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Peptides: The Science, Uses & Safety | Dr. Abud Bakri
02:48:22
Dr. Abud Bakri, MD, is a board-certified internal medicine physician and expert in the science and clinical use of peptides.
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- [00:00]
Dr. Abud Bakri
People are now stacking their GLP1 as their insulin sensitivity tool, their growth hormone or their GHRH and their androgen modulation therapies as this trinity stack. Trinity stack to get very fit, very healthy quickly. So a lot of these transformations you see in CEOs and celebrities and stuff is using a combination of those three things, you know, your TRT plus tirzepatide, reticrutide, whatever it may be, and then using a growth hormone modulation if you can afford growth hormone or testimony ipamorelin and you're seeing people lose a lot of fat, gain a lot of muscle in short amounts of time. Is that healthy? We'll find out. But that is like the celebrity protocol.
- [00:39]
Andrew Huberman
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Abud Bakri, an internal medicine physician who is also extremely knowledgeable on the science and use of peptides. When I say peptides, I mean both FDA approved peptides such as the GLP agonists. You probably know these as things like the Ozempic, Mounjaro and retatrutide, as well as peptides such as body protection compound 157 or BPC157, which as you'll learn today has a very long history of being used in humans for gut health and tissue repair and and many interesting studies in animals supporting its potential use in humans. But a minimum of formal studies in humans, meaning one, we discuss BPC157, what it does and how, as well as things like growth hormone secretagogues like Tessamorelin, MK677 and others. And we talk about things like GHK copper, which nowadays many people are using to promote collagen synthesis and repair for esthetic reasons like like improving skin, hair and so on. We also talk about peptides that have been studied for the purpose of DNA repair and longevity, like epithelin and pinealin, which also have been touted to improve REM sleep and for improving cognitive function. You'll also learn what is known and what is not known about these peptides, both in terms of function and safety. During today's episode, you will come to appreciate that Dr. Bakri has truly encyclopedic knowledge about these peptides. He is also formally trained as a physician and and as a consequence, you will learn how to think about peptides based on whether or not they have known receptors or not that turns out to be very important and what their real safety profiles are, as well as what particular concerns you ought to have if you are considering using peptides of any kind. As a formally trained board certified physician, he comes at this topic through the lens of a physician, but also somebody who is very interested in the current status and future of peptide medicine. Today's discussion, thanks to Dr. Bakri, is a true masterclass on peptides. By the end of today's discussion, I promise you, again thanks to him, that you will be among the most informed doctor or otherwise about peptides, from the GLPs to BPC157 and all the others that I mentioned, including some that I didn't mention here in the introduction. So it is a real gift and honor to have this knowledge presented to all of us. So buckle up, you're about to learn a lot about peptides. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Abud Bakri. Dr. Abud Bakri, welcome.
- [03:36]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Good to be here.
- [03:38]
Andrew Huberman
Peptides, huge topic and huge category of biology and medicine. So we should start off by breaking this into categories so that people can wrap their minds around it. Because that word peptides has come to mean stuff people buy and take and maybe should or shouldn't buy and take. But there's a lot of important and quite simple biology to understand before anyone should even be thinking about any of that. So if I just push the word peptides towards you, how do you carve that up in terms of thinking, thinking about it as an md, as a clinician, and maybe also put yourself into the mind of interested, let's call it a peptide. Curious person out there.
- [04:22]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So scientifically, I would say it's one of the languages of the human body, right? So the body likes these different languages to communicate between cells, going from DNA to RNA to proteins, which can be broken down into polypeptides and peptides. And peptides are one of these languages. Steroid hormones are another language. And then peptides can be broken down further into subcategories, whether or not they have receptors or they have no receptor. And that kind of changes the clinical effects we'll see like the GLP1s, which have a very strong clinical effect compared to these obscure peptides like BBC157, TB500, TB4, that don't have a clear target.
- [04:57]
Andrew Huberman
They have receptors, but they just have many of them, or they don't even have receptors.
- [05:00]
Dr. Abud Bakri
We don't have a receptor identified for BBC157 or TB4.
- [05:03]
Andrew Huberman
Just stopping right there. This is a very interesting distinction. I don't think anyone else has described peptides this way. Let's take BPC157 for the moment. We're gonna talk a lot about it today. If it doesn't have a receptor, what are some ways that it could impact cells and organs and so forth? Or is it that there are receptors, we just don't know what they are?
- [05:23]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It could be that the latter, that maybe the receptor is still elusive, or it could be that it's modifying certain proteins that already exist or linking different proteins together in a more favorable fashion for gene transcription. The Russian peptides are all epigenetic modifiers that they bind to the groove of the DNA in certain that either open up or close the chromatin to certain areas of genetic expression. And they've modeled this out like a steroid hormone. So steroid hormones bind like they bind to it, like the energy receptor binds DHT or testosterone, goes into the nucleus, turns on all the androgenic genes.
- [05:54]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, like puberty is a good example of that.
- [05:55]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, like pinelion that we've talked about shuttles heat shock proteins with androgen receptors.
- [06:02]
Andrew Huberman
Got it. So if I just pause us for a second, what we should think about this word peptides in two major categories. At least one is has known receptors, plural, like the glps. The other category would be does not have known receptors. Might have receptors, but can definitely impact biology in interesting ways. Or so say the animal data.
- [06:25]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [06:25]
Andrew Huberman
Okay.
- [06:25]
Dr. Abud Bakri
A lot of animal data. All right.
- [06:27]
Andrew Huberman
I know a lot of people are interested in GLPs, and I want to go there, but because I know most people are probably listening to this foremost because they want to hear about the other stuff. Let's start with BPC157. What is it? What do we know about it? We'll explore safety. And what is your stance on it from the perspective of a consumer and a clinician? So first of all, what is BPC157?
- [06:51]
Dr. Abud Bakri
The best way to look at it is, you know, as humans, we've been looking for medicines in plants for thousands of years. And in the last, let's say, 150 years, we've been looking for medicines in cells. So animal Derived versus plant. Plant derived medicines is the way to think about it. You think about aspirin, you think about metformin, the statins. Those were all discovered in, you know, plant tissues. Statins, more so fungi. But you get the point. Now we've been looking into animal tissues to find cures, medicines, treatments. So a group in Croatia in the 90s looks out for this peptide called BPC that they and eventually named BPC. It's a 40,000 Dalton Giant peptide called BPC. BPC157 is 15amino acids from that giant peptide. We don't naturally make BPC157. That's what you'll commonly hear online. We make BPC the big protein.
- [07:42]
Andrew Huberman
Did this group go looking for body protection compound for those that aren't familiar in the laboratory. You can take a tissue, grind it up. You can do what's called fractionation. You can start separating basically cells and tissues and liquids according to the size of different proteins. Like different filters will just like certain filters will let sand through or pebbles through or boulders through. That's kind of what you do. And then you figure out what the sequences are and then you throw them on cells or put them into animals and you try and figure out what they do. Why were they motivated to look for what eventually became bpc?
- [08:14]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Pavlov, the famous scientist that would do the experiments on the dogs with the bell and making the dog salivate. The other work he did was on gastric juices of dogs. What he'd do is he'd put a hole in dogs stomachs. He would feed them food and then get the gastric juices and sell that as a medicine.
- [08:29]
Andrew Huberman
That's how he made his money.
- [08:30]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, that was part of his business.
- [08:32]
Andrew Huberman
So he got a Nobel Prize. He was also kind of like what did he have like a call code? It was like enter Pavlov for discount at checkout. Yeah, amazing.
- [08:42]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So this is BPC before BPC157 exists. There's probably other peptides and compounds in there. But they found that gastric juices had positive effects on healing on people that had GERD and these kind of.
- [08:52]
Andrew Huberman
Wait, so people were taking BPC in the time of Pavlov.
- [08:55]
Dr. Abud Bakri
They didn't know what BPC was. They were taking gastric juices from dogs for what? GI distress, GI discomfort. Some people will try it for wound healing. There was a big push in this era for like finding animal tissues and putting them into humans. That science fizzled out. At the same time there's a scientist, Hans Sely, that's coming up with the stress adaptation theory. And he notices that animals are stressed out. Three things happens to them. Their adrenals get really big, so they make more cortisol. Their gastric lining gets destroyed and then their thymus gland and their lymphatics shrink down. And he has this published paper where you have clear adrenal from a stressed animal versus a non stressed animal, a thymus from an animal that's stressed versus not. So this group is looking and thinking like, hey, Pavlov had this gastric juice. Hans Sele said that there was damage when during stress. There must be some kind of cytoprotective or organoprotective compound in the gut. The stomach is a very rich endocrine tissue. It makes ghrelin, all these other hormones. So they're like, there must be something else in the gut juice that protects the gut lining from further damage.
- [09:54]
Andrew Huberman
Were people drinking the gastric juices of dogs? Were they injecting them?
- [09:58]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Drinking was mostly what they did.
- [10:00]
Andrew Huberman
And it was supposed to be a medical elixir, presumably. It had many, many things in it,
- [10:04]
Dr. Abud Bakri
many peptides, dyspepsia and like upset stomach. And this kind of stuff is what people were thinking about.
- [10:09]
Andrew Huberman
Do the reports point to the fact that it might have worked independent of what was sold on Dr. Pavlov's non existent website? This is in like the early 1900s.
- [10:18]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Exactly, exactly.
- [10:19]
Andrew Huberman
And then Celia was what, 1930s?
- [10:23]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I think so yeah, it's about 100 years ago.
- [10:24]
Andrew Huberman
Someone will correct us if you're wrong. And this other group in Croatia was 91. 91. Okay.
- [10:30]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Their first paper talks about this like, hey, there must be some kind of compound. They identified the big 40 Dalton protein, BPC. And then they were like, what's causing the actual biological effects? They identified BPC157, the 15amino acid peptide that's causing all these effects. There's actually more peptides in gastric juices that some other scientists may or may not have already identified. This field of peptides going to be very interesting because almost every organ has a signature of peptides. Like if you think back, Dr. Vladimir Vulovic in 1850s, 1880s finds carnosine and carnitine in muscle of cattle. So you can think of that the first peptides that are found are carnosine and then carnitine is the amino acid. That's they have positive effects on strength training and performance and different effects there. But that was the whole idea is like, hey, there's muscle peptides that may have muscle effects. Right. Gut peptides may have gut effects.
- [11:20]
Andrew Huberman
So this Croatian group isolates this 15amino acid kind of mini segment of BPC. They and others start injecting into mice, inducing injuries to nerve to tendon, maybe describe a few of those effects. I'm familiar with that literature, but I can tell that you are far more familiar with it. So what are some of the impressive effects that they observed that led to where we are today?
- [11:42]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep. So they did all kinds of horrible things to these mice. They would, you know, sever tendons and then give them BPC through oral or injectable intraperitoneal administrations and they'd have faster healing times. They would sever ACLs of the mice. They would do burn wounds. So when a patient has a burn wound in like the icu, they end up having crazy gastric ulcers. But if they were able to put BPC on topically for the mouse, they would have no gastric ulcers. They name it as this anti stress compound is how they, they, they look at it now when they do that Achilles paper on the mice, that's what explodes the bodybuilder interest and leads us to today where we are like, oh, MSK injuries must be bpc tendons and muscle injuries. But the original idea of BPC was to use it as a gastric treatment, not to use it as a musculoskeletal.
- [12:27]
Andrew Huberman
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- [15:32]
Dr. Abud Bakri
In animals. Yes.
- [15:33]
Andrew Huberman
In animals. Yes. Thank you. And that it just generally promotes quote unquote repair. That's kind of weird.
- [15:41]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It is weird, right?
- [15:42]
Andrew Huberman
Because I Could spend the next 10 hours or more telling you about all the ways that people have tried to get nerves to regenerate and couldn't. And as you pointed out, this thing doesn't really have one specific, at least known receptor. So the data on the gut make a lot of sense. This is after all a gut peptide. It makes sense that that gut peptide could get lots of places in the body. But what is it doing mechanistically if we know, to support regeneration or replenishment of all these different tissue types? Because a neuron is a very different cell type than a fibroblast or one of the bits of collagen that make up different connective tissues.
- [16:18]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's modulating a lot of these growth and healing pathways like in the models of damaging the endothelial layer or the epithelial layer of different tissues. You'll get more VEGF signaling. So that's the vascular endothelial growth factor. So get more blood vessels androgenesis being formed, which creates a lot of the controversy around BBC safety. You'll get cell migration, especially when coupled with TB500 and TB4. You'll get more access of the healing factors to the area through angiogenic pathways. On top of that you'll get an anti stress effect. So the other big thing that they did was they'd give corticosteroids with BPC157 to these mice. And usually when you have a wound and you give corticosteroids, the corticosteroids will slow or even stop the wound healing from happening. When BPC was administered, the healing was either the same or even better.
- [17:06]
Andrew Huberman
Is BPC considered anti inflammatory? Because based on what you just said, it almost seems like it helps maintain some of the pro inflammatory response. Some people might be thinking, why would you want inflammation? What Dr. Bakri just said is if you block inflammatory inflammation with corticosteroids, you aren't going to call in the signals to repair tissues. So lowering inflammation is a dicey thing that maybe we set aside for later in the conversation if we have time. But is it thought that BPC is lowering inflammation or is just somehow hitting the gas pedal on all these regenerative restorative biological processes?
- [17:39]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's more putting the gas pedal on these processes to bring in the immune system the healing factors. For example, in one tendon model they noticed that increased amount of growth hormone receptors on the tendon. So theoretically this would allow more growth hormone to dock in and cause the outgrowth of the tendon and the regrowth of it. So there's that theory there. Downstream, it will modulate nitric oxide synthesis. So that's a big thing when it comes to wound healing because you need to dilate the blood vessels. You need to call in different cells. So it's really changing the way cells behave at that level. But that's only for, like, the tendons side of it. They also did weird things on the neurological side. Like they would make these mice drunk. Okay. And they would then give them BBC and they'd get less drunk. And when they go through mazes.
- [18:22]
Andrew Huberman
Oh, boy.
- [18:22]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Okay.
- [18:23]
Andrew Huberman
We did not just recommend you take BBC with alcohol.
- [18:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Just want to be very clear.
- [18:28]
Andrew Huberman
But people are good, you know, will do their own interpretation. So I'm being semi facetious, but very interesting.
- [18:33]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And then also they would give them, get the mice drunk and then have them withdraw from alcohol. And that withdrawal is deadly. If we have a patient in the hospital that withdraws, they could die during that withdrawal if they're not given benzodiazepines. They got BPC and they didn't have the withdrawal symptoms. I'm like, what's going on here? This is a very interesting compound. I think it gets. It gets all the hype for the MSK stuff, but I think the neurological neuropsychiatric, let's say, and then gastric effects are way more interesting when it comes to that because it's modulating the gut brain access in an interesting way. We'll have people come to us and they're like, my Adderall is not working since I've been taking oral bpc.
- [19:03]
Andrew Huberman
Are they happy with that effect?
- [19:04]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No, they're not happy. They're very mad because it seems like it's blunting their Adderall. So it's doing something from dopaminergic signaling, both on both sides, both withdrawal when it comes to, like the GABAergic side, but also the. The peak of signaling. So if you like, peruse Reddit, which you should never do, you'll find all these anhedonia discussions about bpc, people feel like depressed and low energy.
- [19:26]
Andrew Huberman
Incredible.
- [19:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So it seems to be in terms
- [19:27]
Andrew Huberman
of effects in animals and anecdotal reports in humans, because I think both your and my excitement about this might be occupying a substantial amount of the force field here. Let's do something that normally I would do in a few minutes. I'm going to ask you some very direct questions about this. And I don't hold you responsible as being like, bpc, you know, spokesperson, but here you are. That's Pavlov's job and he's dead. Are there any known adverse events from people taking bpc? Known and documented.
- [20:03]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Okay.
- [20:03]
Andrew Huberman
Adverse events where it's unrelated to contamination or something of that sort in the literature.
- [20:11]
Dr. Abud Bakri
When it comes to the animal data, they've injected animals with, you know, a thousand times the dose of BPC with no real adverse effects. So there's. We don't even know the LD50 of BBC, which makes it hard for it to become an FDA approved.
- [20:22]
Andrew Huberman
Maybe. Define LD50.
- [20:23]
Dr. Abud Bakri
LD50 is the dose of. Which would kill 50% of the animals if it was administered to them. So we don't even know what that is.
- [20:29]
Andrew Huberman
And that's actually an important number, as you know, barbaric as it sounds, to determine for any Drug, what's the LD50 for? Caffeine, what's the LD 50 for? Aspirin, what's the LD? This is every drug you take, folks, on or off the counter, you know, at prescription or non prescription, has gone through LD50 testing in animals.
- [20:44]
Dr. Abud Bakri
To be a clinician to prescribe this, we need to know what that is, which limits us. Now. There was two very small phase 1 and phase 2 trials on rectal BPC enemas in the early 2000s from that same Croatian group. So that's the biggest concerned BBC. All the data comes from one group, so people can be skeptical. There's a couple of Chinese groups that have also replicated some of their work. But those groups wanted to try to treat ulcerative colitis. It's a very, you know, miserable condition of where the immune system attacks the lining of the gut in multiple spots. And they use enemas of BPC up to like 80 milligrams, which is much more than. Than people would take.
- [21:17]
Andrew Huberman
Most people are injecting microgram. Yes, 100 or 200 micrograms per day or something, maybe more.
- [21:23]
Dr. Abud Bakri
But up to a milligram.
- [21:24]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, you're talking about 80 milligrams.
- [21:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, rectal enemas. They did a phase one and phase two trial.
- [21:28]
Andrew Huberman
They're doing this daily or they do it once.
- [21:30]
Dr. Abud Bakri
They did it for a few weeks and then they remeasured. It was placebo controlled. The data is not available. The abstracts are only available. So that. That's what also gives us some pause when we're gonna, you know, push that forward, especially when the legal discussions are happening here in the next few months on bpc. The first, the phase one trial showed no adverse effects, and they didn't even have BPC in the systemic System too. That's a key point. To know that orally administered or rectally administered BPC doesn't seem to go systemic.
- [21:55]
Andrew Huberman
Maybe define that a little bit more specifically.
- [21:58]
Dr. Abud Bakri
If you take aspirin and then you measure blood aspirin levels, you'll notice the levels go up. When they measured BPC levels, BBC 157 levels in these individuals, they didn't find it in the blood. So either it was broken down very quickly or it stayed locally to the lining of the gastric tissues.
- [22:12]
Andrew Huberman
That raises a question for me. Let's say somebody doesn't quote, unquote, take any BPC157 by NMR or otherwise. If I were to just draw your blood right now, there's BPC 157 in there. In the bigger protein.
- [22:24]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Bigger. The bigger BPC protein. I don't think you wouldn't.
- [22:26]
Andrew Huberman
Is it circulating or is it. Or is it. Or is it restricted to the gut?
- [22:29]
Dr. Abud Bakri
You don't have that data.
- [22:30]
Andrew Huberman
But that's incredible, right? Because we're talking about these effects all over the body. We don't even know if it leaves the gut.
- [22:34]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No, but. Well, the injectable is going to go
- [22:36]
Andrew Huberman
systemic and most people are going to take, if they decide to do this, are going to take an oral or an injectable. They're either going to inject local to the injury they can, or intraperitoneal.
- [22:46]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So they found fragments of the 15. Like there's a paper in 2024 that looked at this and they could figure out if somebody had BPC administered for doping reasons because it's on the water list now. So they could figure out if someone had taken bpc. Got it. But we don't know. Like, we don't. We need to know the dynamics, we don't know where it goes, how it
- [23:01]
Andrew Huberman
goes, and we don't know the results in terms of what those 80 milligram enemas of BPC did for the colitis.
- [23:10]
Dr. Abud Bakri
In the phase one trial, it was just a safety. There was no adverse effects. And in the phase 2 trial, it was very small, like 40 patients. There was at least a positive signal on the ulcerative colitis.
- [23:19]
Andrew Huberman
And this was done in the United States or this was in Croatia. Okay. So to be quite direct, on the one hand you have groups who I think are mostly well intentioned saying, Hey, 80 milligrams of BPC by way of enema did not cause any adverse events. And that's the phase one that you described.
- [23:39]
Dr. Abud Bakri
If we believe they're dangerous Right.
- [23:41]
Andrew Huberman
On the opposite side, many people, especially in the United States and northern Europe, where the regulations tend to be similar. Ish. Right. As compared to elsewhere in the world, would say, well, yeah, but that study was in Croatia. Now I have many Croatian friends. That's not a knock on Croatia. Why would it be that the clinical trials in Croatia would hold less weight? This is a dicey area, but I think it's important because you'll hear this. Oh, those are Chinese peptides. Those are Russian studies. Like, yeah. And you know, I mean, to me, you know, the question is, was it good science? Was it done carefully? Would it pass muster for a phase one in the United States?
- [24:22]
Dr. Abud Bakri
That's a good question. The groups seem to be very robust and they do really good randomized control, double blind, placebo controlled trials. I think we're very United States centric. We view ourselves as the premier science and we are the premier science. So people kind of trust that more. And there may be, you know, perverse incentives when it comes to different government bodies and like, you know, Soviet era research that might be, you know, pro fabrication when it comes to certain compounds. That makes people hesitant because there's a lot of, like these Soviet era compounds that are not peptides or some of them are peptides that are fantastic. They sound, they sound amazing. But when they get tested, maybe they're not as potent as the Soviet data would suggest.
- [24:56]
Andrew Huberman
I always thought that the Russian stuff was like the really potent stuff that they didn't want anyone else to know about. That is also kind of where it goes the other way. Right?
- [25:03]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It could go both ways. I mean, but they were, they were more interested in performance. They wanted better astronauts, better Olympians, better soldiers. We care more about, you know, a profit drug model that gets people on a subscription for the monthly drug. Unfortunately, sometimes it heals people, but.
- [25:17]
Andrew Huberman
So nowadays is BPC157 legal in the United States? Like, if I wanted to go online and buy BPC157, I can do it right?
- [25:25]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Legal, legally, for research purposes only.
- [25:28]
Andrew Huberman
I thought now under the new regulations recently passed that you can get it from a compounding pharmacy.
- [25:33]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Or technically, not just yet.
- [25:35]
Andrew Huberman
Okay.
- [25:35]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And it depends on medical boards to break it down. BBC 157 never got FDA approved. Right. So it gets into these compounding pharmacy lists. There's a category one, two and three. Category one means the FDA thinks like, hey, this is not an approved drug, but we're okay with you compounding this and you're okay to push that forward. Category two is like, do not compound in late 2024, BPC157 and like 20 other peptides got moved to this category two list. Since about 2017 to 2024, people have been prescribing BPC and these alternative medicine anti aging practices. It gets removed from that list. Of course. You know, compounding pharmacies re label it as PDA penadecapeptide arginate.
- [26:10]
Andrew Huberman
But it's the same thing.
- [26:11]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's the same exact thing.
- [26:12]
Andrew Huberman
Really?
- [26:12]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes. One of them will be an acetate, one of them will be an arginine, but the PDA is BPC157 because there
- [26:18]
Andrew Huberman
are many, many people selling compounded pentadecapeptide.
- [26:21]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Pentadecapeptide arginate pda.
- [26:23]
Andrew Huberman
Did I mispronounce it?
- [26:24]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Pentadecapeptide arginate.
- [26:25]
Andrew Huberman
That's the arginate. Okay.
- [26:27]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I think the acetate one is the one that's on the, the category two list now. Just in April of this year, it got removed from the Category 2 list and it's not yet on the Category 1 list, which would allow physicians to prescribe it through compounding pharmacies now.
- [26:43]
Andrew Huberman
But they can prescribe the PDA version.
- [26:46]
Dr. Abud Bakri
People are prescribing pda? Yes. Now, now state medical boards view that very differently. Like I got a letter from one of the licensed in many states. One of these states reached out to me. It's like you cannot prescribe, not me directly, like to the general public of people in that state said you cannot prescribe non FDA approved peptides no matter what. So there's controversy there. Even if the FDA says okay, we're okay with you prescribing it, is your medical board in that state going to be okay with it?
- [27:08]
Andrew Huberman
So it's state by state, state by state laws. What about with telehealth? So somebody's on the east coast in a state that allows them to write a script for, let's just call it BBC because that's effectively what it is. Or this other thing where they kind of wriggle through the regulation. Can they send that to California or to Wisconsin or someplace else? If the patient is there, the telehealth
- [27:28]
Dr. Abud Bakri
laws go into effect where the patient is. So if, let's say in California, it's not allowed to have BPC according to the state board of pharmacy, whoever bans that, even if you're a New York doctor that's licensed in California, that would be against the California medical board and they would ask you if they found out to stand in front of Them now are boards cracking down on this? Not really. There's a couple states that are cracking down on people and people know to avoid those states. But it's going to be very dicey over the next few years.
- [27:53]
Andrew Huberman
Okay, a couple of questions. Anecdata. We don't want to place too much on it, but the big kind of rumor out there that pricked up my ears a few years ago was when I heard that some athlete before the Summer Olympics, this was two Summer Olympics ago, from Eastern Europe had a complete Achilles transection. Not just a terror or a pole, but when we think about nerves and tendons, we think like complete cut the whole way through. And the rumor was they took BPC 157 locally injected for a few months and they podiumed in the Olympics. They still got a medal.
- [28:29]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Familiar with that?
- [28:30]
Andrew Huberman
That was the, that was the story that kind of got out there that I feel kind of catalyzed this movement of BPC out of these niche communities and in started it toward the, the public awareness that leads to you sitting here today. Among other things, we also, you have a lot of other knowledge, but we're restricting to BPC now. So do we have verification of that story?
- [28:49]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No, no. I think that story was hearsay. I don't think they wanted to reveal what they actually did. I don't think they only did BPC157. They'd be stupid if they did. They should have, you know, all the best and latest, greatest treatments, whether exosomes, stem cells, other peptides, anything that wasn't banned.
- [29:04]
Andrew Huberman
And by the way, I should say BPC157 was not on the banned substances list at that time. It was so unknown. Just like there are compounds right now that athletes are using and not just in the enhanced games in preparation for the Olympics. I'm not saying they're all doping, but they're, it's, it's a common practice that athletes will forage into things that can help them that are not yet on the banned substances list.
- [29:25]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And I mean, good luck proving that. BBC was injected, you know, a week ago because by the time the peptides already gone out of your system. So, or at least we think based on the pharmacodynamics that we understand now. That story was run with from the research community. They used it as a marketing tool to sell more BPC157 because what happened in the, in the field is the GLP1s come online, you know, late 2021, 2022 with Ozembic and WeGov they get the FDA approval for weight loss. There's not enough of a supply from the traditional pharmaceutical versions of the GLP1s. So people start looking elsewhere to get their weight loss drugs. I know people that would drive down Mexico to pick up pens because a pharmacy in the United States would cost, you know, $1500 for an Ozempic pen. Pharmacy in Mexico, one hour drive.
- [30:06]
Andrew Huberman
Same drug?
- [30:07]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Same exact drug.
- [30:07]
Andrew Huberman
How much relative cost, 150 versus 1500. Wow.
- [30:10]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So 10x.
- [30:11]
Andrew Huberman
And this is the thing that Trump has been very vocal about. Like that we're getting overcharged for drugs here.
- [30:17]
Dr. Abud Bakri
We definitely are. And the Trump Rx has lowered a lot of these prices, by the way, for a lot of these drugs. Now, that time there was a shortage of semaglutide and then eventually tirzepatide. So the compound pharmacy game shifted into making these drugs compounded versions. So they're not the FDA approved versions, but when there's a shortage of a medication, the compounders are allowed to make these drugs to meet the shortage. And in fact, the FDA was reaching out these people telling them to do it. Like Brigham, stocking him last week at the hands games. He's like, yeah, the FDA told us to make this stuff, and then they're getting us in trouble.
- [30:45]
Andrew Huberman
This is Brigham Bueller, who runs Ways too. Well. And, yeah, he ran a pharmacy for a long time. Compounding pharmacy. Yeah. We've never actually met in person.
- [30:52]
Dr. Abud Bakri
One of the best ones. Yeah, yeah.
- [30:52]
Andrew Huberman
It's not an ad for pharmacies. We have no. I have no business relationship to bring it. So if there's a shortage, compounding pharmacies can jump in the game.
- [30:59]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes. And they did. And they jumped in very hard on the glp. Yes. And they made a lot of money off the GLP ones. This was, you know, billions of dollars being made.
- [31:07]
Andrew Huberman
Were they selling them for less than standard Pharma was selling?
- [31:10]
Dr. Abud Bakri
They were less than the Ozempic pens. Unfortunately, what would happen is the provider had the discretion on the price. So all these providers also were making a lot of money.
- [31:17]
Andrew Huberman
Who's the quote, unquote provider? The physician.
- [31:19]
Dr. Abud Bakri
The physician or the NP or the
- [31:20]
Andrew Huberman
pa who takes the difference?
- [31:23]
Dr. Abud Bakri
The clinician. Which is, I don't think is legal in most states or maybe not even federal.
- [31:27]
Andrew Huberman
Wait a second. So let's say I wanted to take a Wegovy.
- [31:29]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [31:30]
Andrew Huberman
And there's a shortage. I can't get it from. Who's the big manufacturer? No one orders that Novo Norris doesn't have enough. My doctor says Listen, you need this.
- [31:37]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [31:38]
Andrew Huberman
And I say, how much is it? And they say, well, 1500. $1500. But it turns out the compounding pharmacy, through a different doctor, a more benevolent doctor could have prescribed it to me for. I could get. For maybe $300. In the case where I'm paying 1500, it's going to my physician. Unbeknownst to me, I don't. I'm cloaked from the process.
- [31:59]
Dr. Abud Bakri
If you're getting the Novo Nordisk pen, the physician's not involved.
- [32:02]
Andrew Huberman
No, I'm talking about if I'm. If I'm drifted towards a compound inversion.
- [32:05]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So the. The most of the times when it comes to compound pharmacies, which I don't think is. Is a good practice, the clinician gets a price from the pharmacy. So the pharmacy will tell you, hey, a vial of semaglutide costs 150 bucks. This clinician can now sell that vial to the patient cell. It's really. They're charging an administrative fee.
- [32:22]
Andrew Huberman
All right.
- [32:23]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's not a sale because technically you get some medications like that, they will sell it to you for 200 or $800.
- [32:30]
Andrew Huberman
Okay. If I want to ask my physician, how much are you getting the drug for? From. Because I know which pharmacy it's going to come from. It's going to come in a while. It says, like, Upstate or TaylorMade or. What's Brigham's Pharmacy?
- [32:43]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Revive.
- [32:43]
Andrew Huberman
Revive. It's coming from Revive. What are you paying for this? From Revive.
- [32:46]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [32:47]
Andrew Huberman
And then what? Are you going to charge me? Yes. And I can assume the difference is going to my clinician.
- [32:50]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's going to the clinician.
- [32:51]
Andrew Huberman
All right. Sorry, clinicians.
- [32:52]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah.
- [32:53]
Andrew Huberman
The game is up. Patients are now going to ask, and you have every right to ask as far as I'm concerned.
- [32:58]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. Because what's going to happen with the BBC and all these other peptides moving is there's going to be telehealth platforms on every. On every corner now that are going to be like, hey, BBC199, BBC299. And they're going to, like, check out and they're going to be a doctor somewhere in a room that's going to stamp the prescription. But it's just a, you know, e commerce. It's supplements with. With the stamp of a doctor, which is not good medical care at all.
- [33:17]
Andrew Huberman
Okay. To balance this a bit, the route that many people have gone for about a decade now, but primarily in the last three to five years, was to go to these for research purposes only. What we would Call Gray Market.
- [33:29]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [33:30]
Andrew Huberman
Let's just name names because they're out of business now anyway. They shuttered themselves Peptide Sciences till a few years ago. You could go on there, you could buy pretty much any peptide, it would say for research purposes only, not for animal or human use.
- [33:43]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And you sign that many times.
- [33:44]
Andrew Huberman
And when you paid them, you would have to venmo them.
- [33:48]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah.
- [33:49]
Andrew Huberman
Or you could do it through Zelle. But they would ask that you notice, send it to a Peptide Sciences account. It was like some random name and the names kept changing. So everyone knew they were in on something like this. By the way, I want to be very clear, I ended up getting these things right. I was too frightened to take them later. I have taken bpc. I've tried it. I don't take it currently, but I've tried it through a compounding pharmacy. So I just want to be very clear what that experience was about.
- [34:15]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So eventually they actually got payment processors. Like this market evolved with the desire because there's Maybe I'd say 5 to 10 billion dollars on gray market peptides being spent in the United States in 2025. And that's going to grow this year.
- [34:28]
Andrew Huberman
So here's my question. Standard Pharma we know goes through, of all the things we're talking about the most stringent process. You may hate pharma folks or whatever. That's. You're right. But the stuff that you get that's non generic from Novo Norsk, from Eli Lilly, you can be certain based on the product packaging that it's as clean as it gets, as pure as it gets.
- [34:48]
Dr. Abud Bakri
That's right.
- [34:49]
Andrew Huberman
Compounding pharmacies are a mix. It depends on the compounding pharmacy. Do we know that gray market peptides had problems? Because there are people out there right now who are certainly not physicians. People like Robert Breedlove, who's best known for like his work in crypto, who's also now like very open about the fact that he's taking all these peptides and anabolics and things. And I heard him online the other day saying literally that he's tested the gray market for research purposes only peptides and compared them to the compounding pharmacy versions and they're identical. Now he's not a physician and I don't think he's lying, but many people are taking that sort of evidence and saying, oh, I'll just get from gray market sources. As a physician, what is your stance on this?
- [35:29]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So the API for all these active pharmaceutical ingredients comes from China. There are no such thing as American Made peptides. It gets finished here. So the API, all from China.
- [35:40]
Andrew Huberman
Everything's from the raw materials.
- [35:41]
Dr. Abud Bakri
The raw materials, like the semaglutide you're getting from a compounding pharmacy or a research peptide website, raditzeid included, comes from China and then gets. Either the raw material gets, you know,
- [35:53]
Andrew Huberman
packaged here, raw materials, or. Or synthesized compound. Because there's a big difference between getting, like, the raw materials for something and getting the thing.
- [36:01]
Dr. Abud Bakri
The synthesized semaglutide.
- [36:03]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [36:04]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Gets made in China. It'd be very expensive to make it here. There are people starting to look at that because that's the next thing in the arms race to make American peptides.
- [36:11]
Andrew Huberman
So they're all Chinese peptides.
- [36:13]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Everything's Chinese peptides.
- [36:14]
Andrew Huberman
There's no Guatemalan peptides. There's no.
- [36:16]
Dr. Abud Bakri
China is the best at it, at doing it. Now, the compounding pharmacies vary in grading. Some of them are really good. They do all the testing, sterility. They have very good quality control. So you get a good product, but they usually have to compound it with something else to get by the regulations. Like, they'll add on a B12 or a B6 to say, like, the patient had nausea from the traditional semaglutide. We can compound them with B12 or B6 to get around the nausea, and that's that. That meets the patient rule. Because there's two ways to get compounded. Medications. There's a shortage, or there's a unique need that the patient has.
- [36:47]
Andrew Huberman
Do we know that compounding with something else actually deals with the nausea, or is that just a slight event?
- [36:52]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It might help some people.
- [36:53]
Andrew Huberman
Got it.
- [36:54]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Anecdotally, people will say that they respond better to the pens, like the actual pharma pens, than to the computer compared to the compounded stuff. The research stuff is all over the place. Like, some of it could be better than compounded stuff. It could be the wrong substance. Like, there was a. There was a guy went viral on Twitter a few weeks ago. He got radatrutide, started getting darker. He's like, I don't think I'm injecting ratatutide skin.
- [37:13]
Andrew Huberman
Got it.
- [37:14]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [37:14]
Andrew Huberman
He was melanitan.
- [37:15]
Dr. Abud Bakri
He was injecting melanitan, too.
- [37:16]
Andrew Huberman
And, folks, I realized that we're going places that not even I predicted we would go. But this is super informative. So all of the raw materials are coming from the same source? Yes. Then they're getting filtered into these different. Let's just call them stringency bins. Yes. Standard pharma quote Unquote. Big pharma being the most stringent.
- [37:34]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. Some of the raw materials are overseas. Like, I think Lilly's opening some china factories. Some of it's here.
- [37:38]
Andrew Huberman
Okay. Some are going into compounding pharmacies, and compounding pharmacies, I think it's fair to say, have varying levels of stringency.
- [37:46]
Dr. Abud Bakri
That's right.
- [37:46]
Andrew Huberman
Some are going to be excellent, some are good, some are going to be lousy.
- [37:48]
Dr. Abud Bakri
That's right, fair.
- [37:49]
Andrew Huberman
Okay. The quote unquote, gray market peptides, the ones where it's quote, unquote for research purposes only. But I made the joke on X a few weeks ago. Like, how many of you are running experiments in your home? Not on animals. What are you doing cell culture at home? Like, come on. I know it's involved in doing cell culture.
- [38:06]
Dr. Abud Bakri
You're not.
- [38:06]
Andrew Huberman
No one's doing this at home. So those presumably also come in anywhere from excellent to dreadful. Yes, but we don't know which are which. Nope, we don't know that.
- [38:18]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And batch. The batch. That's the big problem.
- [38:20]
Andrew Huberman
Gotcha. Okay, so it is risky to get for research.
- [38:23]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, I mean, that's the majority of way people are consuming peptides. Unfortunately, we should just, because of the, the, the move in 2024, to get these from the Category 1 to the Category 2 list and make them banned, quote, unquote. That opened up this gray market zone. Like the gray market existed for the last 15, 20 years. Bodybuilders would, you know, have anecdotes about BPC 157. They'd inject it, post, you know, post squats for different injuries. Nobody really cared about it. It was with the GLP1s and then the banning of the peptides, plus this, you know, anti medicine kick that's been happening over the last five years.
- [38:53]
Andrew Huberman
The pandemic.
- [38:54]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes, since the pandemic, that people are like, you know what, I want to inject this because it gives them a sense of autonomy or they feel like their bro recommended it. Like I said, the best job in 2025 was to be a peptide affiliate. People made my yearly salary in a month selling peptides illegally on TikTok.
- [39:10]
Andrew Huberman
And I will say, because for people that think it's just bro science, it's also gal science. I will tell you, I don't even know that's a term. Someone needs to come up with a better term term. My understanding, and not from Reddit, is that more than half of the peptide market is female.
- [39:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
That's right.
- [39:27]
Andrew Huberman
You know, there's this perception that it's like, you know, only guys who like to lift weights and want to be jacked and, you know, jacked and tan or whatever they say, you know. No, no. Especially when we start getting into things like ghku copper. We start talking about things for collagen and skin rejuvenation. There's a big peptide market in towards women. I actually think in the long run it's going to exceed, at least financially, peptide market in men.
- [39:49]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I think it already has because soccer moms become like affiliates. Like, you know, Amway and herbalife was the big thing 20 years ago. Now soccer moms just do peptide affiliate.
- [39:57]
Andrew Huberman
Where are they getting their peptides?
- [39:58]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Research grade website.
- [39:59]
Andrew Huberman
Gray market.
- [39:59]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah.
- [40:00]
Andrew Huberman
Okay, we already know that they're not recommended. But what, what about black market? What would be considered black market is
- [40:07]
Dr. Abud Bakri
like you bought it directly from China. Like, like it's very cheap. Like a viable BPC costs five bucks to make. Like now someone will sell it to you for 199 plus, depending on where. But black market is either like, you know, your friend in China on WhatsApp sent you a vial of bpc, do not do this. Or someone synthesize claims. They synthesize it in their bathtub. Like just like an underground gear. Like all those steroids that were in the 90s and the 2000s. It's like, who knows what that is.
- [40:30]
Andrew Huberman
What's so interesting to me is with steroids, it went from bodybuilding community to eventually hormone replacement. It was like TRT or what I call TRT plus because a lot of guys are taking a lot more than that. Oh yeah, Some are taking less, most are taking more. Some are taking what they're prescribed. And then HRT has become very popular in women. So now HRT is kind of like a thing that it's not like, oh my goodness, like so and so is taking estrogen replacement or testosterone. It's not a big deal. Peptides is different because it came, you know, the big explosion in this came through the GLPs. And I would argue I'd love your opinion on this. Why so many people are now peptide curious is because people, because of the GLPs, are now also very comfortable injecting themselves. Like, like five years ago. If you're like, you're gonna inject yourself, people like, oh my God. Then they realize it's like this little tiny pin. It hurts less than a, you know, Texan mosquito bite. People are doing it on their skin and like, you know, and somebody's, you know, your girlfriend or wife is doing it as if it's nothing. And, you know, it was like heroin addicts or diabetics. Right. You're not going intravenous. So that changed. Yes, that destigmatized it. Now, to be fair, I want to touch on the question about adverse events again. We're going to spend a couple minutes talking about some incredible things that we've seen and heard about BPC157 in terms of its positive effects. The concern I've always had was the angiogenesis, the growth of vasculature. If somebody happens to have a little tumor or what will eventually become a tumor sitting on their liver or in their gut or in their pancreas, in theory, it could vascularize that tumor and cause it to grow more quickly. Is there any evidence that that's actually happened? I want to be very clear. I'm not loading this question because it sounds like I'm kind of like leading the witness when I say that I want to know. I'm not currently taking BPC157. Fortunately, I don't have an injury at the moment, so that would be the only condition, which I'd take it. Unless you tell me there are other reasons. But I don't want to give myself that risk. That risk. And I think most people don't want to give themselves that risk. So what is the realistic risk? Based on observations in humans or animals? Have we ever seen tumors grow more quickly?
- [42:28]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No. Like, for example, most compounds, if they're, you know, carcinogenic, we will see that signature in the animals, like, you know, with carterine. GW was a drug that was very pop. Was very promising because it had, you know, diabetic implications for metabolism. And now it's a bodybuilder drug that they use for more cardio. What is this Carterine GW you might have seen on the Reddits and those forms, but people use it for.
- [42:49]
Andrew Huberman
I stay out of Reddit.
- [42:50]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. Good. Yeah. Increases your cardio capacity. Gotcha. And so it's ban on the water list, of course, but it was. It had promise for treating diabetics because it changed metabolism in the liver. It had a signal of cancer in animal data, so that whole thing was scrapped. There is no signal from the Animal Literature on BPC157 for, you know, cancers. Now that all that literature comes from one group, so we have to be very careful. It's that one creation group that tells you that it's the safest thing in the world.
- [43:16]
Andrew Huberman
All the animal data come from one group. Interesting.
- [43:19]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Almost all of it very few like a couple of Chinese Studies on, on BBC 157 now they're starting to become more interest here. Like I think it's a phase two trial on hamstrings happening here in the United States.
- [43:28]
Andrew Huberman
Really?
- [43:29]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah.
- [43:29]
Andrew Huberman
Humans.
- [43:30]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [43:30]
Andrew Huberman
Phase two, yes.
- [43:31]
Dr. Abud Bakri
We talked to a group, an orthopedic group somewhere on the east coast. They wanted to do a BBC trial so that we consulted with them to kind of wait. Yeah. So it's going to happen, especially if it moves to this Category 1 list and people can be prescribed it. At least we can get like a phase four trial where it's being prescribed and we can see, see what's happening to the people as they're getting it and we can, you know, aggregate all this anecdote into one place ideally and report on it. So that's something we're working on in the, in the background.
- [43:53]
Andrew Huberman
Is that something you personally are involved in?
- [43:55]
Dr. Abud Bakri
We're working on, on aggregating all this, all this data together.
- [43:57]
Andrew Huberman
Great.
- [43:57]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Into anyone ne1 dot study to put it all all together because there's all the anecdote exists but like put it together somewhere, at least we can see what the signals are. For example, on Reddit you'll find signals of hematomas getting worse. Which makes sense with the, with the VEGF pathway.
- [44:11]
Andrew Huberman
I've heard this. So friend and physician who is, I would say peptide curious slash positive told me that when he takes BPC157 for you know, a shoulder or knee or whatever that angiomas on his face, the sort of spider web angiomas, not the formal term, forgive me, derms, but get worse. Yes, that's his personal observation. I think a lot of people don't want that. It makes sense though, if it's promoting
- [44:35]
Dr. Abud Bakri
angiogenesis based on the mechanism. It does make sense. Now BBC 157 is not a uniform androgen assist upregulator. In some models it decreases VEGF in a melanoma model, a cell, cell line.
- [44:46]
Andrew Huberman
So it might be potentially anti cancer, but we need to test it.
- [44:49]
Dr. Abud Bakri
We don't know. And which is what's really unfortunate about this compound. It's very promising. It has all this cool literature in animals and we just don't know when
- [44:57]
Andrew Huberman
it comes to the one enema.
- [44:58]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, exactly. Study. Yeah, exactly. And, and we'd love to know because like if it does work, like I could see a million use cases in ICU that we could use use, you know, BBC 157 to really help people out, especially during the critical illness. Because like in icu, people get gastric ulcers. Like, if, if we knew that it would work, I would love to give them an infusion of BPC157. And that's the future I, I could see happening. But we need data.
- [45:18]
Andrew Huberman
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- [47:07]
Dr. Abud Bakri
There's multiple patents on BPC 157 depending on which salt they're in. The patent has been passed around a couple of times through different places. Unfortunately the company that had the patent under the PLEVA got acquired by Teva. Teva is this generic pharmaceutical company and they don't. They make Adderall. So they're making tons of money making Adderall. They don't really care about PPC157. So they have one of the patents. The other patent expires in like 10 years. I think Sikric still has it. Dr. Sickric is the guy behind BPC157.
- [47:34]
Andrew Huberman
He's in Croatia.
- [47:35]
Dr. Abud Bakri
He's in Croatia, Yeah.
- [47:36]
Andrew Huberman
Would Teva sell the patent?
- [47:38]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I'm sure they would if someone made an offer. The problem is I don't see the purpose of even having the patent because you can add on one chain to the amino acid. This is the problem with peptides. It's. This is what Eli Lilly is coming into when it comes to making reta. Is that patent laws for peptides kind of suck because you can add on one amino acid, you can modify one thing on it and suddenly it's a different compound.
- [47:58]
Andrew Huberman
This is true for other pharmaceuticals. I'm familiar with some of the ketamine and ibogaine trials. And there's a company that took ibogaine and basically added a magnesium component to it. And you can make that a completely new drug.
- [48:09]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Exactly.
- [48:09]
Andrew Huberman
I'm not saying that doesn't work. I think they have good rationale for doing that. But. So this game of sort of protecting
- [48:15]
Dr. Abud Bakri
patents and plus millions of people have already used BPC157 through research use only websites. So I think millions is fair. But now how do you reel that back? Like it's already the cat's out of the bag. So there's no financial incentive to run the giant study unless we crowdfund it as peptide curious people within the category
- [48:36]
Andrew Huberman
of interesting anecdotal data. And in your role as a physician, I realize you're not suggesting these things, but you have a different picture of this stuff at the level of mechanism. And you're a clinician that works with truly FDA approved drugs. And I want you to share with folks, I said it in the introduction, but internal medicine means that you spend your days. What?
- [48:57]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I'm on the wards of the hospital admitting patients from the ER to the floor to the icu, managing very complex disease ranging from simple pneumonia to a coronary artery bypass patient. So yeah, that whole spectrum.
- [49:08]
Andrew Huberman
Okay, so that lens applied to this as much as one can. Would you say that like of the reports that you've heard directly from people you trust and for people that. Who are not incentivized to say these things like, oh, you know, it made me happier, you know, their skin looked better. All the things that one can find with an affiliate code attached to it. Of those, what do you think are the most interesting, potentially valid claims? And I asked that because if we were going to fund a clinical trial, we need to pick an endpoint or a couple of endpoints. Is it going to be recovery from injury? If so, what kinds of injuries is it going to be the gastric stuff? Is it mood interaction with dopamine receptors? I mean, I've heard so many different things. If we had a chunk of money and we're going to design a study and have someone else do it so it's truly independent. Like, what are the, the top three to five outcomes that you heard? That you have a good feeling, there's quote unquote something there.
- [50:02]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [50:03]
Andrew Huberman
And then we narrow it down to maybe one or two for sake of the study. What are those five?
- [50:07]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I would say to complete the phase one, phase two on the ulcerative colitis, do that phase three trial on proving that it has benefits for ulcerative colitis. And I don't think we'd need to use an enema. We could probably have an encapsulated version that releases deeper into the intestines.
- [50:19]
Andrew Huberman
So fix the gut, fix the ulcer. Gut, yes.
- [50:21]
Dr. Abud Bakri
In conjunction with that, you could do a trial on like, you know, gerd. That's a simple condition. A lot of people have it randomized to BPC157 oral capsules versus pentoprazole.
- [50:31]
Andrew Huberman
Okay. And you're basing this on the fact that you've seen and heard that people who have GERD get better, feel better when they take it. Okay. And it could be placebo?
- [50:38]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes. I mean, anecdotally, when I travel, I. I have a bottle of BPC orally.
- [50:43]
Andrew Huberman
Why is that?
- [50:43]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I don't get, you know, travelers diarrhea or, or, you know, when I, you know, eat exotic foods in random places. My friends all get sick and I, I happen not to anecdote. Right. But that's interesting. There seems to be some kind of gut protective effect, and that's what they noticed in the mice literature. They would have an offending agent into the gut, and they'd notice that there'd be protection deeper down in the, in the gastric tract from that offending agent. Because if you think about it, the gut is the most vulnerable part of the body. Like it's open to the outside world. It's a tube that runs through you. You can eat something and it could completely destroy you. So you have to have some kind of mechanisms. The prostaglandins, you know, all these different hormones that are made potentially BBC157 is part of this robust armory that the gut has to protect itself from further injuries.
- [51:23]
Andrew Huberman
What are some things outside the gut or indirect from the gut that are also compelling.
- [51:28]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So I would love to see some neuropsychiatric BBC studies when it comes to addictions. There's enough anecdote data about people talking about addictions. And hey, I don't really crave insert drug here, not recommending anyone tries that out. But for alcohol or whatever it may
- [51:43]
Andrew Huberman
be, do you think that is likely due to the. We're speculating, but likely due to a interference with the reinforcing properties. Just like earlier you said people are getting less drunk, so people are getting less high, becomes less reinforcing. Or is it somehow touching the craving mechanisms themselves?
- [51:59]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's probably touching the craving mechanism through the gut brain access. Because I don't think it's going systemic either. I think it's. It's locally in the gut, shutting down the neurons from. If you think about it, if BBC is what they claim it is. Right. And that's a big if that. If you have a noxious agent going into your gut, your body has to have a mechanism to lock down, protect your. Your vital organs. Right. So is BPC part of this giant transduction pathway to protect your vital organs, your brain, your heart, your kidneys from further damage?
- [52:25]
Andrew Huberman
We had Dr. Diego Borges can never pronounce his last name, forgive me, Diego, who's out at Duke, who's really the world expert on these neuropod cells in the gut that signal through the no dose ganglion up the vagus. No dose ganglion to either promote or suppress release of dopamine to make you either a pro approach or avoid certain foods. Very, very interesting.
- [52:42]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Wow.
- [52:42]
Andrew Huberman
I would be more than happy to encourage his lab, even if get funds for his lab to do something on this. What are some other categories of interesting effects that deserve careful study? Yep.
- [52:55]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So we need to see what BBC does on the musculoskeletal system. Like that's what the hype is. That's where everybody is going. So as I look through like what model I would look for. You just want something that's not very vascularized but could be improved if the blood flow was good, like a tendon injury. So perhaps, you know, a bicep, tricep tendon type of post surgical outcome. So, like, you get your bicep tendon torn, you get a repair, you get BBC either intraoperatively or post operatively, and you see if, if that person heals faster because idea is not to use bpc, it's not going to magically reattach an ACL that's torn. Right. But can it further accelerate the healing from an ACL surgery so you come back in six months rather than 12 months? That's the big question. And that's what a lot of athletes are using BBC157 for that use.
- [53:39]
Andrew Huberman
Has anyone ever done the one limb versus opposite limb control experiment? I mean, I know that people take it orally or inject it systemically like under the skin or into the muscle. Goes systemically in the bloodstream. If you apply it that way, if you can get to the injury site, sometimes people will inject locally. But it seems that the challenge is that let's say you have tendonitis in one elbow and tendinitis in the other elbow. You could inject into your left elbow and not your right, but there's going to be systemic transfer. So it's hard to do that. Internal control experiment.
- [54:09]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. No, I've had, I've used BPC for one injury and I've had results on a different injury. Positive result, positive results. I'm like, oh, interesting that, like, that my shoulder feels better even though I was doing it from elbow or whatever it may be.
- [54:19]
Andrew Huberman
This would be a good time for us to, you know, bracket what we're about to say by saying this is purely anecdotal but filtered through. I consider myself a skeptic on many, many things, especially things I would put into my body.
- [54:31]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [54:31]
Andrew Huberman
I'll tell a story. What's your favorite personal BPC story involving you and your body?
- [54:38]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, I tore my tricep a few months ago. Tore. Yeah, tore tricep lifting with people I should have been lifting with. They're much stronger than I was. Purple from here to here. Like the pictures. I posted them on X. It's. It's brutal. I'm like, I'm gonna have to have surgery. This sucks. I don't have time to have surgery because you're in. You're in a brace for like three months. And I put BBC in locally. Don't try this at home. Not medical advice. But locally in the tissue spot with a couple of other peptides and within three weeks my PT is like, what the hell are you doing? Like, this is healing so fast. Would I have healed that fast anyways, I don't know. But that's typically a grade two tricep tear with purple arm from top to bottom. It wasn't grade three because I could still extend my elbow. That's usually a three month recovery. And to be back in three to four weeks was fantastic for me, which is why I'm so excited.
- [55:22]
Andrew Huberman
What dosage were you injected?
- [55:24]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Large, larger dose than people would not typically.
- [55:26]
Andrew Huberman
Not micrograms.
- [55:27]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No, no.
- [55:27]
Andrew Huberman
You're up in the grams.
- [55:28]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, yeah. A lot higher. I think personally and in some of our, our people we've used bigger dosages. I think that's the problem, the low dosages, even though that translates well from the mice data. For humans, I think the dose is way higher. But people just go based on the dosages that would fit in the pile through a, you know, Peptide Sciences website rather than what. Actually we don't know what, what the human dose is for being PVC 157. So there's a lot of work to do just to figure that out. Like when we spoke to the, to the orthopedic group, they're like, yeah, we're start with, you know, 250 micrograms. I'm like, I don't know if you're going to see an effect at that low of a dose. You might need to raise it up. Like that's what people do online. I'm like, yeah, but that's just because someone's peptide website says to do that. There's no data there but you know, tricep was back to normal.
- [56:09]
Andrew Huberman
Amazing.
- [56:10]
Dr. Abud Bakri
That was an interesting BPC case. I've seen other injuries where BPC didn't really help much.
- [56:15]
Andrew Huberman
I can't match your story. That's a bigger result. I can just say that I had a bad trap neck pull where I couldn't turn my head and I was like, oh, one of those. And you had some PPC. So it was only, I think only 200 micrograms and just pinned it right into the, that street talk for injected right into the upper trap. Ish area. Two days later, completely gone. Course I don't know what would have happened had I just waited, but it seemed eerily fast and then I stopped taking it. So there's a guy that you know. And by the way, that was not gray market. It was obtained through a doctor's prescription from a compounding pharmacy labeled BPC157. Not PDA. PDA. Okay. Those are anecdotes I've also read. Just to be fair, we should balance this out certainly on X, you know, people can say anything they want. People saying, oh, you know, I didn't feel well, I stopped taking it. Okay. Could be due to what it was, was dissolved in. Could be due to their own unique response. Could be due to bad sourcing, contamination. So we don't know. But not everyone has a great result and some have no result. But many, many people report what can only be described as pretty astonishing positive results that cannot be directly ascribed to the BPC because of the placebo effect, et cetera. And I'm not saying that to protect myself. I'm saying that so that people can couch this in, that, like how we got here.
- [57:35]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [57:35]
Andrew Huberman
Is because of stories like this.
- [57:36]
Dr. Abud Bakri
There's two possibilities. Either BPC is as amazing as we think it is and it's unfortunate that millions of people don't have access to it, or BBC is actually either ineffective or harmful to people and millions of people are injecting it right now by buying it through online sources. Both cases are very bad endpoints. One is worse than the other. You can argue which one. But that's why we need this data. We need people to push this forward, to figure this out. Because we don't want these endpoints. Because if in 20 years we find out BPC is as good as, you know, secret Slabs says it is, then, man, people are getting pissed off. All the, you know, joint replacements and injuries didn't heal and all the athletes that maybe could have had a longer career, that would be very unfortunate. But if it's the opposite and like, you know, every 18 year old kid in the gym will come up to me, he's like, I'm gonna inject ppc. Like, where do you get it from? Well, for I'm like, dude, you're 18. You have all the peptides you need in you. Like the parabiosis studies that these are young animals, like actually take your blood.
- [58:26]
Andrew Huberman
And we had Tony Weiss Corey on the podcast that was, you know, young blood is rich with these things. And no, we're not talking about harvesting blood from babies.
- [58:34]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No, no.
- [58:35]
Andrew Huberman
Check out the Tony Weiss Corey episode. We'll provide a link. I mean, what you just said about young guys coming up to you in the gym and saying, should I be taking or I'm already taking BPC is, you know, we could have a whole other conversation, maybe another time. We will talk about testosterone and synthetics and things like that. I see a lot of young guys taking everyone. I don't know if it's everyone. I don't know if it's everyone, I see a lot of bad, though many, many people are taking testosterone exogenously who truly don't need it, and potentially permanently shutting down their fertility or causing other issues.
- [59:04]
Dr. Abud Bakri
With the looks maxing trend, too.
- [59:05]
Andrew Huberman
With the looks maxing trend. You know, they're walking around with hammers, sludging themselves in the face, this kind of thing. You know, I'm sure when I was in my 20s, you know, people in their 50s were probably like, what are these kids doing? You know, and it wasn't in anything like this, but who knows? It was like baggy pants and like, you know, and like, there was weird stuff going on, like hacky sacks and stuff. So not me. Not me. But I'm confident that, thanks to you, we've framed the history of this, which, by the way, is fascinating and kind of where we are now very, very well. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I have two questions. Well, one comment. And one question. The comment is, I think there's a third category of problematic outcome. One you said is, this thing works spectacularly well for a number of important problems to solve important problems. And we don't find out about it because it wasn't looked at carefully. The other is it's detrimental. There's the other one, which is we start hearing about adverse events and it goes kind of the way of the dodo, or it kind of drifts back into who you know. And is it the good stuff or not the good stuff? Because we don't actually know whether or not the. The adverse outcome was due to BPC itself, to misuse of bpc, or to the factors that it's dissolved in or something like that. And I think that's the most likely outcome unless we get our arms around this. And that's where you could say the hormone replacement therapy field has actually enjoyed the fact that if a woman decides she's gonna take progesterone or estrogen replacement therapy, perimenopausal or menopausal or something for PCOs or whatever, that wouldn't be what to take for PCOs, but you get the idea. Or a guy decides in his 40s or 50s or whatever it is, okay, he's gonna go on TRT. He can do it carefully, she can do it carefully, and kind of knows what adverse outcomes to look for. No one's thinking, oh, my God, the sesame oil that it's dissolved in is possibly causing these problems.
- [60:51]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Well, some people will be very particular on which oil their testosterone comes in.
- [60:56]
Andrew Huberman
That's in the gym community. Yeah, yeah, totally with you. And where to inject and so forth. That aside, my concern is that it is kind of Wild west ish.
- [61:04]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes, it is.
- [61:05]
Andrew Huberman
And I'm not so concerned I'll get in trouble for this, but whatever. I'm not so concerned that these actual compounds are necessarily harming people. I worry that the way they're arriving to people is harming them. And we're going to miss out on that first possibility that these are very useful. And of course I don't want anyone getting hurt. So here comes the question. As a physician, I realize that you are more than peptide curious. You're very peptide friendly in your own life. You know, if you have a patient who has, you know, just their gut is a mess or they're dealing with, you know, post surgical issues and you know that BPC from the right source is either going to be benign or could potentially help them, what kind of position does that put you in?
- [61:48]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [61:48]
Andrew Huberman
As an American board certified physician, very uncomfortable position.
- [61:52]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Because if I'm, you know, rounding on a patient in the wards of a hospital and like, hey, you should take BPC instead of your pantoprazole, I'll probably get my license provoked. So not a good idea. Don't do that.
- [62:01]
Andrew Huberman
What about in addition to.
- [62:02]
Dr. Abud Bakri
In addition to, it's like if they come see me in clinic, that might be a place where we can have that discussion. We're going to see very shortly here what the FDA is going to tell us about BPC and all these other peptides, the legality of them if they get moved to the category one list. And then the states say like, hey, the FDA said so, we're not going to look, we're not going to care about this. You can do what you want to do as a physician and you counsel the patient like you have an honest discussion with the patient. I think that's what it should be. It should be between the physician and the patient. Like, hey, there's this promising compound. It's not FDA approved. We have minimal to no human data, but we have anecdota. Are you willing to try this on yourself? And we'll monitor you. We'll have clear endpoints for that. That should be what this looks like. Okay, Frank discussion between a physician and a patient. Now if that patient has an adverse effect, they can go to a medical board and say like, hey, doctor, so and so gave me BPC 157 and I had a bad effect. And I would be like, okay, you gave them a non FDA approved Compound A for injectable B. The problem is there's orals that are being sold as supplements now, like BPC 157 as an oral available supplement because it's not a medication. It's never been approved as medication in the United States. So what is the BBC's legal status? Is it dietary available, therefore? Because if you, you know, cut up an animal and ate its stomach, you'd probably get some BBC.
- [63:15]
Andrew Huberman
Well, I can buy desiccated liver.
- [63:16]
Dr. Abud Bakri
There you go.
- [63:17]
Andrew Huberman
I'm eating livers.
- [63:18]
Dr. Abud Bakri
There's tons of.
- [63:19]
Andrew Huberman
You can go buy liver at the. This like one Michelin star restaurant. Not down this way road, but a different road.
- [63:24]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, yeah. I mean like Dr. Cavinson identified many peptides in liver, like livogen and ovagen that you'd find in your desiccated liver supplement that you eat. It's like the biggest distributors of peptides have been these organ meat companies because each organ has a signature peptide that comes out of it.
- [63:37]
Andrew Huberman
Do they get absorbed?
- [63:38]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [63:38]
Andrew Huberman
Are they bioavailable, active?
- [63:40]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Dr. Cavinson's work suggests that it is. Dr. Vladimir Kavinson is this Russian Soviet scientist that gives us epitalon and thymolin and pinellion and all these Russian peptides. Dye and tripeptides can be orally available if they're the right shape and size. They're not very well available, but they can be available.
- [63:57]
Andrew Huberman
So you won't necessarily get it from the organ isolate or from the. Or eating the organ. Like. Like if you eat heart, probably very rich in L. Carnitine.
- [64:06]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [64:07]
Andrew Huberman
Can my body make good use of that?
- [64:08]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I mean, there's cardiogen, which is one of the heart peptides that. That was scantly studied in the late 2000s that maybe. Or poorly bioavailable. The problem is no one's doing the work to figure that out.
- [64:18]
Andrew Huberman
You painted this picture where not you, perhaps, but let's just say another physician has the awareness that BPC157 might be useful to a patient of theirs that's dealing with a. They had like an ACL tear. They're not recovering very quickly. Doctor says, listen, you're doing everything correctly. There's this new category of stuff. We don't have a lot of data on it. I'm not aware that there are any severe risks, but they could be there. So if you're willing to embrace those unknowns, you could take X number of micrograms or milligrams per day for two weeks and see how you feel. Patient says, okay, I'M willing to do that. The physician says, okay, you want to make sure that it's real and you want to make sure that it's clean, no contaminants. If that physician says, you know, I can write you a script for it and this compounding pharmacy will send it to you and they're making money on it. A lot of people, well, the moment they hear that, they think, oh, well, they're totally incentivized to do this because they're going to get a cut. But if we go back to the original pharma model, it is a little bit of a different situation. Right, because let's say Lilly charges $1,500 for a pen of some sort of GLP. The physician who prescribes that, are they getting a cut of that 1500?
- [65:31]
Dr. Abud Bakri
They don't.
- [65:32]
Andrew Huberman
They don't.
- [65:32]
Dr. Abud Bakri
But there are kickbacks and, you know, pharmaceutical incentives and pharma dinners, those are real. It's flights to Hawaii for a conference, really.
- [65:38]
Andrew Huberman
So there are real incentives even though they're not getting paid directly?
- [65:41]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, there's always, there's always incentives in any kind of business, especially a business
- [65:45]
Andrew Huberman
as big as pharmaceutical, physicians are already getting paid. So I'm not saying that these are, these are peripheral incentives.
- [65:50]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Well, the farmers also lobby a lot of the medical schools and they, you know, gotcha.
- [65:54]
Andrew Huberman
So there's a lot, so there's a relationship there. But it's not cold, hard cash, as direct as the compound pharmacy, but in a compounding pharmacy. Now, this physician, hypothetical physician could say, hey, you know what, you can get it from this compounding pharmacy. It's gonna be 500 bucks. The patient, we've now established, because they've heard this podcast, has a right to say, what are you paying for it versus what you're charging me?
- [66:11]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [66:11]
Andrew Huberman
They might lie, they might tell you the truth. Or the physician could say, you know what, I'm not making a dime on this. It's just, I think it might be useful to you that physician is protected or not protected if something negative happens to the patient.
- [66:22]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I don't.
- [66:22]
Andrew Huberman
Something happens to somebody suing a compounding pharmacy, or they're suing their physician.
- [66:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
They're suing all the three, the physician, the compounded pharmacy, and, and anyone who recommended it.
- [66:29]
Andrew Huberman
So that's pretty scary.
- [66:31]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No malpractice provider is going to give you coverage for peptides, especially non FDA approved peptides, unless there's, you know, high risk malpractice providers that they'll cover you for that.
- [66:39]
Andrew Huberman
Let's say somebody gets Hurt taking one of the prescribed pharma GLPs and they, they're pissed and they, and they sue. They sue their doctor or they sue
- [66:47]
Dr. Abud Bakri
the pharma company depending on who, who had the liability. So if the doctor didn't warn you that, you know, injecting 10 times a dose might cause pancreatitis and you have pancreatitis, they can claim the doctor is at fault. If someone has deep pockets, they can go at Lily and say like, hey Lily, you didn't disclose this risk.
- [67:01]
Andrew Huberman
I think now people, thanks to you, are armed with enough information to be able to make really good decisions about whether or not to say, eh, waiting for those clinical trial results or I'll stick my toe in the pond or I'm going to continue to learn more, but I'm going to now learn more thanks to you. Genuinely with a lot more understanding about how this stuff flows from website or from doctor to patient. Let's talk about Pinealon. Yeah, Pinealon is one that most people probably haven't heard of. I'll just go on record saying I've tried it a few times or more. I don't take it regularly, but I tried it before sleep. If I take it at the beginning of the night, it reduces my deep slow wave sleep and gives me far more REM across the night. Not a great situation. Great situation is if I go to sleep, get my usual ration of deep sleep. If I happen to wake up in the middle of the night to use the restroom once or so, not uncommon. If I do a very small injection of Pinelon at that point, the one and a half hours of REM that I would get in the final hours of my sleep. Now I'm getting three hours in the same amount of sleep. It's just a higher fraction of rem. Sometimes you wake up feeling a little groggy. But it is a whole other life to get that much rem. I don't do it regularly. It's not, you know, I would say maybe three times a month. But here's the interesting thing. It improves my percentage of REM on all the other nights in between those three injections. So I'm coming clean here.
- [68:27]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Lingering effects.
- [68:28]
Andrew Huberman
Very cool. You're interested in Pinelon For a whole other set of reasons. But first of all, what is Pinelon and where does it act? Does it have a known receptor?
- [68:35]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No known receptors. A Pinellion is a tripeptide E discovered by the mention of Dr. Vladimir Kavinson. He's a Soviet researcher that comes out of this Soviet era research to make soldiers, astronauts and pilots better. There's concern that the US might be using lasers to shoot at soldiers. So the Soviet Union tasks him with identifying peptides to defend soldiers. Their eyes. And then they're aging, because what would happen is they'd be in a submarine for a few months, there'd be a nuclear sub, and they, they'd come back to shore and they'd be like, you know, these submariners, let's call them, would look 10, 20 years older.
- [69:10]
Andrew Huberman
Also happens to astronauts.
- [69:11]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes. So then the same, the same thing as astronauts are coming back. They're. They're aged. So Vladimir Cavinson's looking at this and he's like, hey, there's, there's gotta be a solution for this. There's been literature about using extracts of other tissues, notably the pineal gland and the thymus, from, you know, late 1800s till this, this 1970s point, that were, they were, you know, starting our story. And he starts grounding up these extracts and injecting it into these people and then undoing a lot of these aging effects through pineal extracts and thymus extracts. Because these. What do these soldiers have? They had very bad circadian rhythmicity, so they couldn't sleep properly. They had terrible immunity. They'd get sick often, they'd be. Have autoimmune problems, all these conditions that come with it. And then they were able to undo this using these organ extracts. So Vladimir Kavinson takes it a step further. He looks like, hey, what's causing this effect in these tissues? Like, people have been injecting pineal glands in different research models or taking out pineal glands from rats. From the 1800s onwards, he finds peptides in these extracts. He's like, huh, I wonder if these effects are from the peptides, not from the gland itself. So then he sequences from the pineal gland, epithalon, and from the thymus gland, a couple of different peptides, Vilon, thymogen, cristagen, that you'll be hearing about in the next few years. That on their own, do a lot of the effects that the whole extract would. Would do.
- [70:32]
Andrew Huberman
Now you're talking about epithelium, but pinealon
- [70:34]
Dr. Abud Bakri
and epithelium not from the pineal gland
- [70:36]
Andrew Huberman
is not from the pineal gland.
- [70:37]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Even though everyone.
- [70:38]
Andrew Huberman
No, I think it's called that because there's, there's. As far as I understand. Please correct me if I'm wrong. There are animal data suggesting that pinealon can help either regenerate or enhance the general Functioning of pinealocytes. So it's having an effect on the pineal. When culture, like you take cultured pineal glands, like a little P side gland you put in dish and you dissociate the cells or keep it, you know, as a little pea sized thing, and then you give it pinealon and seems to improve the timing and perhaps even the amount of melatonin output from the pineal, these kinds of things.
- [71:07]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So epitalon does that. So that's a big confusion. I don't know why he named them the way he named them. If anyone knows, please let us know. But epitalon is from the pineal gland. Pinelon comes from a ground up brain extract called cortexin.
- [71:19]
Andrew Huberman
And brain has pineal in it.
- [71:21]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, but it was the cortex specifically not. Not the subcortical regions. So he. So specifically not the subcortical regions.
- [71:28]
Andrew Huberman
That's reassuring.
- [71:28]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So Clyde Cabinson identifies, he makes a drug in Russia, it's called epithalamine, which is the pineal gland extract and had great effect on circadian rhythmicity.
- [71:35]
Andrew Huberman
And it's rich with melatonin.
- [71:37]
Dr. Abud Bakri
There you go.
- [71:38]
Andrew Huberman
But basically giving people melatonin, but also
- [71:39]
Dr. Abud Bakri
you upregulate the enzyme that creates melatonin from, from serotonin to N acetyl, serotonin to melatonin. So like when he gave it to young monkeys, the monkeys had no effect. But he gave it to aged monkeys that have decreased melatonin. And you know, from puberty onwards, your melatonin levels dramatically decrease. He was able to restore melatonin production in these aged animals and eventually replicated on humans.
- [72:00]
Andrew Huberman
I want to talk about thymus because it's fascinating and you are truly versed in this. But before we do that. So Pinealin comes from the cortex, not the pineal.
- [72:09]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [72:10]
Andrew Huberman
That's annoying.
- [72:10]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes, very annoying.
- [72:11]
Andrew Huberman
Maybe we just rename it today. I'll let know, you do the renaming.
- [72:13]
Dr. Abud Bakri
We'll call it edr. Edr, that's the three amino acid sequence.
- [72:16]
Andrew Huberman
Great. We'll call it EDR so people don't get confused. What are some of the known effects? Or am I just imagining this REM increase because I can't change what's happening to me during sleep. That would be an amazing placebo effect. And the reason I say amazing is there are many things that one can do to improve the amount of slow wave, deep sleep, not eating too close to bedtime, doing some exercise early in the day, et cetera, et cetera. Very hard to increase RAM extension except by heating your sleep environment. In the last third of your night and maybe some Alpha GPC in the late day can bump it up a bit. Or you can REM deprive yourself. Or you can smoke cannabis for 10 years, then quit and then you'll get a lot of REM because you got no REM for 10 years. Do not recommend that protocol. But for me it was just striking. So why would EDR tripeptide with no receptor. Right. Previously called Pinealon, but from here forward, edr, why would that have this effect on REM sleep?
- [73:10]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep. And I actually searched through all of the literature from Cavenson. He never mentions REM sleep once in his studies. He studied Penalon quite extensively on different neuronal tissue extracts, animal studies, even in athletes. And never mentions the REM sleep they weren't having. They didn't have Whoops in the 1970s in the Soviet Union. What?
- [73:25]
Andrew Huberman
They didn't have an H sleep. You're kidding me.
- [73:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No. So they didn't have sleep trackers in the 1970s when it came to these. So there was no reports on on that. But what seems to be happening? Let's see, what is this Pnell on this edr. It's a tripeptide that meets the groove of the DNA of different key regions and helps the promoter region be exposed. So then that DNA transduction can happen. Trans translation, transcription.
- [73:49]
Andrew Huberman
So you get turning on genetic programs.
- [73:52]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [73:52]
Andrew Huberman
Acting a little bit like a transcription factor.
- [73:54]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, yeah, almost like that. Or maybe assisting transcription factors in accessing the DNA in the right places. So Pinealon in one sentence, it's leading to better brain metabolism through modulating all these different pathways. For example GDF11, SOD1, SOD2, IRISIN PPR Alpha, PPR Gamma. So what seems to be happening? So he made Pinelon as a anti stress cognitive performance compound and was available orally in like Kazakhstan to.
- [74:21]
Andrew Huberman
I'm an idiot. I'm taking before sleep, I should be taking morning.
- [74:24]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes. So if you take a high enough dose, there is sedation from it.
- [74:27]
Andrew Huberman
Okay.
- [74:27]
Dr. Abud Bakri
But if you take in the morning or pre hit workout, you get quite interesting effects. So he studied this compound on athletes and he would do have them do their training session, go to exhaustion and then do a test afterwards. And there's two groups, Pennylon and the placebo. The Pennylon group could keep the performance up despite being maximally exhausted from their training.
- [74:46]
Andrew Huberman
I feel like such a dummy. Here I am having like these elaborate dreams I don't really remember or care about and when I could be actually thinking better during the Daytime, Yeah.
- [74:54]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So a lot of people report less brain fog, you know, better thinking. A friend that has a nine figure company has all of his employees on Pinealon.
- [75:02]
Andrew Huberman
They're taking in the morning.
- [75:03]
Dr. Abud Bakri
In the morning or at night, depending on the dosages.
- [75:06]
Andrew Huberman
Not that we're recommending it orally.
- [75:07]
Dr. Abud Bakri
People will take anywhere between, you know, half a milligram up to 3mg is what. Where people settle in. The caboton ones that come from Russia are like 200 micrograms.
- [75:19]
Andrew Huberman
Some people are injecting it.
- [75:20]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Some people are injecting it.
- [75:21]
Andrew Huberman
It goes systemic.
- [75:21]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It goes systemic. It's orally available through these Latin pep transporters.
- [75:25]
Andrew Huberman
Crosses the blood brain barrier?
- [75:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Most likely, yes.
- [75:27]
Andrew Huberman
Okay, because it's coming from cortex, but yes. Otherwise, the way you're describing it, we're putting no one's infusing into the brain.
- [75:33]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No one's. So we're assuming it's small enough. It's a tripeptide to cross the blood brain barrier.
- [75:37]
Andrew Huberman
Have you tried it?
- [75:38]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I mean, I took some last night,
- [75:39]
Andrew Huberman
but okay, at night.
- [75:40]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. So I. I will take larger dosages. If I want to get good sleep, I'll describe as 8K. REM some people, it will cause them to have a little bit of awakening at first. That may be why your deep sleep is going away.
- [75:52]
Andrew Huberman
I'll say this. If I take half of what was recommended, I'm great.
- [75:57]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [75:57]
Andrew Huberman
But I'm very sensitive to everything. Just sensitive. If I take what was recommended, I fall very deeply asleep. I have elaborate dreams and I wake up.
- [76:05]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah.
- [76:05]
Andrew Huberman
And I couldn't tell if that was a disruption in sleep architecture. I just found. And granted, I'm only doing this three times per month maximum. And I often forget. And then I go months and months and I was like, oh, maybe I'll take a little pineal. And you know.
- [76:17]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah.
- [76:18]
Andrew Huberman
Whoa, this is wild. And then I stop taking it because I don't know enough about it. Now, I know it's cleanly sourced because I trust the compounding pharmacy it's coming from. But I should ask, are there any known risks of edr?
- [76:30]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So far, nothing in the Russian literature. So, big caveat. It's Russian literature. It's not gold standard American research that we love here. So. So there's nothing that's come up as a, you know, clear sign. Cause what? What? It seems the big theory of Cavinton is that as you're. When you're younger, you make a lot of these peptides. Naturally, these try di, tri and tetra peptides. And as you age, they go down in function and quantity. And by replenishing these peptides, you're restoring some aspect of youthfulness. Something similar happens in America with GHK copper, which is another tripeptide that's technically like the collagen regulator. So getting along brain regulator and GHK copper is the collagen regulator. But so far, the side effects we've noticed, we have the. Probably the biggest anecdotal compilation of n equals 1. Every. Every day I wake up, someone text me like, hey, Pinelon did this to me. Some people have a little drop in blood sugar because it activates PPR alpha, PPR gamma, so it'll have positive metabolic effects. So that's something to keep on an eye out. And some people even had their A1Cs drop.
- [77:27]
Andrew Huberman
So that's hypoglycemics. And other people, blood sugar issues take extra caution.
- [77:31]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And then very vivid dreams for some people that could be disheartening if they have, like, you know, nightmares or something like that. But very, very vivid dreams as a result of a Pinealon. Especially, like the color and the, the quality of the dreams is very different than you normally expect. What seems to be happening, yeah, is like, just like, you know, psychedelics change the redox state of the brain. Pine is doing something similar where you're getting more alertness during the day. Like, you don't wake up with as much brain fog. At least anecdotally, you get better performance during, like, high intensity interval training. And then you get more REM sleep at night because the neurons are in a better oxidative state thanks to the PPR alpha, PPR Gamma, iris, and all these different pathways that it's modulating with no clear 1 receptor that it's doing it through.
- [78:18]
Andrew Huberman
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- [81:24]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's a big kind of debatable thing in the pineal research. If you look at the pineal gland Wikipedia, it's very under developed, let's say, because it's kind of woo woo. Like when you think of pineal gland, you think of someone who's going to
- [81:34]
Andrew Huberman
say no neuroscientist chooses to work on the pineal.
- [81:37]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Glad.
- [81:37]
Andrew Huberman
They should, but it's not a very sexy.
- [81:39]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Sounds like someone's gonna sell you crystals or something.
- [81:41]
Andrew Huberman
It's not very sexy.
- [81:42]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, but I think it's a key aspect of aging and longevity. So that's what gives us, you know, our interest in it, the pineal gland. It seems from Cavan's work that the decrease in pineal gland function with aging is more of a physiologic than a anatomic problem. I will see some classification on MRIs. When we have a patient come in for like a stroke or tbi, we'll look at their mri. I'm like, okay, that looks like a little bit of kids calcification there. Maybe my neurology colleagues will disagree, but that seems to happen. But the question is, what is actually leading to the deterioration of melatonin synthesis? Because it decreases quite dramatically. And some people even think that might start puberty. Like if you have a penal, penal cyst, you can have precocious puberty, like 8 or 9 years old.
- [82:23]
Andrew Huberman
The rhythmicity in melatonin, because a young baby, very young baby, their melatonin secretion is not very rhythmic. But they're in rem like a lot, a lot of their sleep is around. It's a beautiful thing, right? With time it becomes more rhythmic. And of course, in today's day and age, with all the artificial lighting and the lack of sunlight exposure, things that you and I care a lot about, people are making themselves somewhat arrhythmic or phase shifted, but epithelin is somehow restoring pinealocytes, is somehow enhancing function of the pineal and other tissues.
- [82:55]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So in, in Kevin's work, he's found that it will increase the expression of the different clock genes. So in like, you know, lymphocytes that he'll measure in peripheral tissues. He'll notice that the clock genes actually change. So in a more rhythmic pattern, he'll notice that morning cortisol is higher.
- [83:12]
Andrew Huberman
Great. Which by the way, folks, I've said this in the cortisol episode, you want your morning cortisol super, super high. You want your evening and nighttime cortisol low. If you're a resident in medical school, just listen to what your superiors say. They don't give a shit about, about your cortisol levels. You got to do the hard work and then later you get to, later you get to go to bed. It's a little weird that the medical profession tortures their own by disrupting one of the, one of the primary anchors of health.
- [83:36]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [83:37]
Andrew Huberman
And cognitive function.
- [83:38]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I mean, I've had 28 hour shifts and that's what got me interested in security.
- [83:42]
Andrew Huberman
You're young, you're good, you're good.
- [83:43]
Dr. Abud Bakri
But yeah, the idea was, it was restoring a more circadian, appropriate hormonal profile through, you know, HT H, cortisol. Taken when, anytime. Because the idea with these bioregulators, unlike, you know, a glp, one drug that you take today and have the effect for the next week, the idea from the Cavanton model is that you take these and then you accrue benefits when you're off of them. Like you notice with Pinellon, you took Pinellon for a day or two or three days a month, and you had effects until you took the next dose. So the idea is, can you accrue benefits from these compounds as they upregulate or downregulate certain genetic pathways in a more favorable state and then keep those effects later on? So in the Cavinson seminal work was his 15 year longevity study. He got people in nursing homes, two groups. One them got epitalon in the form of epithalamine, which is the whole pineal gland extract, and then a thymus peptide called thymolin, not thymulin. There's two different peptides. A lot of people can feed them every peptide website confuses them. But inject them for 15 years, like a 10 or 20 day course per year. Just, just beginning of the year, middle of the year, and that's it. And they had a significant lower mortality when it came to cardiovascular disease, infectious risk and for cancers. So Russian study caveat. But that would, would be the most interesting longevity study I've seen done, if accurate, if true, because he was able to take nursing home patients, give them peptides for, you know, very small amount of the Year, and yet they accrue benefits the rest of the year.
- [85:11]
Andrew Huberman
Impressive. One of the things that really got me excited about epithelin, is it thalin or talon?
- [85:16]
Dr. Abud Bakri
The Russians say epitalon. Is that the way they say it? But it's spelled with a th. Okay, so I'll say epithelial. Whoever wants, you know, we're making the rules today, so.
- [85:24]
Andrew Huberman
Okay.
- [85:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Also aadg, that's the amino acid sequence.
- [85:28]
Andrew Huberman
For amino acids, I'll say epitalin because it's easiest for me, and forgive me if anyone takes offense, I took interest because in my former life, running a lab focused on, among other things, visual pathway repair to reverse blindness or impending blindness. There's some interesting papers, and there I can really gauge the data. Even though they're in mice. I can say this is a real effect or like a meh effect or like a whoa effect. Using epithalin to combat some of the neurodegeneration and things like retinitis pigmentosa, downstream neurodegeneration in rp, which is a very common, unfortunately blinding disease, or even in glaucoma. I should mention that BPC157, to my knowledge, hasn't been looked at extensively in terms of optic nerve repair, but it absolutely should be. If someone knows those papers, please put them in the comments. So I was intrigued. Like, here's this molecule that's somehow involved in DNA repair, and it's either maintaining or restoring some of the machinery that would otherwise definitely be lost in one of these optic nerve damage conditions that models things like glaucoma, retinitis pigmentosa, stroke, traumatic head injury. It's a big deal.
- [86:35]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [86:35]
Andrew Huberman
Vision and movement are kind of the biggies. I mean, there are other things too, but you don't want to lose those. And if you do, you can get by, but you need additional support, obviously. So the reason it's so interesting to me is that it's getting to DNA repair as opposed to these downstream, you know, working on any number of vague receptor, ish, maybe no receptor, things like. And this is what gene therapy is about.
- [86:58]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [86:59]
Andrew Huberman
So do you think of epithelin as kind of a gene therapy of sorts, or do you think about it more as support for genetic machinery that has lots of downstream targets?
- [87:07]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes, I think it supports this genetic machinery when it comes to the eyes. It seems to be repairing some of the photoreceptors that might get damaged in a retinitis. Pigmentation pigmentosa melanopsin wasn't discovered when. When Cavenson was. Was kicking it around, but I would. My. My theory is that epithelon is working on melanopsin.
- [87:27]
Andrew Huberman
Interesting.
- [87:27]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And that it may be upregulating melanopsin levels and then making that morning sunlight that everyone likes to be more effective. Because the big problem is, a lot of people will tell me, doc, I did morning sunlight. Didn't. I didn't feel effects. I'm like, have you had enough darkness to regenerate melanopsin levels? Because we know that in animal studies, five days of pure darkness dramatically increases the amount of melanopsin in the retinas.
- [87:48]
Andrew Huberman
This is interesting, and I certainly have a lot of close, close friends that are in a position to do these studies. And, you know, the podcast is obviously available free to everyone, but we have a premium channel that funds research. We don't talk a lot about it, but we. We've given a lot of money away to excellent laboratories where they're free to explore these things. I'd love to see some of the studies that we're talking about today supported. And by the way, that's done in collaboration with donors that do a match so we could get the right people to do the right studies with no bias toward what the preferred outcome is. In fact, the scientists that we both know, the right ones, would try and disprove the hypothesis that any of this stuff was real. And if something makes it through that filter, then they would conclude it's real. Otherwise, they're trying to essentially knock down the quote, unquote, positive outcome.
- [88:34]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And I think as a clinician, one of the key things for people to remember is that we've screwed up a lot of times as clinicians through different grotesque abuses of our, you know, trust. We've done, you know, interventions or drugs that weren't the most efficacious. For example, like in the 1910s to 1940s, we irradiated the thymuses of young kids to prevent SIDS. This was considered gold standard medicine.
- [88:58]
Andrew Huberman
Like, does have anything to do with sids?
- [88:59]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No.
- [89:00]
Andrew Huberman
They thought that the sudden infant death,
- [89:01]
Dr. Abud Bakri
they thought that the thymus was too big and was sitting on the heart, and that might be the cause. So tons of these kids, and I think at least 10,000 died from cancers. No, I think the only person that's talked about it is Sapolsky. He has a video talking about this. So we've had a lot of issues as, as a. As a field, we have to be very cognizant of that and know the history of where we've been. Like, like, ver of the famous ver triad. He was like, pro this therapy and we all know learn about it in medical school, but no one talks about this aspect. So there's a lot of grotesque abuses of medical power. Let's say if you had to be very careful in which interventions we give people and the first thing is like, do no harm. So while we are, you know, excited about these therapies, we have to be kind of careful in where we're taking people.
- [89:39]
Andrew Huberman
Appreciate it. I wasn't aware of that study. Perfect tee up for. No pun, for the thymus. Tell me about the thymus. Super interesting organ.
- [89:49]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [89:49]
Andrew Huberman
We gland.
- [89:50]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [89:51]
Andrew Huberman
We all have one when we're born.
- [89:52]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [89:53]
Andrew Huberman
By time we're. What age is it? Mostly gone.
- [89:55]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So the thymus is grown under the influence of. Of a lot of these youthful hormones. Melatonin, growth hormone, dhea. And then it's shrunk at the moment you hit puberty. So until from your, the day of birth until puberty, you grow this massive thymus.
- [90:10]
Andrew Huberman
Where does it sit?
- [90:11]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's right above your heart, right behind the collarbone.
- [90:14]
Andrew Huberman
How big is it?
- [90:14]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's a. In, in a baby, it could be quite large on the chest.
- [90:18]
Andrew Huberman
Big as a baseball.
- [90:19]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. Maybe the size of half the heart, let's say maybe bigger. Depends on the size. Right now in our bodies, it's going to be a bunch of fat with a couple of different globules of thymic residue.
- [90:31]
Andrew Huberman
Tiny. Tiny.
- [90:32]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Very tiny. In fact, most surgeons will just remove it when they do surgery nowadays for like, open heart. But there's, you know, good data from New England Journal of Medicine that removing the thymus tissue, residue tissue, leads to a mortality signal within the first five years after those surgeries.
- [90:47]
Andrew Huberman
So people have died because of thymus removed.
- [90:49]
Dr. Abud Bakri
They'll have, like, either higher rates of cancers or, you know, higher risks of autoimmune diseases if they have their, their thymuses removed. Now there are thymomas where people have to have their thymus removed, but we're talking about people that, you know, the surgeons going in to do a coronary artery bypass surgery.
- [91:02]
Andrew Huberman
Is the thymus neurally innervated?
- [91:04]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [91:05]
Andrew Huberman
So it's getting signals from. From brain, vagus nerve.
- [91:08]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [91:08]
Andrew Huberman
So it's getting. Sorry to get technical here, but I. Since I did the episode in the Vegas, some people might remember, there's a lot of asen. You have sensory information from the, from the vagus going up to the brain. There's also motor control from the brain going down through the Vegas. So it's Two way street, mostly up, some down. Is the thymus controlled by the descending, in other words?
- [91:28]
Dr. Abud Bakri
That's a good question.
- [91:29]
Andrew Huberman
Is something going on in our brain like stress level or sleep controlling our thymus?
- [91:34]
Dr. Abud Bakri
There's sympathetic and parasympathetic innervation that dictates its hormonal output. Because the thymus, what is the thymus?
- [91:41]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, what?
- [91:42]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's a gland that both secretes hormones and develops the T cells. So your, your lymphatic cells are found in your bone marrow. That's where they're made. The T cells will travel up to the thymus and get trained so they don't kill you and they don't attack your own tissue, but attack a foreign invader or a cancer or whatever it may be. That process is very good in youth. And as you age, you get more autoimmunity, more cancers, et cetera, et cetera, because the immune system is not as robust. Both because the thymus makes less of the hormones that train the immune cells and makes less of these immune cells themselves. So when you're, you know, 15, you're making 10 to the 8th magnitude of these cells every single day. They're called naive T cells. They will eventually become your CD4 and CD8 T cells. As you age, this number dramatically decreases. And those cells will live somewhere between 10 and 15 years. And that can kind of gauge when the mortality window kicks in for a lot of these different disorders. When your thymus reaches a, you know, minimum level of output, you get a lot of these disorders like cancers, heart disease, autoimmunity. If you put almost any disease and look at the thymus risk associated with it, it increases as the thymus function decreases. There's a Nature paper, 2026 just came out that looked at cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality and all these different metrics that they did MRIs of people, and the people who had the higher thymic scores had less mortality across every single one of these conditions.
- [93:07]
Andrew Huberman
But you said, not challenging this, but what's surprising about that very interesting result is that you said that by time you reach your, you're in your 30s, I'm in my 50s. Those ages, our ages, you've got just a bit of residual tissue there, it's just a few cells, and yet it's somehow maintaining function.
- [93:24]
Dr. Abud Bakri
The rate of decrease varies dramatically from person to person. So we call this thymic involution. So from the moment puberty starts till you die, your thymus is slowly shrinking. That really happens in your 20s and 30s. The majority of that under the the pressure of androgens, estrogens, progestins, and corticosteroids, those are driving a lot of the shrinkage.
- [93:43]
Andrew Huberman
So the hormones that everyone seems to want to increase the rest of their life and that become, you know, active a lot during puberty actually cause thymic involution.
- [93:53]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes. So, like, castration will undo some of the thymic involution. Pregnancy is a great time to involute your thymus, which makes sense because you don't want to be having an autoimmune attack against the baby or an immune attack against the baby.
- [94:06]
Andrew Huberman
Do women's thymus disappear after pregnancy? They.
- [94:09]
Dr. Abud Bakri
They involute and then will regrow during the breastfeeding period under the influences of growth hormone and prolactin. So hibernating animals will have a dramatic shrinkage of the thymus during hibernation and then a regrowth during the feeding window.
- [94:22]
Andrew Huberman
Is there any benefit to doing or taking something to either maintain or regenerate thymic size? So there was as. Let's just say somebody 25 or older.
- [94:32]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. There's a interesting study, TRIM trial from Dr. Greg Fahey. He's doing a study where he's giving a cocktail of growth hormone, metformin, and DHEA gave that for 12 months and had the thymic size increase on imaging, the amount of CD4, CD8 T cells increase, and the ratio of which improved. And then some of the markers that would show, like immune cell exhaustion, like PD1, and all these different aspects of T cell dynamics also improved. So they're trying to use growth hormone to regrow the thymus.
- [95:01]
Andrew Huberman
Getting us directly to peptides. Many people who are peptide curious start asking about thymosyn alpha. Is thymosyn alpha a peptide that comes from the thymus? Thankfully, they named it appropriately this time. Great for that. What does thymosin alpha do endogenously when you're not injecting it or taking it? What's its normal function?
- [95:22]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So thymosin alpha 1 is part of this thymic family of hormones that gets secreted. It's like these 21amino acids. It increases T cell development in the thymus, increases T cell perforation outside the thymus, and makes the T cells more likely to properly attack a pathogen. Like, it's like a jet fuel for the T cells.
- [95:41]
Andrew Huberman
So it's like pro immune.
- [95:42]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [95:42]
Andrew Huberman
I've heard of people taking it when they feel run down. If they're traveling, they're sleeping less than usual. They're a new parent. So obviously that's kind of, you know, peptide wild west kind of indications.
- [95:54]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It was FDA approved as zedaction for kids that were born without a thymus or a malfunctioning thymus, like DiGeorge syndrome, these different kind of genetic abnormalities to be used for these kids to help develop the T cells that they had that weren't in the thymus because they'd have, like, bone marrow T cells that weren't properly developed. So there was good support from thymus and alpha one for these kids. I don't think that FDA approval still exists. So the people are trying to, you know, Grandfather Thymosin Alpha 1 into these. This peptide conversation. In other countries, it's approved for a adjuvant therapy for, like, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, see, and in different cancers. So far, the sepsis literature and the infectious literature is not that promising. It might be like, if you take antibiotics with thymus and alpha one, you might have a quicker bounce around. Well, what I would be interested to see is, like, if you went to nursing homes, injected Everybody with Thymosin Alpha 1 in November and December, would you have less flu in January and February? That'd be the interesting thought experiment. Both Thymus and Alpha 1 and Thymus and Beta 4 come out of the Goldstein lab. That's the very famous lab that studied the thymus in the 70s, 80s and 90s. But thymic research kind of fell out of favor the last few decades.
- [96:59]
Andrew Huberman
But now it's as sexy as the pineal gland. I say that sort of tongue in cheek because, I mean, I think these are fascinating glands. And the reason I ask if they're neurally innervated is that nowadays there are a lot of reasons why people choose to study one thing or the other. But these understudied glands, if neurally innervated, then open up a lot of interesting questions about brain control, behavioral stress control, and the experiments kind of write themselves. Doing them still takes a lot of work. Interpreting them is no easy task either. But I think there should certainly be more work on the pineal and on the thymus. So I want to make that clear. Have you taken thymosin alpha?
- [97:36]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Oh, yeah. I've used Thymus and Alpha 1 when I travel to avoid the cesspool of planes and hotels and all these places which, like, I would say, traveling. And then this year on the wards. The first time I don't get flu, cold, whatever kind of infection. I'm dosing thymosinoff one throughout. And I didn't get sick a single
- [97:55]
Andrew Huberman
time what time of day or night. Are you injecting twice a week?
- [97:58]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Time agnostic. We're talking about, you know, 2.5 milligrams as a prophylactic. That's not FDA approved or.
- [98:05]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Or is it just you doing your thing?
- [98:07]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I'm curious and see if it would work.
- [98:09]
Andrew Huberman
And you're trying to stay healthy so you can take care of patients. Exactly. So you're willing to be your own experiment. When we hear about thymosin alpha, we usually hear about TB500 also. What's TB500 and how are the two related, if at all?
- [98:21]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So while Cavinson's finding thymolin and he's injecting that into people, the Goldstein lab finds thymuscin fraction 5, which is this giant protein that has many different peptides in it. Thymosin Alpha 1 being one of them, and then Thymosin Beta 4 being the other one. Thymus Alpha 1. Thymus and Beta 4 were discovered in the thymus, but they're not. Not exclusive to the thymus gland. They're also made in other tissues. Thymus and beta 4 seems to be this 43amino acid peptide that helps in the actin cytoskeleton of cells. So if you think about it, immune cells have to move a lot, so they have to re. Reorganize their acting cytoskeleton quite quickly. So it seems to upregulate that movement, which, you know, the horse community for dopaming and other athletes have found a niche for thymes and beta 4 to use it as a joke.
- [99:00]
Andrew Huberman
In the horse community.
- [99:01]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, the horse races. THYMC metaphor is a very common doping agent.
- [99:04]
Andrew Huberman
For the riders or for the.
- [99:06]
Dr. Abud Bakri
For the horses?
- [99:06]
Andrew Huberman
For the horses, yes. Do they test the horses?
- [99:08]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. No. There's like a big doping scandal when it comes to horses and thyme symptoms. I don't know if they test them or they, like.
- [99:14]
Andrew Huberman
You know what's funny? This is a very relevant tangent. Occasionally someone will say, hey, does all this morning sunlight stuff, does that work on, like, dogs? And I go, listen, I hate to tell you this, but, like, a lot of the literature came from animals, not necessarily dogs. And they have melanopsin ganglion cells. They have super cosmetic, like, yes, yes, and yes, same physiology. And then recently won't say who wasn't me, truly. I have a friend whose dog was injured. And the question becomes, like, would BPC work? And you can actually say, well, there's a lot more animal data than human data. Talk to a couple vets, and vets will. They're a lot more Adventurous than you might think. And I thought, well, listen, you know, now, of course, these are pets. They're. I love my dog, you know, not the same as a human. I am a bit of a speciesist, but love them tremendously. And I think the pet peptide industry is going to be enormous. So here's the question, and we'll go right back to what we were saying before. There's been so much interest in nad, NMN and NR to upregulate nad. NAD is a prolongevity. NAD for, you know, one of these things that drops over, over the lifespan.
- [100:19]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Although the paper last week says that it doesn't drop in blood, like the landmark paper, I will say, which is
- [100:24]
Andrew Huberman
the news stories on that claim, that I called it a longevity drug. I've always said that nad, I do augment NAD using nmn. It gives me more morning energy. I will say it does make my nails really thick, my hair grow fast. Two effects I was not looking for. But I like the energy effect. I've never said it increases lifespan ever. So this was mentioned in the New York Times and elsewhere, and it's absolutely false that my name's included in that statement. So their fact checkers need fact checking. NAD has been kind of the thing for a lot of people who want to go beyond supplements.
- [100:57]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Right.
- [100:57]
Andrew Huberman
They come beyond creatine, beyond magnesium, beyond what they can get, you know, just on Amazon or whatever. But they don't want to go all the way to, you know, like, blood cleansing and all this other stuff, which I certainly don't do myself. And I think that's too extreme, at least for me to teach their own. When I hear about thymus and alcohol, a TB 500 BPC, it occupies this kind of middle ground, right?
- [101:17]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [101:18]
Andrew Huberman
And so I think this is why a lot of people are saying, hey, Alyssa, I love my dog, I love my cat. I don't know if NAD is going to do anything for their longevity. It doesn't look like it may or may not, I don't know. But I think a lot of people are starting to think, oh, you know, like. And here we go, Pavlov and his dogs. So I do think this is another category of interest. And of course, we're the curators. They don't get a vote. They can't consent.
- [101:39]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Right, right.
- [101:40]
Andrew Huberman
So we have to be very thoughtful there, too. If I ask you, let's say I had an aged dog and I come to you and I go, listen, I know you're a human physician, but he's getting sick a Lot. I don't know, maybe getting some thymus and alpha. He's kind of creaky joints, some bpc. He's probably got a couple years to go and that's it. Would you say, like, well, I know you're not a vet.
- [101:59]
Dr. Abud Bakri
The veterinary board is going to sue me now. But no, they're not.
- [102:01]
Andrew Huberman
Actually, I have relatives who are vets. They are very open, interesting, very open. The veterinary community has been very open. I injected my previous dog with testosterone later in life and I expected the vets to come after me with pitchforks. And I got calls that said, we would love to prescribe this. In fact, we wish we could just do vasectomies on male dogs, let them keep their testosterone and then you don't have to worry about this breeding problem. And you let people train them not to hump.
- [102:23]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep. No. My sister was at a company pharmacy here locally that would give dogs their testosterone and it made him so much
- [102:29]
Andrew Huberman
healthier and happier year. I have zero regrets.
- [102:32]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I'm pro peptide for pets, let's say. I think there would be beneficial effects. We know dogs when they vomit, they end up licking some of the vomit. You've seen this before?
- [102:40]
Andrew Huberman
Yes, unfortunately, as I saw that, I'm
- [102:42]
Dr. Abud Bakri
like, is he trying to get peptides back from the gastric tract? Like that's the first maybe from a
- [102:46]
Andrew Huberman
Pavlovian being kind to dogs.
- [102:48]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So I'm like, I mean, intuitively, instinctively, there might be something there. Like they might be trying to get BPC out of that. Who knows? But I think there would be less hesitation for people to use these on animals. They come from animal literature. Like you said, we don't want to be harming these pets. Right. But a lot of, I think a lot of the, the positive signals are going to come out of people giving them to their pets. Unfortunately, there's so many brands now that are popping up every day given their pets peptides because bpc, is it going to be treated as a supplement when it comes to oral capsules or is going to be treated as med. Like, we haven't got. Got that answer from the fda. RFK himself has kind of said like, oh, these are supplements, they're not, they're not medications.
- [103:27]
Andrew Huberman
So FDA said that.
- [103:29]
Dr. Abud Bakri
He said that we're not going to regulate them as meds because they're not meds. Which I don't know if the agency themselves is going to be too happy with that.
- [103:34]
Andrew Huberman
I mean, there's a big. Well, Makary just mackere. I don't ever know how to pronounce his last name, recently left. So there was a, from what I understand, a kind of a split. I don't think he left because of peptide anything. I think it was related to other things that I'm not aware of. But, but I do think the question that you're raising is one of the most important questions. Is BPC going to be taken seriously as a drug or is it more creatine? Ish.
- [103:57]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep. I mean, for example, I could give you a B12 supplement. You could buy that on Amazon or I could prescribe that to you. But if I was to give you an injectable B12 shot, you would need a prescription for that. So is that distinction going to apply to peptides also? Is the big question that no one's answered. And is a, you know, penalon is a supplement you can find in Kazakhstan and Russia and Ukraine, wherever, all these different countries, over the counter in different pharmacies.
- [104:19]
Andrew Huberman
Is Pinelon available as a capsule?
- [104:21]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's available as a capsule.
- [104:21]
Andrew Huberman
Does it work as well as a capsule?
- [104:23]
Dr. Abud Bakri
In a capsule, higher doses is needed, but it still works.
- [104:26]
Andrew Huberman
What are the dosages, excuse me, that people are injecting versus taking orally?
- [104:30]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So when it comes to the bioregulators, epitalon, pinelion, the cavanton literature looks at like microgram dosages from 10 to 100 micrograms of, of the actual raw peptides. Of the peptide mixes, we're talking about 10 milligrams. So 10 milligrams of, you know, desiccated calvaryne, that might give you a few hundred micrograms of Pineal.
- [104:50]
Andrew Huberman
Oh, man. Desiccated calorie. Makes me think.
- [104:51]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah.
- [104:52]
Andrew Huberman
Krustville Yakov, AKA mad cow prion.
- [104:55]
Dr. Abud Bakri
First patient I had on, on wards in third year of medical school had
- [104:58]
Andrew Huberman
degenerative brain from Crutzfield Yada.
- [105:00]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, it was a bad, bad case on neurology wards.
- [105:04]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Please, folks, do not be consuming brain. I know there's some people like, oh, it's got all this stuff that can help you. Like, please, please, please. Like these, these, these prion things are really serious. Yeah, yeah.
- [105:17]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Scary.
- [105:17]
Andrew Huberman
It's really scary. It's really, really scary. And not just from Wild Game, but it's really scary.
- [105:22]
Dr. Abud Bakri
By the way, I think this set back all that research in the, when, when the, you know, the prion stuff happened in the early 2000s that set back a lot of these animal derived peptide research dramatically, because people are like, oh, we don't want to touch these extracts anymore. Makes sense because there was Thymus extracts. There were like, there was about, you know, 10 different groups in Eastern Europe that came up with their own thymus peptide drug, which was a polypeptide fragment with, you know, Thymus F1, Thymus and beta 4 vilon thymogen crystal. Like all these different peptides that you'd get together. The Eastern Europeans went down like this mix of just mixing up young thymuses because you don't want an old thymus from a cow. You want a six month old cow that has the giant juicy big thymus with all the healthy hormones in there. They'd grind that up and inject that into human humans with positive effects. Like, you know, hundreds of papers on that. The American side, the Goldstein group, came up with thymosin fraction 5, which has thymos alpha 1 and thymosin beta 4 in it. Also thymus and beta 10, thymus and beta 9, a bunch of different thymosins. But studied these 2 dramatically. Thymosin Alpha 1 and Thymus and Beta 4. The French came up with the actual main thymus hormone, which is thymulin, not thymolin. Thymolin is the Russian polypeptide mix. Thymine is a 9amino acid peptide that is the marker of thymus function. It also has very interesting neurological effects, which I think you'll, you'll find interesting because it modulates the, what we're calling the thymus pituitary adrenal axis. Thymus pituitary gonadal axis. Thymulin is this peptide that's secreted by thymus dramatically decreases with age as zinc dependent. So biology likes to use metals with different amino acid structures. Hemoglobin with iron, ghk, copper with copper. Thymulin is zinc dependent. So it's a nine amino acid peptide with zinc inside of it to do its effects. That will develop NK cells and T cells, stimulate the immune response. But also in the animal models, not replicated in humans. Yet when they take out the pituitary and then inject, you know, ACTH or hcg, the amount of thymine sensitizes the end organ to production of the targeted hormone. For example, if you were to give ACG alone to the animal.
- [107:23]
Andrew Huberman
Hcg?
- [107:23]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, acg.
- [107:24]
Andrew Huberman
Synthetic glutenizing hormone.
- [107:25]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes, yes, yes. HCG is binding to the, it's called the ACG LH receptor. So they would get more testosterone produced when they got HCG with thymulin versus HCG alone.
- [107:37]
Andrew Huberman
So what you're saying is that thymosin alpha potentially or TB500 or other thymic hormones, thymulin specifically. Okay. Thymulin specifically.
- [107:48]
Dr. Abud Bakri
The other ones do different effects on the pituitary axis.
- [107:51]
Andrew Huberman
So thymulin specifically can augment.
- [107:53]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [107:54]
Andrew Huberman
The effects of endogenous and perhaps also exogenous hormones.
- [107:58]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [107:58]
Andrew Huberman
Interesting.
- [107:59]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And it makes sense because if you're not robust when it comes to immune status, because you can think of your thymulin as high in youth, low in age, you have no business investing in reproduction. You have no business in creating a lot of corticosteroids because that gives you that, you know, youthful energy in the morning. But if you're making of a lot, a lot of corticosteroids, you're shrinking your thymus. So it creates kind of a feedback loop, negative feedback loop, to prevent you from overrunning your system. A lot of young guys will be like, oh, my immune system sucks and my testosterone is low. Like, is there a thymus link? There is the question.
- [108:28]
Andrew Huberman
Interesting. And I'm sure that you're the first person in the last 20 years to be talking about this publicly, and I really appreciate that you are, because of course, you knew what the thymus was. Don't know a lot about the biology, but you've really opened people's eyes to and what it is that it goes away over time. People taking Thymosin, Alpha TB 500 and Thymulin.
- [108:48]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [108:49]
Andrew Huberman
Is this something that people would cocktail, or is taking thiamulin something that generally could be a good idea under certain circumstances?
- [108:56]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Thymulin itself has a very short half life. The goal would be to increase endogenous production of the thymulin itself.
- [109:03]
Andrew Huberman
How would you do that?
- [109:04]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So sufficient zinc status is necessary to make thymeulin. It the first sign of zinc depletion. Before rbc, zinc or serum zinc decrease is your thymulin levels tank.
- [109:14]
Andrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance elements. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking Element makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise. So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes.
- [110:00]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Welcome.
- [110:00]
Andrew Huberman
When I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an element packet dissolved in it. I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement.comhuberman to claim a free element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's DrinkElement.com Huberman to claim a free sample pack. G H K U Copper. Yeah, most of the questions I get about it are from women.
- [110:40]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [110:40]
Andrew Huberman
I sent out a little informal poll to the. Be careful how I say this. The women in my life, including siblings and things like that. And almost all the women said, what about GHK Copper? I hear it can be good for my skin. Should I use it topically, take it orally, or inject it? If I inject it, should I inject it locally? I'm like, please don't inject your face. Because I don't. As much as I'm comfortable with people giving themselves, like a little, you know, sterile injection and, you know, belly or something. Like, I get worried about non experts injecting themselves in the face and other. Other tissues. So a lot of interest in this. What is it? Why has it made it into this kind of aesthetic category? Because I'm guessing it has a lot of other effects too. But it's kind of funny how things kind of land in one region. Like, creatine was like the muscle thing for a long time. Then it got some kind of, like, maybe it's good for cognition, maybe for people with Alzheimer's. Maybe women should take it too, for all those reasons and more. And it kind of reverted back to, like, the muscle thing.
- [111:33]
Dr. Abud Bakri
GHKCU is a tripeptide with a copper ion in the middle. It's glycine, histidine, and lysine. It's actually found in type 1 collagen fibers.
- [111:45]
Andrew Huberman
So it's only where type 1 collagen fibers are all over your skin, hair
- [111:49]
Dr. Abud Bakri
and skin, connective tissue. So just like Vladimir Kavatin discovers these 40 different peptides and liver peptides, brain peptides, pineal peptides, whatever it may be. There's a American researcher, Lauren Pickhardt, Dr. Lauren Pickhardt, who's passed now. He discovers GHKCU in the collagen tissue. And he's like, hey, this might be the factor that controls collagen synthesis and also collagen breakdown. So he does a bunch of studies. His work is all about this. So almost all the literature comes from this one lab. A common theme in peptides, unfortunately, he discovers it in maybe the mid-70s. It's found to be very high in youth, in, in serum levels. So you'll find this in the blood of anyone that we test up to like 200, I think nanograms, whatever the, the unit was, and then gets down to like in the levels of the 60s by the age of 65. So dramatically decreases with age. It's thought to be maybe what leads to the youthful appearance of young skin. And with age you lose that effect. So he did a bunch of trials, both topically for skin, for hair. There's now injectable work being done. So similar to the bpc, they would, you know, cut rats open, inject GHK Copper in a different site and they'd get faster wound repair of the, the skin tissue from injecting this. So that's, you know, it's become synonymous with BPC157, TE500 Wolverine stack, which is someone online just made up.
- [113:09]
Andrew Huberman
That's, that's the Wolverine stack.
- [113:11]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Is those two. Yeah.
- [113:11]
Andrew Huberman
TB 500 and Alpha.
- [113:13]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No, T 500 and BBC 157.
- [113:15]
Andrew Huberman
BBC 157, yes. Okay.
- [113:16]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Now people will add on GHK Copper and call it the Glow Stack.
- [113:19]
Andrew Huberman
The Glow Stack, yeah. Oh, interesting.
- [113:22]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah.
- [113:22]
Andrew Huberman
Okay.
- [113:22]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Someone has made it up and research chemicals.
- [113:24]
Andrew Huberman
No, I like it. Glow Wolverine. Yeah.
- [113:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
There's a big debate about whether or not if mixing those together causes, you know, denaturing of different peptides. That's beyond this discussion point. Is G H A copper? It both upregulates the synthesis side of collagen and the breakdown side of collagen. So because when you're, you're remodeling tissue, if you're just rebuilding it, you're, you're going to get like very pathogenic structures. And if you're just breaking down, you're getting bad structures, so you're doing both. So the idea is, does it, number one, have a skin effect which it seems to be the Picard's, you know, compared it to, to retinol and vitamin C creams and all these things with positive effects and people anecdotally talk about like, no, their crow's feet going away. And topically it does good for them. There was a study on hair that didn't seem too promising. So it's not going to the peptide sites. Try to tell you, like, this is better than minoxidil. Not really. Maybe it could be an adjunct. And a lot of patients will, will, will have that success using that with some of their other topical hair hair loss agents. And now there's a Chinese group studying it for lung regeneration because there's a lot of connective tissue in the lungs between the different alveoli. And there's some, you know, hype there of using GHA copper as a regenerative from that side.
- [114:30]
Andrew Huberman
How many people are trying to regenerate their lungs is for like copd, COPD and smokers.
- [114:34]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's a big, big industry.
- [114:35]
Andrew Huberman
Maybe Long Covid, from what I hear is a real thing. Lung damage from COVID Yep. I know some people will debate it, but it seems like there are enough people walking around who were vaccinated and non vaccinated who claim that they have symptoms post Covid that have lasted a long time, AKA long Covid. So that might be an interesting place for them to remain. Peptide. Curious.
- [114:55]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. And thymic atrophy is a big part of the.
- [114:57]
Andrew Huberman
I suspect post Covid.
- [114:59]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. Because any infection actually leads to. We talk about the thymic involution that happens with age. There's thymic atrophy that happens after every infection. The thymus kind of shrinks down. And then the idea is that you, you know, recover, you convalesce. We just have convalescent homes for, for sick patients. And then you regenerate your thymus in that state of health. And the problem, modern day people are stressed out, they're at work, they get sick and they keep getting sick. So they never get this chance for that thymus rejuvenation. So then they're constantly getting hit down and they're ending up with these diseases of aging that could have maybe been augmented, ameliorated, maybe pushed down had their thymus function been better in youth.
- [115:32]
Andrew Huberman
Raise my hand, Professor Bakri. I'm only half kid. I really feel like I'm in school. This is so cool for me. I'm truly in heaven right now. If you look back at the literature on convalescing, how long were people recommended to take some time off after a cold or a flu or some other. That's a good question because I think this would tell us, are we just like with sort of how long maternity leave type things. The idea now is people are being forced to go back too quickly in countries like in Scandinavia perhaps, where they get more time. Positive outcomes for baby and mom. I think it's an interesting and important question because our biology hasn't changed that much.
- [116:09]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No.
- [116:09]
Andrew Huberman
In the last, you know, couple thousand years at least. Like after one has a cold, typically people go back as soon as they deem themselves non infectious. Was really worries me. But do you think people are getting back to work too quickly? Yes, I mean, I understand the reasons why, but do you think that adding a stage of really getting back to full functioning without getting into the, you know, back to the gym, back to work, back to everything could be beneficial for these, these longevity effects?
- [116:36]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Right, right. Well, I mean if you think about it, nothing that they do once they come back is, is, you know, additive to healing. Their, their circadian rhythms are thrown off. They're under maluminative lights all day. They're not getting sunlight. They're not. Their vitamin D levels are atrocious. Their blue light exposure at night is, is high. Their stress levels are very high. Their guts are inflamed from, from eating processed, hyper, processed hyper palatable foods. They have obesity or they're pre diabetic. So all these things now lead to this inflammatory state and they just got sick and their thymus didn't bounce back. So then they get sick the next time in two, three weeks. Like post pandemic. A lot of my colleagues were like, dude, I get sick three, four times a winter now before I'd get sick, you know, once a winter. So this is where the interest in thymic peptides is very elusive. We have to figure out if the STPs or the PTEs are the, the more interesting ones. There's synthetic thymic peptides, thymus alpha 1, thyme beta 4, thymulin, and there's purified thymic extracts. These are the two different research committees that exist when it comes to thymus. Which one will be more advantageous? Vladimir Cavenden came up with the thy mullin injectable and oral versions of that. And he had positive immune markers. And he showed like CD4 cells come up and CD8 cells improve and all his immune markers become a more youthful state, let's say. But unfortunately what's happening here is we don't have thymologists. Like we don't have a branch of medicine that's dedicated to this aspect of immunity. Like there's, you know, allergies, allergy and immunology. Immunologists, but they focus more on, you know, allergies to different agents or very severe immune diseases. They're not really addressing the immunity of the general public and how you can boost that. And I think post pandemic a lot of people start to ask like, hey, how can I have better immunity for myself? And. And now finally people are starting to talk about the thymus. Unfortunately, it's been too little too late. That would have been great during the pandemic because we could have used these thymic focused interventions, whether it be zinc or thymic peptides or purified thymic extracts to augment immunity of the population as a whole. Especially because Dr. Davison was doing this in the 70s in Russia. Even in Russia, they don't really look kindly to this research. The Soviet era research has been kind of pushed aside and it's like more Big Pharma style because it's more profitable. Because how many thymuses are you going to inject into people and how many times it exists on the planet to make these different peptides from.
- [118:57]
Andrew Huberman
But you could inject a lot of synthetic thymus and Alpha TB 500.
- [119:00]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [119:01]
Andrew Huberman
And maybe BPC. So Wolverine stack plus, you know.
- [119:05]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. So it'd be very interesting if we can get that because now that everyone's getting like these Panugo scans and different full body MRIs, we can see the thymus size.
- [119:12]
Andrew Huberman
I was gonna ask you, can I get some sense of my thymic size and output from a blood draw or do I have to do whole body imaging? I've done whole body imaging. It is somewhat costly and that's a preventive barrier for people, but if people can afford it, I actually think it can be useful. I have a number of friends, including a neurosurgeon friend who said that he's. Some people are still alive now because they got that scan. A lot of people get scared about what they see. When children rather be scared about what you see and be told that it's okay than not know it's there and then have a catastrophic event.
- [119:43]
Dr. Abud Bakri
We always have a patient that comes in, you know, car accident, young 45 year old car accident, comes in, has a pancreatic mass they would have never known about had they not had that accident. They get a CT scan just to check for any kind of internal bleeding. They find the pancreatic mass that gets removed. It ends up being a malignant mass that had they waited six months, they would have, you know, had stage four pancreatic cancer and passed away. So that's that's the theory. There is the concern about false positives and false negatives when it comes to these screening modalities. Like any screening modality is not perfect. So there's a big debate on whether or not to do do these. That will leave to people and their physicians. But I've been trying to lobby them to give the thymic score to everybody who gets one of these scans because they could see, like, hey, can you. Can you see where the thymus is at? Because, you know, someone might come in, you know, for five different scans over five years, they did a TRT protocol or a GH protocol or whatever it may be, and we could see did that improve thymic status or, or make it worse. Different infections, different interventions. That'd be very interesting to kind of tease out on blood tests. We've been trying to work with a couple different labs to figure out a thymic score. The most commercially available is going to be a lymphocyte count, which look at CD4 to CD8. There's an ideal CD4 to CD8 ratio. That's more youthful. You don't want to have more CD8 cells than CD4 cells. You don't want to have too few of either of them. Them that goes more into like the HIV literature. But the. The most simple thing that almost every single person has gotten done but no one's looked at is their lymphocyte to monocyte ratio on their CBC. So almost everybody's on a CBC with diff. It's a $3 lab test. If you type in any disorder, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, input lymphocytes of monocyte ratio. There's a study that will talk about how low lymphocyte to monocyte ratio is a associated with poor outcomes when it comes to that disease state. So it gives you kind of a general gestalt of what's going on with immunity. Because you want a high absolute lymphocyte count. Not too high because it's associated with, like, lymphomas, but somewhere the hazard, when you look at the charts, around 1,000 total lymphocytes is where the hazard of different cancer sites starts to increase. A young healthy person will be between, you know, 1500 and 33,000 total lymphocytes. And you want the ratio to the monocytes. The monocytes are different types of immune cells that are more inflammatory. So if you have a robust amount of lymphocytes with low amount of monocytes, that suggests you have a more. Let's Say, ready and robust immune state. So $3 lab test that everybody gets. Almost every lab testing company now checks it and no immediate reports on it. But you can kind of stratify people into disease risk based on that score.
- [122:08]
Andrew Huberman
Out of a hundred randomly polled physicians who receive their license in the United States, how many of them probably know what you just described?
- [122:18]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Zero.
- [122:18]
Andrew Huberman
Why not?
- [122:19]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's like rabbit holes that you kind of go down and find out. Like, I've been lobbying everyone in the hospital to look at this.
- [122:24]
Andrew Huberman
It's very easy, right? The data are there.
- [122:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No, I.
- [122:26]
Andrew Huberman
Look, it's not like you're saying, oh, you got to do all this additional work, you got to build insurance.
- [122:29]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No, no, it's all there. Like, I, I started to care about the thymus post pandemic because I noticed people's lymphocyte counts were lower. And I could notice that, you know, anecdotally or looking at, you know, small data sets, like, hey, people had lower lymphocyte counts, had worse disease, or like, earlier, like people that had cancers in their late 30s, early 40s, and like, huh, they all had, like, lower lymphocyte counts. So I started to, like, dig into the literature, and I'm lobbying a lot of the hematologists and infectious disease doctors in my hospital to start to look at this. Unfortunately, they, they kind of are textbook. It's not part of the guidelines. It's. It's in a space that's not pathology. So it's not clear. Like, hey, if I check your lymph side to monocyte count right now, is it going to change my management of you in the hospital today? Not really. It's more of a long term look. So that's where all these direct to health, direct to consumer companies have an opportunity to kind of modulate the way medicine is practiced in the United States. But if we have this metric that we can study, why not use it and then, like, try different interventions and see what actually helps people? Like, we've gotten sometimes peptides, and we've had people go from like a 4 to 1 lymphocyte to monocyte ratio to an 8 to 1 ratio. Now. Is that significant? That seems to be significant, but no one's really kind of discussing it. Unfortunately.
- [123:36]
Andrew Huberman
I know who I'm putting my vote in for Surgeon General, and if ever there's a turnover, I don't. Haven't explored the most recent person. So that's not a comment on her. It's. I know they elected to not vote Casey in but so that's not truly not a mention I haven't done. But I think your voice should be heard far and wide on these things. I mean like more data is good. The scientist in me just says you got the data. Data could be informative. Take a look. There's a category of peptides such as growth hormone, secretagotamorelin, ipamorelin, MK677 that we could, we could do the deep dive on all those. But I'll just batch those and maybe we parse them a little bit and things like melanitans. These are to my understanding FDA approved for certain indications. So they've gone through the randomized control trials for like growth hormone secreted dogs for small stature in kids. They might use it for that or for post surgical burn recovery. I think that's HIV for hiv, hiv. So the idea here, the sort of framework that I'm teeing up is that these molecules have been explored for their known biological function in animals. It's established these molecules lead to an increase in growth hormone above what would normally be secreted. They do it indirectly by. So there's sort of the gas pedal on that system. Growth hormone secretagogue cause more growth hormone to be secreted, not actual growth hormone. They vary in terms of how much they stimulate hunger or don't stimulate hunger and on, on. You should take them if you're going to take them before sleep but not having eaten in the last two or three hours, all that stuff, we can save ourselves some time here.
- [125:15]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [125:16]
Andrew Huberman
Most people who are taking these things, whether they get it from pharma or compounding pharmacy or gray market research purposes only or black market, God forbid they're doing this because they want to lose fat, gain muscle, recover from exercise more quickly and look more youthful. Can we assume that those effects are real given that they were FDA approved for other things?
- [125:39]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. So when it comes to let's parse out the effects and the different types of compounds that exist in this category. So there's the ghrelin inside the ghrelin agonist like MK677, not FDA approved orally available pill that makes you bleed out growth hormone. Like you make so much growth hormone response to that. And in non pulsatile fashion, growth hormone is a very circadian hormone that gets released in the first, you know, 90 minutes of slow wave sleep. And if you miss that big pulse, you're going to get small pulses throughout the day. The question is, is that big pulse better than small little, you know, mini pulses throughout the day, these secret dogs will address the, the broader category of something called somatopause. So you've heard of menopause, you've heard of maybe andropause. Somatopause is this event that happens somewhere in the 30s where growth hormone production dramatically decreases. So if we kind of paint a picture your pineal glands aging before puberty, your thymus right after puberty, you know, in your 20s and in your 30s, you're having somatopause. That's where your growth hormone production is decreasing. You're having, they call it adrenal pause, where your adrenals stop making as much DHEA and the different ratio of cortisol. And then you're having menopause, andropause and all the other chronic conditions. So that's like your first 50 years of your life. That's what you have to expect. The question has been, and it's a big debate in the medical community, is replacing growth hormone and addressing somatopause useful? Because you can measure, if we had your IGF one when you're 18 and your IGF one when you're 30 and 50, that's going to be a dramatic decrease in that. Should we now replenish this IGF1 one? The proponents will say IGF1 is important for skin and, and good quality sleep and for muscle recovery and joints and all these things. And those are true. We know growth hormone has all these beneficial effects on that. We also know growth hormone is thymore generative because it stimulates the regrowth of an aged involuted thyus gland. Based on Dr. Fahy's work, question is, is there an oncogenic signal when it comes to growth hormone?
- [127:27]
Andrew Huberman
Does it cause cancer?
- [127:28]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [127:28]
Andrew Huberman
Can it? Sorry, can it, can it promote more rapid growth of other of existing cancer? Yes, because I don't think anyone thinks it causes cancer.
- [127:36]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's not mutagenic. And this is the big debate. When people are like, BPC causes cancer, there's no mutagenic effect from bpc. Is BPC like smoking a cigarette? Smoking a cigarette, you get carcinogenic damage to the lung tissue that causes a cancer later on. There's no direct mechanism that would link any of these peptides to a carcinogenic, carcinogenic effect. But is it, you know, a growth factor that could grow cancer? Potentially. There isn't good data showing that. The debate may be like, hey, by boosting thymic function from growth hormone, are you increasing immunity and then immune surveillance of different tumors and therefore decreasing and then Causing the scale. There's a big debate of whether growth hormone is even beneficial when it comes to aging, because growth hormone does grow certain tissues. There's models where people are growth hormone deficient and live a lot longer and growth hormone is not positive when it comes to a cardio metabolic perspective.
- [128:22]
Andrew Huberman
And in species like dogs, where there's tremendous variation in the amount of IGF one that's made between, say, a Chihuahua and a Great Dane, the breed that makes more IGF1 downstream growth hormone, of course, lives a lot shorter lives than smaller versions of the same species. So you want a dog around for a long time, get a Chihuahua. You want a real dog? Excuse me? You want a dog that lives a long time, get a Great Dane or a bulldog.
- [128:44]
Dr. Abud Bakri
There's that whole discussion of what's better. And then you get into antagonistic pleiotropy. Is this something that's good in youth but detrimental for longevity, or is it prolonge? And that's big. The big debate in the longevity field, whatever that, you know, field, is of whether or not to use growth hormone. So now growth hormones become very difficult to acquire through clinical prescriptions after the whole anabolic steroids act and Barry Bonds and all that stuff. So people have now shifted to using the secretagogues in lieu of growth hormone.
- [129:10]
Andrew Huberman
Also, growth hormone is very expensive.
- [129:11]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Very expensive. Yeah. Like, Pfizer's pens are in the thousands of dollars. So, like, if you want. If you're rich, you can afford to, you know, have a growth hormone habit, but otherwise, a security dog costs, you know, less than 100 bucks.
- [129:22]
Andrew Huberman
I'm told that growth hormone doesn't shut down one's own production.
- [129:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's not. It's not a strong shutdown like the testicular axis.
- [129:32]
Andrew Huberman
I'm also told that when people take it, they feel awesome, which is scary to say on a podcast because you're like, oh, no, I don't want everyone running out in it, you know? Yeah, young people are already making tons of it. But I mean, that combination of looking younger, feeling great, cognitively feeling great. I mean, I have some friends who've taken like an IU a night or even two IUs a night, you know, five nights a week for years, and you go, hey, like, aren't you worried about some of the tumor effects? And, like, you just function at a whole other level, and you go, oh, God, that's really enticing. But, you know, even with great imaging, you don't know if you've got tumors that you're accelerating. In that case, so it's kind of scary.
- [130:09]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. And we don't have a data set that would show that like where's the body count from from growth hormone? Like the bodybuilder body counts are from other compounds where they're doing everything. Yeah, exactly. I mean when you go into a gym you can tell who's who's doing growth hormone versus not based on their skin shining. Like I see you see a 45 year old dude that's through somatopause but has perfect young skin. And you know there's botox and all the other things involved but you can tell there's that growth hormone look. The hair looks a little bit healthier because growth hormone favors the conversion of T T4 to T3 so it changes the thyroid dynamics. It can have protesticular effects as well from the IGF1 perspective. So there's a lot of, you know, useful effects to it. The question is, is that then a good idea to replace it Traditionally like the medical field's kind of anti using these secretags to augment somatopause. But I think there's going to be a role for it perhaps cyclically because I don't think anything in nature is is rearound. So what if you did a cyclical cycle of and this is not medical advice but theoretical cyclical cycle of Tessamorelin for a certain amount of time got your IGF one to a certain level under clinician guidance, measured your thymus on an MRI before and after and then you saw that the thymus grew and you had higher CD4, CD8 count.
- [131:15]
Andrew Huberman
That would be pretty interesting be interesting a few years back and I've told this story publicly before I tried Sermorelin. Yeah it was different than obviously than Tessamorelin but similar in the sense. The endpoint is you're seeking is more growth hormone, IGF1 and it dramatically increased my deep sleep and like nuked my REM sleep. It was like the opposite of Pinealon.
- [131:36]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep. Stick them together.
- [131:37]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. So well didn't try that. The other thing that it did and the reason I halted it almost right away because I was really just running it as an experiment on myself was that it spiked my psa, my prostate specific antigen, it had always been in range and relatively low. Boom. Spiked it. I was like whoa, that's wild. And I don't want that came off it. Yeah, it reverted to a low level. So that was pretty striking. So obviously you know, hyper responsive prostate to Cimorellan maybe it wouldn't have been to Tesla, Marlin, etc But, but those are the kinds of things.
- [132:09]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It might just be the growth hormone itself, like hormone secretion.
- [132:12]
Andrew Huberman
That's a good point.
- [132:13]
Dr. Abud Bakri
As you age, your prostate gets bigger. The bane of every man is going to be bph. Like that's going to be the reason that you hate your, your life when you're in your 60s and 70s, because you have to wake up at night to, to pee. And then when you're at, you know, an amusement park, you're not finding the nearest bathroom very frequently because your bladder sizes don't work it out. There's, there's some prostate peptides we're looking at.
- [132:29]
Andrew Huberman
Thanks. There's like young guy, old guy, like, taunting, like, you know, you got 10 more years before you're miserable. Thanks.
- [132:34]
Dr. Abud Bakri
There's prostate peptides that Cain looked at that. We're trying to translate some of that literature.
- [132:38]
Andrew Huberman
You'll save me.
- [132:39]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No, there's, there's people, this guy named Brendan Henry who's translated like thousands of of these papers from Russian to English. So shout out to him. No affiliation, but he's translated a lot of this Russian literature and helped us from that. So that's great. But the prostate is growing with age under the control of DHT and estrogen and then probably growth hormone. So the question is, do you want to be messing with that and increasing the size of that? There's, there's concerns about, you know, cardiac growth, liver growth. So there's all these things, but also growth hormone. And, and the secreted dogs have a negative effect on, on insulin sensitivity.
- [133:09]
Andrew Huberman
Right.
- [133:09]
Dr. Abud Bakri
So people's A1Cs will usually jump. Like the joke in the bodybuilding community is you have to get lean enough and healthy enough to be able to take growth hormone. Oh, it's happening.
- [133:16]
Andrew Huberman
Growth hormone or the secretagogues, the growth hormone more. So it can make you insulin insensitive.
- [133:21]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes, especially with more like Tessamorelin. Especially when combined with Ipamorlin. Sermon is kind of a weaker GHRH. Tessamorelin, especially when combined with IpamorLin. Tess Marlin is FDA approved. Epimorin is not the GHRH versus GHRP. Kind of in the weeds there, but those two together can create a giant growth hormone response where your IGF one is in the 380s, 390s. So that's, that's, that's quite high, like puberty levels of IGF1 and you're hungry all the time. Yeah, yeah. With MK for sure. With, with Tess Morland. So Tess Morin has more fidelity, less gin effects, especially because you can have gin effects, prolactin effects and cortisol effects from whenever you're mucking around with the pituitary because they're all in that. In that, that same area. I think MK bleeds out the worst when it comes to having the other effects. MK is not a peptide, it's a non peptide GHRP. What's happened now is people are now stacking their GLP1 as their insulin sensitivity tool, their growth hormone or their GHRH and their androgen modulation therapies as this trinity stack. Trinity stack to get a very fit, very healthy quickly. So a lot of these transformations you see in CEOs and celebrities and stuff is using a combination of those three things. You know, your TRT plus maybe Anavar with tirzepatide, retide, whatever it may be. And then using a growth hormone modulation with your. If you can afford growth hormone or Tess Morland and you're seeing people lose a lot of fat, gain a lot of muscle in short amounts of time. Is that healthy? We'll find out. But that is like the celebrity protocol.
- [134:52]
Andrew Huberman
Very interesting. And I'm guessing that for women it's the combination of growth hormone secretag plus something like. And we'll talk about these. Now, retatrutide or one of the other GLPs I'm going to acknowledge because people are going to start throwing darts at me about this. Yes, retatrutide is hitting things other than the GLP pathway. It's also GIP and glucagon pathway, but most people put it under the category of glp. So you are an encyclopedic, my friend. I really, really appreciate the clarity and the thoughtfulness of your answers on these. And as people are probably becoming aware, we could spend 50 hours talking about celanx, about cerebral license. I think we will have to have you back to explore those other ones. There are a few other things I'd like to talk about if you're willing to give us the time. We should close the hatch on ghkcu. I misspoke and I saw it in your eyes. You're like, he said it wrong. Do I correct it? Yes, correct me. Everyone else does. GHKCU for the collagen effects. It's available in a lot of creams. Assuming it's real, assuming people are doing this medically supervised, is there any benefit to putting it directly on crow's feet or other wrinkles or face versus injecting it for it to go systemically?
- [136:01]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, I think if you have a well Formulated topical. That's actually not broken down because a lot of these, from these research chem sites, they sell topicals now because everyone's in skincare. They're, you know, poor quality. They're not even blue like the GHK should be blue, but that, that would be blue from the copper.
- [136:15]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, okay, that makes sense. My copper pills are blue. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
- [136:19]
Dr. Abud Bakri
But that doesn't mean that it's real. Could be copper just falling out of the, the complex of the ghk. So yeah, you want a well formulated, like a good skincare brand that knows how to formulate these and deliver them into the skin because that's, that's another thing. So like, you know, every skincare brand has their now GHK formulation because people are demanding it, but it's been around for 30, 40 years, years on topical. The injectable is not FDA approved of course. I think it's going to be on the second round of discussions when it comes to the peptides. Coming back to category one, the first round is going to have these seven peptides, bpc, tb, et cetera. And the second round is going to look at ghk. I don't imagine that that makes it. There's no good human data on that. But topically there's great human data on like different aesthetic outcomes, especially when coupled with red light therapy because it seems that the blue pigment and the red light seem to be synergistic in that effect. There's also some, some literature when it comes to GHK CU for post UV damage. So people that are, you know, sun friendly can use GHKCU topically to alleviate some of the photo damage. Of course dermatologists are going to get mad at us and say like you just use sunscreen and don't get the damage in the first place. But for people that you know aren't as responsible, you can use GHKC as a post.
- [137:27]
Andrew Huberman
Listen to the, the derms who are slightly more sun positive, especially low UV index sun when the sun is low in the sky. Dr. Abud Bakri is perhaps the only other person on the planet besides my friend Semer Hatar, who's been on this podcast who's as excited about circadian biology as an organizing feature as I am. There are a couple others out there. But in terms of people who are really grounded in what's real, that he's, he is, I put him in that category whether he likes it or not. So people are taking GHKCU cream, putting it on and then doing red light therapy. And there are human data that, that perhaps can augment some of the collagen reparative.
- [138:05]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes. Some of the photo aging effects. Some of the effects of aging when compared to like different retinols and stuff like that. I think the, the consensus in the field now is to use it with the rest of your skincare routine not in place of it. But a lot of people, especially bros that that have never been in skincare are now into skincare because of.
- [138:21]
Andrew Huberman
Oh my goodness.
- [138:22]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, so okay, there's that. But it's promising.
- [138:25]
Andrew Huberman
Grows are in the skin care y a documentary before long. Like what do you call that? The manosphere. It's like the skin sphere.
- [138:31]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Well with looks maxing. That's it's the looks maxing peptide now ghk because all these guys that are into looks maxing will use ghk.
- [138:38]
Andrew Huberman
They're dipping their hammer in GHK CU and and tapping themselves. And by the way, if you want great like long wavelength red near infrared and infrared light to augment your GHKCU peptide, by the way, I'm not suggesting that there's this thing called sunlight that provides that. You just have to be careful not to get too much UV in the process. So before people start thinking they absolutely need a red light device.
- [139:02]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Full spectrum too free.
- [139:03]
Andrew Huberman
Full spectrum balanced. Great article in Nature we can link to recently that describes the different spectrums coming out of different devices. And that thing that we call the sun which is the the best source of all of that.
- [139:12]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And better blue light too.
- [139:13]
Andrew Huberman
And better blue because we're deprived of
- [139:15]
Dr. Abud Bakri
480 nanometers in this setup. Unless you have full spectrum lighting that we don't know about.
- [139:19]
Andrew Huberman
I don't get paid to say what I'm about to say, but I'm really excited about something. For a long time I've used Bond Charge's bulbs because they have these bulbs that switch from full spectrum in the day. Then you flip the same switch and it goes to yellow and then flip the switch again and it goes to red. I find the red to be kind of difficult to navigate at night. Raw optics. Yep.
- [139:38]
Dr. Abud Bakri
They made the new one.
- [139:38]
Andrew Huberman
Made one that goes from like a morning really bright light, full spectrum with a lot of blue in there on purpose to make, you know, part of the way.
- [139:46]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And the bright blue, the 480 cyan
- [139:49]
Andrew Huberman
blue switch, the same switch. Don't have to change the bulb. It goes to kind of a late morning mode to afternoon mode and then goes to candlelight mode. In the evening. And here's the cool thing. Not only did it get the spectrum and the balance right, but it doesn't flicker. They got rid of the flicker that you get from LEDs. And yet it's an LED. So it's energy efficient. Yep.
- [140:07]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's a lot of infrared and.
- [140:09]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. And I have no affiliation to them whatsoever. I pay full price for these things. And I have to say, I really, really like them. Even my bulldog puppy has a little one. I have this little monkey holding a lamp and I say, when the monkey goes to candlelight, you're going to sleep. And he knows. He's learning. When it goes to candlelight. Now he's sorry, he's a dichromat, not a trichromat, but that's a different podcast. All right, GLPs.
- [140:28]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [140:29]
Andrew Huberman
Now we can comfortably exhale into your colleagues can. You can feel completely comfortable about anything that they might think or say, because the GLPs are the reason why people are comfortable injecting themselves. It's why this whole thing of peptides has really taken off. BPC kind of rode in on the GLPs, in my opinion, even though it's been around for a long time and so have all the other peptides we've been talking about. So what are your thoughts? I've never taken one of these. First things first. We're hearing that some people. I think Sam Altman actually talked about this publicly. Overdose with Kara Swisher. About what he thought. Yeah. Where he overdosed. Actually a compound pharmacy issue he thought was what did it. I trust him to do the right calculation. So it does sound like that was a compounding pharmacy issue.
- [141:15]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Could afford it. This is the buy the pharma a great option.
- [141:17]
Andrew Huberman
I think back then people were just getting them where they could. Yeah, I know.
- [141:19]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Don't.
- [141:20]
Andrew Huberman
I didn't ask him why that happened, but nonetheless, get the dosage right, make sure you're getting the right stuff clean. But he talks about the kind of lack of motivation which many people have described anecdotally, like, okay, lowered their food drive, but lowered their drive period. Makes sense depending on which pathways are being affected. But do you think that's a real effect? Is that something that people need to be concerned about? Do you think people can microdose this stuff? Because a lot of people are micro dosing it regardless of what their source is. They're taking a lot less than the kind of standard clinical trials will be. And we're leaving out retatrutide for now.
- [141:56]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [141:56]
Andrew Huberman
Because it's so new. We're going to talk about it, but I'm talking about the standard if. Yeah.
- [142:00]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Semaglutide in tir. Appatide. Yeah, yeah. So you have your, you know, semaglutide which is Ozembic and WeGovy. The WeGov is the FDA approved version for the weight loss for Tirzeptide. You have Zeppbound and Mongero. Zepbound being the FDA approved version for weight loss. The allows them to keep their patents for, for longer. These medications are good. Trying to transforming medicine especially where, where I practice.
- [142:20]
Andrew Huberman
Right.
- [142:20]
Dr. Abud Bakri
If you, if we kind of zoom out our medical system, if we didn't have these interventions was going to collapse on itself thanks to the obesity, pre diabetes, diabetes epidemics because we don't have enough clinicians or finances to get everybody who was pre diabetic in the, in the last, you know, 20 years had they all transitioned to diabetes and ended up with, you know, diabetic medications and dialysis and eventually cardiovascular disease and all these things. We don't have the resources to take care of all these people. Like our medical system was going to collapse and there wasn't enough finances to take care of it. Now these GLP1s are coming in and kind of transforming that phase of medicine because now we have a chance to dramatically change the rate of obesity, diabetes, prediabetes and all these cardio metabolic disorders. So where do we stand? We needed something to happen. I mean ideally everybody, you know, would get morning sunlight and eat only healthy foods, unprocessed foods, and have low stress and sleep great at night. Maybe no one would develop to become obese. But the reality is people become overweight, obese, they get stuck in that hole. And if you just try to step out of the hole the way you came in, sometimes that doesn't work. You need a different path out of that problem. And that's been the diet and exercise literature for the last 40 years. Millions of books have been sold on how to get people leaner. We now have interventions medically that can dramatically change people's weights for the first time. We've had drugs in the past that, you know, 5, 10% of body weight. Now with the GLP1s, we're getting 10, 20, even 30% of body weight being shaved off of people. Especially with the new retreatide data. Is there a free lunch? That's the big question. Like we kind of talked about earlier, there's always been these medical mishaps that have happened. So far the data is very promising. When it comes to GLP1s and that we are now reversing this rate of chronic disease, is it going to stay that way? That's a good question. I'm cautiously optimistic when it comes to these medications. I've been prescribing them since I was a resident. In my VA clinic. I was putting all these vets that are, you know, 300 pounds on GLB1s. They were losing 50, 100 pounds before it was even FDA approved for weight loss. We knew that, that if you put diabetics on this drug, they would lose weight. Thanks to a lot of the bodybuilders that kind of pioneered that.
- [144:27]
Andrew Huberman
When did the bodybuilders first start using GLPs?
- [144:30]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Late 2000s.
- [144:32]
Andrew Huberman
Wow.
- [144:32]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Early. And then the signal. I don't, I don't think Norvo or Lilly wanted to make these for obesity. They were focused on making diabetes drugs. Because if we zoom out even further, this is another animal derived compound, right? It's found in the, the saliva of the Gila monsters. GLP1 was discovered, it's too short acting to have worked on its own. Then pharmaceutical companies, where you got to give pharma their credit, they developed these drugs into more functioning versions that had, you know, longer half lives and could stick around in the serum for longer to have the clinical effect. So then we started noticing that diabetics like my Grandma got by ETA, which was one of these first GLP1 drugs. Like 25 years ago. It was the, out of all the drugs she was on, the reason I went into medicine, that was the drug that changed her, her whole trajectory because she had less insulin needs and she was less losing weight and more energetic. So we had seen the effects on diabetics. And then you get liraglutide, dual glutide and then eventually semaglutide is the blockbuster. But you get all these positive effects coming from these drugs on diabetics. It gets translated into obese people and overweight patients. The question is, what is the long term effect of this? Do you have to stay on this drug forever? Can you titer it off? The pharmaceutical companies have not given us good guidelines on that. They've shown us what happens if you stop the drug that you max out on maximum dose. Appetite, pull the brakes on. People tend to sometimes gain the weight. Some people don't, but some people will regain back to baseline. Cause if you think about it, the better way to think about weight loss, it's the calculation your brain does every single day with all the different Hormones and, and peptides that are made from the gut, the gip, glp, glucagon, insulin, testosterone, estrogen, all these things kind of modulate and there's this thing called a set point theory or settling points, and they integrate. Should I eat or not eat? Right. So the GLP1 is a giant signal to the brain of don't eat. So we're, we're modulating this pathway. What happens to all these young kids that are 18, 19 years old on 5 milligrams of retit that have lost 30, 40 pounds, are they gonna have to be on that for life now to maintain that weight?
- [146:30]
Andrew Huberman
Can I ask you about that? Because when people say perhaps you have to be on a drug for the rest of your life, I think, okay, what's the availability? What's the cost? Yes. What's the real world cost of taking six months off? Because you can't access it. There's a shortage and maybe better drugs will come on. Like, I don't necessarily have a problem with it. Although if you Talk to Type 1 diabetics, in the old days they weren't crazy about the idea that they had to constantly inject themselves with insulin. Now they're better delivery devices. I kind of feel like eventually there'll be some slow release polymer that will just kind of give you a microdose of it. You could dial it up if you want.
- [147:03]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Those are all pills.
- [147:04]
Andrew Huberman
Now personally, I don't worry so much about like for the rest of your life. I worry more about the much shorter life if people are obese. But what about these brain effects? I do worry about a brain that's developing in the context of a, you know, thousand fold or more increase in these GLPs. Because when we had Zach Knight on the podcast, he's not a clinician, he's a scientist up at ucsf. Howard Hughes investigator. Which means he's like a superstar and deserves to be in that category. He described that, that the diabetic drugs would increase GLP by like double quadruple. But the weight loss effects weren't really there. But the drugs that you rattled off a few minutes ago, Mounjaro, Zempic, et cetera, and certainly retatrutide. We're talking about thousandfold increases in GLPs. We don't know what the long term effects of those are on neuroplasticity and learning. It could be great, could be positive. We shouldn't always assume those effects are bad.
- [147:54]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, the effects for let's say a 60 year old pre Diabetic. Diabetic. On Alzheimer's disease seems to be potentially positive. I think that's. The study last year didn't show a good signal on our Alzheimer's prevention. But we know diabetes and cardiometabolic disease speeds up that transition, so controlling insulin dynamics might be beneficial there. And obesity is not great for Alzheimer's risk. The question is, what about for like these cognitive effects? Is the effect happening from the drug itself? Is it from misuse of the drug? Too high of a dose, you're not getting enough electrolytes, you're not getting enough micronutrients, macronutrients, you know, your blood sugar, sugar is low. Because a lot of these patients, the way we, we approach it is training wheel effect when it comes to GLP1s. Okay, you come to us, you're a patient, you want to use GLP1s, we'll give you a lowest dose as possible that has an effect for you. GLP1 in conjunction with lifestyle modification, dietary advice, exercise programs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and then hopefully peel away those, those training wheels or keep them on if you need them until we get to the end point that we want. Now, when people do it that way, I don't hear a lot of these effects anecdotally from, from Berkeley patients that we hear about online where people are like, oh, I'm depressed. I hate my life from, from these drugs. And the question is, are they just, you know, a lot of people have low blood pressure from, from these drugs because they're not, you know, consuming enough electrolytes or enough food, period. Because, like, some people will take a mega dose of these drugs and end up not eating. The, like a day goes by, they've eaten one meal that's not conducive to good, feeling good, everyone. You know the reason people are beast in the first place, because eating is such a pleasurable experience for humans and a social experience, et cetera, et cetera. The other thing is, if you're not eating with people on the same table, are you having less of that socialization aspect? A lot of times you meet up to eat or drink or whatever it may be. So I'm very curious. When it comes to the cognitive effects, is it from the drug directly interacting with the receptors in the brain when we've seen that the right amount of dose decreases inflammation in the brain? Or is it because of the social aspects of the drug changing the way you behave and therefore leading to negative output?
- [149:49]
Andrew Huberman
How dare you think of confounding variables it's like, no, it's so cool because you're willing to go outside the box and say hey listen, this might be due to some of the downstream consequences of reduced appetite.
- [150:00]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. And we know the literature shows that people now are having less alcohol cravings from this. It might be ch changing the way the dopaminergic signaling is happening in the brain. Which is concerning. Right. Because a lot of people will be stacking this with, you know, ADHD medications. They might be using some of these peptide stimulants, some max length, whatever it may be. So the question cuz what happens is people go to these websites, they, they buy one peptide and they got a great result and they'll be like, you know, let me add three more peptides on sensory peptide. Yes. It's an increasing AOV problem. So the average sale value goes up from these research sites. We'll see where GLP1s go. The reality is it's here. There is no pre GLP one world. For us as clinicians, as health enthusiasts, we're in a post GLP one world and everything kind of dictates downstream from that.
- [150:43]
Andrew Huberman
The people I know have taken these and I don't know exactly which are taking much lower dosages than were prescribed to them and they are indeed sharing them with getting the prescription. Then people are sharing them, people are cost sharing. Now people are trying to get them from other sources. Is several of those people say they, they feel like they can think better. But I told them, well yeah, if your insulin sensitivity is improved, if you're carrying less body fat. Body fat's an endocrine organ. It's, you know, you need some body fat. But there could be a number of reasons for that. I don't know if these are direct effects on the brain.
- [151:13]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, well that'd be left sensitivity increases as you decrease the body fat mass. There's, there's GLP1 receptors on the POMC neurons in the brain and no one's kind of examined what that means downstream for the leptin, melanocort. Leptin melanocortin pathway and what that means for energy status, thyroid hormone production, reproductive status. We know a lot of people are ozemic babies and that a lady will be subfertile or infertile. Start a weight loss drug and then find out by accident she's pregnant.
- [151:39]
Andrew Huberman
Was she obese before?
- [151:41]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah. These are overweight obese women that are having their fertility improve as a result of losing the weight. Because we know your leptin status is a key Driver of fertility. Because if your having low leptin levels, you're starving, you shouldn't be fertile. If you have too much leptin and you're leptin resistant, you shouldn't be having kids either. So both of those things kind of get modulated by these drugs as well.
- [152:01]
Andrew Huberman
There was a science paper some years ago that leptin hitting a certain threshold is actually what signals the onset of puberty in females. Is that still considered true?
- [152:09]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I think that's part of it makes sense.
- [152:12]
Andrew Huberman
Like enough body fat to signal that there are enough resources and then animals. Or that was an animal study. Or the idea was that people perhaps also become females, become reproductively competent at the point where there's enough energetic resources. That interesting. Have you ever taken one of these?
- [152:26]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Oh, wow.
- [152:27]
Andrew Huberman
Yes.
- [152:27]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I. I had a family member with a GLP1 pen from 4 years ago that said it wasn't working. So I'm like, okay, let's see what's going on here. I got a pen. Don't do this at home. And I was like, yeah, it's not working. Like, it's bunked. They got them overseas. It was a brand name Ozempic pen, but gotten from overseas, got the pen. I was like, you know what? If it's bunk, let's see what it is. Don't do this at home. Biohackers in me came out and tried it. I injected a. I think it was a milligram of ozempic.
- [152:57]
Andrew Huberman
What's a standard dose?
- [152:58]
Dr. Abud Bakri
You start at 0.25 and escalate to 0.5.
- [153:00]
Andrew Huberman
You went straight to a milligram?
- [153:01]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, because I was like, ah. They're like, it doesn't work. I'm eating so much. I'm okay, whatever. You got bunk. Bunk pen from overseas. I go to do a shift. I was on a night shift that day. And I've never had Charizard, like projectile vomiting and low blood sugar. Presumably the blood sugar effects for non diabetics that don't get that low. But it was just miserable. Like I would, I would go admit a patient, go upstairs, vomit in the, in the call room.
- [153:25]
Andrew Huberman
You just gave a really good reason why people shouldn't just do what you just.
- [153:29]
Dr. Abud Bakri
No, they shouldn't do that. Then go back to, back to the er, admit a patient. And it was, it was the most miserable night. Night of my life. So be very careful how you use these drugs. That's why I titrate very slowly. Luckily, with the newer ones, the effects are much less like people who report tirzepatide and retroside even have less of these gastrointestinal effects. But that's a peptide gone wrong story.
- [153:52]
Andrew Huberman
Peptide gone wrong red. A true tide.
- [153:55]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yep.
- [153:56]
Andrew Huberman
I put out a post on X. I thought, and I do still think that redruetide is going to be a trillion dollar industry. Not because so many people are necessarily going to use it for weight loss, but because many people will use it for weight loss, many people will use it for other things. Because you can be sure, absolutely sure that Lilly is going to find other
- [154:17]
Dr. Abud Bakri
ways to market it.
- [154:18]
Andrew Huberman
Market it. And you can protect a patent by finding additional uses for things. I mean, a lot of the blockbuster drugs for eye diseases, the patents to prevent generic forms were continued by. Here's the deal folks. Companies are really incentivized to take the hundreds of millions of dollars that they spent on clinical trials and research and development and not have to do it again. So if you can find another valid use for a drug, you don't have to run all the safety stuff, you don't have to do a lot of stuff, you just have to show efficacy and a few other things. But that's the way that drug companies continue to play the game, to protect their, their investment.
- [154:54]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Right.
- [154:54]
Andrew Huberman
I mean you can understand why they do it. That's your business. But so I'm guessing that retatrutide is. We're going to discover that it's useful for a number of things. And from the clinical trials there's a reason to believe that's going to be the case.
- [155:07]
Dr. Abud Bakri
And the big thing they're trying to do now is classify as a biologic. So Retroside has 39amino acids. To be a biologic you have to be above 40amino acids.
- [155:14]
Andrew Huberman
And once you get to above 40amino acids, if you are a biologic, then the patent lasts way longer.
- [155:19]
Dr. Abud Bakri
I don't know the exact numbers.
- [155:20]
Andrew Huberman
Like 15 years.
- [155:21]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, much, much longer.
- [155:22]
Andrew Huberman
Whereas if it's a, if it's 40 or below amino acids, then it's something like five. Yeah, five to seven years.
- [155:27]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Someone baton will have to.
- [155:28]
Andrew Huberman
So we're talking like hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars. If it's a, if you, and you can tinker with this, you can add amino acids and more importantly, no one
- [155:37]
Dr. Abud Bakri
can compound it if it's a biologic or if it's very difficult to compound. Like is that the right. Right. Certificates. Something similar happened with ACG where it was taken out of the compounders recently.
- [155:45]
Andrew Huberman
Really?
- [155:46]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah.
- [155:46]
Andrew Huberman
So acg, human chorionic gynotrop and this is commonly prescribed for trying to restore fertility to, to men. But it's main mostly being given in IVF cycles to women.
- [155:57]
Dr. Abud Bakri
There's a big controversy about HCG and compounders and who can compound it and who can't. That's beyond this. But this is a very important thing because if Lilly gets retatrutide as a biologic, then the compounders are out of luck because the compounders all have the formula for Retta. They're ready to make it. Like they can get the API from China and start compounding it as soon as it's available. It will make them all billions of dollars. But if Lily's able to do this, they'll be able to protect themselves from what's going to happen. See, the Trump administration now is trying to get with Trump rx, Lily and Novo Nordis to drop their prices to make him more available, which has happened like now. I think you can get a, you know, $300 monthly dose of tirzepatite available through these websites.
- [156:36]
Andrew Huberman
Used to be 1500.
- [156:37]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, 1500 without insurance. Some insurance will cover it. Some, some wouldn't. You'd have to get, you know, savvy clinician that advocate on your, on your behalf to get these covered. But cash pay between, you know, even some of the, the pills, I think you can pay 150 bucks a month for the OR plan which is not a peptide, but still GLP1 agonist. Um, which kind of gets into the point like it doesn't matter if it's a peptide or not. What matters is where, where it touches, what receptor it touches. Because OR for is more similar to semiglutide. Both of them are GLP1 drugs. One's a peptide, one's not. Then BBC is the semi glutide. So like everyone online talks about peptides are good or peptides are bad. There's no actual scientific category of peptides that gives you a functional definition that's discussable between two people. Because what do you mean by peptide? Do you mean carnosine? Do you mean ratatouille's diet?
- [157:21]
Andrew Huberman
Excellent point. Speaks to a lot of the confusion. You are a beam of clarifying information on this. I actually am going to put in a vote publicly right here and now, but also I'm going to do what I can to contact folks that are relevant. I think you should, no joke. I think you should be in charge of a nomenclature committee. I think in the world of genetics for a long time people would just name genes Sonic hedgehog or sync1, or people name it after their cousin, and it was a mess. And so what ends up happening is you find similarity between genes across different laboratories, and eventually you have a meeting and you come up with a. You have a nomenclature committee, and then you say, this is, you know, Efren 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. These are the sequences. The general public doesn't think about molecules in that way. No, but the general public are diving right into this. They are the experiment. And so what I think would be very, very useful would be a clear and accessible nomenclature to divide up what we've talked about today. You know, BPC157, you know peptides with and without known receptors, the regenerative peptides, as you've called them, things like thymosin, alpha TB500, which are immunogenic peptides. I think the word peptides is just too general.
- [158:37]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's too general.
- [158:38]
Andrew Huberman
I'm putting my vote in for you. Not that you don't already have enough to do to come up with some nomenclature that maybe I can help propagate. And some of the other people in the podcast community, we'll even contact our close, close friends in legacy media and explain to them how this works and maybe they can help propagate it. Just for sake of clarity, right, we're not taking the stance these are good or bad, but just for sake of. Of clarity, as given that there's so many people that are peptide curious. Okay, so before we wrap, I solicited X and Instagram for questions about peptides. I did not reveal exactly who you are, but I gave some of your credentials and got back many, many excellent questions, most of which, thanks to you, were answered during the course of our conversation up until now.
- [159:21]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Sweet.
- [159:21]
Andrew Huberman
But there are a couple of them that many people asked we didn't touch on, at least not directly. One thing that's come up several times is the question about. For women who have endometriosis or fibroids or other things related to reproductive health and potential, can things like BPC157 help and or hurt those circumstances, given their potential role in angiogenesis and the other
- [159:43]
Dr. Abud Bakri
things you described, no literature exists on either animal or human data that relates those peptides. I'd say those are more hormonal metabolic issues that. That a good OB GYN should take care of. They're very difficult to treat conditions and very miserable to have for people and have fertility implications. But those are more on the hormonal side. I think the hormonal level is way stronger than a peptide. Level like BBC or any of those. And as far as I'm concerned, there's no case reports or studies that would
- [160:09]
Andrew Huberman
suggest positive or negative CNS effects, central nervous system, excuse me, of BPC157 or other peptides that we've talked about that don't fall under the typical umbrella that people go to when they think about PPC 157. Now you talked about some of the stuff related to alcohol and perhaps other things like Adderall, but anything known about people feeling better or worse on different peptides, just psychologically, neurologically, tbi. I'll throw TBI in there for myself. I don't have TBI fortunately, but I know many people that do. They reach out to me. Could it be beneficial in those cases?
- [160:45]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yeah, there were studies in Russia on TBIs when it comes to cortexin and cerebralysin which will probably never be available in the United States. So we'll skip those. There's no good data on BPC and TBIs. They theoretically could be useful from an anti stress perspective. That'd be interesting to explore that. BPC's neurological effects are very homeostatic in nature. They don't let you get too high in the mice data. At least the mice can't get too drunk and they can't withdraw from alcohol. They can't get too high on the mice methamphetamines and they can't get too high in the methamphetamines and they don't withdraw either. So there's a homeostatic mechanism that might explain some of these anhedonia side effects that people are reporting. Where BBC modulates the gut brain access in a way which we do not understand. It's kind of woo woo that makes it so that your brain can't go too far in one direction. Maybe in putting, if we think of a just, just so story, it's putting you into a rest and digest state to heal whatever problem you have. If that's why BBC exists as a big parent compound. That might be part of the fact that if you scream BBC your body goes into like a convalescent mode because it will, it will take away stimulants, it will take away sedatives. Don't try this of course. But there seems to be a homeostatic mechanism in BBC that needs to be explored further with good data.
- [161:55]
Andrew Huberman
Very interesting. Thank you. The major question was what should people do if they are actually interested in obtaining peptides? Just set the GLPs aside because it's kind of a Separate category and they want to explore their use and they want to be as safe as possible. Where shouldn't they look? Is how I'll phrase the question. Where should they look? Who should they talk to? At what point can they be confident that what they're taking is what the bottle claims and that it's free of contaminants and so on? Many, many questions. But I think this is, is like kind of the question.
- [162:31]
Dr. Abud Bakri
It's the most difficult question to answer because the majority of people are getting their peptides from research only websites. Unfortunately those are not reliable. We don't know what's in them. They, they could be good, could be bad, could be as good as a compound pharmacy, could be much worse, could be the wrong peptide in, in the vial. So we don't know what's in there. What should happen over the next 6, 12, 24 months is there will be a lot of physician led options for patients to get peptides. Number one, you should encourage your physician. If you don't have one, get one and get a good relationship with one. Because having a good relationship with your physician is a key aspect of driving good health. But having a physician that's educated on peptides to my doctor friends, all of you guys are now living in a peptide era. You have no choice but to get educated. So get educated. We should create resources for that. There will be a lot of telemed options opening up soon through various companies that will offer these peptides and it will be good for the consumer because it'll be a race down in price and then we'll know which, which compounding pharmacies are better, which which ones are worse. So you can get better source peptides but you should get them from clinicians. The question that's going to happen is there's going to be a lot of these orally available peptides and they're going to be all over supplement websites. Like you'll, you'll find them with your magnesium, your creatine and then your Pinelion or your BPC157. The question is what is that going to look like? So we'd like you know, our FDA overlords to give, give us some guidance there on what can and cannot be sold and bought. But it should be physician led. You should be doing this under the guidance of a physician that's monitoring you. You know you shouldn't be taking Testamorlin without checking IGF1 levels. A GLP1 even should be monitored with the physicians that can counsel you on, on too much Weight loss like some of these celebrities should have had better clinicians monitoring their GLP1 journeys because they lost way too much weight. That doesn't look healthy at all unless someone's first of all, if someone's not having the basics in place, there's no point in putting all these peptides in
- [164:06]
Andrew Huberman
like morning, sunlight, sleep, darkness at night.
- [164:09]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes.
- [164:09]
Andrew Huberman
Good diet, minimally processed food.
- [164:11]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Yes. The next phase of peptide curious and peptide driven discussions is going to be like how do you incorporate it into a giant health system? Like you do morning sunlight, blue light blockers and epital and you do, you know BPC and you work out in the gym or whatever it may be. There's going to be protocols that develop, but I think within six months there'll be very good physician options for everybody.
- [164:31]
Andrew Huberman
Abud Amazing. Thank you so much for coming here today and again shedding so much light on what all of these things are. You have an clearly a virtuoso level understanding and ability to communicate about the history of these things, what they are, what they aren't, what we know, what we still don't know, the potential upsides, the potential hazards, the regulation and on and on. There are 50 other topics that you and I must talk about at some point. Your knowledge of hormones in men and women, pregnancy and women's hormones affecting the fetus, how progesterone impacts dharma and male offspring. Incredible. Absolutely want to have you back to have that discussion, but we'll let people digest this. In the meantime, we'll put links to where people can find you. And I just want to say thank you for doing what you do and if you don't mind me sharing, you're 33 years old.
- [165:20]
Dr. Abud Bakri
That's right.
- [165:20]
Andrew Huberman
I love that you're a clinician and you're practicing medicine, but please, please, please keep wherever you can keep up your efforts as a public educator. Come back and talk to us again. You're a gift to us all. And thank you so much.
- [165:32]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for the kind words.
- [165:35]
Andrew Huberman
Thank you for joining me for Today's discussion with Dr. Abud Bakri. To learn more about his work and to find links to the various things we discussed, please see the show Note captions I should also mention that Dr. Bakri has just released a new app which is focused on circadian biology, which we didn't talk about today, but he's a true expert there as well. You can also find a link to that app in the show note caption if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel.
- [166:00]
Dr. Abud Bakri
Subscribe.
- [166:00]
Andrew Huberman
That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the Follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple. You can leave us up to a five star review and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcasts or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Hub Lubberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre sale@protographsbook.com there you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram X threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter. The Neural Network Newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You Simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for Today's discussion with Dr. Abud Bakri. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.