Benefits of Peptide Therapeutics for Bone Health, Osteoporosis, and Metabolic Health!

so we're always looking for the best tools to improve our bone health this video is going to present an option that I bet you've never heard of and I'm going to tell you exactly what it is where we get it and how we use it but first let me give you a little background this compound has evidence to support its benefit for muscle Health metabolic Health heart health improved sleep improved performance as well as bone health now if that sounds too good to be true trust me that it's not but the research does leave room for improvement now I'm curious about what you found to be the Magic Bullet in your bone health program and if you have something that you'd like to let us know about just leave a comment on YouTube I'd love to hear about it so what is this thing that I'm talking about well it's a peptide called hexarelin now a lot of people don't know about peptides so let me just give you a little background here so peptides are these interesting molecules generally naturally occurring that are just simply chains of amino acids and amino acids are the building blocks of protein so these are simply just kind of like short proteins but with amino acid chains less than 50 amino acids in length most proteins therefore would be over that and again they are naturally occurring molecules for the most part and they act generally as signaling molecules within the body so in some ways there's similar to Pharmaceuticals and in fact some of these peptides do end up becoming Pharmaceuticals some famous ones you've probably heard of would be like insulin like the hormone insulin is actually a peptide OIC which is a a gp1 Agonist used now for weight loss mostly but originally studied for diabetes and that is also a hormone and a peptide so there's a lot of peptides that are actually already on the market but what we're talking about are the things that maybe they were tested for pharmaceuticals and dropped for various reasons or they've never been pursued because they're naturally occurring products and unless a pharmaceutical company can alter them either through delivery or in some unique Way by adding another component of a compound then they can't actually be p ented so if you can't patent a product then if you are a for-profit company and you need to invest Millions potentially billions of dollars in something you're not going to want to do that with something that you can't patent that's naturally occurring because you're not going to get your money back so unfortunately a lot of these products do then end up not going to Market and not being available commercially because they simply can't be patented now that said many of these peptides do have adequate research to stratify risk and potentially the benefit so hexarelin is one of these peptides where like I said the research isn't perfect but I think there's adequate research to use it for patients and there's adequate research to present it as an option because there is research that is both animal and human and intervention style and trial and there are recommendations to use this as a commercial drug it's just not available as a commercial drug all right so what is this thing called hexarelin so hexarelin is a synthetically derived growth hormone releasing peptide or a gin analog and I'm going to give you all the science here it stimulates the growth horm hormone receptor by activating the growth hormon secretagogue receptor in the brain so did I just lose you so don't worry here's the non-medical version of that statement hexarelin is a short chain of amino acids that act as a signaling molecule in the brain to release growth hormone does that make more sense so growth hormone we know is important because as we age growth hormone declines in fact it starts declining really early and while some anti-aging gurus are Advocates of injecting growth hormone there are some potential negative effects of injecting growth hormone and it's very difficult and expensive to find so peptides that work around the growth hormone axis have been studied and may provide some of the benefits of growth hormone and avoid some of the potential negatives of growth hormone are more easily available less expensive and hexarelin is in this group all right so again remember I'm going to show you exactly where we consider this peptide but first let me walk through a few studies that encouraged me to offer this to our patients all right so study one study one is a mouse model and we're going to go through several animal models so study one is a mouse model and we're going to go through a lot of animal models here not a lot but a few hexarelin when given to a mouse it increases pulsatile growth hormone secretion now pulsatile is important because hormones in general we don't want to be present all the time so we want it there and then we want it gone it's also important because when you pulse hormones then a lot of times you won't disrupt the natural regulation of that hormone and we saw that in mice in this study Now growth hormone when you give it as an injection is going to more look like chronic elevation of growth hormone and that's I think is where some of the issues occur with growth hormone but as far as the effect of the hexarelin on the mice what we saw is that they had increased fat burn or lipolysis they had reduced fat production in the liver so their denovo fat production was reduced they had less visceral fat likely as a result of that they had lower triglycerides in their blood and they had improved insulin sensitivity but didn't alter the insulin levels or glucose tolerance or anything negative when it comes to the metabolic function so all that's pretty cool but I didn't say anything about bones in there did I but don't worry we got more so study two is a more recent Mouse model and this one again was looking at intravenous hexarelin and it again showed benefits from an insulin sensitivity perspective they showed again that increased fat burn decreased fat Mass but the most important finding here and why I included this is that it increased lean muscle mass so compelling in an animal model that it increases lean muscle mass all right so then third study again on mice looked at mitochondrial function and mitochondria those little factories of energy within the cell and the mitochondrial function went up again with hexarelin and again benefits in fatty acid production uh sorry fatty acid metabolism that's burning the fat and then also protective of the beta cells in the pancreas that make the insulin so again there's a benefit of insulin here now this fourth one is a a rat study and this one's specifically looking at the formation of plaques so the things that cause heart disease disase the thing that caused heart attacks and strokes and what they found here is that the hexarelin actually suppressed the formation of plaque and all these different markers that they looked at but essentially the things that caused plaque were reduced when the the rats had hexarelin compared to Placebo so that's actually kind of cool and then the last animal study I'll show you I only included it just because it makes sense from a dosing perspective why the oral dose is so much higher than the subcutaneous dose because they found that the bioavailability once it goes through the gut is about 10% of that if you were to do it subcutaneously or through injection so before I get to the human studies let me just do a quick mention of our master class so if you are confused about all of the 160 things that we're talking about in our videos you want to hear me put it together in one place go to our either our website optimal human health.com or look for the link in the description below on YouTube and sign up for our free master class again totally free you'll hear me put all the stuff together and then answer questions for 10 to 15 minutes it's been really helpful for a whole lot of people so I would encourage you to do that if you haven't done it already Okay so a couple of human studies here so the first human study was looking at hexarelin versus a couple other things including growth hormone itself and what they were looking at this for was specifically in cardiovascular function and what would be the potential benefit of using this in someone who let's say had a bypass surgery so a big heart surgery and what they found is that hexarelin was independently acting differently than growth hormon so even though it acts through the growth hormone path way there must be receptors for hexarelin and other tissues that are more specific to this type of peptide because there was impact improved function from a cardiovascular perspective with hexalin that was better than the other two things that they were studying including growth hormone so that's kind of cool another study just simply demonstrated that if you give hexarelin the growth hormone does go up but again it's pulsatile so it is up and down it can augment normal growth hormone secretion all right second to last study is a study on both men and women that shows that Meal Time consumption doesn't affect the serum levels of this now this might not seem that important but a lot of these peptides particularly in the growth hormone and the igf category which I'll explain in another video all of these peptides are generally recommended to be consumed fasting and that can be a challenge for people because a lot of times they want to consume them around meals so what this next study showed is that essentially that didn't matter and that the meal time did not affect those that's different than a lot of especially the igf-1 peptides and then the last one arguably most important one is an older study but it looks at hexarelin use on elderly human subjects and what they did is they did a 15-day trial of oral hexarelin at a pretty high dose of 20 milligrams and what they showed first and foremost is that there were no negative side effects there was no desensitization meaning there was no alteration of the growth hormone pathway and that the the their conclusion was that the pulsatile treatment of hexarelin through growth hormone actually restored growth hormone levels in elderly subjects so again you're kind of Mimi thinking what it would be like to use growth hormone but not quite all right so I haven't mentioned bone health yet so let me just talk about this last study so this last study is a rat study so it's again it's an animal model not a human study but what they did is they looked at the impact of hexarelin on the loss of bone in an animal model that would typically lose bone and so essentially what they did is they in a neutered rat model you would see loss of bone and you could monitor the increase in in bone turnover markers Etc what they noticed is that if you use hexarelin it blunted all of those bone turnover markers so the rats were not losing bone as they were given this peptide whereas if they were given growth hormone historically even growth hormone would not have prevented the loss of of bone so again hexarelin has an impact on bone that growth hormone does not so is that an animal model yes is that a human model no you know do we have good clinical trials on this no and so this is kind of the rub with a lot of the peptides this one in particular I would say the evidence is present but not amazing but is it enough to support patient use well I look at it like this we're never going to see large clinical trials on humans with the outcomes that we're looking for because pharmaceutical companies are just not interested in that benefit so what do we have to do well we use the evidence that we have decide whether or not we think it's safe and then we can plug it into a risk benefit ratio right so what is the risk of this thing that we're considering and so a risk for something like this that has been studied and there are other trials that I didn't mention too there's dog studies and there's more studies so this isn't all of the evidence but we look at the potential risk of which there really doesn't seem to be at the doses that are being used here and then we talk about the benefit so the benefit here being that we are utilizing a growth hormone pathway without the risk of growth hormone we are getting some of those benefits including increas Le muscle mass including likely decreased in visceral fat improved metabolic function potentially improved cardiovascular function improved an arterial function all of those things are pretty darn compelling so then when we use this for the whole big picture could it help bone health well it seems like it likely would because we've been using peptides for this space around bone health and muscle mass for a long time and this is just another one that fits into those categories Additionally the risk around naturally occurring products are generally going to be smaller assuming that the dose is reasonable we never want to assume that something's not going to be harmful but again if we have trials where nothing's come up then we feel pretty confident moving forward with something like this even though it is certainly in a gray area so we clinically have access to both the oral form so a capsule form as well as subq hexarelin most people of course prefer the oral form and that's fine we like to use it for people that are really struggling with muscle mass and we see this very very frequently with osteoporosis because those two really do go hand inand so if someone's struggling with muscle mass if they have you know challenges with their bone health and they're struggling to to Really encourage that P1 and P side the building side then this is a reasonable tool to help encourage a pulsatile secretion of growth hormone and augment the normal growth hormone pattern in that specific population and I told you that we were going to talk about dosing so when it comes to dosing you can look in again the human studies you can look at some of the animal studies and subq is a common way to do it that means a subcutaneous injection versus intravenous now obviously we're not giving people intravenous medications through our our platform but we have access to subq and oral the subq dosing recommended by thees is around 0.1 to 0.3 mg so therefore based on the study demonstrating oral bioavailability being about 10% of that then we would recommend oral dosing around 1 to 3 milligrams and so that's what we've been doing and again this is something that we do see a benefit for some patients okay so for those adventurous folks who want to go down the peptide pathway the next question is where do I get it and this is something that I wanted to talk about specifically about this peptide but really all peptides in general so I not to discuss options that are not easily available for most people but I get so many questions around peptides that I did want to at least bring up a couple of options and see what their respones like the challenge with peptides is that you really do need to work with a provider who understands peptides who's been trained in peptides I went through a whole certification course through a4m I'm a member of the international peptide Society so I've looked at a lot of this data and I understand how to prescribe these things so I'm not the only one that can do this there's lots of people that can do this maybe not lots but there are lots of people that have been trained but what I want to encourage you to do is to look for someone who has that training be very weary of direct to Consumer pharmacies so these things do exist there are people out there that are selling these to people that should be coming from a pharmacy that would require a physician's prescription I want to encourage you not to use these not because what the companies are making is not safe I can't say whether they are or whether they are not but the challenge that I've seen is around the dosing so it's very challenging for someone who doesn't have the training to understand what it means to put a certain number of MLS of hydrostatic water into a powder and make a liquid and then inject that and in fact we've seen that we've seen a ton of reports of this around the gp1s I mentioned OIC in the beginning of this video and that's a a product that a lot of people are trying to use for weight loss it's expensive and it's hard to get insurance to pay for it so some people are using these directed consumer Pathways and they're screwing up the dosing because again it's not simple in fact it's really challenging for us to even create the protocols for our team to be able to prescribe them accurately we have to go through so many checks and balances to make sure that we're not you know missing a decimal point here or whatever so it's challenging to do this on your own and the directed consumer products do not walk you through this and they offer no support because it literally says on the product not for human use so unfortunately people still like to go down that pathway um and we're seeing unfortunately a lot of people get injured as a result of that now that being said does that mean that we shouldn't use peptides at all no remember that peptides are if you're using the ones that have been demonstrated safe through research peptides should be safe particularly the doses that are being recommended by providers that are trained in these things that is not to say that things are are without Risk Everything has risk in fact just a quick reminder that even oral let's say anti-inflammatories like nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen because those are direct to Consumer there have been issues with dosing different tolerance levels and there are about 20,000 deaths per year from ibuprofen or other anti-inflammatories in the United States and this is every year over and over and over again so you just need to be really cautious about what what you're putting into your body know what it is why you're using it what the right dosing is and if you have any contraindications for something please understand that as well really just work with the provider who can help guide you down these things that's why the doing yourself model can be such a huge Challenge and remember this that osteoporosis isn't the end but deciding to reverse it is a beginning