, there’s a huge range of quality, purity, and cost. There are some excellent compounding pharmacies out there. We discussed the more reputable ones on the podcast. This source still requires a prescription. 3) Gray Market: compounds being sold without prescription labeled “for research purposes only, not for animal or human use”. The range of quality and purity is vast. 4) Black market: not *necessarily* “home grown” but zero validation about what you’re taking. In theory, this is also a problem with certain gray market sources, but even more extreme with black market sources. The episode gets into the fact that for some peptides— in particular the GLPs/Reta there are randomized controlled trials to support their specific uses, (also true for Melanotan and GH secretagouges) but many people are taking these compounds for things other than what they were studied and approved for. (Off label use of FDA compounds is not on unusual but typically it’s a doctor making those decisions not the patient). For anyone who is peptide curious, skeptical, or anti-peptides (that are not studied with randomized control trials) as well as people who are very pro peptides will benefit from listening to the episode. You can find it at hubermanlab.com & on all podcast platforms. Thank you for your interest in science! @stanford @stanford.med

ellent to dreadful. Yes. But we don't know which are which. Nope. We don't know that. And batch to batch. That's the big problem. Okay. So it is risky to get for research purposes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the majority of the way people are consuming peptides. Unfortunately, we should just, because of the move in 2024 to get these from the category one to the category two list and make them banned, quote unquote, that opened up this gray market zone. Like the gray market existed for the last 15, 20 years. Bodybuilders would, you know, have anecdotes about BPC-157. They'd inject it post, you know, post squats for different injuries. Nobody really cared about it. It was with the GLP-1s and then the banning of the peptides, plus this, you know, anti-medicine kick that's been happening over the last five years. Since the pandemic. Yes, since the pandemic. That people are like you know what I want to inject this because it gives them a sense of autonomy or they feel like their bro recommended it like I said the best job in 2025 was to be a peptide affiliate people made my yearly salary in a month selling peptides illegally on TikTok