNF. That's incredible for the brain, right?

1:42:17 So that one's interesting, but don't abuse that. You can't use that long term. There are other peptides that are coming to market. This is where I think the future of peptide is going, where we're going to see more small molecules that're uniquely and scientifically designed and patented that's going be very specific. So I can't say it yet, but there's a company, I'm under NDA, They are going to market with a four amino acid peptide that is being used for cognitive decline,

1:42:52 autism, macular degeneration, and potentially spinal cord injuries if it's used before the scarring has fully happened. Is that an oral one too? It's oral. And this is the other piece that I think we're going to see in terms of delivery format, right? Injection's been historically what we have used. We have like buccal delivery, we had transdermal, there's intranasal. There's lots of really cool things happening.

1:43:22 I thing we are going see advancements in oral and it's going come all the way down to how we're actually synthesizing and making that molecule so that it's stable enough in the gut to cross into the bloodstream. And that's going to get, and this one is that way, they've already done studies on it, it crosses the brain barrier. So those are, I can't say what that one, is yet, but it is coming. It's like the future of delivery methods. Well, And I think that can be amazing, eventually getting that for hormone replacement therapy is going Well, let's talk about that because you're the

1:43:56 only person I know that's like one of the people I've known that like actually understands what's going on there. So how could let say women go from I think like injections, in my experience, like the highest efficacy for women with like testosterone estradiol. Yeah, a lot of doctors will tell you injectable estridiol doesn't exist, but I have some and I've used it. Like I actually used, side note, not talking about myself, I'd actually use injectable estradiol in low doses because I'm someone that does not aromatize that much estridiol out of my testosterone. And I always been like that.

1:44:26 So like when I was super deficient in testosterone, my estrdiol was like under five and low testosterone does low estrodiol. Especially I think when you're leaner too, you just aromatize less of it, Injectable estradiol has actually been beneficial to me as a man, and I'm not transitioning or anything anytime soon that I am aware of, but. I do know a woman who does get injectable, estridiol from her doctor. You can get it from a compounding pharmacy, you can go to any compound. And yeah, he can. Because we talked to a lot of women that are like, well, my doctor said that doesn't exist.

1:44:58 Yeah, it does. But to all of this point, I think we will see more adoption of hormones, which I we can help bring to the world. Pediatrics are great to help people with hormones. What does the frontier look like of migrating to more easy delivery systems I think it's gonna be across the board. That's what's so exciting. It's going to be, you know, just easier to use, more convenient, right? So when you're traveling, it just pre-dose. You're not like, what are the units?

1:45:28 What's the milligrams? Yeah. What are micrograms? All these things that are super. Get their TSA. Yeah, like really, yeah. Exactly. Doesn't get dissolved while you are flying. And it doesn't require, cold storage kind of stuff. So I those are, because peptides, when they're in the lifelike form, And hormones too are actually very stable molecules. So I think that's where we're going to see like delivery technologies, unique, you know, even modifications of molecules, I Think there's some opportunities with some of the hormones that way too to make them more effective in these different delivery formats will be really exciting.

1:46:07 Yeah. I think specifically for women, I wonder if we'll have better success with women first because they're so much more, especially in the testosterone route, because there's so many more androgen sensitive. So like a little testosterone, a woman goes a long way. And so like how that could play into like conversation. I have seen a lot of women, this is like a whole nother rabbit hole. And we can talk about this with Taylor too. We have a of like the testosterone cream. Here's what's interesting about testosterone and cream, I'm not saying it's bad. A lot people do amazing with testosterone creams.

1:46:39 But if you go to a doctor and you say, okay, what is the benefit for cream of cream as a man? What increases DHT more than erections, or excuse me, injections, which lead to better erection than men in a Okay, so why would a woman use cream if it is raising DHT more? Because she wants to go bald. Exactly, right? You're like, wait a minute. Get acne and everything. And so I would say the vast majority of women, when they go to get their testosterone, and then potentially their estradiol too,

1:47:12 is being compounded in a cream. Then they get bad side effects because of spiking DH more, which causes hair loss, which causes the unwanted things of what we're starting it for in the first place. And that's why I've seen like the micro dosing of injections, even if it's just like four milligrams a week, in some cases for women, every woman is like a lot different in like how they'll fall. on that range do better. But what would be even better than that is if we had something that was better, than both of those to wear a small dose.

1:47:46 If you could have some sort of like oral delivery that's healthy, that like did the intended version of it. And can still convert. Yeah, to get the effects there too, would it be really cool? For men, they have like Kisotrex, but I don't, is it better that nothing? Yeah. Sure. where you need to go past a certain point. I think that's debatable, but I would love to see that for women because I thing in terms of like how women respond with creams, it's so variable.

1:48:17 Like how like some women is perfect and then some woman is like way too virilizing is to like find something like that from women. So I'm excited to who knows if it is two years or five years, I agree. I also want to call out I love that you talked about estrogen, estradiol for men, because estrogen is a happy hormone and men make it. So it is something you absolutely need and it's really great for male cardiovascular health.

1:48:51 And it just makes you kind of like It's an anxiolytic. So like if I am stressed out or whatever, I don't do this a lot, if i'm stressed, out I could literally inject half a milligram of estradiol sapienate and within like 30 minutes I'm usually like much more calm and collected. I will say if there has been any times Taylor and I have arguments, it's probably been because my for whatever reason. I obviously don't use aromatase inhibitors, but like sometimes if you're like dieting or whatever, even just like the regular amount of testosterone.

1:49:24 And then two, if don have testosterone with HCG, that could be, you could aromatize lower because HCg will help raise endogenous levels a little bit. But yeah, it's huge. Unfortunately, most of the hormone world, probably still have like 60% of people of mindset that you automatically should suppress estrogen when you testosterone and that's like, that why so many people don't stay on testosterone therapy because they feel after six months, you will feel worse than you did when you started if you're suppressing estrogen as a man.

1:49:54 So it's as important for man and what I like too, what you brought up is like no one really talks about the cardiovascular and the brain health benefits. I've talked to, I actually talked with a doctor one time that had been on aromatase inhibitor for like 30 years and he was worried, he starting to get dementia. I was like, well, you've been cutting off the supply of ashtrays, go throw your anastasol in the trash. And he actually liked that. Even that just helped kind of like course correct. I mean, he was in his late 50s, early 60s. But yeah, I think it's huge for the hormone piece to kind drive where we're going.

1:50:30 I agree. And then you think about women and perimenopause. So first your progesterone declines, then your estradiol declives. It can happen earlier than we really believe it can. A lot of doctors are telling people it could happen. I'm like, you can be in your late 30s and you're in peri-menopaus. Yeah. You can in 40s, and your entering late permenopus into menopas. Think about the fights you have when your estrogen is low. us ladies as our hormones are changing, right?

1:51:00 And you think about the challenges that we face that way. It's the power of hormones to stabilize us too. Yeah, it really is. That's why I always keep a running telly in my head of what they, Taylor's on her cycle. Obviously for fertility purposes right now, that's like the biggest concern, but it actually is one of the best things in relationship. If you know when your wife is, especially if she's menstruating on that kind of timeline, then actually will inform like your communication of how well you could be.

1:51:30 And I think a lot of people don't understand that. Then they don' understand in a relationship the piece of important hormones are in relationship, especially once you start to really witness the decline of them, of like how beneficial replacement can be to stave off. A lot marital issues could solve with hormones. Totally. It definitely can be, especially like whether it's like, whether as a woman going through menopause or whether its a women who is coming off of birth control

1:52:00 and she's in her even late 20s, early 30s or its woman who's had, you know, three kids in the matter of like four years, like back to back having children, how much that plays a shift in their hormones. Absolutely. Yeah. One thing I did want to ask you about is glutathione. So I think glutothione is one thing that doesn't get enough attention that could potentially fix a lot of issues for people around the, you know, like the whole detox conversation.

1:52:30 What are your thoughts on glutethione? Like how do you approach glutthione supplementation and is injection the only way or are there other ways that we can do it now that aren't quite as painful? Painful with the injections. Glutathione is the OG peptide. That's one. I'm like, you need to remember that glutathion is a peptid, it's a tripeptide, and it is actually an anchor into, I believe, a really strong argument for peptides to potentially be dietary supplements. Yeah, and non injection format.

1:53:01 So something I really want to work on in the future. But yeah, I mean, glutathione is incredible. It's your body's main antioxidant. And it's a detoxifier, which in modern world, we need a lot of support. Yes, especially now. Yeah. And then it's also an immune modulator. So there's some really neat things that glutathione does in terms of TH1, TH2 balancing of our immune systems on a teeter-totter. I love glutothione. It's incredible. Again, it is something you want to use in the right scenario.

1:53:33 Just not like, oh, its glutthione so I need to take it. You also make it, you can measure glutithione, It is a commercially available peptide lab, which I think is super cool. to see, and there's an oxidized and reduced form of glutathione. Now, because it's a peptide, taking it orally, I don't think it is really that effective. It's expensive chicken, like all the peptides oraly, unless the action is in the gut, right? There are certain peptids, but you want glutothione in your circulation. You want it in you bloodstream. So, you know, IV injection, some of the other alternatives other than a capsule or tablet is going to be best for glutathiol.

1:54:11 I've been experimenting with topical glutathione to help with skin brightening. Cool. Yeah, that's used in Asia. You're like right along. They're obsessed with it for skin health. It's been pretty awesome. I think it works pretty well. Yeah, for just brightening the skin, it's been super beneficial. And in Asia, they use it a lot for hyperpigmentation or the prevention of that, which, again, at its core, if you look at...

1:54:43 I was with a bunch of dermatologists. It's an inflammatory picture at it core. A lot of times with the liver. So it makes so much sense that glutathione would help with hyper pigmentation. Let's actually talk about skin health. Um, obviously like everyone's like, have you ever seen these videos? Now people will be like someone in the background like calls out like skin, health, and like so it says like GHK. It's so like it'll be the top 10 peptides and just like Skin Health, GH K, Repair, BPC.

1:55:13 I think that the glow, the word the Glow, It's like the best marketing strategy because every woman hears the glow blend and it's really more like a healing blend. And they all go out and go crazy about it for making them have more glowy, healthier skin. Do I think that GHKC can help injecting it? Can it help with, you know, skin and skin elasticity?

1:55:44 Yes, but it's not what women are thinking that it is doing. Do you think using it topically, if it designed right and dose right, can be amazing? If it dose too high, it can really damage the skin. In terms of like bringing back old scars? It can bring back, old scarring. It, can, bring, back even old, if you struggled with acne, like as a teen and you start using it into high dose, it can actually bring that out again.

1:56:18 Yeah, and I think it comes down to skin. Again, there's so many reasons for different skin issues, right? So we always want to go back to what is the person dealing with? Why would we use a peptide or a different ingredient for their skin specifically? We have all these inflammatory skin issue like psoriasis, that tends to really have a core in gut health. So when I think about glow, I'm like, yeah, it's working because it is also helping heal your gut.

1:56:51 Sometimes it related, you know, your got lining is critical for your skin health, another thing I will say, I had horrible acne most of my life, I did everything. I'm like a very androgenic female. So I build muscle easily, you know, that's just kind of like my hormonal personality. But I was so frustrated with my hormone acne, really reactive skin, histamine issues, so I'd get red. For me, it was totally insulin sensitivity.

1:57:23 When I was able to, I've microdosed trisipatide for a couple of years on and off. It absolutely cleared up my skin. And that was my biggest thing. KPV can be really great in some of these more immune, you know, inflammatory situations. GHKCU is great for skin, and I would say it's great when you're looking at like collagen, elastin, once your skin is you know, starting the age, you're having a lower, amount of that.

1:57:54 But I would actually lean into some of the other reasons, even immune modulation is a big reason why we have skin issues. It's not actually our skin. Yeah, it just shows, a reflection of what's going on inside. I do have to say GHK, see you. I have to call this out because you guys know about like connective tissue disease. It's a big deal that I think we're realizing there's, a lot of people that have that. So these are like the really bendy people, right?

1:58:26 They're like very flexible. I get so mad when I'm in yoga and like, there are some people No, just say it. There's people that are not in shape, and you get mad because they're a lot more flexible because you're very in-shape. And so you were like, how does that person... They're like touch my toes and beyond, you know? Yeah, so it's interesting because it has to do with collagen synthesis and the structure of the collagen is dysfunctional in these cases.

1:58:57 So type 1 collagen's the most common in our skin, our vascular, like all of our connective tissue everywhere. So here's what I would say, the new stack of BPC and TB500 is Bpc and GHKCO because it's helping with connective tissue integrity. It works on type 1 collagen. My sister, I believe we are figuring out, has a vascular expression of this connective tissue disease. She has severe issues that we're uncovering.

1:59:30 I believed GHKCU will be a new tool for connectative tissue diseases for type 1 and type 3. We have type one in our vascose system, but it's a lot more type three collagen in that scenario. Could it make the collagen more functional? I don't know, maybe, but GHK-CU regulates over 4,000 genes that we know right now. So epigenetically, I'm like, could it kind of be like CRISPR and peptide form to like do some gene therapy? Maybe.

2:00:00 What advice, like while we're on the topic of GH K, what advice do you have for the people that it's painful to inject? I think it's one of those dilution as a solution sometimes. I'm really interested in just buffering it a little bit better. There's some more chemistry involved in that to make it less of an issue.

2:00:30 I have to always add, I had to reconstitute it with a lot more. It does help, it doesn't take it away in all cases, but it does. And then I think like, you know, icing or like using a theragun, before or after that kind of thing is good. Or you do a non-injectable format. But it's a little peptide. It's tripeptide, so some of these other delivery formats are good. Cosmetically, you know, the big thing there is like, it does have to penetrate the dermal barrier. The products on the market right now, there's no substantiation that happens.

2:01:04 It's interesting because I recently just got a new product and I swear it's working. Cool. Well, it was before all the other ones you tried, you're like, what does this even do? It is not doing anything or I get really bad scarring would come back out and This this new one that I found like I'm loving it. I need it Yeah, I'll tell you All right, sarah, so you just launched amino academy i've had the privilege to go through it and I thought it was really

2:01:38 cool is like obviously I exist in the peptides world. There was so much in there that No one I've heard on the internet talk about stuff related to peptides is in there. So I highly recommend everyone go through that, and we'll have links to that and everything. But just talk like how you built the course, kind of like, how thought about, because there's all this peptide information out there, what I think the hard thing to do, especially for a lot of people, is thematically organize it into a way that's easy to understand. And I think you're able to also like, be able, to like explain it in a way that like it's retainable and you can understand information because I,

2:02:14 think verb, verbalism and vocabulary can be very like much intimidating. And especially when we're talking about the peptide subject, you've made it so clear and so like easy for me to understand. Oh, I love that. Yeah, so I designed it one. I built this because I had so many people ask me to make a course and I was like, OK, i'm going to do this. So the course is designed to be super practical and that was my goal that I get to the point there's not a lot of fluff.

2:02:47 but you really get a good overview of everything you need. So there is an introduction to peptides. We go over, what are peptide? How do they work? how should they be utilized responsibly? And then each of the modules is broken down in a way of more systems biology based off of health, right? So we have healing and repair. we talk about things that are more about metabolism, gut, inflammation, immune, mitochondria, and really approaching it from that angle of understanding

2:03:17 mechanism of action, right? It's really important that we understand that. What are the clinical applications? What is some of the things that you want to utilize it for? Dosing, you know, some other recommendations there, what you would expect in terms of timelines that can see. Because again, it's important you really know those kinds of things about peptides so you don't have unrealistic expectations. Caution, contraindication, so it is really for people to understand and screen properly for peptide use.

2:03:49 We also have scientific papers, because I love that stuff. So you can actually read full papers. People are like, I want to know about GHKCU. And I'm like here's a really great PubMed article. Read the whole paper. It's in there. Then we make really actionable next steps. Things like educational handouts. Right? So it's just really nice sound bites of summarizing the different peptides. How you dose them, how you reconstitute them. I even talk about all the different delivery formats.

2:04:20 So it's very neutral in terms of all of the things that we have. There are certain peptides, for example, that make sense to take orally. We cover that in great detail. And there's all kinds of like, what do you do if this happens? Like fatigue with a GLP, or I have this kind of response. How do you navigate that? What are the clues there? How you potentially stack in a way that's reasonable and not excessive? So all those things are in the course and it's been really cool.

2:04:52 So far, I've had a few practitioners that really know their stuff and peptides go through it. And they've said that too, they're like, it is so nice because I can actually retain things. There's a quiz too. you pass the quiz, you get certified. And I'm excited to see like even maybe what more comes out of that over time. Yeah. Who is the course for? Can anybody use this course? Yeah, anybody can use the courses. I really did design it for people who are in the health and wellness space.

2:05:22 So it's not just for practitioners. If you are someone that really wants to know peptides and you really want to no peptide science, this is a course The other thing I am doing in real time is I'm going to film a short course for consumers that are maybe brand new. They don't have a scientific background and it's more like three to five minutes per module to give you a really nice intro into that. And then also for practitioners to use with their patients and their clients.

2:05:52 I think that's a huge underserved piece is like, a clinician is only going to be able to have so much time with someone. There's only so many hours in the day to give them educational materials that they can trust. Like, hey, this is helpful on your journey. If you are giving them peptides or whatever, use this in tandem with this. I think the first of all the demand for good peptide information is like sky high right now and the supply is actually pretty low and people be like well there's like peptides stuff all over social media and I said good information and that's part of the part.

2:06:25 Of the thing that it's unique about a course is one yeah sure you can go on tiktok you go to instagram whatever google whatever peptid and you're going to get information i think it is the quality of information what i liked about the course was that Not too long and not too short. I actually struggle with like saying things in a condensed format that is actually like every minute is useful. So like I love that because it was like, every moment was actually worth the attention that you were giving to it. Um, I think too, we would all be lying to ourselves if we didn't say like AI was changing the world right now.

2:07:00 AI is big in the peptides world. We could probably even talk about on the synthesis side of things, like how it's affecting it. I think this, though, what I have seen, a lot of people are relying on AI to give them their peptide information, which I'm not opposed to. Actually use it for deep research, actually accessing papers. It's much more easy to contextually search something than it is on a journal database search engine. So it's like, if I want studies around like GHK and lung health, it will actually contextualize that and like you'll find them.

2:07:31 Now you have to verify that they're real because sometimes it hallucinates fake citations. But if you're actually like wanting to go to the primary source, you can be a little bit better tool. What I've seen is like people are like well, I put this in chat GPT and it told me to do this dose and as long as like wait a second. First of all, where is it getting that information? Is getting it from Reddit? Where is pulling information, is making it up, or is actually legitimate? I think even with some of it being legitimate, the wild card is you don't really know.

2:08:01 And so I'm not saying those tools, they're just tools. They're not bad. But I thing what we have to do is the active people that are moving the space forward, is actually no, because if you, someone might use chat GBT to make a video and they don't know anything about peptides, but I'll just read off what it says, all of a sudden that becomes now truth in the sense of people are like, well, that person said it, so I'm going to use that to someone that might not have the experience there. I'm rambling about this because the quality of the information is very important.

2:08:35 And yeah, you can Google anything. You can chat, GPT, anything, but I think it's important and I always tell people like, don't listen to Taylor and in an echo chamber, like go listen, to other people because there's a whole heck of a lot of stuff. I would say go do your own research. We don' know everything and everything I say is like my best foot forward. But like in a few years, it might be wrong. you know, like to what we do. So I just say that to like, understand like information is super easy to get now, but it's actually finding the quality information that's harder to come by.

2:09:10 That's what I appreciated about that because it was, you don't want those things like anyone can Google, what peptide for this or whatever. But getting it from someone that has been in the space is huge. Yeah. What do you think about, and we'll close out with this. Well, two things we will close that with. One, what do see like AI playing into the peptide space as a whole? And I'll, we ask that question then we asked. I think that it will be a helper to drive innovation. It shouldn't ever replace humans, but I can humans can use it to do discovery of all the things that we talked about in terms of just,

2:09:44 you know, better delivery formats. Like a database to hold the information and the whole of the studies. Exactly. And it just organizes it, right? Like we can do that so much faster than our human brains, But I don't think it'll ever replaced us at all. I think as long as there's humans, I mean, who knows how long that is, but as far as our humans are going to be things for humans to do, you know, and we can use those as tools to improve our health, our relationships.

2:10:15 Um, last question. So in addition to doing all the amazing things you do, you're also a mom. You're. A normal person. What does like a daily routine look like for you? A day in the life of someone like Sarah that is a peptide expert. How do you, what would just be like an average day that you go? Yeah, so I don't actually get up too early. And this is something I believe women and especially women in peri and menopause, be careful about overstressing your nervous system. So I get off at like 637. I got up a lot earlier when I was building my course.

2:10:49 and I start my day with my dogs because I get them from their area where they spend the night and they're so happy and it gives me a dopamine and serotonin boost. I love drinking coffee and just having some time to... I started my days with gratitude. One, like, what a gift to be alive and to have breath. Even if things are hard contextually, I'm just grateful for life. So I typically start my morning that way. I have a 13-year-old daughter who I absolutely love.

2:11:20 Our mornings are involved in braiding her hair and getting her ready for school. And she's in sports, so making sure she has all of the things and good nutrition. Is she hockey? She is soccer, soccer and basketball. And take your multivitamins, all the things that are just normal daily things. I work during the day, so I have a walking pad with a standing desk and my desk I sit at. So I try to do the movement thing throughout my day.

2:11:52 So I get sun in the daytime when I can, and I love to walk. I normally try to get to the gym three times a week. So, I walk almost every day, but my schedule is really demanding, so that works for me. which is really fun. And I typically, after dinner, we go on a walk too. I do watch TV shows as my way to decompress at night sometimes.

2:12:25 Or I love sitting out in front of a fire. Fires are so therapeutic. It's kind of funny just to the TV point thing. When I was younger, I definitely was one of those guys No fun. You got to like, it's always be like from the moment I get up to go to bed. And actually, like I think in recent years, Taylor and I really enjoy just like watching a good TV show. I feel like brought that out on you more. Yeah, I used to always. Be like no, even if I have like free time, Actually, I'll go out on a limb and say watching fiction TV or reading fiction books,

2:13:03 because I've gotten a lot. I love reading fictional books. And I kind of got away from that when I was in my 20s. It's just nice and relaxing. So much of the human experience is stories. And when you understand stories, you empathize with people better. And in the work that we do, it can get very technical, but then I always get brought back to it's really the stories of people that are transforming their health, that they're working on things, they are doing things.

2:13:35 There's something about just being a person that a good story really hits home and actually wires our brain in a way that makes it you can understand the world. I know for me, I view the word better when I am engaging with stories, because it makes me more empathetic. And it also brings new perspective to things and can kind of put me in places that we become so myopic in our work that allows us to see things better.

2:14:08 Now, am I just making that up because I like watching TV shows at night? Maybe. But I do think there's something to be said for people that I think in a biohacking world, whatever world we're in, that people feel guilty for doing that stuff. And it's like, it' okay. It's so okay and having fun is a really important part of health and playing as adults. When anybody asks me like Sarah, what's your biggest health hack? I'm like as an adult, play. Yes. it is so healing.

2:14:38 Its so good for us and we forget to do it. Well, thank you Sarah. You've been amazing as always. Social media wise, website wise what's the best place for people to find you? Yes, sarahmorgan.co is my website, Instagram, and TikTok. Awesome. Go check her out. Obviously, we'll have the links to the courses. So please go check that out, but support her work. Like I said, Sarah's work needs to be more prevalent in the world. She's, I would say, the one voice of peptides that people need to hear more of.

2:15:12 Yes. Definitely. Thank you so much.