As a sports medicine physician, I've been asked numerous times by my patients about peptides, specifically BPC157. If you just go off of what you read online, you'd swear that it's a magical elixir that cures everything based on every fitness influencer swearing that this is the best thing ever since sliced bread. But does this compound actually live up to the hype? Today we dive into what the actual data shows about BPC157 and why that might be a little bit more surprising than you think. Let's get started. Welcome back to the Building Lifelong Athletes podcast. Thanks so much for stopping by, I appreciate it. My name's Jordan Renick, we haven't met yet, and I'm a dual board certified physician in sports and family medicine. And the goal of this podcast, it keeps you active and healthy for life through actual evidence informed education. And today we're talking all about peptides, right? These naturally occurring compounds in the body and people talk about them like they are the most magic thing in the world. Today we're talking, like I mentioned, BPC157, it's a specific peptide that has gained huge attention for its potential healing and performance enhancing effects. And in this podcast, we're gonna explore the science, separate the hype from the facts, and discuss the potential risks. So let's dive in. So first things first, what actually are peptides? Well, they are naturally occurring chains of amino acids, generally between two and a hundred amino acids in length. So a longer chain of amino acids are usually considered proteins, right? So amino acids are the building block of proteins. These little tiny things, you kind of make these chains of them into different proteins and peptides are essentially just part of these chains. And some people will say like, if you're less than 50, it can be a peptide, whatnot, but long story short, peptides are just chains of amino acids essentially is what we're looking at here. And what they do then is these peptides then bind to specific cell receptors. And then this binding triggers an intracellular cascade of events. That is well beyond the scope of this podcast to talk like what's actually going on in terms of gene protein coupled receptors and da da da, all this stuff. But they essentially go in there, they bind to a cellular receptor and then exert some effect on the cell. That's essentially how they work and what they are. And they typically have a short half-life and can have multiple effects. And some peptides that we see and hear about quite a bit are things like insulin, GLP-1, collagen peptides, which are synthetically made. So, people are talking about buying collagen peptides for your skin, for your tendons, for whatever, that's a peptide is what they're talking about there. And other things too, hormones like thyroid stimulating, hormone, your adrenocorticoid hormones, so ACTH, growth hormone, all those things. And these are typically found in nature. So they're natural, right? You make your body mix these. And specifically, we know insulin is a huge one that we all have. And if you don't have it, you end up having type 1 diabetes and that can lead to lots of issues. So peptides are nothing new. They're not all dreamed up by pharma. They come from our body. A lot of times the inspiration from them come from the body quite a bit, but not necessarily all from the body. But peptides are just kind of these short amino acid sequences that are a lot of times found in our body. And that's why people are so excited about them, right? 'Cause they're like, oh, this is something that we can naturally have and it's a natural substance. And so peptides, that's generally what they are. We're gonna talk about peptides. And then what is specifically BPC-157? Well, BPC-157 or body protection compound 157, it's a synthetic peptide derived from a naturally occurring protein found in the stomach. And that naturally occurring protein is something called body protection compound and it's found in the gut. And this is just a portion of that. So it's a big picture here of this body protective compound is found in gastric secretions, so stomach secretions. And BPC-157 is a little short portion of that. So it's just a clip of it. That's where they initially found it and got the idea from it. It is made of 15 amino acids and it's synthetically made based off of that natural peptide I talked about that's found in the stomach. And it was identified as a fragment of that larger BPC. So this kind of 15 amino acid sequence, they said, hey, this seems to be a crucial part, what's going on? And overall, it is a stable peptide. It seems to be relatively stable in the body. And so they found this thing and they said, oh, this is cool. And so now what they do is they synthetically make it. So most people are like, this is natural. And what they're not doing is they're not harvesting gastric secretions from people and then they're giving you this. No, they found the inspiration from that. And now in the lab, they put these peptides together, these amino acids together to make this peptide. So it is inspired by a natural peptide, but is surely synthetically made, the ones that we're talking about here. And as I mentioned, it is natural, but it is not known to exist in nature, meaning it's inspired from the gut stuff, but it comes from another protein. And BPC-157 is being studied for potential to accelerate healing. And this includes tendons, ligaments, muscles, bone, pretty much like anything. If you read it online, people say like, oh, just like eat it or inject it and it'll magically cure everything is literally what I've seen some people say. And so it's quite the claim. And so that's what we're looking at more specifically here today, but that's essentially what BPC is. We talked about peptides and then what BPC-157 is. And why is there hyper-balance? Why is everyone saying that it's amazing? Well, the initial research on this was done for protecting the healing stomach. So essentially they had either gastric ulcers or something going on in the stomach. And they found that, hey, exposure to this started to heal that stomach. And then of course, when you see healing anywhere, they say, hey, where can we extrapolate this else? And so they've kind of lots of stuff. Research then expanded to include other areas with tons of animal studies, suggesting a range of healing properties, specifically looked at, you know, accelerating healing of various tendons, including, you know, Achilles tendon, quad tendon. They looked at ligaments as well. They looked at muscles. They looked at bone. They say there's enhanced cell survival, meaning BPC helps cells stay alive longer under stressful situations. It enhanced cell migration, so specifically helped promote the migration of tendon fibroblasts, which we've stepped back. Fibroblasts are kind of the precursor to tendons. So you need fibroblasts to lay down important stuff to then become tendons. So fibroblast moving and increasing of that is theoretically increasing your tendons potentially. Also has angiogenic effects. So they may increase blood vessel formation specifically and increase blood flow, which is important for healing. And also was associated with activation of VEGF, which VEGF, as we know, is important for angiogenesis. Angiogenesis meaning the creation of blood vessels. So they're saying, hey, this peptide also may enhance the creation of blood vessels. Good or bad, we'll talk about that later. Also, there's sometimes in some studies showing some anti-inflammatory effects, some cytoprotective effects, meaning kind of inhibiting damage from other stressful situations. It may counteract some of the negative side effects of NSAIDs and it also may help increase muscle growth after muscle cross injuries. They looked at some of the studies as well and may counteract muscle wasting away that kind of tumor cells and tumor muscle associated wasting and seem to slow that down. And it may promote recovery from, in different ways as well. So increasing smooth muscle creation and all that fun stuff. So the big thing is that these results are from animal models So what they did, started in the gut and said, hey, we're trying to protect the gut. Can it work out somewhere else? And they said, hey, well, let's try. And so they took various random rat models, rat stomach, rat, Achilles, patella, bone, whatever, petri dish, all these things, all these studies I'm mentioning all come from animal studies. And they pretty much were all, not all of them, a lot of them were petri dish. So essentially they took out some of the cells and looked at them in the petri dish, not necessarily living animals even. So a few steps removed from what we consider really high quality evidence, but that's really where all this came from. So lots of stuff from animals. And then it led to the BBC 1.7 and why the hype was so much is 'cause they saw these things in there, but also they found that you could give it a bunch of ways. You could give it from an injection, you could give it, they said, intragastric, so you could inject it in there. You could give it orally, you could, a bunch of different ways. And they found that overall it was pretty stable and you could take it multiple different ways. And that's why they were super interested about this. But the big thing is you see all those things, right? Tension, bone, growth factors, like all these amazing things. And this is where people take a little tiny bit of science and then extract what it's saying is the most amazing thing in the world. So those things are all awesome, very cool. And it's very academically interesting to see these arguments and these results that we found, 'cause this is awesome. This is how we learn things, right? You start somewhere. But to say, we saw that here in like a Petri dish, like literally they took out like an Achilles, transected Achilles and put it in a Petri dish and observed what happened. And then to take that and extrapolate it to saying, hey, it's gonna help you as a human recover. That's a big leap. That's a big leap I'm not quite ready to talk about. And that's why I wanted to talk about it 'cause I was so, I just was quite honestly shocked when I was looking at what was going on. But that's really why the hype is here. And what does research actually say? Well, almost all the research, as I mentioned on BPC157 has been conducted in animal models. I literally looked through every single published paper on Pet Med looking at BPC157, there about 190ish, something like that. I looked through all of them. And there were like literally only a handful, like I'm not joking, like less than a handful of like any of the thing involving a human. Most of the times it was, even if then is a human cell might be interested, but actual human experiments like on humans, like incredibly small, almost none. And on top of that as well, there's very few authors. This one person out of Croatia, Skirsek, I'm sure I'm butchering the name, I apologize. That person had like well over 40 publications related to this. So obviously that's his area of expertise and that's phenomenal. You know, that's awesome to dedicate your life to do something, not knocking that at all. But when a large percentage of the studies come from one single person, I worry a little bit, there might be a little bias, right? They've invested a lot of time and effort into this and this is their baby and they wanna see this shine. And so just something to think about as well, but it was like at least 40 for like primary. So I didn't even count how many times they were secondary, which I'm sure were multiple as well. And so a large swath of the data comes from one specific research group. And that's something you just have to consider, right? It doesn't negate the science by any means. I'm not saying it doesn't count, but if you were out there in the world and someone says, "Hey, this magical compound does this, that and the other thing." And you say, almost all the researchers coming from one group, you'd kind of scratch your head, say, "Hey, do they have a bias for this? Do they have a commercial interest? Who knows what?" That's just what I saw as well. So yeah, being a huge nerd going through all of them, I just read through it, took quite a bit, but not a lot of human studies and that's really, really important. There was the one specifically when it looked at muscle regeneration. So there might've been other adult one and I should say human ones, but I looked specifically at like muscle, tendon, ligament, anything like in the sports medicine or general medicine or like being lifelong athletes around my looked at. And there was like a single study, a single study looking at humans. And so props to the people for doing it, but that's what it was. It was a retrospective study, meaning that the researchers looked back on previous data from things that I already did and it was not perspective. And so what they did though, is took place in Orlando, Florida and there were 17 participants. So step one, 17, hey, I love that we're doing research. I'm not knocking that at all, but what am I gonna learn from 17? Nothing concrete, that's for sure. But hey, 17, we'll keep going here. Average age, about 60 years old, but it ranged from 17 or 19 to 77. And these people all had knee pain. That's what they're coming here for, knee pain. They're about nine women, seven men. And most patients were white with one of Hispanic sense so in one of Korean, so pretty homogenous group. And then 16 of the 17 people were actually contacted for the followup. I'm not sure why one of them wasn't, but they weren't. And the treatment included an intra-articular injection of BPC-157 into their knee. However, some patients also received TB4, which is another peptide that may be helpful for healing as well. So, but 12 of the 16 just got BPC-157. And this study aimed to determine if BPC-157 helped with multiple types of knee pains in a primary care setting. So multiple types that is pretty nebulous in terms of like, it's not just like specifically, you know, mild or moderate OA or what, it was just like knee pain, you got it. And you got money, here, you can get peptides. Essentially what it came down to. But that's how I read that. What they did, once again, 12 of the 16 got that. And for followup, the followup took place, it was varied. Most patients were contacted about six months to one year. So there wasn't even a set like, "Hey, this is our one time point "we're gonna look at there," anything like that. And patients were then asked to rate their pain prior to the injection, the length of time the peptides helped ease the pain, and the degree to which the injection helps them. But there was no specific tool which measured the function. So one thing in studies that we do a lot is we have validated measures, right? So specifically for arthritis, you use things like the WOMAC score. It's like a validated thing of, "Hey, what's your pain like here?" It's a validated scale and you measure pre and then after this WOMAC or the VAS, visual analog scale, or there's a ton of them, right? And this, they pretty much just asked them like, "Hey, do you feel better?" And this happened retrospectively, right? So they got this injection, they say, "Hey, how long were you in pain? "How bad was it before?" At this point, six or 12 months later, "How bad was it before?" And now you feel better. You can't ask me what I ate yesterday, I'm not gonna remember, but you're certainly not gonna be able to definitively know what your pain was before the injection. You definitely can know directionally. I'm not saying that at all. You'd definitely be like, "Oh yeah, I got better or not." But to say like, "This is what it was before, "six months ago or 12 months ago, and where is it now?" That's not necessarily ideal from a study design perspective, but so yeah, that's what it was. And overall though, 11 of the 12 patients, or what, 91%, who received the BPC-157 have significant improvement in knee pain. However, as I mentioned before, this was retrospective, and there's lots of confounders there. And the biggest one is there's no control group, right? Making it possible to determine if the improvements was due to BPC-157 or other factors like placebo or spontaneous recovery. So these people theoretically went to this clinic, right? And I guess I didn't necessarily see about the funding of that, but they went to this clinic expecting to get something injected to them, most likely. This clinic is probably advertising that or not they're involved in this study. Either way, they're expecting to get that, and they get something injected to them. And we know from the data that if you get something injected to you, a percentage of people would feel better. Like we do steroid versus saline placebos, and people in placebos, some of them get better. So the question is, how much is this worth BPC-157? How much is this worth the injection? How much is this just natural time course? You get someone in six to 12 months, will their knee pain get better? A lot of them will, absolutely. And so with no comparative group, it's really hard to determine is this coming from BPC-157? Once again, this is not a knock on the data. I'm never gonna knock a single study saying, "Hey, we tried to learn something." And this is helpful 'cause we don't have any human data. So that can be helpful for that perspective. But just understanding the limitations of studies like this, that's just something I really wanted to mention. And it was also a pretty small participant, only 16 people with the follow-up. And yeah, there were no objective measures. And so overall, it seems to suggest that it may be helpful and maybe an alternative steroids is what they're trying to say. I'm not ready to say that yet, but we need much more information. And on top of this one study in humans, another reason I just wanted to talk about other data is there are multiple studies showing improved signs of healing, whether that's muscles, tendons, whatever. There's one of a rat Achilles tendon where BPC-57 was used and showed complete healing of a detached tendon. So essentially cut it and then it grew back together, which is what they're saying in the rat Achilles. So that caused a lot of people to get up in arms saying, well, look at the incredible healing properties of that. That's another reason why they said that. Once again, though, in rats, not necessarily there. And then there's also shown increase of tendon fibroblasts, like I mentioned, and tendon explants. So they essentially took tendons, took them out and they saw improved healing on that. And yeah, overall, very, very limited human data though. And we need a lot more rigorous studies to make this more confident that we can, that we can make more confidence saying, hey, like this actually is doing something. I think it's great that we had the study, this one study in human, we have these rat studies, but overall it's not the most robust data set, but that's okay. We're, you know, we take what we got and we go from there. And so that was kind of what the research was saying overall on that. And now what are the risks, right? So we were saying, hey, Jordan, this sounds good. What's going on? Well, the first things first is BPC-157 is not approved for human use by regulatory agencies like the FDA. So that's like the first thing. If it's not approved by the FDA, you gotta put a little pause. And I know some people might be saying, oh, the FDA, like it's all corrupt. Okay, at the end of the day, they are our governing agency for trying to make sure things are safe. And whatever your opinions are about the FDA, we have to recognize that they do have a decently stringent process of approving something. And so if something's FDA approved, I at least feel better that they're being manufactured in a good way and that odds are it's probably gonna be safe. Whereas if the FDA doesn't approve something, then you don't know how it's being made. So that's just the first thing here. There's also lack of safety data in humans. So there's been really no randomized controlled trials in humans to determine the safety of it. We have no idea what the actual dosage should be. So there's no like one set dose of BPC-157. We're kind of just guessing based off of studies that we've read. It's a completely unregulated market. It is not regulated by the FDA. So therefore there's no guarantee for any sort of quality or safety. So where is this being manufactured? No idea, no idea. It's not an FDA approved facility. If literally, if you try to buy this online, it's only for research use only. They say, hey, this is only for research use only. It should not be consumed by humans. But literally they say that, but then people buy it and they use it in some way, shape or form. And the FDA has actually cracked down recently on peptides, making it harder. So it's harder for compounding pharmacies to make this as well. So compounding pharmacies are essentially, they take an idea from paper or a known substance and they can make it themselves. The FDA has kind of cracked down that as well. So it's hard to get this. So you're literally just buying it from like some random website, hoping that it's pure and it's supposed to be for research purposes only. So that's another big thing as well. And the WADA, the World Antidopent Agency also has it. It's legal, it's on their list, so we can't have it. And then one thing that I just kind of thought about reading this is cancer risk, right? Not that saying there's studies showing that it causes cancer, but some growth factors that they've seen in there have been associated with several tumor lines. That's one thing. Also increased angiogenesis, increasing blood vessels also can alter and theoretically can increase cell growth and cancer cell growth. And there have been some studies showing that BPC1.7 maybe decreased some of these initial tumor lines and look at some things. But overall, if you're telling me you're increasing growth factors and blood vessels and all that stuff, yes. Could this be a good thing? Absolutely. But it also taken to the extreme can be a bad thing. And so there's zero data at all about like long-term BPC stuff, right? So the risks that we are when we're taking this, if someone's taking this, the risk is that we literally know nothing about long-term effects, right? We have people saying, "Hey, I took it and it's fine. No big deal." That's fine, but I'm not hanging my hat on. That's for sure. Like I saw a comment on another YouTube post about BPC1.57 and someone's like, "I don't get what the fuss is about. I've been taking this for five years and I'm fine." Well, that's like saying, "Hey, I've been taking anavoxirates for five years and nothing's happened. Hey, I've been taking meth for five years and nothing's substantially bad has happened to me." It's like literally pick anything. And just 'cause it hasn't happened to you doesn't necessarily mean that you're in the clear, right? Specifically cancer, right? That can take years and years to develop. And so that's one of those things. Anecdotes, this is strong on anecdotes. This compound and what they talk about is just anecdote after anecdote after anecdote of someone saying this happened, this happened, this happened and is there something to anecdotes? Absolutely, but do I hang my hat on anecdotes in terms of safety and reliability and purity? Absolutely, I do not. I do not do that. But that is what's happening. Those are kind of the risks that we do have. And then in terms of alternatives, we're trying to heal ourselves, right? We're trying to get healing there. There are definitely alternatives to that. And the big things we talk about are physical therapy and essentially PRP or platelet-rich plasma. If someone wants to have a fancy compound, PRP would be a reason why it has a really good side effect profile. You're injecting your own cells in use. You're not worried about something purity-wise of that. But for most injuries, the reason most people take this is from injury perspective, right? Not necessarily performance enhancing, but from injuries, most people get better with time. That's just how it works. And there's a little bit of guidance. I always say just a little bit of nudge with physical therapy, a lot of times all we need, but physical therapy would be my mainstay. I certainly wouldn't skip forward on that by any means saying like, "Oh, let's get PT, just get BPC157." PT is the bedrock of everything. And then if you need like an injectable or something to take you there, PRP is what I'd probably recommend. That can be expensive as well, but better. We have lots and lots of data on that in humans that it seems to be relatively safe. And that's just kind of what I'm thinking. If you're like, "Hey, I need to help healing." Then PRP is probably where I'd go before I do BPC157 just 'cause I have no idea if you're actually getting BPC157 or not. But those are kind of the alternatives I think about. And overall, just kind of conclusions of this though, the potential benefits of BPC157 are based pretty much on animal studies with no real human data. And we have no idea what this thing actually does or could do, good or bad, right? It could be the most incredible healing compound in the world. And that'd be awesome. I would love that. But it also could be a cancer causing agent that we didn't know anything about yet. We just don't have the studies. And a lot of people, what they'll say online is they say, "Well, this can't be patented, it's natural. And that's why Big Pharma will never get ahold of it. And that's why there's no money in this. So that's why nobody's marketing." Well, I've just challenged that assumption. 'Cause first of all, what are those peptides I mentioned earlier, right? Like insulin and GLP-1, like pharma makes those and pharma makes a butt ton of money on them. So they absolutely could come up with a BPC157 proprietary blend, whatever, some pharma grade of it. They can make that and they could present it. They absolutely could do that, like 100%. And so why hasn't it been done yet? I don't know. Maybe they're not aware of it. Maybe they don't think it's that helpful. Maybe they've done studies and realize this is garbage. We're not gonna go forward with this. There could be multiple different options. But when someone says there's no money to be made in this, I don't think that's true. I think if this worked and pharma wanted to, they can make enormous amounts of money on it. So I just wanna, you know, a lot of times people say pharma doesn't want this so that therefore it must actually work, right? This is like a hidden secret. Like pharma has no control over this. Like that's not the case. They could absolutely develop their own version of this and make money on it. So I just wanted to take that argument off the table as well, which I saw online as well. People saying, "There's no money to be made on this." If something works, pharma will find a way to make money on it. That's for sure. So that's kind of an argument for me. Almost another reason why I don't wanna use this is if pharma most likely has probably found this, right? I'm sure that people are much smarter than me looking at the studies and saying, "Hey, should we pursue this?" Maybe they even pursued a little bit, found it wasn't worth it. They're really good at one thing and that's making money. And if something works, then they're gonna make a lot of money on it. And so if something doesn't work and they scrap it, then I think, okay, maybe that's a reason why it hasn't come to market yet. Just absolute speculation there, absolute speculation. But that's another argument I've seen online saying that, "Oh, look, they can't make money off it. I definitely think they could." But that's just something to mention as well. There's no way to actually get pure BBC 157. So we have no idea if it's safe to use. Like literally no idea when you buy it online for experimental use, like what you're getting. You could be getting something completely different, but there's no guarantee. Maybe it's one, maybe it's actually pure. Maybe the people making it take a lot of pride in their work and do a great work. And I'm not saying they don't, but there's just no way of knowing, right? 'Cause nobody's checking. They're not batch testing and saying, "Yep, this is pure and there's no regulation of it." And there's no studies proving that they've done the process, they've gone through it and we understand it's safe. Understanding it's safe in humans, all that stuff, right? So if something comes to market from the FDA, it's done in rats in labs and hey, what does it look like? Perfect, that's like first step. Maybe stage one in clinical trials. And then stage two is like human feasibility and then we go to animals and then we go to humans. So like we have lots and lots of different steps going on there and we haven't done any of those things yet. So we don't know how safe this thing actually is. And so I would say I would exercise extreme caution when considering any sort of unregulated substance. And for me personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable using this yet just the unregulated nature of it. You know, I've known people, I've had patients who've done it and tried it and some have said it's been helpful, some have said it has not been helpful. And so once again, I'm not here to tell you yes or no, I'm not your doctor listening to this, I'm not your doctor, we're just having a good time hanging out and learning. But I personally just don't feel comfortable with it yet. For me, the risk reward's not quite there. You may determine it is, you may say it's fine, that's good, but for me, I'm just not quite there yet. But you know, hey, that can change for everybody. And I said, I'm not judging here, this is just one beggar to another beggar telling me where to find food. Meaning this is just what I've seen, this is kind of where it comes from. And so I just wanna take a step back saying this is, you know, on social media touted a lot and very confidently in that, that, you know, I can do these things, these things, these things, but based on the actual data, I'm not sure. And obviously, yeah, you're not data, right? You're not, you're just one single person, you're not a huge group of people or anything like that. But based off of what I see, I just wanted to share that saying, hey, this is actually what's out there. And sometimes people are advertising this like we have a lot more data than we actually do. So just wanna put it out there, but if you made it to the end, I appreciate you sticking with me, it's kind of a niche nerdy one, but yeah, I really appreciate you stopping by. And if you would, it'd mean the world to me if you either liked this video, commented or subscribed on YouTube or shared with a friend, that's like the biggest comment you can ever give me. And yeah, I just really appreciate you stopping by. Now get off your phone and get outside, have a great rest of your day, and we'll see you next time.
