The truth about peptides and influencers playing doctor with Dr Michael

peptides have been around for a very very long time actually like i'm ashamed to admit this i did a documentary with bbc recently when i was in my 20s and i was a medical student i thought it was very clever and obviously the dunning-kruger effect was in full flow back then i actually used a tanning peptide when i was 20 because i had done some research ahead of the

game

I know.

This was back in the early 2000s.

There was no fake tan.

You were also in the

UK, to be fair.

So the need for fake tan, I do understand that this changes depending on geography.

But no, look, I'm not making any excuses.

It was pure, pure vanity.

And I did my research, in inverted commas, and found that there was a type of tanning peptide that was available to use for a certain skin condition.

So I assumed it must be safe.

Anyway, I started taking it and I felt horrendous pain.

and it gave me so many side effects i just felt completely unwell on it and i had to stop it after a few weeks and that was back in 2000 and well that must be 2003 2004 but anyway things started to kind of quieten down it was a very gym underground scene where people were using peptides but it wasn't this kind of wild you know this kind of mainstream as it is today i think what happened is gyms are always known for being a bit more that gym goers are happy to take on risk more than the average person so like obviously bodybuilders use steroids and things like that and they kind of make a calculated risk it's not scientific but they're they're really reasonably well informed so anyway that's kind of underground in the early 2000s and then it gets to towards kind of mid-2010s where we start using things like ozempic and wegovy and manjaro and all these things peptides start to come along ozempic i remember prescribing ozempic for a diabetic patient maybe 2013 so these medicines have always been around but then it started to be used for the kind of weight loss treatments and then before all these medications were out it used to be a bit of a taboo to inject yourself with something like i think that was a bit of a a red line for people you know like oh if you have to inject yourself with with something to improve your body then that's that was always a bit too far for people i think then since it's been normalized with these weight loss injections i think that people are like you know what that's not a taboo anymore and uh they're not just doing it for the weight loss types of medicines they're doing it for all these new peptides that are coming out The issue that I have is, look, the stuff like Ozempic and Wegovy and those types of medicines, being around for a very long time, you're talking, I think they've been in development for almost 30 years now, they've had all the studies and the research that go along with them.

So even things like Retta, you've probably heard of Retta, everybody talking about it.

That is one of the newer types.

So again, I'll use the iPhone analogy.

You had kind of a Zen pick that was the iPhone 15, and then you get Wiggly and Manjaro, which is the iPhone 16.

And then Retta is now going to be the iPhone 17.

But it's not quite there yet.

It's in its... final, final stages of development.

And it's made by a big drug company called Eli Lilly.

You've probably heard of them.

They're like the biggest, the big pharma.

But people now just want to skip the steps.