I Investigated Peptides, Here's What I Learned

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Alok Kanojia (1:01)

Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Kanojia, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

Today, we're going to talk about peptides because everybody else's. So if y'all have been on this place called the Internet recently, you'll see that there are a bunch of people who are talking about how amazing peptides are, right?

SPEAKER_4 (1:38)

Do you know what a peptide is? No.

SPEAKER_6 (1:39)

I think that's going to become a bigger talking point.

SPEAKER_3 (1:42)

So what actually is a peptide? Are you into peptides?

Alok Kanojia (1:45)

Oh, all of them. My loved ones can't stop asking me about peptides.

SPEAKER_3 (1:50)

I've had some wild experiences with a couple of peptides.

Alok Kanojia (1:53)

They're injecting these things that they get from places, like the Internet, into themselves. And they're saying that this stuff is revolutionary, stops my aging, improves my recovery after a workout. I love this stuff. It's revolutionized the world. But then we also have a bunch of people who are like reputable science educators who are basically saying, hey, there's no evidence that this works, right? And then we also have some people who are like science educators who are like, hey, this stuff is really amazing. Interestingly enough, not a whole lot of these people are actually clinicians, but. So what's the deal, right? So how is it that half the Internet swears by peptides, but you have a bunch of like medically qualified people who are saying, we have no idea what this does. And you may think that, okay, there's a really simple solution, right? There's a simple answer to this problem, which is that the people on the Internet are ahead of the scientists. Big Pharma hasn't done the studies yet. We haven't done the studies yet. People are injecting this stuff and they're seeing real benefit. The science is lagging behind. Well, I have a different answer, which is that peptides are placebo until proven otherwise. Now this may sound kind of insane, right? Because you're saying like placebo means like it's all in their head. Like that's not what peptides do.

There are all these studies on mice and rats that show that peptides like BPC-157 enhance wound healing. So like that's not like in someone's head. So in order to understand this, we have to understand a couple of things. First is who I am. Hi, I'm Dr. Alok Kanojia. I'm a Harvard trained psychiatrist. This is the part that people don't usually know about me. So my area of expertise is in evidence based complementary alternative medicine, which means the reason I got into Harvard and the work that I was doing there was actually to figure out from all this weird alternative medicine crap, I'm a certified Reiki healer, I'm a crystal healer, I've studied Ayurveda, which has gotten me into some hot water, and I've done yoga, I've done meditation. The work that I was doing when I left Harvard was developing evidence based meditation protocols to treat certain mental illness. Now, while I was at Harvard, I was connected with a couple of really important mentors, one of whom was Kathy Kerr, may she rest in peace, and her mentor, who's a guy named Ted Capchop. Now, Ted is awesome. He's a Chinese medical physician and I think professor of something at Harvard Medical School, and Ted is an expert in placebo research. So here's a study from the New England Journal of Medicine, which is the most reputable journal on the planet, which Ted published in in 2011 He took a group of people with asthma, and then he gave them albuterol inhalers, which showed a 50% improvement. He gave them placebo inhalers, which showed a 46% improvement, or 45% improvement. And then he gave them sham acupuncture, which also showed a 46% improvement. So the first thing to understand is like, what is placebo? Placebo is two things.