By Dr. Anthony Policastro
We eat things made of fats, carbohydrates, and protein. Each of these are complex molecules made up of smaller pieces. Fats are made up of what are known as fatty acids. Carbohydrates are made up of simple sugars (glucose, fructose, and galactose). Proteins are made up of amino acids.
There are 20 different amino acids. Nine of them cannot be produced by the body and are called essential amino acids. They must come from diet. The other 11 can be produced by the body.
Chains of amino acids make up proteins. A small chain (between 2 and 50) of amino acids is known as a peptide.
The most famous peptide is insulin. It consists of two connected chains. One chain has 21 amino acids. The other chain has 30 amino acids. Making insulin in the pancreas is essential for metabolism. Loss of that ability causes diabetes.
As most people know, insulin must be injected. That is because digestion breaks down proteins and peptides back into individual amino acids.
Other peptides have been discovered. They act as messengers in the body to transmit chemical information.
Some of them are now being used. The most famous one is semaglutide. It is what is found in preparations like Ozempic and Wegovy. They were originally used for helping to treat diabetes.
Wegovy comes in two forms. One is injectable and has an 89 percent drug availability. The other is oral. Because of that, it gets digested. Only 1-2 percent becomes bioavailable. Therefore, it is very inefficient. It has a special coating. It must be taken on an empty stomach with limited water intake in a much higher dose.
However, their use has been expanded to weight loss in general. They have actually achieved fad status. One school system’s insurance plan stopped coverage for the drugs when 25 percent of the employees wound up taking them.
There are some peptides that are used for muscle building. There are some that are used to promote skin elasticity. There are others that are available.
Most of them have not been out that long. Most of them have not been well studied. Most of them are not proven to actually be of real benefit. We do not have a track record of side effects for them.
What all that means is that for the majority of people on the peptide bandwagon, they are serving as guinea pigs. They will tell us if they work. They will tell us what the side effects are. They will tell us more than we need to know.
If you think about it, insulin treats a genetic disease. If a normal person takes insulin, their blood sugar will drop. They may die from hypoglycemia. There have been multiple cases of murder using insulin as the murder weapon.
Since we know that people are taking peptides regardless of their genetic sensitivity to them, we will likely find a variety of complications related to that. In some cases, a normal dose might be too much. In other cases, the peptide may unmask an underlying genetic disease.
It is only a matter of time before we realize that playing with genetic modification is going to cause unexpected side effects. Hopefully, they will be more benign than the ones Dr. Victor Frankenstein discovered when he tampered with Mother Nature.