The Most Effective Peptides for Gut Health & Longevity | Dr. Jeffrey Gladden

Are there any peptides, I know there's tons of peptides, but are there any that you think are sort of worth honorable mention? Oh, all of them. I think peptides are amazing. You know, we have an IRB approved trial here where we now have access to every peptide. So there are no restrictions for us being able to get peptides. So for our clients, this is relevant now because the FDA has really been putting progressive restrictions on the use and distribution of peptides. And so people are now going to oral peptides. And there are a few oral peptides that are super helpful, as you probably know, for the gut, right? So oral BPC and KPV together can be incredibly helpful for healing the gut. In fact, body protection compound 157 is made by your gut. So you're basically just giving yourself more of what you're already making. But we love the peptides. I mean, CJC 1295 with epimoralin to release growth hormone as we age, we make growth hormone, we just don't release it. So being able to do that. We love BPC, we love KPV, we love GHKCU, which is a copper-based peptide that basically improves wound healing and skin. We like TB4, TB500, which is thymus and beta-4, which also augments muscle healing and growth. That's a really cool peptide. Yeah, it's very cool. And then we love the thymus gland peptides, right? Like thymus and alpha-1 for boosting the immune system. It's actually in clinical trials for cancer right now. Thymolin can be very good for modulating the immune system. And yeah, on and on. So we love the peptides, really. With any of the GI peptides, do you see some flaring of symptoms in the short term before people get better? We haven't. We haven't seen it. Some people have seen that. I'm just not sure if it's a sensitivity in the cohort that we work with, which was my assumption, because I've never read anywhere something like BPC is going to cause short-term joint pain or things like that. We haven't seen it. What you might be seeing is they might be getting a little bit of a Herx reaction if in your protocol you're killing off a bunch of stuff. That might be a possibility. What are your thoughts on tesamoralin? Because I had someone the other day asking me about, geez, doc, I was using tesamoralin, or I'm sorry, I was using CJC 1295 with epimirellin, feeling really good on that. I switched over to tesamoralin. Tesamoralin's more so for body fat reduction. I didn't feel like I was, this is the remark to me, I didn't feel like I was getting some of the same energy and recovery outcomes with the tesamoralin as I was getting with the CJC. Is it possible for me to combine these? And I know they're hitting overlapping mechanisms. I don't go deep enough into peptides to have any thoughts on this. So the CJC 1295 epimirellin is a combination of a growth hormone-releasing peptide and a growth hormone-releasing hormone. So you're kind of getting both of the receptors for releasing growth hormone. The tesamoralin, I believe, is just a growth hormone-releasing peptide. Don't quote me on that. It's one or the other, though. And so tesamoralin's a little more potent in and of itself. Then there's samoralin out there, which people have probably heard of. That's a little less potent. We've been really happy with the CJC 1295 with epimoralin. It just seems to work well for our people. People tolerate it well and they seem to get good results from it. But we're big fans of not doing it all the time. That's a nice question. How do you cycle it? So you know the whole mTOR story, right? mTOR is good for building stuff, but too much mTOR and you get cancer and die younger, right? So that's why rapamycin is important, because if you're blocking mTOR intermittently, you're basically allowing autophagy. Now all of a sudden you're getting all the benefits of your intermittent fasting and things, right? If you're on mTOR all the time, it blocks autophagy. So you have to balance these things. It's really a symphony, as I write about in the book, 100 is the new 30. So anyway, when it comes to mTOR and it comes to these peptides, these peptides that are growth hormone releasing, growth hormone is going to create IGF-1 in the liver and that's going to activate mTOR. And so we're big fans of, like if you're doing testosterone replacement, let's say you inject testosterone on a Monday, take the CJC 1295 with epimoralin Monday night, right? If you're going to be anabolic, be anabolic, and then take it again Tuesday night, but then don't take it Wednesday or Thursday, right? As your testosterone levels are coming down, maybe you're going to inject again on Friday, then take it again for a couple of days and then back away. And then if you're going to take rapamycin, rapamycin takes 10 days to get out of your system, right? It has a half life of 60 hours. So if you're going to do that, you can take your testosterone, maybe a little lower dose during that 10-day period, but don't be dumping growth hormone and releasing peptides on top of the rapamycin. Now you're just, you're pushing on the gas and the brake at the same time, right? So that's a good time to really bump up your spermidine and stuff like that. But yeah, for autophagy, yeah. And with the CJC, typical protocol is at least two days off per week. Sounds like you have a little bit more of a nuanced perspective. Yeah, we're a little bit more on and off. We try to couple it with when you're anabolic, be anabolic, when you're not, you're not. A lot of people say five days on, two days off, but I think it makes more sense for us to do it the way I just described. In terms of on the macro scale, do you do a number of months and then take a month or so off to maintain sensitivity to receptors? I know that's one thing that people have commented. I think it's theoretical. I don't know in practice what you're seeing. Yeah. Well, I think if you take that 10 days off while you're doing the rapamycin, and we're not doing rapamycin every week, right? Because if you do rapamycin every week, it takes four half-lives to get it out of your system, right? And at 60 hours for a half-life, that's 10 days. So you actually never really get it out of your system. So we like the idea of getting it out of your system. So if you did rapamycin every other week or every third week, and you're not using it then, you're kind of taking a break, right? So that's kind of would be our recommendation.