Peptide and hormone therapies sit at the edge of modern performance medicine, where promise must be held alongside humility. In this conversation from Mente e Corpo com Dra.Andrew Huberman, the strongest thread is not novelty for its own sake. It is the disciplined question underneath the trend: what actually helps the body become more resilient?
[Music] [Music] Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Craig Connover. Dr. Craig Conover is a medical doctor who did his training at Brown University and Thomas Jefferson University. He is a world expert in what he refers to as performance medicine, which involves the use of peptides and other therapies for improving mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, many of you have perhaps heard of peptide therapies. Perhaps some of you have not. A peptide is simply a small protein. So, insulin is a peptide. We have many different thousands of peptides in our brain and body and they perform a variety of different roles. Dr. Connor's expertise is in the use of exogenous that is peptides that one takes exogenous peptides for activating multiple pathways in the brain and body to augment health. Now of course peptides such as insulin have been used for many years now to treat things like diabetes but today we talk about novel peptides including GLP1. So these are glucagon-l like peptide analoges things like ompic and munjaro which I realize are a bit controversial. However, today we talk about the micro doing of those peptides. We talk about those peptides combined with other peptides as well as behavioral practices to offset the muscle loss associated with them. And then we dive into some lesserk known peptides, but ones that are growing in
peptides, but ones that are growing in use. For instance, BPC157 or body protection compound 157, which is used to treat inflammation, to accelerate wound healing, and a variety of other things. Then we discussed the use of peptides specifically to increase growth hormone secretion during sleep as well as some peptides that can actually increase rapid eye movement sleep dramatically. Today we also discuss testosterone therapies not just for men but for women. These are growing increasingly popular as well as things like NAD as well as specific supplements. Dr. Connor, as he will soon tell you, is not a huge proponent of supplements, but he does mention several that he feels are of particular use, including things like co-enzyme Q10 and some of the methylated B vitamins. And he explains why he takes that stance. So today's discussion is really for anybody interested in mental health, physical health, and performance. And the reason I say that is that even if you aren't considering taking peptides or already taking peptides, peptides and some of these other compounds I've mentioned, sit somewhere between doing nothing except diet and exercise. Supplements, which I sort of see as the next step up the ladder in terms of augmenting your health approaches. And then of course there are a number of prescription drugs including hormone therapies such as growth hormone therapies, testosterone therapies and a number of other things that yes can modify those hormone pathways. They are in fact hormones but they actually can shut down one's natural production of those hormone pathways. Peptide therapies sit somewhere between doing nothing and
somewhere between doing nothing and supplementation and those more advanced hormone therapies. And that's why peptide therapies I believe are growing in popularity. They can augment specific hormone pathways. They can augment specific, in fact, multiple processes within the brain and body to augment health, but they don't tend to operate in that negative feedback cycle by shutting down one's own endogenous production. Now, that doesn't mean that they aren't without some safety concerns. And today we of course discuss the potential side effects and safety concerns of peptides as well as the critical issue of sourcing clean peptides and working with a board-certified physician if one is going to pursue peptide use. So by the end of today's discussion, you will be right there on the cutting edge of what's happening and where things are going with peptides. And in keeping with that, you'll notice that during today's discussion, we talk a fair amount about what the FDA currently allows in terms of prescription peptides, what the FDA has recently removed from the market in terms of peptides. And as a very recent update, just prior to the release of this episode, I learned that three peptides CJC1295, omellin, both of which are in the growth hormone secret family, meaning they promote the release of growth hormone, as well as thyosin beta alpha, which is in the sort of anti-inflammatory and tissue repair pathway. Those three are now reallowed for prescription in the United States. So, at the time of recording this episode, we discussed some of those as being recently banned by the FDA. They are now approved again
by the FDA. They are now approved again for use in humans by the FDA. So, there's a brief and very recent update. So, just to summarize this admittedly long introduction today, you're going to learn about this incredible area of science called peptide biology and how it can augment mental health, physical health, and performance. And you're going to do so from one of the world's leading clinical experts. Before you 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 zerocost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is JWV. JWV makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology. Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near infrared light sources have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellar and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, even mitochondrial function, and improving vision itself. What sets tube lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning specific wavelengths of red light and near infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellar adaptations. Personally, I use the JWV whole body panel about three to four times a week. And I use the JWV handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you'd like to
home and when I travel. If you'd like to try JWV, you can go to JV spelled jvv. com / huberman. JWV is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $ 400 off JW products. Again, that's JWV spelled J Ov. com / huberman to get up to $ 400 off. Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Therapy is an extremely important component to overall health. In fact, I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise, including cardiovascular exercise and resistance training exercise. Now, there are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can really trust and talk to about any and all issues that concern you. Second of all, great therapy provides support in the form of emotional support, but also directed guidance, the dos and the notto-dos. And third, expert therapy can help you arrive at useful insights that you would not have arrived at otherwise. Insights that allow you to do better, not just in your emotional life, in your relationship life, but also the relationship to yourself and your professional life and to all sorts of career goals. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you can really resonate with and provide you with these three benefits that I described. Also, because Better Help is carried out entirely online, it's very timeefficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule with no commuting to a therapist's office or sitting in a waiting room or looking for a parking spot. So, if you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to
BetterHelp, go to betterhelp. com / huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp. com / huberman. And now for my discussion with Dr. Craig Connover. Dr. Craig Conover, welcome. Thank you, Andrew. I appreciate the invitation to be here. I'm thrilled that you're here. We are going to launch ourselves into the space that is called peptides. Yeah. And it's a it's an interesting space for sure because I think um most people probably don't know what a peptide is, right? They should feel no guilt or shame about that. I'm sure you'll you'll tell us. But this area of medicine that people broadly refer to as peptides is picking up a lot of momentum even though it's been around for a long time. And I find it particularly interesting because um there are many people using peptides for very specific purposes, but most people haven't really heard of the various peptides that are out there, right? And if anything, we can be sure that in the years to come, peptides are going to be increasingly popular. And there's totally agree. And there's of course the incredibly popular peptide of GLP-1 agonist um for sure taking over. So to drop into this um and make sure everyone's on the same page uh what is a peptide? Yeah, I mean just from a very elementary level peptides are just chains of amino acids. So amino acids
chains of amino acids. So amino acids all naturally occurring molecules. We call it a peptide if it's 40 amino acids or less. call it a protein if it's 41 amino acids or more. The body makes I think the last I read 300, 000 peptides. So it's a massive number. Uh we probably therapeutically are using closer to 150 over the years which is obviously tiny compared to that. So to your point this is blossoming. We've been using peptides for about 8 years a long time. um but still very early in in our understanding of how best to use peptides and how clinically we're going to get the most out of them. So, it's exciting. Maybe just to orient ourselves, we should talk about GLP-1 first. um not because it's necessarily the uh category of peptides that um I think uh people would want to consider for themselves um but because most people have probably heard of uh semiglutide and um mjaro and things like that. Sure. So um how long ago was it that humans started injecting GLP-1 agonist in order to lose weight? I think the weight loss aspect has only been a couple years. I mean it's been tremendous how it's accelerated to like literally becoming the number one prescribed in America. Uh you know semiglutide ompic was approved longer than that for for type 2 diabetics helping with you know glucose control and helping with glucose utilization. Uh
and helping with glucose utilization. Uh and what they found you know as a side effect was that these people were losing weight and then that word caught on. And you know what's interesting and I don't think most people understand is most of the medicines prescribed particularly in America are prescribed off label meaning they've never ever been approved for what they're used. So is that right? Yeah. The vast majority. Yeah. Are never approved. So as a physician I'm allowed to prescribe any drug for any reason I want as long as it's been approved for something. Right. As long as we're safe, right? We don't want to be cavalier about this and renegade and do all these things that are not that are out out of bounds. But that is the truth. So that's semiglutide is a great example being used for helping people diabetics, type two diabetics lower their blood sugar. And then it got to well no let's help diabetics lose weight right because diabetics struggle with weight the insulin resistance. And then it became well even if you're not a diabetic could you benefit from losing weight? Well heck yeah right I mean look at the amount of obesity and people who are overweight and having trouble maintaining healthy weight. It's exorbitant in this country and certainly worldwide. So then it spread. It did eventually get uh FDA approval specifically for weight loss. But you know at first no it's been just for type 2 diabetics to help with glucose utilization. And you know we've been using primarily tepatide which is like semiglutide version 2. 0 mostly for the past 2 years. have learned a tremendous amount and my opinion's actually changed
amount and my opinion's actually changed from working with people. Yeah. What is your opinion? My understanding is that um well there's sort of two camps on this it seems at least two camps. One camp seems really bullish on this um they seem very excited about this drug. The other camp seems to point to the fact that one may be creating a drug dependency. Um that it's very expensive. Um and they point to the also potency of lifestyle factors like exercise and caloric restriction um eating mostly non-processed foods etc as a quote unquote better alternative. I'm not necessarily saying that. I think that both have their place. It's to me it seems very contextual but as a clinician I'm curious what you think. Yeah, I I agree. Both have their place. Uh my philosophy is I want everyone have to have access to things that are number one safe that propel them to look, feel, and perform their best. And if that means, right, if it was just about if I can exercise my way out of this, eat my way out of this, meaning lose weight, change my body composition, why do we have an epidemic, you know, of so many people who struggle with that? Cuz it's really hard, right? And we don't totally understand it. I'm not saying that, yeah, the processed food thing is a massive problem. You I mean, I know that's come to light recently with people pushing for us to take a look at food companies and the quality of our food, which is amazing, but if people aren't interested in doing better for themselves, and you know, this is may
themselves, and you know, this is may not make sense, but I think it does. The analogy I use is I like to help people win the race first, which then helps them motivate to train for the next race, right? And this kind of goes against the grain of conventional medicine which is you know if you want to train for the race you have to you know run a certain number of miles you have to sleep a certain way you have to eat a certain way you have to do all the things struggle to get there right and losing weight is a struggle and and the way I look at if I can help people lose weight first literally by using something like tricep semiglutide and I've seen this they're now excited I mean I met with a client yesterday here in Los Angeles and she literally looked at me and said you've changed my life she goes I am a super successful woman in my company, with my family, with my kids. Everything's great. But now I love my life. My workouts are better. I look better. My clothes fit better. I am super excited about waking up every morning. Like she is there. And that is what it's about, right? And so for people, if you can help them achieve their goal first, then they're going to be motivated. The light bulb turns on, they're going to be like, "Wow, I want more of this." And that's the aha moment that I love helping people with. So, at first I was like, "Oh, we got to be really cautious with this same thinking." Like, I don't want people to lose too much weight. Like, this is a problem. Are they going to be dependent? I don't like the notion that you have to take something the rest of your life. And I'm not saying it has to be the rest of their life. But when something works and as far as I can tell, it's very safe. I think it's worth discussing. And I I like people having those options at least. Yeah. It sounds like from the uh story you just told us
like from the uh story you just told us that it's not just about um an aesthetic change that motivates people to lean into other aspects of their health and life when they lose some weight. That it's also just that the sheer literal weight and also that atapost tissue, fat tissue, you know, produces a lot of hormones that we know impact the brain and um brain function, which is not to say that there aren't people out there with a lot of atapost tissues who aren't extremely bright and motivated, etc., But many people who are carrying excess body fat don't feel good. They report brain fog etc. And I think now thanks to Chris Palmer and actually at Stanford there's also a program in metabolic psychiatry we're starting to see um or understand and appreciate the link between atapost tissue and brain health or lack of brain health in most cases. Sure. So in the um in the case of GLP1 um people have criticized it saying that a fair percentage of the weight uh that's lost is uh lean body mass muscle loss but it seems to me that can be remedied pretty easily if people just do some resistance training. I I think part of that yeah resistance training the other thing I would say is from what we've seen is when people are using the conventional dosages um they're losing weight too quickly and so what we do is we get uh both semiglutide mostly tepatide compounded and that allows us to use basically micro dosages and start very low in terms of dosage and go slowly with people and what we found is as long as
people and what we found is as long as people are losing less 2 lbs or less a week they're not losing the muscle mass. We certainly encourage adequate protein intake, you know, resistance training, but that micro doing has been a gamecher, like literally game changer because then people don't feel like, oh my, and I've seen it where we when we started, people were losing, you know, 15 pounds in 3 weeks. Goodness. Right. And then they're like excited, but then they're not cuz then they come off of it and they just gain it right back. Or they lose a lot of weight and they lose that fat in their face and they look like skeletons. We've seen those called ompic faces. we don't like the way that looks and that fat takes a while to come back. So, if we just go slowly with this and we can really dial it in and nuance it, that has had a tremendous impact. And now beyond the weight loss, you know, we're seeing cognitive benefits, we're seeing, you know, inflammation benefits. A lot of people with autoimmune disease who their inflammation markers are coming down and that's the only thing we can think is working. Is that a direct effect of um ompic on the immune system and pathways related to inflammation or is it indirect through the loss of atapost tissue body fat which then lowers uh lowers inflammation? Great question. Or or I could say is it the positive thoughts that come from looking yourself in the mirror and feeling good right which transcends to you feeling better about yourself and that feeds forward to the momentum that you put forth in the world. All of those things. I think it's all of the above. You know, I think that's going to be hard to dissect, but it's real. I mean, I have a patient,
it's real. I mean, I have a patient, she's 50, she has Hashimoto's thyroiditis, meaning she attacks her thyroid. She doesn't, you know, make enough thyroid hormone. So, she takes thyroid hormone. Well, one of the challenges with that is they make a lot of thyroid antibodies. This antibody called thyroid peroxidase antibbody. And when you have an elevated thyroid peroxidase antibody, you don't feel good. You feel inflamed, your joints hurt, you get rashes. Life is just not easy. And it's a challenge to get that number down. I mean, certainly a challenge for me. You know, we traditionally use probiotics, a lot of things to help bolster the immune system. Well, now we're starting to use the GLP-1s and we're seeing that those antibbody levels come down. And I I don't have a great way of explaining it, but there's something going on that's very positive, very interesting. Well, I suppose moving from um most widely known um peptides are still fairly unknown to most people, even the concept, but that's why you're here. uh you're changing that right now. Um but moving from things like GLP-1 to what I would probably call the second most popular peptide, the one that we're hearing more and more about all the time. Um and that's BPC57, body protection compound 157. Yeah. Um which to my understanding there are a lot of animal data, very few if any clinical studies on humans. Agreed. But a lot of people now taking BPC in various forms. Yeah. Um what are some known uses for BPC? Let's just say within your clinic. Sure. Um
just say within your clinic. Sure. Um and then we'll get around to the fact that BPC has let's hope temporarily been taken off market. Um and what some of the alternatives are. But um what is BPC? What instances or people have you found it useful for? So many. So I think with BPC for me kind of the most utilized peptide that we've used. So we'd like to use BPC almost with every patient. It is very anti-inflammatory, right? And so just from a very general perspective, you know, most people walking around who are adults, you know, they're stiff, they're sore as they get older, they work out, we work with uh athletes of all levels, there's that element of inflammation. Maybe they have some chronic disease, diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune disease. Inflammation is paramount. We understand that and BPC I've, you know, observed with so many patients, we're talking thousands upon thousands of patients where their inflammation comes down. So they feel better. They're not as stiff. They're not a store. Their knee doesn't hurt as much. Their shoulders improved. So, we've learned, you know, that we start with a dose, you know, based upon these, like you said, animal studies, um, which is conservative, make sure it's safe, and then we've seen over time that we can get to higher and higher dosages and have even more of an impact, you know, and I think so for people understanding using BPC, we started with a dose of like 500 micrograms a day. We got up to 5, 000 micrograms a day, you know, u, and we'd like a protocol 5 days on, 2 days off. And that's been very helpful for a variety of things from
helpful for a variety of things from postviral you know with the pandemic had a lot of success with BPC to again you name it honestly almost everyone I could think of particularly as people are engaging more fitness related lives they're working out more I would argue that anyone who's working out on a regular basis BPC is going to benefit you know improve the inflammatory status but also help with recovery and it doesn't seem to be one of these agents that's going to be detrimental Like we've we were talking earlier, Rob and I for the starter like you know they found that people are working out hard taking antioxidants that there seems to be a negative consequence to that because you don't allow the body to kind of repair itself. I don't think that's happening with BPC. That's interesting because my understanding is also that um part of the specific and general adaptation of exercise is triggered by inflammation. This is why indeed it is true that doing ice bath or really cold water immersion, cold shower seems fine, but cold water immersion in the, you know, 4 to 8 hours after resistance training can limit some of the hypertrophy and strength gains from resistance training because what you're inducing when you actually go into the gym is the that leads to the hypertrophy and strength training is an inflammation response that triggers the compensation, right? Or um or the hypercompensation. So, um, it's interesting. You're saying that BPC, by the way, I must say this because then, uh, forgive the editorial, but that is not to say that cold plunges and cold immersion is bad. It's just in the hours following resistance training
hours following resistance training specifically for hypertrophy and strength training. If those are your goals, probably best to do it outside of that window. Other times has some tremendous benefits. Be safe, but there. Okay, back to the topic at hand. forgive me, but this can set it can set off a complicated um storm of sorts if if I'm not ultra clear about the details. Um BPC57 strongly anti-inflammatory. Yes. My understanding is it also may upregulate growth hormone receptors. It does, right? And so it works well if you're, you know, we'll get into taking a growth hormone releasing peptide. It pairs very well with that because then you're working both sides of the equation. Meaning if you're using a growth hormone releasing peptide like semurin orin GHP6 whatever you're helping your pituitary put out more growth hormone well if you combine it with BPC which upregulates the growth hormone receptor you make the process of growth hormone binding more efficient so you get more out of it then you can use less of the growth hormone releasing peptide with the same result. Got it. Yeah. BPC-157 um comes in many different forms or it used to when it was allow when it was FDA uh not disallowed. Um sure. So I could imagine how the oral forms would allow for a just general um anti-inflammatory response. It's a gut peptide. So we don't have to worry about it being destroyed by the gut. Most peptides that go into the gut are broken down and so but this peptide when it's naturally occurring occurs in the gut. So it survives in the gut. So if somebody is taking BPC 157 orally
somebody is taking BPC 157 orally through a capsule or tablet form, right, um my guess is that has a general anti-inflammation response. I think it can. What we've observed is it's more limited to the gut. So people with any sort of you know gastrointestinal issue, whether that's inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn's or ulcerative colitis, you know, irritable bowel, you name it, leaky gut, I think oral BPC is more effective there. Has it been shown to be effective for those conditions or have you observed that clinically? I've certainly observed that clinically, but interestingly, I've observed a better clinical response when people inject it even for gastrointestinal related things. So, I think injecting and then so people injecting subcq, which is right under the skin, we use the tiniest of needles like an insulin needle, 30 or 31 gauge. We're talking super small. Um, and so I know a lot of people like, I'm never injecting that is less painful than a um than a Texas mosquito bite. There you go. super easy. Once you do it once or twice, it's really easy. And we we walk people how to do that. But interestingly, I we started thinking, okay, if you've got something going on in your gut, you should take oral PPC because it's going to target it right then. And I found, no, if we're injecting, it actually works better than the oral. And uh and then they came up, well, what if I've got an elbow injury? Should I inject it in my elbow? And we found actually don't. It's going to work systemically. You can inject it in your abdomen or your rear end. You're still going to get benefit in your elbow, but now you're going to get benefit in all your joints, all over your body systemically. How do you think that's working? And my understanding is BPC-157 can initiate fibroblast migration. Some of the cells that make up the the various connective tissues that um when
various connective tissues that um when injured or sore, other things can make us injured or sore of course, but when injured or sore that they those need repair. Yeah. Um, so it always was um perplexing to me why one could put BPC57 in such a small volume under the skin, you know, just a few uh centimeters off the belly button and it would somehow um seek out the the injury site in an elbow or an Achilles. And there all these wild anecdotal tales of you know lore of let's just say uh there was this Olympic athlete not this last Olympics but the previous summer Olympics that had a torn Achilles who came back a few weeks later and everyone was and meddled. People were talking about you know took podium um uh that is and people were talking about BPC57. there was kind of this, you know, and who knows, that's just uh chatter and fog as they say, but um kind of wild the idea that you could just inject something systemically, put it into the systemic circulation into the bloodstream, and it would fret it out the location in which the injury took place and initiate a recovery response. But we've seen it with, not to get off topic, we've seen it with with stem cells. So, they've taken stem cells, they've tagged them radiographically so you can see them. Um, in the study I read, which I can find for you, someone had a wrist, broken wrist, and they gave them intravenous stem cells, and 24 hours later when they visualized radiographically, those stem cells had aggregated at the site of the fracture.
aggregated at the site of the fracture. So there's a lot, you know, about our bodies. Obviously, we don't know. Sure. There's a kind of innate human like design and intelligence, which I believe in. Um, I see it because we've we've done a lot of IV therapy over the years and you you know it's interesting when you give some something introvenously, you're getting in the bloodstream and you can feel some of these different compounds. We're just talking about vitamins working within seconds and it shows you how quickly things circulate. People don't understand like how quickly we move our circulation. It's massively fast. If one has ever gone into the hospital for a surgery and and got a a cold saline infusion, you realize how quickly it hits your your toes. You know, they're putting it in at your elbow almost instantaneous. Yeah. Within a few seconds. It also u makes one appreciate how we're all generally a little bit dehydrated. When you start getting a real proper saline infusion, all of a sudden you feel yourself come to life in a way that, oh, this is what it feels like to have just the right amount of salt in my bloodstream. Exactly. So going back to BPC, where I think it shines is in these ligaments and tendons, right? I think this is where most of these injuries happen is where muscle is connecting to the bone. Um, you know, and there's, you know, people, you know, grow their muscle, but we don't stretch the tendons and ligaments well. And that's where we get pull sometimes strain and sprain and tearing. And I think that's where BPC shine. That's certainly where it's been studied in animal studies. And I know that because we can inject it directly into tendons, which is unlike steroids. We would never inject steroids into a tendon. you damage the tendon. BPC we
tendon. you damage the tendon. BPC we mix with things like PRP, PRF, which is platelet rich fiber and a little bit different than PRP and you'll get healing within days. Like it's awesome. Wow. Super safe. Uh and it's amazing for people. BPC is definitely shorthand for BBC 157 that is is certainly in widespread use. I have been concerned just personally about um gray market sources that um contain contaminants and the fact that um many people are obtaining BPC57 not from a physician, not from a compounded pharmacy, but just kind of on quote unquote on the internet. Sure. Uh you're a physician. Um I'm guessing that until the recent ban by the FDA, you were able to prescribe clean BPC as it were. What's the story with BPC now? And maybe we could talk about gray market versus um I think it's a great question, you know, versus prescribed and made it a compounding pharmacy versus uh pharmaceutical company uh pharmaceuticals. So um and then of course there's black market, but let's just leave that out. Um you know, there are people that are going to tell, you know, tell you, hey, this is BPC and sell it to you. That's obviously bad and dangerous. Well, we see that with anabolic steroids, right? Like so anabolic steroids are on the black market. You can't really I mean there's one anabolic steroid which is nandrallone which is deca which can be officially prescribed. We use it you can combine it with testosterone all on the up and up totally above table. The rest things like trenolone others you you can't get them from a physician in fact
can't get them from a physician in fact you very hard to get them from a reputable website in the United States. So as long as we're we're here my understanding is decadorin and uh testosterone cypionate are can be prescribed or testosterone and nanthate things like that by by physicians that's correct that's that's because it's been FDA approved for the treatment of various things hypocinatal syndromes uh testosterone replacement therapy in both men and women correct etc so th those categories of testosterone um like compounds right um cypate and anth etc and decadoroblin which is basically Like is it similar to DHT? Is it uh a little bit? Yeah. I mean it's uh the generic name is Nanderlone. Yeah. I mean it has the flavor of helping with joints. I think uh it works synergistically with things like testosterone different you know whether it's testosterone senate um and and I like it for people who particularly people who've been on testosterone men who've been on testosterone replacement for a long time which is many men. um they tend to get less out of testosterone becomes less potent. Like anything, right? If you use something for a long time, you're going to get less out of it over time. Anything you expose yourself to continually doesn't work as well. Um and so, you know, like to to make this really real, I had a patient who was a uh in the uh Marines and served at Secret Service for several uh White Houses and he had a lot of, you know, osteoporosis, osteopenia, you know, bone loss. And you know this is where I learned about using
know this is where I learned about using something like Nanderlone because we combined nandelone with testosterone. It changed his life. You know this guy in his 80s who was how to use a cane who came back to life who started you know becoming super mobile and working out again and synergistically I think it works really well. Not to get too far off topic but no it's interesting and I think uh another sort of brief editorial for me if I may. Um you mentioned this patient was in their 80s. I think nowadays, unfortunately, a lot of younger males in particular, guys in their gosh, even teens, but 20s and 30s, even early 40s, think that they need to look to um synthetic testosterones in order to uh look a certain way, um perform a certain way um in the gym, libido, etc. And I I'll go on record again and again saying that it's absolutely not necessary for most people of those ages provided that they um are taking good care to sleep well, eat well, take care. Now, but I I realize that there are a growing number of use cases where people for whatever reason aren't able to recover from exercise, they're struggling. This is a little bit like the OMPIC conversation, right? Where that there are things that can help move the needle in the right direction, pun intended. Um, but here with testosterones, synthe synthetic testosterones and deca, there's a real concern about loss of fertility. Totally right. I I think it brings up a larger point, which is, and obviously I'm biased, but I think it's super helpful for people to have a physician help them in this course, particularly with
in this course, particularly with testosterone. It is just known that people get it from their trainers, their bros from the gym, right, who are saying, "Oh, you got to use this." I mean, I have so many patients who are started using testosterone in their late teens, early 20s. Goodness. Yeah, that's I mean not goodness meaning badness. That does not seem like a good idea. Still very common. Like still very common. And you know, one in particular, this is probably 10 years ago, came to see me. He's 25. He got married. And to your point, he said, "I'm ready to have kids. I have zero sperm left." Right. And that's a real thing. And so he had been using and I would say abusing both testosterone and growth hormone for years now. What he told me was, and I get it, he was Superman. He could wake up, do a hard workout, you know, crush it, wake up the next morning, was not sore, crush it again, and just kept going, He was super fit, super happy in that regard, and how he looked, how he felt, how he performed. But then he got to a point where he's a little bit wiser, mature, and he was like, "Oh my goodness, now there's a repercussion for this." And I've seen that time and time again. And the repercussion is big. You're not making any sperm or the sperm quality is super poor. Now, what do you do? Well, now you got to come off testosterone. kind of rebuild your system which we can do you know we can use things like clomophene and clomophene hCG lots of different agents to help in that regard even certain peptides but I think it brings up the large point even getting into peptides which is having a physician who's knowledgeable to me is super helpful the challenge for people is they don't know where to get the right information right and they're getting it from websites they're getting it from people saying oh just try this peptide
people saying oh just try this peptide and I've had lots of people talking about the you know websites or whatever not to name any names who have had anaphylactic reactions to research type peptides which are not for human consumption. And I'm not saying that there's bad companies or whatever. You just got to be careful. You got to be selective at least, right? Well, what brought us on to the uh conversation about testosterone was this black market issue. There's also what I would call this um dark dark gray market issue, which is that there are a number of companies that will sell all sorts of things, but peptides in particular. Sure. And listed on their website, it'll say not for human or animal consumption for research purposes only. Right. And one of the major issues is that the um potency and cleanliness so to speak of uh purity yes of those um compounds is not established. Right. Um and many of them have LPS, lipid polysaccharide in them, which is inflammatory. And earlier before we started recording, you mentioned um that you have heard of or interacted with not your patients, but people who have come to you saying that they had like really serious life-threatening um consequences for using these black market certainly, but um dark gray market uh peptides. Yeah. And so to to tell the story story further is back in October of 2023, the FDA uh put many peptides BPC and we can name them out on what's called a category 2 list, meaning they are no longer allowed to be compounded. Right now that excludes then research
now that excludes then research companies who are not under the purview of the FDA. But these compoundingies, it's been a huge blow because they've been told they cannot use these agents. And the compoundingies are distinct from these other um black and dark gray um sources um in that they actually can establish purity. They are designed to be injected into humans and they have a totally different standard, right? So they and I think it's confusing for people when they hear compounding pharmacy. They thought fringe. They're not fringe. They're FDA regulated. They're board of pharmacy regulated in every state. They are monitored. They are inspected all the time. I've worked with compoundingies my whole career which is going on you know close to 25 years now just like anything there's some amazing compoundingies and there's some not so amazing compoundingies which cut corners the ones we work with don't cut any corners and I know that cuz they're inspected all the time right and it's a big deal to them and they want to do it right with purity with processing and making sure that anything they make especially a sterile compound which is going to be anything injected you know eye drops things you inject in yourself whether it's IV subcqure are intramuscular. They are considered sterile. Um they have to then be tested by an outside lab to make sure purity, make sure that there's no endotoxins, things like that. It's it's highly regulated and it's a big deal for them and it's a big deal for the physicians who, you know, prescribe with them, which I appreciate because the advantage of a compounding pharmacy is we can tweak the dosage. We don't have to use a standard set dosage. we can combine things synergistically to get you know 1
things synergistically to get you know 1 plus 1 doesn't equal two now it equals four and that to me is a huge advantage just like we were talking about with the GLP1 semiglutide and tepides we get those compounded so that you know we have a a the compounding pharmacy we're using now we're making a unique combination of tzepide and semlanin right which will address some of this muscle loss that people are getting so we can combine to stimulate growth hormone release offset some of the muscle loss from exactly to reposide. Yeah. And and so you can do things like that with a compounding pharmacy. But again, just to make sure people understand, compoundingies are highly regulated. Um again, there's always going to be bad apples. But uh you know, physicians who know how to work with compoundingies, I think provide access to things that these conventional both pharmaceuticals and conventionalies can't. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. AG1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs and it tastes great. Now, I've been drinking AG1 since 2012 and I started doing that at a time when my budget for supplements was really limited. In fact, I only had enough money back then to purchase one supplement. And I'm so glad that I made that supplement AG1. The reason for that is even though I strive to eat most of my foods from whole foods and minimally processed foods, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits, vegetables, vitamins, and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone. And I
and adaptogens from food alone. And I need to do that in order to ensure that I have enough energy throughout the day, I sleep well at night, and keep my immune system strong. But when I take AG1 daily, I find that all aspects of my health, my physical health, my mental health, and my performance, both cognitive and physical, are better. I know that because I've had lapses when I didn't take AG1 and I certainly felt the difference. I also noticed, and this makes perfect sense given the relationship between the gut microbiome and the brain, that when I regularly take AG1, which for me means a serving in the morning or midm morning and again later in the afternoon or evening, that I have more mental clarity and more mental energy. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1. com / huberman to claim a special offer. Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, that's drinkagg. com / huberman to claim that special offer. So, is it fair to say that if one is interested in exploring the use of peptides for what you refer to as performance medicine? Y um mental, physical health, and performance. Yes. um falls underneath that to essentially only put peptides into their body um maybe even on their body surface that they're obtaining from a physician who's obtained the peptides from a compounding pharmacy. Yeah. A and who's developing a relationship. So we for any peptide that we use, we meet with the patient. We make sure they're a good fit. We make sure that there's no contraindications. We also can recommend and specifically dial it up or down. whatever it is, come
dial it up or down. whatever it is, come up with this is what we think you should use based upon your life experience, the medicines you're taking or not taking, the conditions you're treating or not treating. Right? I think that's really important. Again, I'm biased being a physician. My whole goal is to get to know patients. That's why I'm here is to kind of walk that walk and help people in that regard. And, you know, if someone's out there on the internet doing it themselves, they're they're walking in, you know, kind of, you know, on their own. And so, you know, not to make it like everything bad is going to happen, but when you're when you have the help of someone who has experience, that goes a long way, I think, particularly with something like this. Yeah, I agree. And um and it worries me very much that people are buying PPC from um gray mark gray market or uh uh black market sources. I mean, anything that says on it not for animal or human use for research purposes only, you can pretty much guarantee the endotoxin, the lipopolysaccharide at least has not been removed. And that could be really problematic, especially since my understanding is that that can be cumulative over time. It's not that one injection causes somebody to go into aniflactic shock. It's that some of this LPS can build up an inflammatory response over time and then you don't know where the tipping point is and then somebody can have a really terrible reaction. Well, and then taking a step further, you know, getting away from just peptides, but I remember this was, I don't know, 15 years ago, someone was taking advice from a very famous doctor on TV about taking an oral compound to lose weight. And they called me up and they said, "I'm having terrible headaches, terrible headaches for days."
headaches, terrible headaches for days." They came in, their blood pressure was through the roof, you know, like I don't remember the specific numbers, but let's just say 220 over 140. You know, normally it's 120 over 80. Well, did you take anything different? Oh, yeah. this doctor recommended I take this weight loss compound. Right? So, the problem is people have access to all this information, but if they're not under the guidance of a doctor to help clean up the mess and we clean up the mess and not that there's always mess, but this is what we enjoy doing, you know, is as a physician, like we've seen the darkest of dark, you know, we're able to help people when things don't go perfectly planned. And uh I think that's a big deal, you know, particularly when there's lots of these tools and they're exciting tools and they're great tools and um fortunately for me, I've been in this space longer than most that I've just, you know, built up a large repertoire of experience of observing people and working with people and seeing we got to tweak this, we got to nuance this or sometimes we don't ever want to use this again. You know, this is not for most people. So given that BPC57 has been effectively removed from the um legitimate market, uh what are people's alternatives again uh working with the the uh caveat that um people should work with a physician? Yeah. Um where can physicians get something similar enough to BPC57? So there's a new compound newer uh peptide called uh the short for PDA penta arginate. It's basically the same molecular structure
basically the same molecular structure as BPC except they've swapped out an acetate for arginate one amino acid substitution. Um and so we're using that and having really good results. Um, I'm certainly it's early in the game of using PDA, but it seems very close to BPC in the clinical responses we're getting from our patients who are reporting back decrease in inflammation, all these wonderful things that we used to see with BPC. So, and I think uh I surmise that this is going how it's going to be with all of these peptides, right? Because again, peptides are just chains of amino acids. You know certainly a lot of people smarter than me trying to figure out how do we then create other types of amino acid combinations you know i. e. peptides that do similar actions to BPC to thyus and alpha to epimearon to TB500 on and on. So I'm hopeful in that regard. Um and I also you know some of my patients work at the very highest level of the US government. they are well aware of this and who have assured me they're going to look at this that this is serious you know because they're they've been using peptides and they're concerned that oh my goodness the FDA came in and changed the game very it's been a huge setback for all of us I definitely want to circle back as to what the motivation was by the FDA for doing that um at some point I think um in the meantime however I think um there's a lot of interest in BPC57 a lot of use of BPC5 57. The sources of BPC57
of use of BPC5 57. The sources of BPC57 are now drying up. Y and that's why I'm personally concerned that people are going to start going to the dark gray market and black market. I'm excited about the uh pentadca arginate. Yes. Um so let's put that on people's um ear map um ring map. Pentadca arginate may be a good uh physician prescribed substitution for people that can benefit from BPC57. and a good starting dose. So to make it really clear for people and helpful 250 micrograms to 500 micrograms. We're using 500 micrograms injected daily. Again, we like Monday through Friday. Take the weekends off. That's a good dosing schedule. We'll we'll see how that goes. We probably can use larger dosages. That's conservative. Um but that's a good starting point for people. And thus far, you haven't mentioned any side effects of BPC57 or Pentadca arginate. It's that's kind of remarkable. It's been tremendous. Yeah. And we were using BPC introvenously as well. You know, patients would come in and you know, oh, tweaked my knee, tore my ACL, tore my, you know, meniscus, whatever. Um, you can give them BPCs essentially as a bolus introvenously. My goodness, that made a difference. Now, that using something introvenously from the pharmaccoinetic standpoint, it's not going to last in the system very much. It's more of a spark. Whereas if you use an agent subcutaneously, you're going to get more of a longlasting, you know, again, not terribly long-lasting with peptides, but longer than using something introvenously. Kind of the sweet spot was certainly using both. You could use something as a spark to initiate that anti-inflammatory cascade,
initiate that anti-inflammatory cascade, then follow up with a subcutaneous dose. Yeah. And even though earlier we were talking a little bit about um some hormone replacement therapies um before that off microphone um you mentioned that you prefer peptides to direct hormone manipulations in most cases. So I think um while peptides can be hormones there are things like uh um uh oxytocin is sometimes called a peptide hormone. Um, in general, when people think about hormone therapies, they're thinking testosterone, estrogen, pregnnolone, uh, you know, thyroid, etc. It it sounds to me like much of your practice is built up around the the notion that there are things that one can use, peptides, to kind of um, push and pull on these various systems without getting into them directly. My understanding is the advantage of that is you don't get the negative feedback. You don't gain the shutting down of natural production. Yeah. You know, and testosterone is a great example. Um because like we were saying, I don't ever want to manipulate hormones. You know, growth hormone is another example. I don't ever want to manipulate that. Meaning, you know, providing it to people and more than they would get in nature. This is why I actually don't a little bit off topic like when people use testosterone pellets or any sort of pellet therapy because you're exposing people to a concentration of hormones we would never ever see in nature. I would prefer people inject it where you're going to get some variation in dose on a day-to - day basis, which we're humans, so we do get some day-to - day variation or topically or under the tongue or something. Um, peptides, same thing. I
something. Um, peptides, same thing. I don't want to manipulate the hormones, right? I want to just stick within kind of the the highways or the lanes, swim lanes for how they should operate and and then take advantage of that. And that's been a safe way to do it as opposed to and I've seen it you know talking about another peptide which isin a growth hormone releasing peptide uh you inject under the skin travels up to the pituitary the posterior pituitary in the brain which is responsible for putting out growth hormone. And that growth hormone then leaves the pituitary, enters the bloodstream, travels to the liver or we make insulin like growth factor 1 which then enters the circulation is very anabolic meaning growth healing mending you know as we get older we make less growth hormone. as we get older we wear down obviously we get you know degenerative conditions part of that uh I don't know what part of for everyone's a little bit different is because of our hormonal decline and so when you can give something likein and we can talk about others you're actually helping not only push out a little bit of growth hormone for people you're directing when you push it out right we we think it's why it's important for people to be asleep by 10 p. m. between 10 p. m. and 2 a. m. Do you think that's the largest pulse of growth hormone during the 24-hour period? Is that right? So, I've um long wondered whether or not the um the tale I was told when I was growing up, which is that every hour before midnight is worth 2 hours of sleep post midnight. Um that feels true to me. Um then again, feels true is is often misleading, but feels true to me. Um but it makes perfect
true to me. Um but it makes perfect sense if the the largest pulse and growth hormone is occurring in the couple of hours before midnight. Yeah. I mean that's that's how I learned it. Um I agree with you. It feels true to me as well. Um but taking advantage then of you know injecting something like at bedtime then you're going to you know within a few minutes and within it's interesting because people will get a little flushing tingling at times. Um and what I've seen with the point I'm making is uh there are some physicians and somearmacies which you know the the dosage of it and most of these growth home releasing peptides should be 100 micrograms. That's the max dose uh for to bind the receptor and you know what I've seen is within rare but some people do get anaphilaxis and it's happened and I think that happens when people are pushing it and giving more than they should and I've heard of that they're giving 200 300 400 micrograms at a time which is a big dose now what they're getting is the client the patient is like oh my gosh I feel this amazing flushing it must be working but then you could spiral into oh my goodness I don't feel so good in your, you know, circulation system collapsing. So, yeah, using side effects as a uh indicator of whether or not something's working just seems like a terrible idea. But, um, but it's very common. You know, um, I tend to be very conservative about these things. And by the way, um, I've tried various peptides for short periods of time because I like to experiment um, very safely. Um, and some things like serarellin, we'll talk about other growth hormone secrets. Uh for me uh for
growth hormone secrets. Uh for me uh for whatever reason you know gave me great sleep but only in the first part of the night. It nuked my rapid eye movement sleep in the second half of the night. It um spiked my prostate specific antigen. It was a very consistent effect. I came off it and it went back down and it went back on it went back up and so I just found I couldn't take it and it didn't take me very long to figure that out. But I know that there are some people who love Serellin and don't see any of the same issues. So it seems like it can be very individual. I agree with that and that's why I think it's again helpful to work with a physician who has experience who can kind of you know I think of these peptides as having flavors particularly the growth hormone releasing peptides if very clean you know as long as you stay within 100 micrograms or less people are going to lean out a little bit sleep a little bit better there's no real side effects you take it pre-leep pre-leep at bedtime without carbohydrates ingested in the previous two hours correct yeah or 45 minutes technically yeah but that's right and then they're saying like growth hormone release peptide 6 GHRP6 which is also going to bind. So I think of being the most specific for the growth hormone receptor but the weakest. So when you inject it you will get growth hormone to come out and only growth hormone but it's not going to be a big burst of growth hormone. You inject GHRP6 now you may bind some prolactin. Now you may bind some ACT which is going to have your adrenals put out cortisol. Now you're going to get a hunger response right and maybe even have trouble sleeping if you're getting you may have trouble sleeping. But where is that where that's beneficial for is if you're looking to put on mass or get strong, GHRP6 is your go-to, right?
strong, GHRP6 is your go-to, right? Because you will increase your appetite. And if you're smart, you'll eat a lot more protein. You know, and and the building of muscle is not necessarily complicated, right? It's resistance training, sufficient protein, which is where I think most people fall off, and then having some anabolic kind of hormone in the background like growth hormone or testosterone or both helps that process. That's where GHP6 can shine. And I mean within weeks people will get big and strong, increase their bench press, whatever stuff flat out works, but you got to know how to use it and and understand the flavor. So the point I'm making is these different peptides have different flavors. And to your point, there's individual responses. That's that can be a good thing. I think for most of our audience, um the interest in growth hormone secrets probably relates to the better sleep and the overall feelings of vitality. And probably uh most people are seeking to not spike their appetite or put on muscle really. These days we're hearing uh more and more from people both men and women who want to be strong without being big and they prefer to be lean as opposed to not lean which I think is a great goal. Uh frankly that's my goal at this stage of life. I just turned 49 yesterday and I really Oh thank you. Yeah. Thanks for coming out to the the birthday uh mini bash the other day. It was a lot of fun. Um, you know, I I yeah, I want to be strong and capable. I also want to be able to run and have cardiovascular fitness, but I don't want to be large. I don't want to take up a lot of space. I'm not interested in taking up a lot of space. Um, and I think most people fall into that category. So, if GHRP6 can
into that category. So, if GHRP6 can spike appetite, which for a subset of people might be useful, um, but probably most people will want to avoid it. I've always been calling it, but at 100 micrograms um dosage or less per night sounds like it's an interesting tool. What are some of the other growth hormone secrets? And I should just brief I'll I'll take the liberty of define these are peptides that stimulate the release of your own indogenous growth hormone. This is not taking growth hormone, right? Yeah. Um two other main ones that we use. One would be tessamellin um which is similar to semurellin and that it also is going to work on the growth hormone releasing hormone aspect a little bit higher up in the you know chain of how these hormones are released. So both semarin and tessimrone um you you don't necessarily need to add anything else to it. Classically with epipamone, hexone, GHRP6, we would add this other compound CJC1295 which is going to work on the GHR which allows the peptide and then the growth hormone to stay in your system a little bit longer. The growth hormone releasing hormone. Correct. Y but we can almost set aside CJC now because CJC1295 the FDA just came in and uh one let's just say one acronym took out another. There you go. The FDA took out CJC. Okay. And BPC. Um people are probably getting a little dizzy with these acronyms but I think we're uh doing a good job of guiding people uh uh along. So smearellin
along. So smearellin um and tessamellin are similar enough similar in that regard. Tessamellin again talking about flavors. Tessamel works on visceral fat reduction. So fat around the organs and it's been FDA approved for that purpose. Yeah. with HIV patients having this lipodistrophe which is you know abnormal accumulation of fat in particular visceral fat around organs. So testom works well for that. My observation from using it for with lots and lots of people seems to work better in females than males or does it get lead to this um feeling of enhanced sleep as well? Yeah. So I think any of the growth hormone releasing peptides anytime you're going to make growth hormone more active in your world. That's how I think about it. Better sleep, better skin tone, texture, right? you're more resilient. I think growth hormone is a resiliency hormone. Durability. You know, people find that, oh, I do a hard workout, but it takes me days to recover. I sprain my ankle, it takes me a week to recover. I cut my skin, takes me forever to heal. They've got a durability issue. And that's how I think about where growth hormone can shine. Not that you got to go all the way to growth hormone, but these peptides can be a really nice push. And this is taken before sleep, no food within 45 minutes of the injection. And then what and then the kind of the magic and what we do is you know when we first started about eight years ago we'd use one peptide at a time and then what we learned is let's combine these peptides let's stack peptides and that's how we do it at lower dosages sometimes lower dosages um but for example we had a great combination BPCON and teslanin all together um taken at bedtime and you're
together um taken at bedtime and you're going to get subcutaneous fat reduction from the epimerone visceral fat reduction from the testoon upregul regulation of the growth hormone receptor from the BPC. It was a wonderful peptide. We we kind of labeled it as a fat loss peptide, but people would put on lean muscle mass. They'd sleep better, their skin would be better, they'd be more durable, their thought process would be better. Awesome stuff. And and that's where I think that's where we enjoy it is stacking these peptides together. So, it's not again just one peptide at a time, but able to do it. And that's why again working with a compounding pharmacy, we can put these together. So, you're only doing one shot a day. You may be doing three to seven peptides, but it's still one shot. Got it. And um if one is combining tesarelin or serarellin uh epipamellin and well not BPC anymore but pentadca arginate instead because you can't get BPC57 compounded. Um is that done every night 5 days a week three days a week? What's the rationale of this 5 days on two days off? Five days on two days off I came up with because of how we would dose growth hormone. So the traditional growth hormone dosing cycle would be 5 days on two days off taken at bedtime. Yeah. And that's where it came up. And then I I personally with patients and myself, I like to take breaks. So even with supplements, I won't take them on the weekends, right? Because I think you we you know, again, anything you expose yourself to on a regular basis is going to decrease the potency. We see that with exercise. We see that with food. If you're eating the same food every day, it seems to become
same food every day, it seems to become less valuable for you, right? Like change it up. like we we have to, you know, throw on the crazy switch every now and then, but change it up. And so then you're going to make it more potent for you. I do the same thing with supplements. So that, you know, just resonates with me with people to take a break from stuff. I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood, urine, and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had too high levels of mercury in my blood. This was totally surprising to me. I had no idea prior to taking the test. function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor-in - formed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption because I had been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with knack and acetylcyine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification, and worked to reduce my mercury levels. Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health. And while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly
years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive. I've been so impressed by function, both at the level of ease of use, that is getting the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, go to functionhealth. com / huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250, 000 people, but they're offering early access to Hubberman Lab listeners. Again, that's functionalth. com / huberman to get early access to function. Today's episode is also brought to us by EightLe. Eightle makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night. That's truly the foundation of all mental health, physical health, and performance. And one of the best ways to ensure that you get a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3 °. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase about 1 to 3 °. Eight makes it incredibly easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment by allowing you to control the temperature of your mattress cover at the beginning, middle, and end of the night. I've been sleeping on an eightle mattress cover for nearly four years now and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. Eightle has now launched their newest generation of the pod cover, the pod 4 ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and
fidelity sleep tracking technology, and even has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your air flow and stop your snoring. If you'd like to try an eightle mattress cover, go to eight. com / huberman to save up to $ 350 off their pod 4 ultra. Eightlee currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eight. com / huberman. Before we started recording, uh you mentioned that you're actually not a huge fan of taking massive amounts of supplements that you are a big fan of taking CoQ10, co-enzyme Q10, 200 milligrams per day in the morning. I also take CoQ10. Um I think I I started taking it for uh quote unquote general mitochondrial health. I don't know that I thought very carefully about exactly what I was trying to accomplish with it. Um but what what is the rationale of taking CoQ10? So if I can break it down, try to keep it simple. If we people are familiar with the mitochondria, it's the battery of the cell, these little organels inside each cell. Um and they are responsible for you know doing many things but primarily making ATP chemical energy. And so how do we make energy? Well, there's three main ways the body uses it, right? Or makes it. First is glycolysis. We take glucose, which is a sixcarbon molecule. We break it in half to make two pyuvates, right? That when we do that, we make a little bit of ATP. That pyuvate then is converted to something called acetal COA. We run that through the KB cycle where we're also making ATP, but we're then we're making these
ATP, but we're then we're making these intermediate products. It's one of those intermediate products and the main one is something called NADH. That NADH is then shuttled to the mitochondrial membrane for you know this is the magic where we make the most ATP and there's five different hubs or we call cytochromes right and this is how I think about it because I just like to simplify cytochrome one is where we use NAD and um what the different hubs are doing is we're exchanging electrons for protons and that's a kind of an electrical process. We're exchanging electrons for protons going down an assembly line to eventually turn this wheel the ATP wheel to make ATP. The way I understand it is the five different hubs. Different nutrients hit them. So cytochrome one is NAD, cytochrome 2 is riboplavin, vitamin B2 and suinic acid. Cytochrome 3 is CoQ10, vitamin K2. Cytochrome 4 is methylene blue which we can talk about. And then cytochrome 5 are things like magnesium, vitamin A, and copper. So if you're thinking about mitochondrial health, if you include any or better all of those, you're going to maximize how your mitochondria can work and make energy. It's the strongest way to do it. And it's again not necessarily complicated. So when I think of CoQ10 and again we use a lot of NAD, which we can talk about where I think most people the the traffic congestion happens on cytochrome 1, right? And so when we give people upregulate their NAD production, it's essentially we're allowing for more electron flow at cytochrome one which has a downstream effect on the other cytochromes. So the traffic jam opens up
cytochromes. So the traffic jam opens up and now you can move electrons to exchange for protons and make way more ATP. And if you're and but that's not true for everyone. And so some people it could be at cytochrome 3 with CoQ10. It could be at cytochrome 2. A lot of people at cytochrome 4 which is again cytochrome we call it cytochrome c oxidase which is where methylene blue binds. But that's just a simplistic view. We just people we run into traffic jams, right? These electron flow gets stuck. We're just trying to open up the traffic jam. So 200 milligrams a day of co-enzyme Q10 can be um can facilitate some of that right for sure. And CoQ10's been studied very safe up to 2400 milligrams a day. No harmful Yep. No harmful effects. Sometimes I'll take more. Like I was telling you earlier, it's been dramatic for me with migraine headaches and you basically reducing them to zero. You know, as people are hearing this, they're probably thinking, "Okay, well, these are just, you know, this is what I call anecdata or whatever. I I you know, I don't have to remind people that you're a board-certified physician." I think that what what's still ringing in the back of my mind this entire conversation, even though I'm paying very careful attention, is that most of the drugs that are prescribed in this country are off label. I think that just like I I don't think I've ever heard that stated out loud. Yeah. It's wild. Yeah. Right. So, the idea that people would take something that wasn't um shown in a uh clinical trial to be effective for purpose A um that they would but it gets that it gets approved for purpose A, but then can be prescribed by doctors for purpose B, C, D, or E. Right? I mean, you're not telling me this is common place. You're telling me this is the
place. You're telling me this is the majority of prescription drugs. But it makes sense if you think about it, right? So, if you took an antibiotic, right? like we can just an antibiotics can be very specific what it gets approved for in terms of like working against a specific bacteria but then through clinical use and just experience you know we learn that oh I can use doxycycline or a zpack of zithramyin or whatever it is for a variety of bacterial infections that extend well beyond just what it's approved for well that makes sense and and does that ever cycle back to the uh clinical trials or no this just becomes physician understanding and lower like hey yeah you know I've got patients that you know they get on on a zithroyasin and their their acne clears up by the way I'm not saying that folks I'm not a physician but um but for instance exactly what happened with semiglutinide nompic right approved for helping glucose utilization or lowering you know blood glucose in patients with type two diabetes and they found through use only people were losing weight and now it's become blockbuster and it's and we see it with you know things like you know repurposing drugs for cancer Right. There's a lot of that going on. A lot of the repurposing. So, you know, doxycycline is a very common one that's used in cancer therapies, I think, by sophisticated oncologists. I don't treat cancer, but by sophisticated oncologists to use things like doxycyc, metformin, mabendol, which is an antiarasitic drug, right? Um to help with cancer. That's amazing. So interesting. It is amazing. I think also um you know I'm I'm reminded that
um you know I'm I'm reminded that um you know medicine as beautiful a uh field as it is I have tremendous respect for it um of course uh is a field of of fairly siloed training um and I love the idea that now thanks to public education efforts like this one um that you're providing us that physicians learn from each other in a much broader way and can potentially hear about what drugs can be useful for this or that. The other thing um and this is not editorial. This is a real uh uh observation pharmaceutical companies are very interested in the other uses of already approved drugs. Sure. The research and development process for a drug, the safety uh evaluation is incredibly expensive. So they want nothing more than to take a drug that's already been approved for one purpose and to take that already safety approved drug and find other uses. How are they not circling back to the uh off label uh use and understanding of these compounds and um and then essentially marketing them for these other purposes or I guess with Ompic that's exactly what happened. That's what happened with Ompic. I mean it's again I I write prescriptions. I'm I think there's a time and place. I think it's challenging for me though, right? And I think for a lot of physicians, it's become challenging operating in a paradigm um where we talk about chronic disease which is essentially failing. I mean, and we all know this statistically,
and we all know this statistically, we're not making huge dents in heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disease, neurodeenery. We're not at all, but we're spending exorbitant amounts of money, right? Um and this is, you know, something that I had to learn over time. And and I don't know how I got into it, but when I started my practice back in 2006, I started it was a traditional family medicine practice, but I started using these nutritional IVs. And this is before hangover IVs. This is before it was popular. This is, you know, 20 years ago. And what I learned was that these nutritional IVs help people feel better quickly. And I developed this model for my patients, which I think is a better model, which is I want to help people feel better first, like we were talking about earlier in this podcast. Because if I can get people to feel better, what what we learned through co and honestly what I want to say to you, Andrew, which is really true, your podcast and what you do has been so successful at a time during the pandemic when people lost so much trust in people like me, right? People lost that trust of what do I do? You know, my this is a scary time. I don't know what's going on. and you guys come along, you in particular providing this very stable vetted information that people can trust and have a starting point be like this is what I want to do because health one of the gifts of co was it put our health on the forefront of most people's mind and life and and so what you're doing is tremendous work and I can tell you personally no literally like as a physician I am just
literally like as a physician I am just it's it's such an honor to be here and to to talk to you because Every day, every day my patients come to me and said, "I heard this on the Hubberman Lab podcast. What do you think of it?" And and I am not joking. And I love that. I think it is awesome because people one taking their health seriously, but two, they have a stable resource that they can trust. The problem with physicians and and I'll tie this back in is physicians are hard to trust, right? And it's this paternalistic model which is and that's how I I was trained which is you know you're going to do this because I'm going to tell you to do it right and I remember being in medical school which was in the' 9s and I can't remember the exact specifics of the study but they would go they did a study where they collect collected the trash outside of physicians offices found that greater than 30% of prescriptions written that day were thrown away. Greater than 30%. Wow. And what and I remember learning that and I was like what is going on by the patients. Correct. Like you came to the doctor because you wanted a prescription, right? No, you came to the doctor because you weren't feeling good. You came to the doctor because you wanted to be listened to. You came to the doctor because you wanted to be validated. And most of the time, and this still happens to today, the vast majority of doctors will just write you a prescription or they'll write you two prescriptions. And that's not what most people want. Sometimes it is and I do it and sometimes it is but there are so
and sometimes it is but there are so many other tools that we can use and so when I help people feel better first what I why I've been successful and I work with you know the peak you know people on this planet whether the athletes the best athletes celebrities the royal family you name it I'm so privileged it's because they trust me and that trust is really important and I take that really seriously you know what I mean and So, you know, tying it back in is we've lost a lot of that with the pandemic. It's actually come to the forefront. And so, that's why I want to help people feel better first. You know, the traditional model of medicine, it's just get a diagnosis, write a prescription. If that prescription doesn't work, write another prescription. And so, yes, there there's a time and place for that, but there's also time and place for just helping people. It only works when people value themselves enough. Like we were talking, I can tie this back to weight loss, right? Why do people have such trouble losing weight? I would argue that most people don't value themselves enough to actually care enough to make the hard disciplinary choices in their life to get away from emotionally eating. You know what I mean? To do the right things that they actually it's going to be a struggle to get the right food for themselves, get away from processed foods, to be disciplined to go to the gym on a regular basis. They don't have the right people that they trust. This is where you've been such a gift. Tremendous gift. Well, thank you for the kind words. I mean the the um the birth of the podcast did take place during the pandemic and um in large part because I
pandemic and um in large part because I saw everybody getting very anxious their circadian rhythms disrupted and um those were focuses of my laboratory and and frankly when I was a posttock and graduate student but especially as I got a little older uh in my years um I couldn't believe that you know I was reading these papers about how important it morning sunlight is and all these things but then my colleagues were all getting sick and dying around me or getting what we call the tenur look where they show up, you know, start their job and 5 years later they look like they've aged 25 years. And I realized that I I wanted to avoid that. So, I've always just enjoyed learning and sharing uh science and health tools. And so, thank you for the the kind words. I've I've certainly um been um kind of both astonished and positively amazed in the ways that the pandemic and the post-pandemic years. I I like to think we're in the postpandemic years. I I think we can safely say that now. Um how they've drawn people's attention to this idea that they need to take agency into their own healthcare that that no one no pill, potion, injection, etc. can replace good behaviors. Um pills, potions, and injections uh can potentially augment those good behaviors um and get people going down the right path, which is what we're talking about today. But that it's a it's really a personal responsibility. I mean, no one can give us a calmer mind. No one can give us a healthier body. Um, no one can do that, right? You can It's interesting that some of the wealthiest people in the world, um, the new thing
people in the world, um, the new thing isn't for people to boast about their their yachts or their properties. It's about their health. It's about their vitality, their longevity. Because that's the thing that I suppose in some sense money can start to buy, but it doesn't require a ton of funds to take great care of one's one's body and mind. It doesn't. And and what I've learned and I've had to learn this over time and I think the wisdom is is and this is why it's it's e even more challenging because I think people, you know, go on social media and they listen to podcasts and they listen to influencers and and a lot of the messages is additive, right? If you're not doing a high-intensity workout every day and then doing sauna for x amount of time and then cold plunge and all this kind of dieting, you're not doing it well. I know that that is that that stress of that is cumulative to people, right? And so what I've learned and I have a really good friend, probably the most, you know, affluent, successful, but also the most generous and smartest person I know who lives on the big island. And he says to me, which is worth repeating here, I look for every opportunity to surrender. And it is that surrender to people who you can trust to guide you, right? So you don't have to be the quarterback of everything, right? And that takes off the pressure. And I think finding it's not always about adding. It's it's actually creating space for us to just be in that flow, right? Like is to be in like you and I know you've talked about this a lot, that kind of active rest place where it's not about being super focused. It's not about just going to sleep, but almost the best parts of our day is when we're in that flow state where things just click. And to me,
where things just click. And to me, helping people with those, you know, types of times and figuring that out is the most valuable. And and I don't think people talk about that enough. So I appreciate that you do a lot. Yeah. Well, and I appreciate that you're um bringing up this notion that, you know, just stacking more and more behaviors like you got to crush a workout and do sauna and that is not the message. You know, sometimes um we get teased and there's some good comedy uh takes on me um uh that make me chuckle now and again. Um about that, but that's not the the approach. These these are tools that people can can uh it's a buffet. Um and I think most everyone agrees that sleep is key. Um most everyone agrees that exercise is key, nutrition is key, a great social connection is key. When it comes to um because I want to make sure that we um circle back to this when it comes to the peptides, it seems that one of your approaches if I may is to kind of raise the tide so that the you know the boat can get you know get out get can get out to sea. And we were talking about these growth hormone secrets. covered um uh uh GH RP6 which is the one that stimulates appetite. That's probably going to be a niche uh case condition that people would want to use that test and simmerin. I get a lot of questions about is it MK677? What in the world is MK677? It sounds like a weapon. It does. It's Yeah, it's it's just I think of it just like GHRP6. However, it's it's absorbed well orally. So, it's basically the same. I see it working this very
same. I see it working this very similarly to G to GHRP6. So stimulates appetite. It does and stimulate cortisol prolactin. Sounds like a not good situation for most people. Not for most people although you know let me give you an example where is I have a client very successful guy and um he's been on testosterone. He's doing all the things right. He's in his early 60s. He's he's working out well. He's he eats well super well. All these things he can't put on muscle mass well, right. And and actually as people get older, that does become an issue for a lot of people is maintaining healthy muscle mass. MK677 before it was taken off uh the compound list by the FDA, it's another one that was included. Oh, another acronym taken out by the FDA. But you can take it orally, which again removes the stigma or burden of having to do a shot and you will increase your appetite and that actually is a very useful agent, you know, metabolically for people as they get older. Um, and I know this, you know, my kind of approach with this and both personally, professionally is I try everything I can. And I remember MK677 I took at bedtime and it was an hour later I was in a dead sleep and I woke up and I had to go eat. This it sounds like puberty. It was I was like, "What is going on?" Cuz I didn't totally understand. I was like, "What? Oh, I took that c Oh my gosh. I should never have taken it right before bed." And I had to go up and eat and destroyed my sleep that night. But I learned and I'll always learn and I'm grateful for it, but don't take that one at bedtime. Um, but it absolutely will stimulate
Um, but it absolutely will stimulate your appetite. Which are the growth hormone secrets that um your more typical patients who don't want to stimulate appetite? Um both male and female patients prefer what what are you compounding for them? I tamerin I I don't see any appetite stimulation from that. Hexarellin, we haven't talked about that. I don't really see Tell us about hexamel. Yeah, hexarin. Hexelin. Sure. Hexarellin I think of is more again if we talk about the flavor of these peptides is how I kind of look at it in my head is more of the energy endurance growth hormone releasing peptides. I like it for people to use it in the morning. They get a nice burst of energy. They feel it's a clean energy. It's not a caffeinated energy or jittery or anything like that. Um and it's good for more endurance type you know athletics or working out. So people in that you know field of competition or whatever. Um I think hexon is a great choice. Does not spike appetite. I have not seen that. So, this is taken first thing in the morning. You get an additional growth hormone release. Yes, you do. Yeah, you do uh in the early mornings when you're waking up and and you used to compound it with CJC1295 to get the other pathways involved that can help. But now CJC has been taken out, correct? By the FDA, right? But hexelone still exists that can be compounded. What's the dosage on hexone that you typically prescribe? 100 micrograms. It's the same as these other likelp uh 100 micrograms. the the two that are different would be tesson uh ideal dose is 2 milligs per dose um which is 2, 000 micrograms so quite different and then semlan has a actually
different and then semlan has a actually very broad dosing range anywhere from 200 micrograms uh I've used it up to 3, 000 micrograms depending on you know your goals we were talking about co-enzyme Q10 and the um KB cycle um and I forgot to close the hatch on supplements more broadly yeah Um, again, doesn't sound like you're a big fan of taking lots of pills and capsules. I think some people will take that as a relief. I think a lot of people get tired of taking a lot of pills. Some people don't like to do that. Um, what are some of the other things that um, you do take besides co-enzyme Q10? Um, earlier we're talking about methylated vitamins of different methylated B vitamins. Yeah, this is becoming increasingly popular. We're starting to hear more about methylation and methylated compounds. Um, could you educate us on methylated B vitamins? Yeah, and I think people are familiar with it. Um, you know, some people are talking on podcasts about the MTHFR snip. We've not talked about that on this podcast, so it' be nice. Sure. So a snip is a single nucleotide polymorphism, meaning that genetically things don't flow as easily. Again, that's an oversimplification. Um, and you know, you could be homozygous for that, meaning you have both genes making you, you know, influencing you more. You could be hetererozygous, meaning it's just one gene, meaning one copy from one parent or homozygous copy from each parent. Yeah, you say that way better than I do. Um, and so, um, what that means is where we see that reflected, homocyine is a marker we use, a lab
homocyine is a marker we use, a lab marker we use, it's an emerging marker for looking at one's cardiovascular risk profile. And so if one's got an elevated homocyine um and elevated by some labs it's going to be greater than seven by most labs greater than nine um means you're at an increased risk and what that is I don't remember but you're in increased risk of having a cardiovascular event which would mean a heart attack or stroke and so we want to lower that number and the best way to lower that number is taking ample methylated B vitamins. Methylated means you're adding a methyl group. Um so methyl B12, methyl folate, trimethyl glycine, methionine, these are all methylation donors which just metabolically and through your detoxification pathways in your liver is going to help you lower that homocyine. Um I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but that's most people if you're going to take a B vitamin, take a methylated B vitamin because then you overcome even you again I don't we've done a lot of MTHFR testing. I don't think it's as profound as some people make it out to be like it's going to change their life. I've never seen that. Can it help you? Sure. But you're gonna overcome it by taking sufficient methylated B vitamins anywhere. And again, those methylated B vitamins are methylated B12. folate, uh there's a methylated B6. There's uh and then trimethlycine. Um TMG is is a good compound. Methionine is a good methyl donor as an amino acid. Are these taken in the morning or in the afternoon? I like taking them in the morning. Although I think, you know, for people
Although I think, you know, for people to play around with, cuz I've certainly seen it, you know, people get that 300 p. m. kind of slumber. Um, as opposed to reaching for the coffee or the donut, take some more methylated B vitamins and see what happens. Or just the coffee. No, sorry. You're not supposed to drink caffeine in too late in the day. Lately, what I find, I don't know, this is wrong to bring up on this podcast, but I can't help myself. I love yerba mate in the morning and afternoon. Okay. Coffee in the morning now makes me feel nauseous. I don't know if I'm pregnant or something, but it makes me feel nauseous, but I love the taste of coffee in the afternoon. This is like a midlife thing. I don't know what it is. Um, so I now in the afternoon, like around 1 or 2 p. m., even just the smallest amount of coffee is like it's like the most delicious thing I've ever tasted. Yeah, I love coffee. Um, it can mess with your sleep too late in the day. But, um, that's a perfect segue to talk about sleep. Sure. Um because one thing that I know you've done a lot of work on and with are these peptides that can improve sleep. Not just by virtue of enhancing growth hormone release, but um you know, I'll just be very direct. I um for the last gosh, like four to six months, I've had the opportunity to try pineal. Mhm. Um and uh injectable pineal um combined with glycine. Yes. Um, goodness gracious in the positive sense of the goodness gracious. You're from the south, so I don't know where where people how the never before have I found something that can improve the amount of rapid eye
can improve the amount of rapid eye movement sleep that I get. Yeah. Besides rapid eye movement, sleep deprivation, you know, sleep deprivation, the next night you'll get a compensatory effect. That's not the way to increase your REM sleep, folks. You know, there are a lot of things like um high-intensity exercise that improve my slowwave deep sleep. um cold plunge early in the day improve slow deep sleep then been a few other things but with pineal I'm and by the way I'm not doing this every night I do this occasionally I ran a little experiment and I track my sleep using the sleep tracker that's in eight sleep um and it's doubling the amount of rapid eye movement sleep that I'm getting doubling which is so like from an hour to two hours or from an hour and 30 to like near nearly 3 hours you know even um I posted a picture of a sleep score with some rapid eye movement sleep. It's not something I typically do, but um even the uh the the most competitive of biohackers, uh Brian Johnson was like, "Oh, nice sleep score." You know, um now he touts a sleep score that's perfect every night for, you know, um for for every night, but um and I'm kind of poking at Brian because we like to poke back and forth. We're friendly with one another. Um so the point being that pinealin is a remarkable way to increase rapid eye movement sleep. I have very little knowledge about it except that I my understanding is that it might stimulate some um regeneration or stimulation of the pineales of the pineal. That's exactly it. You've nailed it. Yeah. I remember when you messaged me after starting it and you were like this is
starting it and you were like this is amazing. It's amazing. Yeah. You were saying it's amazing. I hope the FDA doesn't nuke it as a consequence of this conversation. I hope so too. No, but I mean your response is what we see with our other patients who are loving and I think that combination with glycine. I'm a big fan of glycine and injecting it seems to work really well. Um but back to your question about pinealon. Yeah, I mean it's a big one of the smallest peptides u but I think it's one of the most profound. We used to combine it with epitalin the the Russian peptide that was used for circadian rhythm and for my understanding um epital also um it's involved in DNA repair and might might has been explored in animal studies for um trying to offset vision loss and some retinal degenerative conditions. Yeah, again put on the do not compound list um with all the others. So that's gone. Um but pinealon stays and remains and yeah your response to it and experience with has been very common place from working with patients and seeing that it's I I think there's a sort of circadian rhythm aspect with it as well you know and helping with melatonin production obviously that comes from the pineal gland. Um I this is just I'm postulating. I think there's more to the pineal gland than we understand. Oh yeah. Um yeah it makes things other than melatonin that's for sure. Yeah. And I think it's kind of elusive, but I think there's something to it. And I say that having used a lot of pinealon with people over the years and having very similar responses. Um, which is awesome. Like everyone knows, like you said, when you sleep better, your entire day is
you sleep better, your entire day is better. When you sleep better, your life is better. Like exponentially better. I think of the millions of people that suffer from lack of rapid eye movement sleep. The lack of neuroplasticity that can be the consequence of that. The lack of um healthy removal of uh emotional labels on previous day memories that is the consequence of REM deprivation. The enormous um impact on depression rates, the enormous impact on pretty much every mental health issue is made worse by by lack of REM sleep. So I I say or I raise this conversation about pineal with um a little bit of trepidation because I do worry that on the one hand people will see it as a miracle drug. That's not what we're talking about. It has this effect. But at the same time I okay I'll just say that you know there's another drug that was released recently. Um uh this is a FDA approved drug um in the category of sleep drugs called the Doras. So it works a little differently. It doesn't um push on the sleepiness system so to speak. it um it suppresses the wakefulness system and the idea is that it's supposed to increase REM sleep. Okay. Was by name Quivic and things like that. Um I tried it. It was a total disaster for me. I fell asleep, woke up 3 hours later, couldn't fall back asleep. I tried it with lower dosage. It's extremely expensive as well. So I'm going to piss off whoever makes Civic. I forget who makes it. It was a complete disaster for me. Yeah. I'm um Pinealin has been incredible. And
I'm um Pinealin has been incredible. And here's what's really interesting about it to me is that it seems to improve my sleep on the nights when I don't take it, which makes total sense if it indeed is providing some regeneration of the pineal pineales that make melatonin and other sense to me. Yeah. So, here we're talking about something that one could potentially pulse with now and again and get improvement in sleep every night. Yes. Yeah. Wild. Yeah. And it's I mean I think it's worth noting that you you also take care of your health on many other aspects and that's probably why you were sensitive to it but it worked really well for you right and some other people it's going to take longer you know if if they're you know having to work on their diet and having to work on their exercise and having to work on their thought patterns right we don't talk about that enough having positive thoughts um but yeah it's been it's so safe we've never ever seen I mean I never ever have seen a side effect or negative side effect from pinealon It's and and your response has been uniform. You know, it people don't always get there as quickly, but people get there with their sleep. Love it. And so, and you compound it with glycine. Yeah. What's the rationale there? I really like glycine as an inhibitory neurotransmitter. Um it's calming to the nervous system uh over the years. I tend to start with that when people are having trouble settling down at night. Not that it's going to sedate people. Um, but just transitioning from, you know, being active, you know, 8: 00 p. m., 9: 00 p. m. wanting to settle down. Glycine in pretty large dosages, at least most people think there are starting with 3, 000 or 5, 000 milligrams
starting with 3, 000 or 5, 000 milligrams orally, um, kind of tones down the nervous system. People relax a little bit and then they tend to sleep better from it. And then you can dial it up. I mean, I've used very large dosages for the other advantage of glycine is it works on phase 2 liver detoxification, uh, which is amino acid conjugation. So, you're helping your liver work better. Um, and in a world where we're being exposed with all these toxic things from glyphosate to heavy metals, we all need to do some sort of, you know, liver med mitigation strategies, glycine's one of the best. Wow. Interesting. Uh, we haven't done an episode of this podcast yet on heavy metals, but we're um I'm very interested in in this because many people write to me asking about metal toxicity and about mold toxicity. molds become super big. Mhm. Yeah. Big big. Um yeah, I mean it's it's very prevalent and it seems the more we talk about it, I mean we've seen it for years and years, it makes sense, right? Like if you think about the amount of airplanes flying above us every day pouring down heavy metals. I mean it's massive. It's in the air. It's in the water. It's in the soil. You talk about glyphosate or Roundup, same exact thing. So many chemicals and it's challenging for us as humans. The way I break it down, not to get too far off topic, is you know we're water soluble organisms living in a fats soluble world. It's the job of our liver essentially to take the fats soluble stuff, make it water soluble so we can excrete it, right? And that takes place in the liver in two phases. Phase one, we're using the P450 enzymes. It's like taking the trash, putting the trash in the trash can,
putting the trash in the trash can, putting out the side of the road. You have phase two amino acid conjugation. The trash truck comes and picks up the trash. Very few things in nature induce phase 2 independent of phase one, meaning most of us have trash piled up on the side of our road. Those things are the polyphenols, right? And so things like the blues, the reds, the pigments, that's why it's important to eat a wide variety of colors in your diet. Matcha tea, you know, has a very strong inducing effect on phase 2 liver activity. Is that right? Y I need to develop a taste for matcha. I feel like it's kind of grainy. It is. And it's bitter, you know, but bitter things tend to be, you know, again helping that phase two. Um glutathione helps phase two. Uh you we do a lot of that introvenously. And then glycine is a wonderful agent for inducing phase 2 independent of phase one. And the trouble is I don't think people realize, you know, people are told, well, you know, most pharmaceuticals induce a P450 enzyme. And a misconception is, well, if I'm just inducing one, I'm good. If you induce one, you induce them all. So, if you take any pharmaceutical, you're inducing your entire P450 system. You're speeding it up, meaning you're putting more trash out on the side of the road. And if you look at the amount of things we're being exposed to outside of pharmaceuticals, it's mounting. When you say on the side of the road, you mean in the liver. Yeah, that's what I'm I'm just using that as a metaphor. Yeah. Like you're not about excreting it in the um you're talking about um building up of of debris, cellular debris with it or uh excuse me, metabolic debris within your body, right? That the the trash, again, very oversimplification. You need to speed up
oversimplification. You need to speed up phase two to get the trash trucks come to pick up the trash so that you can then take that compound and excrete it in your stool, in your urine, your sweat, your breath. Right? I mean that's the only way it works. It's not complicated per se, but I think there's a lot of misconceptions about it. So when people take a peptide that's injectable pineal and glycine, they're getting glycine obviously, but for let's say somebody doesn't have access to to you or to for whatever reason, there's a barrier um to getting a hold of those peptides. Um can people take glycine orally? They can. Yeah, glycine is absorbed well orally. Has a really sweet taste. It's actually the smallest amino acid. Huge fan of it. We've been using it a long time. You can take big dosages of it. Very sick. Again, I my starting dose is usually 3 to five grams at bedtime. Wow. And then I tell what my the way I do this recommended is try that for a few nights in a row. Not noticing a thing, double the dose. Go to 10 grams. Literally, most people at 10 grams of glycine will notice it. And again, it's not going to necessarily make you drowsy. You're not going to be sedated, but your ner nervous system is going to be toned down a little bit. It's going to help you fall asleep a little bit better. And then while you sleep, where a lot of this detoxification process starts working, you're going to be more efficient in how your liver works. Everything ties together, right? I'm still still a big fan of things like magnesium 3 and8 um epigenine, which is a chamomile derivative. Um and I'll try glycine. I think a few years back I was was using a little bit of glycine, but it was more like um a thousand milligrams, but now that it's in the injectable peptide,
that it's in the injectable peptide, yeah, the pinealin, I I don't take it. Um, is there an oral form of pinealin that works? They there's these bio-regular bio-regulator peptides um which were developed by this Russian scientist uh last name Corbinson I think done a lot of research actually there's published research about it. I think pinealon's one of the ones uh that they say will survive the stomach acid and get through the gut and be absorbed. Um so I I think that's true. we've always used as injectable and um I tend to like injectable things for the bioavailability. So um yeah, but to your point I think people can those are going to be harder and harder to find actually. It's probably easier to find an injectable pineon than an oral one. Yeah. And I as we're talking about this I'm realizing what unfortunately just the way the internet works that people are going to start selling likely as a consequence of this conversation we'll start selling pineal but you need to know that you're actually getting pineal. I mean, it's very easy for somebody to just pop something up on Amazon and sell it and uh totally maybe they just throw some melatonin in there and call it pineal and like there there's a lot of like BS stuff out there. So, tons this is why the compounding pharmacy component and working with a physician and researching right making sure that what you're taking is is legit. Lot of illegitimacy out there. Do you think the pharmaceutical companies are going to move into these other peptides? I mean that is certainly uh uh epomorellin for the reduction in visceral body fat that's an FDA approved drug um so is smearellin FDA approved
drug um so is smearellin FDA approved drug um uh the GLP-1 agonist FDA approved drug so those are the FDA is unlikely to pull those but they're blockbuster um especially GLP1 I mean they're making a not even a small fortune but a large fortune big money the the concerning part about the GLP1s is uh to me is What we're starting to see, they've been able to be compounded because there was a shortage. And the way it works with compounding is because those are brand name drugs and they're not patented for the peptide, right? They're patented for the delivery system, which is the pen. Um, which most people don't realize and they've been able to be compounded and then way more affordable because they're compounded. Um, and there is rumors that the pharmaceutical companies now have supply back. they'll come back and they will, you know, remove the ability to to allow these peptides to be compounded, which means we'll have to stick to traditional dosages and people will lose access because they're going to be way more expensive. I mean, they are if if insurance doesn't cover it, 1, 500 a month for for most people. Very expensive. That's a lot more. Yeah. For a lot of people, that's rent and more. So, yeah. Uh I'm hopeful that doesn't happen. Um but that's that's in the works. and and that would be a huge shame. And again, I'm not a a pessimist by any means. I'm a perpetual optimist. So, we'll just make sure it stays this way. But, you know, again, if it does happen,
you know, again, if it does happen, we'll get creative and and go other routes as well. Um earlier you mentioned stem cell therapies. Y those are not FDA approved in this country. They are actually they you can mistake. Yeah. So, uh I think that using the term stem cell is a problem, right? If we use the term autotogus cell, right, which would be PRP, it's basically the same plasma, right? They take your blood, they spin down, they take the Right. And so the ruling, as I understand it, as long as you're taking a cell that from you and you give it back within 4 hours, then that is allowed with under the FDA guidelines. Interesting. There was this clinic in um Florida a few years ago was um touting stem cell therapies for macular degeneration. Injected some stem cells into these patients eyes and they went blind really quickly and they were not blind prior to the injections. That to my understanding caused a severe setback to the whole field. Um I'm old enough to remember when gene therapy was set back by about 10 years because a patient received gene therapy um which is now pretty common um for certain diseases and the patient died. It's unclear exactly why they died um but that delayed the field of gene therapy um by at least a decade. I mean they this country is very conservative when it comes to the approval of new therapeutics. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. No. And I think um like anything there's
No. And I think um like anything there's going to be people who get too aggressive and I've heard of doctors injecting stem cells into people's discs and then they get discitis and infection and that can just spiral very quickly. I think it's you got to be reasonable in in you know what you're trying to accomplish. I I'm excited about stem cells and exoome therapy and PRP and PRF and using them as you know kind of biologics and uh because I think there's a lot to learn. I think we only know very little. Um, from what we've seen from working with our patients, it's been tremendous from a rejuvenation standpoint. I mean, we're as long as you know, I think taking from your own, you know, and then giving back your own within how the FDA outlines it, I think that's great way to do it. Well, certainly you have the clinical uh clinical data um to back those statements. Thyosin alpha one. Uh, what is this peptide? But maybe before we discuss it, did the FDA nuke thyosin alpha 1? Sure did. Whoa. Okay. They're coming through with a howitzer and taking out all these peptides. Um Okay. Um well then let's keep this relatively brief. What what was thyosin alpha 1 being used for previously? Yeah, I think it was uh from my observation the best peptide for immune modulation. So we would use it uh if you had an overactive immune system like autoimmune disease. By definition if someone has an autoimmune disease their mean their immune system is attacking their own self, right? That's classically lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, things like that, celiac disease, type 1 diabetes. Those are all, you know, autoimmune diseases.
are all, you know, autoimmune diseases. We could use thymus and alpha 1 and we tone down the immune response. We'd also use it a lot in postcoid where you have an abnormal immune response where the immune system hasn't caught back up and you can kind of dial it up using thyus alpha one in a very safe way. used a lot with long co um and we were using 5, 000 micrograms a day um sometimes introvenously getting great results very safe had no issues with it um but unfortunately it's off the table I hear a lot of complaints about um brain fog um with long co um and brain fog generally um cerebral is a very interesting compound um my understanding is that cerebral is available in Europe more broadly than it is in the US. Is it here? Did the FDA is it taken out? It's still available. Okay. All right. Cerebral L made the cut. We'll see what happens after this podcast. That's right. Um we've used a lot of cerebral. Um we I actually have a clinic that's open in London. We actually did use it. Uh we've used it a lot more over there than over here. Ah, so you have a US clinic and a UK clinic. We have a one in based in London and one in Charleston. Yeah. And um I think you know cerebral has been used for decades in the setting of you know poststroke um post-traumatic brain injury. The trouble with it again I've observed with people they get cerebral and we're talking about IV you can also use it subq is they will have a day or two where they feel really down and out like it's like
feel really down and out like it's like their mood shifts to like this dark place. Um sounds scary. Yeah. And they come out of it. Um but most people don't like that feeling and so we just we stopped using it mostly. Yeah. For that reason. My understanding is that cerebral lyin is a kind of a cocktail of brain derived neutrophic factor, silary neutrophic factor like some other things. It's not one thing. Yeah. And I think right I think collectively it increases BDNF levels, right? Like uh there was dhexa too. I don't know if you're familiar with dhexa. That's another one that was removed by the FDA. uh supposedly the most potent way to increase you know brain derived neurotropic factor they're kind of the juice the neurons live in again oversimplification that's gone but I think cerebral did the same thing interesting so as long as we're talking about um maintaining or boosting cognitive function um here's one I've never tried um but you and I have talked a little bit about and uh it it's still seen as kind of renegade but it's becoming more common place um and that's methylene blue and I always make the joke uh that I used to use methylene blue to clean my fish tanks, right? Um cuz I was a I'm a big uh fish tank afficionado. At least I was when I was a kid. Right now I don't my have a tank, but it's empty. Um no pun intended. Um what is methylene blue and what are people using it for and does it turn your tongue blue? It does for sure. Um not permanently. It's actually the uh the
permanently. It's actually the uh the first pharmaceutical ever prescribed in this country in the late 1800s was methylene blue. Goodness. Here. So, it sounds like really renegade, but it's it's not. Got it. Yep. Um but it's it's gained favor in the last 5 years. That's certainly when we learned about it particularly, you know, I learned about it through this doctor who was telling me with COVID patients, he was getting immediate like within a day uh of stopping of COVID symptoms from using methylene blue. That's what like piqued my interest like wow that's incredible. And then he went on to say that then co tests were turning negative within a matter of like 2 days which was unheard of. I've seen that was something else but I'll get back to that. Yeah. And so that's when I was like oh this is you know it started to be talked about and learned about it. Um so methylene blue when we talk about the mitochondria used on that mitochondrial membrane binds to cytochrome C oxidase. And I think of it you know traditionally it's used when people have carbon monoxide poisoning. They'll still use it. You go to the emergency room, you have carbon monoxide poisoning. It'll give you methylene blue and it helps your red blood cells displace the the carbon monoxide and put oxygen there. And so you're it's an oxygenator. That's how I think of it. Is it used as a performance-enhancing drug and in uh endurance sports? Because this sounds like the kind of thing that cyclists would would really want to use. Check with your local governing body. There's always a question I get. People like or they hear something on the podcast and they go, "Can I take it or am I going to get disqualified?" And I always say, I have no idea if you'll get disqualified. Yeah. I don't believe it's on the water list. Okay. I don't believe we we don't we'll just look for the people with the blue tongues. Yeah. Easy test. So, um, methylene blue very well
test. So, um, methylene blue very well absorbed very well orally. You know, I think of it like NAD, the molecule NAD because it works on that, you know, on those cytochromes. Different than NAD though because NAD is not, if you're taking NAD by itself, not absorbed orally well at all. It's one of the trouble with it. Methane blue is and actually you can take way bigger dosages orally than introvenously. We've given it introvenously a lot but we're limited in using it introvenously just because it'll start to cause some spasma of the vein. The arm starts hurting if you're giving too much methylene blue either too much or too quickly. And so we can give it orally you can get a capsule of it. That's how we ours. So I think a good dose is no more than 10 milligrams. 10 milligrams taken when in the morning. It is, you know, it's a cognitive stimulant for sure. I mean, I've had more people over the last 5 years cuz we make methylene blue. We combine it with some other agents, a little bit of caffeine, some B vitamins, and people say, "This is the best thing for, you know, my brain function, recall memory, kind of quote unquote neutropic, a term I don't really like because yeah, you know, there aren't circuits for being smart. There are circuits for y task switching, etc." But yeah, so it's 10 milligrams of methylene blue combined, and you've got some other things in the cocktail version that you make. Take it in the morning on an empty stomach. Yeah, I you could take it with food though. Again, it's going to be well absorbed. Um, it will interesting to people and I need to say it will turn your urine green or blue for how long? Um, about 24 hours depending. And that could be kind of fun. Yeah. Well, and a good caveat is if it doesn't and I've had patients then that's interesting to
had patients then that's interesting to me as a clinician because it means that your mitochondria is not working well. Right. Like the way I see this is you should get spillover. You shouldn't kind of use it all. And if you're not, there's something wrong there that you're using all of it and you're getting no spillover back into your bloodstream which gets filtered into your bladder or your urine which you urinate out that and that's happened with a couple patients. So it's like, oh wow, you had no green or blue urine. There's a problem with your mitochondria. So it's putting more oxygen onto the blood cells. Correct. Like your your hemoglobin is able to pick up more oxygen. That's exactly right. Um, but then there's the, you know, a mild MAI inhibitor, which is monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Yeah. Which going to allow things like serotonin to work a little bit longer in that synaptic cleft. Um, you know, and you've expounded way better than I can about serotonin and dopamine and how those work, but um, there is a cognitive enhancement from it for sure. It's very real. Uh, and we have a lot of people using it and love it. It also seems to be an antiviral. You know, you get this again that's probably through the mitochondria making your mitochondria more efficient. It's a prescription drug, but there's there's now, and I don't totally understand it, there's now strictly over-the - counter neutrautical supplement options that are methylene blue. For sure. Anyone can go online and buy it for sure. Well, trust me, now there there are going to be a few. And and you talked about turning your mouth blue if you take a liquid form, right?
blue if you take a liquid form, right? Uh, and we'll do that sometimes in the office when we're doing other treatments. We'll give a big dose of methylene blue to kind of help fuel kind of quickly make a lot of ATP, which we want to do with some different IV treatments we do. Um, so we'll give sometimes up to 50 milligrams at a time. Um, their gums, teeth, lips are blue for about an hour or two. And how often um can people take methylene blue? Again, I you you could take it every day. I think it I think it's a little bit longer acting. I don't take it every day. I take it about three times a week. I think that's about right. Um I do have people who need it more, you know, for whatever they're dealing with. I do think, you know, as a nutrient, if we're going to call it that, it's it's a lot of it's an insurance policy for your mitochondria. So earlier you mentioned um a patient or maybe it was patients plural that experienced a more rapid transition out of a uh a COVID infection or maybe more recovery from long COVID symptoms etc. Uh it reminded me of um the second time I got CO um far less intense than uh the first time. Uh but the second time I got CO I had an amazing experience where um my COVID test was very strong band. It was very clear like I I had COVID. There was no question about it. Um I didn't feel good. I was fatigued. Um wasn't super
good. I was fatigued. Um wasn't super severe. I would put it more kind of on a six six out of 10. Okay. on the kind of malaise level, no fever. Okay. So, I stayed in bed and, you know, stayed away from people, this sort of thing. Um, but I did an NAD infusion. Mhm. I of course told them I had CO. They came over, they gave me an NAD infusion, right? And correlation is not causation, but um I think it was 750 mgram NAD infusion over the course of about 45 minutes. Mh. Um, I had the usual feelings that one gets when you get an ND infusion of you feel like an elephant is stepping on your legs. Um, your chest kind of cramps. So, you feel and then when that stops, you feel much better than you go into the thing. Yeah. Um, the band was absent the next day. My symptoms were I went from I don't want to say gone. I went from, you know, like a five six out of 10 as I mentioned to like a two out of 10. Yeah. And within another 48 hours, I was good, good to go and better. Now, this is correlation, not causation. I don't know what was going on. Could have been the saline bag, right? Could have been any number of things. Sure. Um, but the shift from a dark band to no band, was so dramatic that I took another test. Okay. After the no band and then of course the next day and the next day, you know, this kind of thing. Um, it it's interesting. I I don't know what it means. Um, but one wonders whether or not it's just a
not it's just a um a global way of combating inflammation. You know, I I just sort of anytime I think about a systemic effect. Um, and the reason I raise this is that I don't want to give the impression that I think that like NAD is specifically in the pathway that was targeted. Um, but that my brain and body were inflamed. Clearly, I had an infection. So, you don't you could have a flu, you could have a cold. You're inflamed. Um, what are your thoughts on that anecdote? Again, it's just anecdote, but what what are your clinical reflections? We've seen it so many times. Yeah. I mean, the for the longest time and so we've been using NAD longer than most. I'm fortunate that I was given the original NAD infusion protocol which came from Mexico. It's kind of a long story. I don't want to bore you, but um that dosage of 750 milligrams is actually what we came up with in my office and that's what most people adopted just because we've used it more than probably anyone else on the planet. huge fan of NAD, very biased, but that's only because I've seen it work over and over in inexplicable scenarios just like you're describing where it's not just you go from A to B, but you're going to A to Z very quickly. And I used to use the word transformational talking about it. not just okay going from a sick state to a well state but in most people going from a well state to a super well state really quickly and it's super impressive. So there's a lot more to NAD than we understand, right?
to NAD than we understand, right? Because just very empirically giving someone this co-enzyme, this vitamin B3 derivative, how is it dramatically changing symptomatically how someone feels, but it does, and I've seen it with thousands upon thousands of people, certainly in the setting of COVID, certainly in other bio infections, you name it. I have been more impressed with the work of NAD than probably any other agent we've ever used. Amazing. Yeah, I take sublingual NMN each day. Um, it makes my hair grow ridiculously fast. I've done the control experiments. I'm a scientist. I know how to do control experiments. It's still just N of one. It's just me. Makes my nails grow really fast. Makes my hair grow fast. That's the major consequence. Um, I don't, by the way, I want to be clear. I don't have any stake in any company that sells NAD or NAD infusion. So, I'm just reporting what I'm reporting. I think it's great. Um, uh, somebody who's, uh, quite expert in the, uh, NAD pathway, Charles Brener. Yeah. Um who I believe has a relationship to a company that makes NR supplements encouraged me to try NR. I I took these um NR supplements. This is what it's um NAD minus a phosphate group is my understanding. Um and those I took orally. I I couldn't tell if I got the same or different effect because I was taking them together. Um I didn't continue to take them because compared to NN it was very expensive. Yeah. um and uh I just stopped taking so I that's why I use sublingual NMN but um
that's why I use sublingual NMN but um in brief discussions with Charles and kind of Leo forging online it seems that there is some literature human clinical literature showing that NR can reduce inflammation is that right yeah okay less data that NMN can reduce inflammation at least lack of human studies okay so we're still kind of in the it's still murky murky foggy territory with with respect to the the research and clinical the biochemistry. Yeah. And like what does the biochemistry do? And the way I think about it again because we kind of pioneered the infusions the NAD drips which for me transformational just observing lots of people who I never saw the same thing with NNR. You know you're not having these transformational experiences within a week. Um, you know, the I I tell the story a lot is I had a patient, he was diagnosed with a chronic Epstein bar virus, which is rare, but there it does exist. He was depressed and on disability just because he couldn't almost get out of bed. This is mono. Um, but it was reactivation of Epstein bar. Yeah. And so very like fatigued and depressed and literally on disability, couldn't work. And he I said, "Before we do anything, I I the way I operate is I want him to get you feeling better first before we start to tackle some of the bigger things." We we did the loading dose of NAD which we came up with five treatments in 10 days. Came back to my office. His wife was there. She was crying. She goes within a week my husband is back. Wow. And I've seen that so many times with NAD and I can't explain it. Right. And I and if I just stick to the biochemistry doesn't
just stick to the biochemistry doesn't make sense. Oh, you're increasing the NAD to NADH ratio fueling the mitochondria which are all over the body thousands per cell. There's something that we just to there's there's got to be outside the mitochondrial effect of NAD that's not well understood. So in the backdrop of our conversation today, there have been uh uh a number of themes, but one of the themes that seems to keep coming up is that um there are a lot of things about medicine that we don't understand. Totally. Um and yet there are tools that seem to work for certain people extremely well. Um a few years ago, I went to a meeting. This is a foundation meeting, a foundation I was a part of. Um where you get to see talks from really the the best of the best laboratories. Um, and they only show unpublished data. And at the time, I don't know if this paper is published yet, but at the time they were showing that they took people that were diagnosed with um, major depression, okay? And they start doing a bunch of metabolomics on them. Okay? Now, this sounds pretty standard for social media. It is actually is like pretty heretical like not a lot of of places have done this, right? So, you know, couple thousand patients, blood draws, they're they're trying to figure out, they ask a simple question. are there any specific vitamin deficiencies that are associated with depression? And as I recall, they identified a few different types of vitamin deficiencies. So, it's not like one vitamin. It's not always methylated B6 or something like that or excuse me, it's not always B6 or B12. That's um but they found these, you know, clusters of patients that had major depression that
patients that had major depression that were deficient in a particular B vitamin. they supplemented back the B vitamin and lo and behold those patients showed remission of their depression. So one could, you know, conveniently conclude, oh well, all depression is a B vitamin deficiency. But of course, that's not true, right? More likely depression, like fever is just a raw description of symptoms, right? But what was so exciting about this talk to me anyway was that people were starting to look at nutritional def deficiencies as a potential source of mental illness. Yeah. Which now has a bit more traction, but at the time was like, whoa, what what are we really saying here? I thought all of depression was a serotonin deficiency, right? this kind of thing. So when you talk about NAD having these transformative effects and the fact that NAD can kind of um raise the tide on a number of different biological processes, to me it makes perfect sense. It might have kicked off some mitochondrial pathway or some cell some cellar pathway that then fills in a blank that's desperately needed. Is that one way that we can conceptualize? That makes total sense to me. Okay. I like how you described it. So how often do you encourage your already healthy patients to do NAD infusions? What are the dosages? I should mention the NAD infusions for most people are a little bit costly. They are costly. They're like anywhere from $ 500 to $ 1, 000 or more in Los Angeles if you're in Los Angeles. Um so assuming someone has the means. Yeah. So here's what we found and again just found it by treating a lot of people and learning is um we do a loading dose um for most people uh we found the sweet spot to be 750 milligrams introvenous.
spot to be 750 milligrams introvenous. introvenous um when they were doing uh NAD in the' 9s and they were doing it for substance abuse. So alcohol, pain medicine, you know, morphine, they used it for that. That's where it came from. Actually, it was in the' 9s. People traveling to Mexico for NAD infusions at that protocol was 10 straight days of introvenous NAD. Yeah. The dose they use was 3, 000 milligrams. 3, 000 millig. And that's why it took 6 to 8 to 10 hours per infusion. You could not get through it. putting 500 milligrams in over the course of 45 minutes is gonna be very uncomfortable. Many people take an anti-nausea med. So I'll tell you about that. So that that comes from so there was a gentleman in the states in 2006. He lived in Louisiana. He had a pain medicine addiction, went to Mexico, got the NAD protocol, changed his life. He then licensed the use of the only injectable NAD product which was from a South African company at the time. Brought it to the United States, opened a clinic in Atlanta. All he did was addiction. And I got to know him because I'm in Charleston, not too far, involved in IV work. He was not a physician. I don't remember the time, but he came to me and said, "Hey, I need some help because I'm getting a lot of questions about this NAD stuff." And so, he handed me the original protocol. I mean, I'm super grateful and fortunate. U But what I realized is no one has time to spend 6 to 8 to 10 hours in someone's office. You know, they may do that once, but they're not doing it more than once. So we started triing, you know, different dosages, 250, 500, 750, 000 on up. And I
dosages, 250, 500, 750, 000 on up. And I just found collectively by watching people how they did 750 milligrams was a sweet spot. Meaning they'd get the benefits, which we can talk about, but then they could get through it in an hour or two hours. And that was meaningful. And then we found that we don't need 10 straight days. That's too much. That just is crazy. We found that five treatments in 10 days again afforded people the ability to have great benefits which were uniform. Probably 95% of people who do a loading disc will come back and tell you their brain is getting bigger, they feel more creative, they have an elevated mood, they can sleep less but have more energy, colors look brighter, languaging is easier. I mean this is all very real. So I think it affects the nervous system first just because of the concentration of the mitochondria for every single neuron in the body. the physical components meaning you know recovery and helping with physical exercise those come but I think they come later and so we settled on 750 milligrams we settled on the you know loading dose and then what I noticed is that people were coming back between three and four weeks saying hey I don't feel as good as I did after I did that loading dose and so we started doing a once a month maintenance dose and that is what we still recommend to today some people will do less and some people do more I have some people who do it once a week um but plenty of people do it once a month and then some people do it quarterly, some people do it whenever they can. On average, once a month seems to work really well for people. Then during the pandemic, um, and realizing this is growing because again, we train practices kind of in the medicine that we practice. We've trained
medicine that we practice. We've trained 300 350 practices and kind of give them the playbook, so to speak. Um, people weren't coming to the office as much with COVID. So, we started doing it subcutaneously and actually that's worked out really well. We'll do a 100 milligrams subcutaneously. Again, five days on, take two days off. You get a little bit of that stomach cramping from a 100 milligram injection. Um, like you said, can't really be absorbed well orally. Not going to really work. So, you're going to have to inject it or infuse it. Agreed. There's a price point here, right? Um, it's going to cost money. Um, but like most things, it's, you know, it's to me, if I had to pick one thing for people, engaging in NAD would be it. Really? Yeah. I would of all the things we all the things I've just been so impressed over the years now peptides are amazing not to knock peptides peptides there's so many peptides and I we'll get there right because you can you take this peptide for the nervous system this peptide for the immune system but collectively one agent one thing it's NAD has been the most impactful from where I sit working with patients wow that's a significant statement so 100 milligrams injected subcutaneously you get a little bit of stomach cramping yes as compared to the 500 milligrams to 750 or, 000 milligrams that one brings in IV. The fastest I've ever dripped it in was I think like 40 minutes. Um, I have to tell you the record. What's the record? 3 minutes and 26 seconds. Is that you? No. Never. 500 milligrams. 750 milligrams. Two separate people did it. 500 cc's of saline. 3 minutes 26 seconds. Wow. It's
saline. 3 minutes 26 seconds. Wow. It's insane. Yeah. I don't recommend it. No. We wouldn't allow it to happen. It's too much. It's it's you got to have a lot of experience with NED. Yeah. I I found that because you have to sit there for a while, you you could think, okay, well, if you organize the, you know, the the plumbing correctly that you could type or something, but you feel garbage enough during the infusion that you like PE you get irritable. It's actually a very interesting um window into empathy for people who have pain. Totally. You know, when you when you're in this kind of whole body kind of systemic pain and discomfort and you're getting that saliva, I'm kind of sensing it now. I have a distinct memory of this. Kind of like for people that get seasick, you think about being on a boat and walking back and forth. Um, get a little nauseous. Someone would walk in the room and you're like, "God, why are they walking like that, right?" You know, and it's your own it's your sense of pain. I I normally don't have that response to people. I I'm not a moody person um in general. But then you know when you remove the infusion you feel great and all of a sudden people seem delightful the the irritating person it's it's a very interesting experiment in in social empathy. It is and it's this is just what I postulate is that a lot of people are challenged because a lot of people are numb to the world they live in. They don't feel things. And when you do NAD there is nothing like that experience and that feeling. And so you are going to just psychologically say something is changing inside of me and it's something powerful because it's when I receive it
powerful because it's when I receive it it's a lot. And to your point what what we do is we have a kind of an IV room where we have like eight chairs and we make it social because when you're talking to people and learning about their experiencing it it's there's actually a lot of healing that occurs just from that community. That's a bonding exper experiment. Yeah. Um, for people that can't afford the infusions, um, the injections would be the next best bet. If they can't afford those, would it be the sublingual NMN or NR? I think so. I think the NN I would choose over NR. Yeah. So, it going from most expensive to least expensive. Most expensive would be in uh, IV, then it would be um, subcutaneous, then it would be NR, and then it would be sub sublingual NMN. Yeah. Okay, that's about right. I mean, you could do uh, NAD topically. It's a little bit wild card doing it topically. You could do it under under your Yeah. patchetic patches. Those give me a really terrible The problem is the patch. Um I get this is the patch. It's the adhesive. It's too strong and lots of people get irritated. Their skin gets irritated. I think the NAD gets in well, but the the patch itself is a hindrance obstacle. And for those that are listening to this and they may recall, I did an episode of this podcast with Dr. Peter where we talked about NAD and NMN and NR and that was mainly focused on the the research literature. You're not going to find much um you know so what we're talking about here is clinical experience. Yeah. I'm a full disclosure I'm a clinician through and through. So my experience is observing people and you're interested
observing people and you're interested in what works. Well and but I but you know I I'm confident about it because I've done a lot of it. you know, I've seen a lot of, you know, how peptides work because we've done a lot of it. This NAD because we've overseen, again, a lot of NAD here and in London all over and the providers we work with. So, we get a lot of feedback about what works and what doesn't work. You know, speaking of um clinicians and science and and all of this, um there are a couple other peptides that have received FDA approval um that are commonly in use. things like uh PT-141 um which is in this um melanistite uh hormone pathway uh that's used one of its uh FDA approved uh uses uh is I think the brand name is Vileia is for um uh female hypo libido so it stimulates libido in women it's also used to stimulate libido in men is that right can be and it can be helpful for it's like a neurogenic uh mechanism for erectile dysfunction so so it's not just related to blood flow. It's not actually it's not and PT-141 yeah like a fragment or derivative of the peptide melanotan um which stimulates alpha melanocyt stimulating hormone which you know uh is becoming more in play I guess in the environment I operate in just because of mold toxicity and we think of mold toxicity being a biotoxin and hitting you know MSH being kind of the the general in terms of a lot of these hormonal pathways actually and melanitan
hormonal pathways actually and melanitan can strip bolster by putting out more melanocyt stimulating hormone seems to bolster immune response. I think there's an element with energy too. Um the downside of melanotan is it stimulates melanocytes. So you're going to get this tanning and it's not like a it's like an orange looking tanning from the inside out. Yeah. You you see it, you recognize it. So PT41 what they found is in rats, I think it was female rats were populating more when they got this compound and they're like, "Oh, cool. And let's try it in humans." And it it's led to that. Our trouble with it is very small or narrow therapeutic window. And if you give too much, you're going to get nauseous pretty quickly. And some people don't like particularly women don't like that tanning look. It's not a very it can look very unnatural. Unnatural is the word. Yeah. The medial pituitary, which at least my understanding is the origin of the these peptides that we're talking about now is is super interesting. And you mentioned the nausea. These peptides hit multiple pathways. Um when we had Dr. Zachary Knight from University of California, San Francisco on to talk about GLP-1 in a lot of uh detail. Um he mentioned that you know some of the nausea associated with um ompic and mjaro and things like that relates to the fact that there's um you know there are receptors for these things not just in one hypothalamic structure but also in like area postramma and areas of the brain that are these quote unquote primitive areas that are associated with um generating nausea when you need to rid yourself of a poison that you know
yourself of a poison that you know nature conveniently uh engineered us with um with neurons that when they detect chemical changes in the blood make us vomit. Yeah. And but to touch on that is what we found is if we start with a again a micro dose and go slowly with the GLP1s, the nause is virtually unheard of. Not saying it doesn't occur, but it's super rare if you just take your time with it. I think when people have nose problems, they're doing they're shotgunning the dose. Essentially, you're overwhelming your system. So, I have two more questions. The first one is a bit of a controversial one. Okay. Um, today we've talked about a lot of peptides that you've observed incredible clinical utility for. Uh, we also talked about a lot of peptides that the FDA has banned basically to be blunt. Um, we've also talked about peptides that at one point not too long ago were considered part of kind of niche culture like fitness or bodybuilding culture that are now approaching what will probably be trillion dollar industries over the next 10 years. Things like GLP1 agonist. So any listener with um their neurons firing, we'll put two and two together and say, "Okay, what's the deal?" Obviously the FDA, I like to believe, has a genuine interest in our safety. They don't want us taking things that are dangerous for us. At the same time, um there seems to be a kind of clawing back of what's out there and then um a handing off to pharmaceutical companies to put out compounds for which there are tremendous profit margins. Correct. I
tremendous profit margins. Correct. I mean, the profit margins on these are insane. We can't comprehend it. You can't comprehend it. So, um I you know MK677 I crossed out, right? FDA grabbed that one. Um thyosin alpha 1 crossed out. Okay. A bunch bunch of other things. um that have been uh BBC57 clawed back. Um so how should we frame this in our mind? In other words, do you think that the FDA has um genuine good intentions of trying to protect the general public and that's why they're doing this or is this a plan to kind of um make that appear to be the case so that these that can then be sold at a very very high profit margin? And perhaps it could be both, right? It's not an either or. And and I want to be very clear, you know, I work at a major medical school. I um but I'll speak freely anyway, right? You know, um as would my colleagues, like I like to think that these governing bodies have some people there at least with very good intentions. Sure. I don't think it's a bunch of bad people like riding their hands together with getting kickbacks from farmer. I don't believe that. In fact, I know that not to be the case. But like what's really going on here? Because this is kind of weird. There's this huge class of of compounds we call peptides that clearly have immensely beneficial uses in the right dosage in the right hands with the right physicians. They're being clawed back. Why? It's confusing. I I think it's probably both. I think, you know, I would say that unfortunately a lot of times when the government acts they
times when the government acts they overreach, right? Like I do think they probably have good intentions. I think there's a there's probably sound reasons to want to have oversight of things that seemingly is the wild wild west, right? And there's truth to that, right? Because peptides came on the scene and people started using them. They're recommended here and there. People could get them from still can research companies and there's not a lot of coraling of understanding well what are what is going on. So I'm sure there's an element to like hey let's understand this better but on that side I think they went too far right because I think if you really look at data or if you were really interested in that there's ways to understand how things work without removing them from the marketplace. So the other side of me is like just like we're talking about ompic and monjouro semiglutide and tzepide are blockbuster drugs. If you're a pharmaceutical company and you see that there's 15 to 20 other peptides which are really working and really working because again we've just seen the clinical response over and over. It's not a large, you know, leap to think, hey, if we're a pharmaceutical company, what if we turn that peptide which was available to the commoner, for lack of a better term, into a drug? Oh, like Vissi that was done for me stimulating hormone pathways. Yeah. And so I'm sure I think it's both, you know,
so I'm sure I think it's both, you know, I think um and that's why I go back to we have to operate within certain boundaries, right? like that's that's great and we have to understand those boundaries. It would be and I say this sincerely. I I don't when we're talking about healthcare and we're talking about people's health, I we're not even close to talking about the truth for most things, right? We're we're not talking about why people get chronic disease. We're not talking about how our food is really overprocessed and the availability of high quality nutrients and what that means. We're not talking about all the toxicities. We just look at Roundup, glyphosate, and its interference with so many pathways in the body. And people say, you know, and Monsanto and whoever runs that now saying it's so safe and it's just not true. So I think it's in line with and what I support is unfortunately and fortunately as an individual, you have to be your own best advocate. You can't rely on someone to say particularly the government that you have permission or not permission to do this. You think it's best for people to do their own research. You know, seek out reliable information, right? Start here. I mean, you guys vet so much stuff. Very safe place for people to be like, "This is where I want to start." And then life is you you learn by exploring and seeing what works for you. It's like you start with a recipe to cook, right? But some people like it saltier, some people like it spicier. You got to see what works best for you. And that's why I seek out other people, people like myself, other physicians, other people who have experience saying, "Hey, we'll help you, guide you in this." And that's where the magic happens. But to be honest, we're
magic happens. But to be honest, we're not being truthful on many levels when we talk about health. We're just not. We spend so much money for what? We're not making a dent in chronic disease. We're not making an impact. We're not helping people lead better lives. You know, medicine is great for life and death things. It really is. You know, I in 2000 in August of 2020, I had terrible abdominal pain. I had just come back from visiting our friends in Hawaii. I kind of tried to treat myself unsuccessfully. Eventually, it was on Labor Day. I had so much pain the next day. Called my friend who was radiologist said, "I need to do a CAT scan." I did the CAT scan. He called me on the way back to the office. I had a blood clot in the vein going to my liver that had completely cut off. I almost died. Like, it was really serious that I could be hospitalized. I'm on blood thinners now. I am forever grateful for pharmaceuticals. Saved my life, right? But those same medicines aren't probably gonna help me lead my best life, right? And there's it's it's challenging having been educated in a very formal conventional medical system which is dominated by the pharmaceutical industry is a problem. Right? We go back to the Flexner report is like 1917 1915 or something where they studied medical education and basically said if you're a medical school and you're not promoting pharmaceuticals and inline and we're going to kick out alternative remedies and modalities like chiropractic and acupuncture nutrition. they don't count anymore. And that's where we are. The only thing that matters, and we see it
only thing that matters, and we see it as a society, we're deemed healthy by the pills we take, right? If we're gonna be really honest, those pills aren't making us healthy. And by and large, they're not even making us well anymore. You know what I mean? And so, I think it's time, and it's wonderful to have this form to be able to talk about like, and this why I support so many other people talking about it, like we need to make a change in that. We need to start being honest about what we're doing. Our health is not going to be coming from doctors saying taking this pill or that potion. It's not not at this stage. And it's more likely that people are going to feel healthy from seeing their trainer in their gym. Right? These why these things go to the gray market or black market because people actually get results. You know what I mean? And it's just sad but true. And so to answer your question, I think it's both. I think the pharmaceutical companies are greedy. I think they like making money, right? I think they also like helping people, right? They want to help people. Um but it comes with a big cost and um the government's there to kind of corral that but like most things the government does they go too far right and uh I think we need to be honest about those discussions and it's not threatening and it's not harmful just to be saying hey how do we make this better and how do we even agree to disagree? Let's just start there. I really appreciate your take. I I too rely on prescription drugs now and again. Um, I don't know, maybe I'll lose some following for saying this, but like I I've had some some situations where it made sense to like take an antibiotic like after a surgery or something or like I'm not like anti -
like I'm not like anti - antibiotics, right? I also don't take I don't also don't eat them like M M's. I also um believe that uh well everything you said I I generally agree with. I don't have the clinical expertise or the nuance to really understand these governing bodies. That's one of the reasons why I'm asking today and really appreciate you uh shedding light on this. I think um you're you're clearly a trutht teller. You're telling us your truth from the clinical perspective, but it's clear you also have a a broad uh broad optics here. Um we appreciate that. Sure. Yeah, this podcast has always been about bringing in diverse uh uh outlooks on the same things and um it's been wonderful today to be able to explore peptides, NAD and and this issue of FDA approval and FDA removal as the case may be. You said something earlier a couple of times that I'd like to uh finish up on. Um you talked about positive thoughts. Yeah. You're a physician. Yeah. Uh not a psychologist. No, but you're a physician. and you're in the business of making people feel better. And it's clear to me that among your many talents, you have great powers of observation. So what is this thing about positive thoughts? I mean there are a lot of neuroimunological data out there showing that you know stress makes us sick if we stress too long for you repeatedly for too long. Stress in the short period is actually good for us, right? Um there are some data showing that positive thoughts can enhance immune system function etc. The data are pretty
system function etc. The data are pretty cool. Um clinically however what's your observation about mindset and health? I think we're just scratching the surface and I think it is the most profound way to affect your life. Right. So there's a couple things I'll say about it. One, no good has ever come from a negative thought. Nothing ever good has come from a negative thought. And because all of us have a choice about every decision we make, to me, it's always best to make a to slant that decision in a positive frame. Now, it doesn't mean you're fake about it, right? People really suffer. People really go I mean, it is a very stressful time right now. Maybe the most stressful time in human history. And there's no need to gloss over it and saying life is, you know, peaches and cream cuz it's not for a lot of people. But what I know just personally and professionally is that when you start pivoting towards positivity, you get more positivity, right? And all of us, every single human has that opportunity to do that. That some people with way harder choices. They are dealt a much more challenging and difficult hand. Lots of people. But if we think about it, we didn't get to choose our eye color. We didn't just get to choose our family. We didn't get to choose where we were born or how we were brought up. But we do get to choose how we respond to those things. And so what I've learned is the more I there's never enough positivity I can exude. There's never enough positivity I can be around ever in my life. It is just the most amazing
in my life. It is just the most amazing thing and it can never be taken from you. Right? And so when we talk about success and longevity and health span to me positivity has to be a part of that because the mindset of positivity will override almost everything literally. And and I can't tell you how that happens on a biochemical or physiologic basis, but I know it to be a truth. I know it in the core of my being that the more positive I am, the more I can influence other people's and plant seeds and help people be more positive. And that is something that I cherish and just love and is not talked about enough. you know, specifically as a physician, we're talking about the science and oh, this study and, you know, putting people on this medicine, but really the value and and I made this decision back in 2010 cuz I had my own practice and I decided to stop taking insurance. And it wasn't a money thing. It wasn't like, oh, it was because I was no longer valuable taking 5 to seven minutes with each person and seeing 40 patients a day. And for me, I felt like I'm not fulfilling my purpose here when I'm just writing prescriptions. That my purpose will be fulfilled if I can really have conversations where I get to know people. and peptides and NAD tie into that because they are gateways to build trust with me so that I can actually help you, an individual, learn how to be more positive and to slant yourself and have that posture because ultimately all
have that posture because ultimately all of us need the energy and want the energy to find our purpose, right? Once you find that purpose, oh my goodness, life gets magical, right? Because we're all unique. We all have a different DNA structure. God gave us that to be unique, to shine our light, to contribute, to help others. Most people don't know about that because they're in pain or they're tired or whatever they're suffering. And if we can help walk people through that and help them heal that, that's going to get really good and that's that's just what I enjoy doing. Beautifully said and so grateful to you for doing that within your clinical practice, for making that decision a few years back to shift over to being, you know, aligned with your purpose and and the way that you've now expanded your practice to public education. We'll provide links to your practice and to your public education efforts and for coming here to do uh this uh significant public education effort about peptides and other compounds and um regulatory bodies and also just the field of medicine and also just you know I think so often we hear from scientists or from physicians and and we forget the human component and and what's what's so um what's so beautiful about what you do and the way you do it is that your humanity really comes comes through. Oh, I appreciate that. So, it really does. I can tell you really care and I know our listeners and viewers uh can tell as well. So, thank you. Um, as this field evolves and advances, um, please come back and talk
advances, um, please come back and talk to us again. Would love to. Meanwhile, again, we'll provide links so that people can find you and some of the resources uh that back up what we've discussed today. And Craig, Dr. Conover, thank you ever so much. Well, thank you, Andrew. No, it's really I'm so honored to be here. Um, I respect and love the work you're doing and the light you're shining and you're helping so many. You have such a wide audience that you know trust you and it's amazing. Uh, like I said, I see it every day with people coming to me and and bouncing what you do and saying, "Hey, is this good for me?" And it's that is amazing. I love that. That's how we get better, right? We help support each other. Um, and I just appreciate what you're doing and being here is truly an honor. really a big deal for me. So, thank you. Well, thank you. I'll take that in and right back at you. Okay. Come back again. I appreciate it. I appreciate you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Craig Connover. To learn more about his work and his clinic, as well as to find links to some of the things discussed in today's episode, please see the show note captions. And if you'd like to learn more about peptides, including some of the ones that we discussed today, but also some additional ones, please see the link to the solo episode that I did about peptide therapies in the captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zerocost way to support us. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a fivestar review. Please check
us up to a fivestar review. Please 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 podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment 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 5 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 at protocolsbook. 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. If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram X, formerly known as Twitter, 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 content on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media channels. If you haven't already, subscribe to our neural network newsletter. Our neural network newsletter is a zerocost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief 1 to three page PDFs. Those protocol PDFs are on things like
Those protocol PDFs are on things like neuroplasticity and learning, optimizing dopamine, improving your sleep, deliberate cold exposure, deliberate heat exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that describes a template routine that includes cardiovascular training and resistance training with sets and reps, all backed by science and all of which again is completely zero cost. To subscribe, simply go to hubermanlab. com, go to the menu tab up in the upper right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and provide 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. Craig Connover. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
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A peptide is a small chain of amino acids that can act like a message inside the body. That makes the category powerful, but it also makes broad claims difficult. GLP-1 medicines, growth hormone secretagogues, BPC-157, NAD-related compounds, and hormone therapy do not belong in one simple bucket. Each has its own mechanism, evidence base, and risk profile.
The useful question is not whether peptides are good or bad. The useful question is whether a specific compound has a clear target, human data, quality control, and a clinician who can interpret the whole picture.
The conversation returns often to partnership with a knowledgeable physician. That point matters. These compounds interact with appetite, inflammation (read the full breakdown), sleep, glucose regulation, repair pathways, and hormonal tone. Those systems are not isolated. They are the architecture of resilience.
For the reader, the lesson is restraint. Curiosity is reasonable. Self-experimentation with gray-market compounds is not a longevity practice. It is uncertainty dressed as optimization.
The most grounded moments are not the most exotic. Mitochondrial support, sleep, strength, nutrition, and measured biomarkers remain the foundation. Advanced medicine can only make sense once those basics are respected.
The sophisticated move is not chasing the newest compound. It is building a body stable enough to know what any intervention is actually doing.
Resilience is built when the signal is strong enough to adapt to, and measured enough to return from.
Evaluate every peptide individually. A category label is not evidence.
Work through qualified medical care when hormones or injectable compounds are involved.
Protect the foundation first: sleep, strength, metabolic health, and recovery give advanced tools context.
