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It seems we are treating Peptides like drugs here. It's my opinion that amino acids regardless of how they are chained do not belong under and stricter regulat

• A_D_E_P_T 7mo ago
  > given I eat peptides every day from my food This is briefly addressed in the article, but basically it's one thing to eat a peptide and quite another thing to inject it. Your digestive system is extremely adroit at taking peptides and proteins and breaking them down into individual amino acids, which are then absorbed via "transporters" in the gut. (e.g. SLC6A14 for glutamate and cysteine.) If you eat insulin, absolutely nothing will happen. If you inject just a little bit too much, you're dead. So, generally: Ingested proteins/peptides aren't drug-like, whereas they can be extremely potent drugs if administered via injection. Granted, there are exceptions. If you accidentally get a drop of botox into your mouth, you'll be okay, but if you drink a vial, you'll be poisoned. And people have been trying to make orally-active peptides and proteins for decades, with some noteworthy successes, however few and far between in the general case.
  • Bender 7mo ago
    I agree with some of this. There are most certainly orally active peptides such as BPC-157 and its replacement PDA penta deca arginate that can repair the gut and still circulate throughout the body especially in those with leaky gut. People with leaky gut should be able to buy a clean source of BPC-157 or PDA without a prescription and without visiting dark alleys. It is very safe and tolerable. GLP's are all the rage these days. Doctors seem to be giving GLP peptides out like candy and those are injected. People are looking like zombies. That said if doctors are going to be so liberal with them I should be able to buy it in the grocery store and slap it down on the conveyor belt. Again I can buy things far more dangerous than any prescription drug. There are very dangerous supplements, some that are shilled heavily on youtube. For example, Glycine (for me specifically used without a specific process) is more dangerous than heroine and the vast majority of doctors would have no idea what I am talking about.
    • dc396 7mo ago
      > It is very safe and tolerable. Can you point to the clinical trials that demonstrate this? > Doctors seem to be giving GLP peptides out like candy and those are injected. There have been several _thousand_ clinical trials that have shown GLP-1s to be safe and effective.
      • XorNot 7mo ago
        Also LOL at the notion "peptides are safe because GLP-1 exists". Pretty much all venoms are mixes of short (10-15 base) peptide chains. It's the naturalistic fallacy in an utterly perverse form ( and also goes to show why a regulatory system is good: the average person has no idea that they're dealing with or even common sense about it).
        • flexagoon 7mo ago
          "Liquids are safe because water exists"
          • Bender 7mo ago
            FDA is a money sink. People basically bribe to get their own self tests approved much like the airlines have their own FAA inspectors that approve their own self tests under duress and bribes. It's all a scam and everyone here knows this even if they won't admit it. Nullify the FDA, FAA and at least half of the other orgs. Give at least half of those budgets to the people. Make aircraft smart enough to evade all obstacles. Make it technically damn near impossible to collide with anything. Make aircraft coordinate themselves. All doable. Force retire all FDA and FAA and give them a balloon, a golden wrist-watch and send them away. Give people an app to paste in all the things they take or plan to take in terms of foods, supplements, drugs, their allergies. Let the best AI figure out what will happen.
    • fragmede 7mo ago
      Injected BPC-157 to a wound is a magic healing potion as far as I'm concerned. That it's not more broadly available is a crime, imo. If I had a billion dollars, I'd push so many things through the FDA.
  • tshaddox 7mo ago
    > > given I eat peptides every day from my food It’s also just a silly rhetorical technique. The ability to construct a grammatical sentence of that form does not constitute a valid argument. “Restricting nuclear material is silly given that nearly all the stuff I interact with every day contains atomic nuclei.”
• kube-system 7mo ago
  The regulation of drugs or most any consumer product is not due to the inherent danger of an item itself, but the danger presented to a consumer inside the context of societal mechanisms that influence behavior. You're right that many regulations don't make sense outside of a societal context -- but that's because they also don't exist outside of a societal context. The reason we don't need tight regulations on bleach is because we don't have a societal issue causing people to drink it and hurt themselves... at least, not anymore: most of the locking lids on household cleaning chemicals are there by law.
  • Bender 7mo ago
    The reason we don't need tight regulations on bleach is because we don't have a societal issue causing people to drink it and hurt themselves.. I think you missed out on a long time period of 4chan. They managed to get a number of people to mix ammonia and bleach.
    • kube-system 7mo ago
      More people do this accidentally trying to clean something than have ever done it because 4chan told them to. Still, the incidence rate is low.
      • Bender 7mo ago
        Maybe so. Still one would be amazed at how many people will follow extremely dangerous and dumb trends on the interwebs. Don't get me wrong, I see it as just a small part in the great filter much like I think we should remove all warning labels.
• jmye 7mo ago
  > Drugs risks do not enter into the picture given the fact I can buy ammonia and bleach along with a myriad of other dangerous compounds. This is a deeply weird take. You think anyone ought to be able to buy, for instance, warfarin and freely take it without a doctor’s involvement? We should let parents self-diagnose diabetes and administer insulin without a prescription or discussion? We should just hope that patients heard their doctor say hydralazine and not hydroxyzine? > As a side note more dangerous than any drug is stopping a prescription drug cold turkey. Abject nonsense. It was very easy to stop my prescribed amoxicillin. It’s clear you don’t have any actual idea what “prescription drugs” are, in aggregate, and that should maybe inform your decision to have Big Opinions about them.
  • Bender 7mo ago
    You think anyone ought to be able to buy, for instance, warfarin and freely take it without a doctor’s involvement? Yes.
    • cm2012 7mo ago
      Triple yes! Most of the people buying it have been buying it and using it for years.
      • jmye 7mo ago
        Why do you think only the people taking it would be buying it?
        • JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
          > Why do you think only the people taking it would be buying it? I don't. But the cost of access is significant. And with pharmacies in India, China and Mexico willing to ship basically anything into America, it's a purely-cosmetic tax now.
    • jmye 7mo ago
      Why? Why, specifically, do you think an adult without HF should be able to buy a random drug, likely by accident, and start taking it? I guess I don’t hate everyone else enough to agree with that.
• refurb 7mo ago
  > It seems we are treating Peptides like drugs here That’s exactly what some biological drugs are too - peptides! And peptides are just short chains of amino acids. Almost all the other biological drugs are just longer chains of amino acids - antibodies, enzymes, antigens, some hormones, and others. Derek is right that the safety risks are exponentially higher when you inject peptides - you basically skip a bunch of protective mechanisms like enzymes that quickly break them down if taken orally or routes. As a former R&D scientist there is no way I’d inject any peptide that hasn’t at least gone through a phase 1 safety study in humans. Otherwise you have no idea what it could be doing to your body. A good example was a drug that was quickly pulled from market for causing fatal anaphylactic reactions. It wasn’t even caught in the clinical trials! At the same time, I think people have the right to take whatever substance they want. But I worry a lot of people aren’t aware of the risks.
  • Ucalegon 7mo ago
    >As a former R&D scientist there is no way I’d inject any peptide that hasn’t at least gone through a phase 1 safety study in humans. Otherwise you have no idea what it could be doing to your body. A lot of people do not understand the trial system or the value of Phase 0/1 tests when it comes to the substances that they put into their body. And thanks to the influencer/grifter/biohacker ecosystem that exists, more people would put their trust in accidental evidence, from people who's incentive it is to make money off of them, while complaining about the pharmaceutical industry operates off of a profit motive.
  • renewiltord 7mo ago
    Yeah, but my mum is an eye surgeon and she wouldn't get LASIK. That's just how it is with people involved in the field.
• __MatrixMan__ 7mo ago
  I'm all for laxer regulation of substance control e.g. buying cocaine at the grocery store, but I think its also a bit misleading to describe arbitrary sequences of amino acids as if they're meaningfully comparable to food. That's like saying that since neither one nor zero requires regulation, neither does software. Maybe software does or doesn't, but in either case its best based on the nature of the aggregate, not the nature of its components.
• margalabargala 7mo ago
  > It's my opinion that amino acids regardless of how they are chained do not belong under and stricter regulation than food given I eat peptides every day from my food. I mean, why regulate anything? Everything is just different arrangements of hydrogen and time. It's so weird that certain arrangements of hydrogen and time try to claim to have things like "morals", and try to force other arrangements of hydrogen and time to not do arbitrary contrived concepts like "murder". All is one. Just hydrogen and time. Therefore everything should be legal.