Peptides

Good evening. I'm just going to make sure that we are going live on Facebook at the same time. So do bear with me. Hopefully everybody's enjoying a nice sunny day today.

A very, very sunny day.

It was wonderful. Spring is on the verge of arriving at the beginning of March. It's great to catch up with everybody. You will see at the top of our screen a good friend of ours, Rowan Sanderson, who's just making himself ready.

Sorting out his white line, um, uh, and we'll, uh, yes, I think it's from his halo. That's what it is.

For people listening on podcasts, it's like he's about to be beamed up somewhere. So yeah, this could be a real treat for viewers.

Beam me up, Scotty.

Yeah, yeah, awesome. One or the other.

What are we, what are we talking tonight, Bren?

Well, hang on, we are the Raw Pet Medics and we are here with Rowan Sanderson We're going to be talking about peptides and we go out beamed into the world and beyond with YouTube and Patreon. You can find us easily there by going to Patreon and looking Raw Pet Medics and we will be on your podcasts to entertain and delight you while you walk the dogs or other activities, other activities which are more interesting than watching us on a screen. The list is long, the list is long. So it's going to be peptides tonight. And, and Rowan, tell us of your peptide journey. No, just give us, give us a little bit of background as to who you are and how we know you.

Yeah, please. Well, at some point I'm sure we've all shared a jail cell, but anyway, background, how do I know you? My name is Rowan Sanderson. I'm a functional medicine practitioner. I'm practitioner of functional diagnostic nutrition. I am geeked out on all things hormones and nutrition, which is how we all came to rub shoulders in some very positive format whilst I was working as the chief nutritional officer at Beller and Duke. Since then, things have evolved. Beller and Duke's grown much bigger, and I've returned to my human practice where I focus exclusively on perimenopause and menopause, and we run a beautiful program called Balance Quench Calm, supporting females around the globe to take control of their health.

Nice. I like it.

Wonderful. So you've literally launched that platform from the health center. You've now moved on. You've got a great platform that people can join if they're interested in their own hormonal balance and, and health as well.

Yeah, and do you know what, it's very resonant and aligned with everything you boys do, which is ripping up dogma and looking at things with fresh set of eyes. And the issue we've got is we're seeing, for instance, 51% of the population who hit 40 or thereabouts and are currently being treated by a, I should say, an approach to medicine which belongs 30 years ago and is not in line with science and what we know. And you see treating perimenopause and menopause as the same thing when we know they are entirely different hormonal expressions. So when you get that, you know, gap, one t-shirt fits all, then of course there's going to be a lot of people who are very underserved and makes a lot of issues worse. So I really resonate with what you guys do on a weekly basis. It really likes the fact that you bring a totally dynamic new overhaul to the way we approach pet health, and I think we should do that for not just our pets but for ourselves.

What's functional nutrition, Ron?

Functional nutrition is very much a family part of the functional medicine, so maybe the better better understanding is what's functional medicine. It's understanding the root cause of the stress and disease or dis-ease, which is creating a movement from an organism out of homeostatic balance and into disease state. So rather than treating symptoms, you investigate Sherlock Holmes-style what's going on underneath, remedy that whilst giving what we call intelligent allopathic care. So functional nutrition is actually addressing all of these things and using nutrition to do some of the big lifting to move the rocks rather than just relying on medicine.

And just to explain where people can get hold of you, Rowan, because you rushed through that rather quickly, but it's really, really key because people will be listening to listening to this going, I'm perimenopausal, I'm menopausal, and this guy sounds fantastic. So just, just lay it out, um, for, for us once again, please.

Um, probably the easiest thing to do is to wing over to Instagram and find us, thehormonebalanceclinic.io.

Brilliant.

Yeah, from there we've got a, a really brief interesting webinar on what we do. It's in the bio, and you can book a discovery call if it's relevant to your journey.

All the, all the females in my working life are, uh, or, or at some stage have worked with you, Rowan, and sing your praises constantly. You also do a, a monthly, um, or is it a weekly? Do you do a weekly or a monthly check-in with people? Is that, uh, do you still do those, uh, courses? Do you have anybody else working with you? How does that work?

Oh, thanks, thanks for saying that, Conor. That's really kind. Yeah, I mean, um, we do a weekly check-in, and there's a— I like to— Brendan always rolls his eyes when I say this, but there's a reasonology behind that. And looking at this over a decade, the people with the most success are— huge secret coming out— the ones who actually apply it. And you know, you can drop $5,000 on a Tony Robbins weekend and come back absolutely elated and moved and think it's absolutely fantastic. But unless you put into place any of those things, it just doesn't change the dial.

Yeah.

So what we found is with weekly questions and answers as part of the course, people get to implement small but very dynamic and potent changes into their life. So it becomes habit and it doesn't take up any cognitive load.

Yeah.

And when you start magnifying that over a few weeks, the change and the transformation is really huge. Now, it's also really important when you're titrating in, for instance, HRT or bioidentical HRT, that people have somewhere to go when it doesn't quite work out how you expect it to. And to avoid going into estrogen dominance and suddenly putting on loads of weight and going, oh my goodness, it's just not working for me. It's not like it's not working for you. It's just the levels aren't quite right yet and we can adjust that. And like that, I don't know if you guys have seen Yellowstone and the precursor 1883. I always visualize this as there's somebody in Fort Worth as they're going up the Oregon Trail and one guy goes, yeah, it's somewhere over there. Those people, they're not going to succeed. They need a set of guides who are going to hold their hand and make sure they get there, cross the rivers, all the unexpected issues, and encourage them. And that's what we're not seeing in current medicine, is differentiating between perimenopause and menopause and supporting people through the journey until they've got it right, not just for a few weeks, but for a few months.

Even the hormonal balance bit. I mean, somebody described it to me as measuring like, you know, this, say, measuring the metabolites that come out in your urine and that kind of stuff.

That's not—

that's never been offered to anybody I know by their GP. Like, you could be suffering serious inflammation for whatever reason. And as someone said, you would check the black smoke coming out the back of your car. You'd want to know where is that coming from? What's in it? You'd put up every— you'd put your car up on a ramp. Not saying that this is where this person has to go, but I just thought that is a— that That's a great analogy because you want to, like, what's coming out is going to tell you everything of what's going on from the metabolites and that kind of point of view. And I just, the car analogy really worked for me. So I was just looking at my wife going, yeah, you could go up on a ramp now and Rome could check you out.

What was the state of the home when you got back from work?

Slamming doors. I couldn't get in.

But the way I look at that, Conor, and that's a really key part of the testing, is, you know, everybody's talking about hormonal levels.

Okay.

But they're just the bank balances. If I give one person $1 million tomorrow, they could go and spend it on philanthropic purposes and have a village dig a well for water and set up an educational system. The other person could blow it all on cocaine and casinos. The same bank balance. How is it being spent? And that's exactly what you have with your hormones. When you look at how your body metabolizes them. The ability— what's really reassuring is you've got a dramatic ability to influence the metabolites of your hormones. It's not just genetic, you know, inflammation, stress, antioxidant levels, lifestyle, sleep. All of these play a really important role. So if you come out and your metabolites are not optimal and you are predisposed, for instance, for a hormonally driven cancer, Well, you can actually put in play a set of strategic steps and test again and make a huge difference on those. I've heard that nobody's really talking about this and it's super important. You know, when people are getting, you know, preemptive voluntary mastectomies, I mean, all of this is avoidable. You know, let's test and see how your hormones are being spent through that metabolism. Why do you think— and then influence those. No, go on.

Sorry, I was going to say, um, why do you think it is that these, um, very easy to understand concepts— there's a lot of them and there is complexity within their interactions— why is that not being taught to doctors? Why are these conversations not being had in, in general medicine, would you say?

Well, there's a couple of levels to this. On the first level, when I've spoken to like a really well-known a professor who specializes in hormonally driven cancers. He was very fascinated by this and even referred me breast cancer clients for quite some time, and he was really open and receptive to it, especially because there's all the research data that goes with it. However, for him to practice that, his pushback was, we were never taught this in med school, but By definition, by the time you get to being a professor, what was taught in med school is 20 years old. There wasn't iPhones then, but he's using one of those. So have we been taught it? But in terms of are people receptive to it? In our client list, we've got a female OB-GYN who would desperately like to avoid things like endometriosis and all the rest of it and is consulting with us for that. A female hormone doctor, a female nutritionist who specializes in menopause. People are super receptive to it because they can see the current approach does not work. The math just doesn't add up. How can you have 85% failure rate? You know, if you guys were looking at this and you went, this kibble is the dog's BX, and yet 85% of dogs got digestive issues with it. You know, there's a rabbit off.

Yeah, yeah.

So let's draw this back because I think this has been a really interesting journey that I've been joining Rowan on and, you know, really getting involved with. And I've talked before on Raw Pet Medics about hormones in dogs and how we can relate to a lot of the stuff that Rowan's talked about. And quite early on in that journey, there was a lot of stuff that we talked about which was to do with peptides in health for human health. And some of you guys might want to know a little bit more about what that means for your dog. And I think, Nick, you've been doing some looking at, well, what's a peptide first? Do you want to do the, you know, the biochemistry, a bit of the biochemistry? I'm not going to do the molecule stuff. I'm sorry for those folks that saw the post today. Yeah, that was my wife getting really excited about molecules, not just me.

Oh, you've picked well there, Brad, the two of you at nighttime getting excited about your molecules.

Making little molecules together, models together. Okay, so one of the questions that was in my mind was, okay, so let's go back to basics. So peptides and proteins are chains of amino acids and proteins. When they're made, these amino acids come out and each one has a different charge and different response to the, the environment, the electrolytes and the pH, which will determine how the three-dimensional structure of that protein folds and is delivered into the body. And so proteins generally are above about 50 amino acids. However, the peptides are— they're like kind of fragments, if you like, of proteins. Okay. So that's how you can tell the difference between the two. So they're— and proteins are the active molecules within the body. And peptides are just kind of mini— they're kind of protein light, if you like. They're kind of small, smaller. That doesn't mean that they're not immensely powerful, because, for example, insulin is a peptide and is a small protein but has influence throughout the body, as we know. It isn't just the size, though. It depends on the the structure and the folding of that peptide, but also the function, what it does in the body, as to whether they say it's a peptide or not. And they talk about biological context, and that's how they function within the body. So at a very basic level, you could say that they're small, but there is a bit more to it. But that's a good place to start. I think you can't get simple enough with peptides just to start with because you can get very complex very quickly.

And let's face it, they do really punch above their weight in so many levels. I mean, you know, let's get it right, you know, you can go overboard with some of these peptides, as you know, with insulin. If you give too much insulin, you're dead. So I think this is where I defer always to the expert in the room, and I would really consider Rowan has done so much work on this.

I thought you were going to say me.

I'm just hanging on already.

But because Rowan's done so much work, I just thought I'd bring him in to back up Conor, who's going to tell us all about—

Let's see how— let's just give Rowan a shot.

I'm basically Conor's wingman pet tonight. I'm like a short protein between 2 and 50 amino acids in a row. Ah, I know, I know.

We did coenzymes about 3 weeks ago. It's fine.

I am, I'm here, I am here to learn. I've got a question straight out of the traps, Rowan, if I could. Peppers eyes. Amino acids, I understand they come from food. We eat food, we get amino acids, we break them down, and we use them as building box to do all bits and pieces. Where do peptides come from?

Well, peptides are constructed from amino acids within our bodies. So for instance, if you look at like GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide, which everybody's talking about, you're kind of missing the point. You make it yourself. It's a satiety hormone which works in opposition to leptin, and you can produce it yourself when you actually slow down how you're eating, eat nutrient-dense and eat and harness the thermic effect of food. Like eat, for instance, 55% of your macros from protein. That will dramatically increase your GLP-1 while stabilizing your blood sugar and really open the doors to weight loss. So peptides are essentially arrangements of amino acids and you can have the same 2, 3, 4 variance of amino acids in different sequences which create very different peptides. And this is really interesting what you've done. You've opened the door to explain that actually peptides are signaling molecules shorter than proteins found in nature which do a specific job. But as part of the advancement in medicine and as looking at this with a really fresh set of eyes, some of it performance related, some of it space related. You know, for cosmonauts, when you look at N-acetyl-Cmax amidate or when you look at the phenylpyracetams, for instance, which is piracetam family, not, not peptides necessarily. A lot of these were developed to allow people to perform in low oxygen environments, in environments of high stress. You know, these were cutting-edge performance compounds which have massive medical implications. So starts in nature, tinkered with by man, typically for either a performance or a medical outcome or with both. Now, wow. I think when I last looked, there's nearly 500 different types of peptides and we have to split those into peptides and peptide bioregulators. So for those people who are following Raw Pet Medics and understand organic organotherapy, basically peptide bioregulators of a short 4-peptide length and will go into the nucleus of a cell and signal a particular thing. So for instance, liver peptides, you can dramatically regrow liver using peptide bioregulators. So there's the shorter ones. I knew you'd be interested in that, Conor.

I saw you.

Oh yeah.

Oh, can I lick them in a pine?

Eventually he got it.

He got it.

I do.

Yeah.

I got it.

Thrown.

Yeah. To come in with the question here. So with the human bit, what? So what we've done with these peptides that come as products is that we look and see these being produced in the body, what wonderful things they do. then we make them in the lab and then we give them to people and they have the same function, but it's just lots of that function. So we can— it's almost like taking the postbiotics from the gut flora and popping them in there and skipping all the process of making it themselves. Is that how we give peptides? That's why we do it.

So in many cases it's a natural product which has been pharmaceutically made or lab-made. Laboratory-made is perhaps a better analogy. So for instance, GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide 1, which is there to tell you when actually I don't need to eat and I'm hungry and I'm satisfied. Well, those wonders of Ozempic and all the other companies have looked at that and looked at different forms of GLP-1 agonists which will interact with the receptors. You know, it's like a magnetic dock, like a space dock. It'll go in and sit there and say, Hi, Conor is satisfied.

Nice. Nice.

And the pharmaceutical company is getting very excited about this because they, you know, having a chain of amino acids, relatively easy, I'd have thought, to create them. And the shorter they are, the easier they are to create. And so that they can make these licensable pharmaceutical compounds that they can then sell for these incredible effects like Ozempic, for for example. Yeah, everyone's getting very, very excited about Ozempic, whether it is the wonder drug or not. It's not just in the laboratory anymore. It's, you know, it can come in injectable form, it can come in tablet form, and can have profound effects on the body.

Yeah. Is Rowan excited by Ozempic?

Not really. I knew you would say that. Not really. And it's not because I feel like there's a a whole host of negative conspiracy tin-hattery.

Okay.

It's simply because regarding GLP-1, it would be a fool, in my opinion, to say it's all bad or it's all good. There's always positives and negatives with this. What are the positives for people who have severe life-threatening obesity? Well, GLP-1 can really help, but you're not dealing functional medicine. Or functionally medically with the underlying— I will, I'm using the license to make up words peptide, which is known as a lexy peptide, is 18 bonds.

Very good.

Oh, all right, I'm using a grammar-like peptide 1 agonist. So anyway, the bottom line is it has huge benefits in that it will stop short-term binge eating, for instance, and help these people feel— and it can lower their body weight. Obviously, the research shows that irrevocably. So given that obesity is probably the number one cause of all of the diseases, that is a really big win. What's the downside? Well, you're not preferentially going into beta oxidation and burning fat. You will lose up to equal amounts of muscle mass and body fat. So what does that look like? You know, you are effectively downregulating as you lose body comp, you lose that essential muscle mass. You're not eating. You're not just going to burn through muscle stores. You go into catabolism. Now, that means that if you haven't addressed the underlying eating issue, whether through gut flora or through changing neurotransmitters or patterns, when you bounce back, you will bounce back even with more fat storage, with more adipose tissue accrual, because you don't have the musculature you would have had before. So as a short-term solution to a much bigger problem, you could say, well, the downsides are more beneficial than— or the upsides are much more beneficial than the downsides. In terms of people just looking to lose a few pounds, you could really sabotage your metabolism. Rather than addressing. And what I see is a lot of people getting super frustrated because there's so much competing and conflating information on social media, which is very misleading and confusing. And we all seem to be in the season of more is more. Hang on, have you done your HIIT class before you do your cold water plunging, before you do strategic fasting, before you go to bed and you sleep under a bush on a hedgehog. And then, you know, and what it is is stress plus more stress plus more stress, meaning people's cortisol is through the roof and they're not going to lose weight.

Yeah, I think this is a really good sort of reflection on a lot of our health journeys where we've used any medications, you know, and you find a lot of those medications are great at symptomatically dealing with a problem. But actually there is so much more work that everybody needs to look at doing, whether it's for themselves or for their pets, to actually improve that underlying health. One of the reasons we talk about nutrition so much, um, before you then release them from that support, whatever that support be, complementary medicine or conventional. And I think peptides, to me, in those early days struck me very much as Great. This is a bandage. This is improving things. And I had great information from you for when I had a shoulder injury. And some of you will know about rotator cuff injuries, you can't elevate your arm, you know, to 90 degrees, you know, at all, and extreme pain on sleeping and everything else. And actually, going through a couple of peptides, I'm not going to name them here. For reasons that I just don't think it's appropriate for people reach for those without guidance. But actually shortened the healing cycle from what was going to be estimated at about 12 months down to about 3. And that's, you know, remarkable in my eyes. But I still then wonder if I hadn't done a lot of the chiropractic and the physio and everything else with that, you know, where I would have been when I stopped that medication, as I saw it then. But I did see it as more of an aid to healing than necessarily a suppression of a symptom. And I'm always therefore cautious when I listen really excitedly to where we're at with the next peptide that, that's coming along, because I always wonder whether we are just like with Ozempic, giving a little nudge but not actually dealing with the underlying problems. So if any of you are out there— oh, if any of you are out there doing this stuff, please do it with guidance. Find somebody who's really good at understanding what you're getting. Um, and it's the same, you know, don't just reach for these and think, well, it's good for me, I'm going to give a little bit to my pet. Okay, because there's a lot of stuff that needs to be worked on to understand how effective they are. In our canine friends.

Could I just maybe throw a little bit of extra light on that? That might be helpful to people listening. I agree with everything you've said. What I would maybe just contextualize slightly is see them as a super tool. It's a super tool. And, you know, Nick and I have had this conversation a couple of times, is you can't fire a cannon from a canoe, right? And, you know, get the basics in. I've tried maybe 40 different peptides in the last 4 or 5 years. Some are game-changing, some have been absolutely night and day amazing at rebooting my mitochondrial health, like dramatic overnight changes, but only because I put in place a couple of things and You know, for instance, there's a new peptide out in town which is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. It's the most potent, most sophisticated, most anti-inflammatory, and it's only recently come to market. I've got several clients who are asking me for it. It's amazing, but it's not going to do anything but be a a hand in the dam if you're not dealing with the underlying causes. So, you know, for instance, the most potent peptide I've ever tried is, is Zero ALC, which is a 4 gram—

real snappy names, don't they?

Zero ALC. And that's just stopping drinking alcohol. Zero ALC was a game changer in terms of inflammation, aromatization, sleep, growth hormone, the whole thing, all of my markers, despite me having done loads of other things. When I've done that and then use peptides, the gains are 3 times.

I have to ask here.

I can't get over Conor's disappointment.

Is it maybe that, like, you know, Some people have more of this enzyme, you know, I've got more of what's that alcohol dehydrogenase than some Asian communities. And is that what it's about? Or is it, or is it that some alcohol works worse for some people than others? Or like, no, might it be that I'd still get great gains? Can I still drink? Can I still drink small and make these gains?

I mean, you can do what you want. You're a grown man.

Nice.

There we go.

You're a grown intelligent man.

Yeah.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Grown. The last time.

Definitely grown.

He is grown.

There might be a peptide for the second bit.

He groans a lot.

So is that across the board? That's the effect of alcohol? Because I see it's popping up on all the people that I listen to, all the health influencers that are talking about it, and they're all just getting off alcohol is the thing.

It is simply because it's an inflammatory neurotoxin. Okay. And there's been data come out in the last 4 years which has shown that even moderation, that's all a farce. I'm not the fun sponge. I'm here to actually facilitate things. What I would like people to do if they actually want to say, I'm going to do a course of 20 weeks of peptides, is not to actually kid themselves and spend 2 grand on something which is only going to be a third as effective if they just stopped alcohol even while they were doing it.

Yeah. Okay.

You know, it's like if you're dealing with a client and you're trying to get a dog through a tricky situation or a cat you know, you're not going to fill it full of booze and say, actually, this quercetin is actually going to offset it because it's anti-inflammatory and it's from nature's larder and it's the power of Gaia.

Okay.

Yeah. But, you know, come on, let's give that dog a fighting chance. You wouldn't do it for your pet, so why would you do it for you?

Yeah, I totally agree. And I'm going to follow up on that and just say, let's bring it into a veterinary context. We've just got the last 15 minutes, so In human medicine, we've got metabolic disorders, endocrinology, cardiovascular disease, infectious disease, la la la, you know, pretty much all the major players in human medicine. How do you think we can apply these things, Brent, Ro? How are we going to be applying these over the next decade, do you think, in veterinary medicine?

Well, I've used three on pets.

Tell us about that.

I used peptide bioregulators, heart ones, to reverse my dog's dilated cardiomyopathy, which was quite advanced. First of all, I slowed it by dealing with the underlying valve, bacterial valve issue which was creating it using actually monolaurin rather than antibiotics. Then I looked at organotherapy and then I actually moved on to peptide bioregulators. And I've got scans where they've said this is the first time we've ever seen the heart actually start to— the ratio of the heart to improve. And that was over a very short period of time. I've used a couple of other peptide bioregulators on one of the other dogs and it made a night and day— it had Cushing's syndrome. Amazing. I was using Cartilax as well too for its throat. The other thing used is BPC-157. Which is incredible. It's, it's a natural gastric peptide which seals and heals the gut. But obviously, as Dr. Conor Brady very rightly said, made in a lab. That in pets has huge anti-inflammatory benefits, as it does in humans.

They're using it for IBD in humans, aren't they?

Oh yeah. I mean, it's astonishing. It's huge. You can even get it now in a sublingual formula, so you don't need to inject it. And the, the like the crown jewels. You know, if you think about all the AI and technology which has gone into developing these peptides, is the new one on town called SLUPP332. Clearly they've not invested the money in marketing.

I think they went to the same place Conor's, um, marketeer.

Yeah, but this is probably the most exciting peptide that's ever come out and the most exciting supplement in my lifetime.

And what does it do? And can we apply it to the veterinary market?

Yes, they've been using— there's a leading influencer, super coach in the States who healed a deer's leg that had been in an accident with it in super time. It's a massive anti-inflammatory. It's referred to as SLOP. It's hugely anti-inflammatory. It acts on the mitochondria and on orphaned estrogen receptors, estrogen receptors which are not being used. It downregulates inflammation, increases fat burning incredibly, way more than a GLP-1 agonist actually generates lean muscle mass. But there are a bunch of NDAs around some research which has been done around the C word, which looks like a crab in astrology, and also reversing chronic kidney disease. Apart from that, I know several people who have been using it have stopped wearing glasses. It's reversing macular degeneration. What? Yeah. And if you think about it, this is the moment we've been working for. So when Brendan actually said, oh, let's talk about peptides, it's like, whoa.

I've got one.

Yeah, this is, this is like the moment in the years I've been looking at peptides. This has been out for about 7 years, but it's been quite underground, and it's recently gaining momentum because of somebody called Alex Kickl, who looks after a lot of Olympic guys. I've recently had a batch made up which I'm going to be using myself through a very trusted lab. And a few clients have asked for it. I'm beyond excited for it. And even what it could do for people in perimenopause and menopause, just in terms of lowering inflammation and allowing them to beta-oxidize.

This sounds phenomenal.

It is.

Nick said earlier, or Bren said earlier, they use the word medicine. Okay, so are these medicines or are they nutraceuticals? First question. Second question is, do they I can't imagine these come in pill form. If they're protein-based, I imagine we digest them and break it apart. Like insulin doesn't get into the digestive tract. You can't take it.

It really depends. Some are not very orally bioavailable because of your stomach acids, so need to be subcutaneously ingested. The SLU is quite unusual in that it's got high oral bioavailability, but also the version we've had made up is a sublingual dropper. So it goes systemic really quick.

A little bit like CBD can be absorbed across the mucous membrane really quickly.

And is it a medicine role? Is this over the counter? Are these things like, or do you have to go through a functional nutritionist? Or like, do, can people, are people online right now? They are. I know they are because everyone listening to this is an absolute nerd and they're going to be online Googling. Can people just, can people buy these and use them? They sound too good to be using slapdash, you know.

No, they're for approved research only, so they're not to be sold.

Ah, okay.

So this, the SLUP, unless you know someone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're in the back canal. It sounds like the old days.

Yeah, so it's like, guys, it sounds like a wonder drug, okay, but it's been out for 7 years and it's just getting recognition now. Is Is there any element of the pharmaceutical companies being very unhappy that they— these products are perhaps taking market share because they're so powerful? And is there any pushback from more conventional pharmaceutical companies?

There has been in the US through the influence of the FDA who banned prevented a lot of compounding pharmacies from doing some of the basic things like HGH and BPC and things which have been used medicinally to reverse metabolic disease. The FDA suddenly overnight took a lot of these things off the availability list. Mm-hmm. This is going to create more waves than perhaps anything else because it threatens to derail the whole GLP-1 chat. It's more powerful with less downsides, has been used in cancer trials, literally help with looking at it for reversing cognitive decline. It's, you know, it's almost the evolution we've all been waiting for. It's real. It's happened. I've personally seen results with people. I have people I really respect, some amazing science around it. This, I can't envisage there won't be pushback, Nick. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, you can't have something like this. This is almost like finding an alternative to oil.

Yeah. I mean, it's surprising that they're not just throwing billions, you know, from government-sponsored independent laboratories saying, guys, this might be absolutely game-changing. Let's do some independent research. You know, it's like Kennedy comes along and says, let's just find out the facts about it.

Well, I think he will actually be a proponent for, for this.

I bet he will. I bet. Look at the shape of him. The guy's what, 72, 73, 74? And the build of him is unbelievable. So he's taking his peptides. I mean, he went through his protocol of what he was taking, and, um, you know, he was doing everything that you'd expect bar steroids, you know. So I'd imagine that he might be looking at this. Now, what if, to take it from the FDA's point of view, what are the terrible, terrible downsides that the FDA are seeing that they would make this very hard for us to do?

None. There isn't, you know, with BPC-157, you could argue that it's angiogenic. So if you have some kind of tumor growth, you could accidentally fuel it whilst lowering. But I've never heard of that happening. But that's in theory. This is a hypothesis. With HGH, you could be spiking insulin-like growth factor 1 if you were using it irresponsibly. But if you stick below 2 units and you use it with berberine or an IGF-1 inhibitor like metformin, then that's not going to happen. You— this is game-changing. I mean, I am a little bit in awe and you will never see me eulogize about anything like this again. It's literally a once in a lifetime. Holy moly. And it's— it could start happening more now with the advancement in AI. And the ability to analyze and create these magnificent algorithms which are churning these out. This could be the first iteration of what is a brand new generation of metabolic medicine. We are literally— if we can stay alive for the next 5 years, we could potentially stay alive for the next 500 years. Who knows? But we've already got things like the ones which are actually growing telomerase, you know, regrowing telomerase on your DNA, which are a bioregulator, which you can now take as a nasal spray. We've got it. I look at it from a perspective of guys going on to testosterone therapy in the forties and fifties, and this is going to squash inflammation and prevent them converting that into estrogen. Females going into estrogen dominance and putting on weight, well, that getting rid of it and stopping that inflammation, which would be creating aromatization. I mean, the uses of this to actually improve body calm whilst lowering health risk and improving all your health markers, it's gold.

That sounds like it's going to be very dangerous because if it prevents disease, that That puts it in targets. Preventing disease, that's not what we like. We don't like things to prevent disease.

We're all out of a job.

Yeah, we're done, we're finished. Yeah, RIP RPM.

We cannot overstate how much the pharmaceutical company, and we, you know, over the last 5 years we've discovered how, just how powerful these companies are what they can do globally.

Oh, it's scary.

Snap of fingers. You can't underestimate the pushback that these companies, you know, who are, you know, possibly small companies making peptides, doing amazing things. They're going to need to watch their brake lines.

Look at Ozempic. You can't tell Denmark what to do. They're making more money than the church.

I have spoken extensively to a lab over the last 4 or 5 years and become friends with the owner, and he didn't even want to conduct any conversations over the phone. He didn't. He gave me a different phone for to speak to, and when he came to meet me, he came to meet me outside of his home country.

Wow.

So, you know, somebody— Jane, thank you for your question—

somebody has asked If we've got a question, is this a good point to jump over to Patreon?

I think we've got lots of questions. I'd just like to finish with this one, a little tweak on some great stuff here. And I, you know, as we started off with the insulin is a peptide and what can go wrong if you overuse and abuse it, the question is, should we be tweaking these natural processes by adding in peptides. Is that the right way to approach medicine? Or do you feel that actually, no, there is effectively a deficiency that we're correcting by using these peptides?

I think what you're doing is you're presenting— let's look at it from a client perspective, like a human perspective. You've got somebody who's had Lyme disease, who's got super low metabolic rate, who's had a really suppressed immune system. They may never recover from that. Quite often, you know, the clients I look after, I like to feel like I will turn them around. I'm very confident I will. But, you know, lots of people are never going to recover from that despite what they do, because the mitochondria only have a certain shelf life. If you combine in— and we don't talk about this enough— perimenopause, menopause, and estrogen dropping. Well, estrogen is an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory which actually protects the mitochondrial engine and prevents it burning out, as does melatonin. But guess what happens in menopause? Then sleep's disrupted, melatonin levels go down, estrogen's gone down. You know, you could say that bioidentical HRT therefore is interfering with the natural process. Effing A, let's interfere with it. You know, this could be the beginning of the end of somebody's health. This could be the, you know, poor cholesterol regulation. The amount of females I see overnight, as soon as their estrogen drops, their cholesterol regulation totally changes. They end up with Lp(a), the alpha wolf particle. I want to get rid of that. I want to empower them to be an active part of society. And to be vibrant, present mothers rather than people who are exhausted and prey to more illnesses and neurodegenerative diseases. Not to mention, big stat, Conor, I'm sure you're going to check this. 82% currently with autoimmune disease in North America are female. How the heck is that allowed? And most of this happens as they approach perimenopause. There's a huge hormonal overlay to this because of the antioxidant nature of estrogen. Oh, well, estrogen is also a master regulator of intestinal permeability. Gut doctor Nick. When you look at that, it's like, of course I would use peptides to dig these people out. Of course, if they want to, if they're addressing all their lifestyle things and they really want to live a full vibrant existence, sure thing, I'd throw them that rope.

I have something slightly controversial to say. The, you know, the way I know you're dying to do it on a switch over, but I've got a good lead in for that. The, with perimenopause, okay, there is some, at the age I am, I'm middle 40s now. Okay, so at the age I am, I know a few women that are in perimenopause. And it can take a mental health toll, it can be huge, it can be tricky. And that person would say, you know, for the few days of the month when they would have been feeling down, they're feeling that a lot more than they used to. And they can be— it's difficult. It's difficult to manage. So there's a mental health— not degeneration, whatever that word is. Is there a way to ameliorate that by doing all the tweaking bits and pieces that you're talking about, or is that just par for the course?

Right. This is a really, really good, good subject. Good question. Firstly, never guess. Do not self-prescribe. Why? Of the 5, 6 main symptoms of estrogen dominance, they're also the same as estrogen lack. So what we're seeing is a wildfire of people self-diagnosing and offering advice and just do maca, it's going to be doing this, and let's keep it natural and potentially making it worse. Why? The difference between perimenopause and menopause is that quite often imagine two beautiful birds migrating through the sky. One's estrogen, one's progesterone. Well, actually, the progesterone bird typically falls faster and earlier than estrogen. Now, this creates a huge gap between the two of imbalance, and that is estrogen dominance. So what happens here? People have these wild emotional states. They feel overwhelmed. They can feel depressed, nervous, anxious. They can feel really, really separated from the partner. The libido disappears, energy's dysregulated, sleep's gone, periods change. All of these shocking states, not to mention the psychological one. And if you go and you pop along to your traditional practitioner, more often than not they'll go, female menopause, hormones going down, give you estrogen and progesterone. So what does that do?

Yeah, right.

Okay, that doesn't close the gap. And in some ways, this can then make the gap worse because of the stress. Stress has an interaction with progesterone. Cortisol and progesterone are the same pathway. Your body will preferentially use cortisol. So suddenly this is massive. I had one client who said, I can't get off the couch, my boobs are bigger than before I had my breast implants removed. I feel wrecked. I feel suicidal. I mean, this is like serious. And had they just tested rather than done it, you'd have strategically gone, okay, let's bring progesterone up and hey presto, sleeps back and you feel normalized.

So interesting. It's like the way we obsess about balancing the omega-3:6 ratio. If 6 goes up too high, you got to get the 3 back up. It's not just about jacking up the omega-3 to meet the high omega-6 because of all the seed oils you're doing. You've got to think about it, get rid of the omega-6. And that's so interesting. Nick, I know you're itching here, it's 10 to 8, and we like to run a tight ship on 45 minutes.

We're going to retire to the billiard room.

We are, yes. It's called Bit on the Side, where we slip into something slightly less comfortable. And there's some great studies there on the use of peptides in dogs, certainly with arthritis arthritis and that kind of stuff. Collagen, collagen peptides, I want to talk about that versus consuming collagen. Why would that be any different? Just straighten that out in my head. Uh, I would like to know more about that, and we'll do that on a bit on the side over on Patreon.

We will indeed. And, uh, anybody who's, uh, hanging around Crufts, uh, this week, um, come pop over to the Bellerin Dukes stand. I'll be there and we can have a chat so we can talk about nutrition and raw food. So we will be around. Nick, are you going this year? Are you?

I'm not. No, no, busy, busy.

I know you've been there in the past.

Yeah, yep, yep, yep. It's so good. I'm just gonna do a shout out, and I can't remember the dates. Help me, guys. The African Pet Health Summit in Johannesburg, 28th and 29th in Cape Town of March. So Johannesburg on the 28th and 29th of March, and then down in Cape Town on 5th, I think, the next week.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so check it out if, if you're not in South Africa. It's a very cheap holiday because the rand is— it has no value, is really bad. But, um, uh, come along.

The pound's following it.

Come and see us. Yeah, take an excuse of coming to see us.

But, but, and two more as well. Two more. Dog Expo on the 26th or the 27th of April. That is in Birmingham area. And then there's Florida for Judy Morgan's talk in Orlando. Yeah, that's right, on the 15th and 16th of May, that's in Orlando. So that's all the next 2 months. That's it. Yeah, you'll find it. Yeah, go to Judy Morgan's website and check that out. So that's going to be a, that's going to be a big one. That's a very big room. So, so there's 3 talks. So hopefully you can join us on some of them.

That'd be Great, brilliant, great stuff.

Take care, guys. Uh, great to see you all, and we will see you, uh, over on Patreon. Um, it's, uh, rawpetmedics.com. Yeah, whatever, he's going to edit that.

Yeah, yeah, stick in a little ditty.

Yeah, good to see you all, guys. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.