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Comment by zemvpferreira | Hacker News Reader

Ozempic and Mounjaro are peptides. They are a silver bullet for obesity and orders of magnitude more effective than anything up to a gastric band surgery. Insulin is a peptide and keeps some 50 million people alive globally. You could go on and on.

The real question is: Should you be putting novel, poorly researched and dubiously manufactured substances (which happen to be peptides) in your body via injection? To that I say, to each their own but I'll wait for the pharma industry to catch up. I'm not that bored.

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My take on the peptides craze is it’s like random people started injected insulin because they have a hazy idea of it being helpful for something or other based on the word on the street but they aren’t sure about dose and also can’t be sure what they’re injecting is actually insulin or uncontaminated. They also aren’t diabetic.

Most peptides don't seem nearly as dangerous as insulin, luckily. Injecting insulin without medical supervision is a good way to give yourself hypoglycemia and die - blood sugar regulation is not something you want to mess with!

People don't seem to be regularly dying from peptides, at least not now.

I'd love to be able to make that statement with such confidence, but you just don't know. Literally no one has any clue what the long-term effect of injecting BPC-157 or what ever stupid well-marketed bullshit is the flavour of the week is, is.

> The real question is: Should you be putting novel, poorly researched and dubiously manufactured substances (which happen to be peptides) in your body via injection?

on one hand: no, absolutely not, hell no.

on the other hand: these people are voluntarily doing human sperimentation. things like this are going to happen anyway so we might as well collect the data (samples, effect etc). it's not much different from the safe needles initiatives.

Except the data is completely useless. Especially given the extremely strong selection biases towards: status/image-obsessed; high-risk; low-intelligence; generally high appetite for a constellation of dubious interventions.

The data isn't entirely useless. It might be a good signal of areas to point legitimate research toward

Narrowing down areas into "Anecdotally many people say it works, we should check" does have some value, even if it does just wind up debunking the claims

BPC-157 was discovered in the late 80s, not really novel. As opposed to mRNA shots that everyone was taking happily.

So, chemical pollution and the destruction of our microbiome with excessive antibiotics cause a global obesity problem, and we pump more chemicals into the body to try to solve it.

Life out of balance, indeed.

What other solution do you propose?

(Yes, eating healthy and exercising would probably help most people, but many remain)

That's what GLP-1s do: they make it trivial to eat healthily.

If you want to be reductive, and correct, these medicines make it trivial to manage total food intake.

Progress on making fecal transplants more widespread, less wide-spectrum antibiotics prescriptions and more targeted ones (it would help with antibiotics resistance, as a nice side-effect), investing more in bacteriophages as an alternative to antibiotics, and far stronger limits to chemical pollution, and cleaning up existing ones.

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