317: Are Peptides the Key to Longevity, Reducing Biological Age and Inflammation with Regan Archibald

Hi, I'm Natalie Jill and I help women in their 40s, 50s and beyond redefine, rebrand and laugh with aging. Welcome to Midlife Conversations. On this podcast I do what I do best. Taking complicated information that is relevant in this point of our lives now and break it down simply with actionable steps you can implement to level up your life. I also regularly interview some of the most inspiring people living their best midlife years. Now on this show I cover topics about our shifting hormones, weight struggles, our mood and focus changes, raising teenagers, our relationships, career changes, beauty and more. If you are new here, I encourage you go back and listen from episode one when this podcast was previously called Listen up for the Full Transformative Experience.

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Today on Midlife Conversations, I am talking with Regan Archdebaud and I am can't wait to dive into this conversation today because he is the expert on all things page Peptides. And I know most of you listening in right now either don't know what Peptides are or you've heard very little about them so far and they are things that we could be using in so many areas of our life. When it comes to longevity, building muscle, cognitive hormones, weight loss, injury, pain recovery, the list goes on and on and on. I think we need more experts in this but I'm lucky to have you today. Here, Reagan. So, so let's dive in. Thanks for being here.

So good to be here, Natalie. And it's a pleasure to talk about peptides because I see them as like, this is the future of medicine. And these are natural expressions in the body. They're just folded proteins that actually change a cellular response. And so if more people knew more about peptides, we'd have more science behind it, more research, and I think people would be healthier in general.

So let's start back a little ways. I'm assuming you didn't grow up as a kid going, I'm going to get into peptides, I'm going to be an expert on peptides. So take us back. Like, where did this even come from? How did you come across them? Where did you start getting interest in this?

Well, you know, I grew up on a farm in Idaho, and so we, we grew cattle. And I wanted to be anything but a rancher growing up. So as a kid, I was like, kind of my number one goal was anything but a farmer, anything but a rancher. Number two was I had an uncle who was a doctor. And so, okay, I want to be like Lester J. And so I started really getting heavy into nutrition. And I read a book called Inner Athlete by Dan Millman, and it's a phenomenal book. Any of your listeners could go read that right now. And even though it's a, you know, 30, 40 year old book, it's the wisdom there is timeless, but it taught me the power of the mind and the power of healing the body. And so I started using those principles to make the sports teams because that's how I got out of cattle that got out of work is making the football team, the basketball team, track, all those things. And, and so, but then fast forward, you know, I ended up doing my undergraduate work at the U. And then I studied at an integrated medical school in Hawaii and learned both eastern and western medicine. But I had pretty severe ADD from a lot of concussions that I'd had. And so I started dabbling with peptides back in 2008, 2009, to try to tame the wild brain that I had, because I.

Who first told you about them? Was it just your own research? Did you, did somebody bring them up to you? Was it a doctor?

It was actually.

It was one of my good friends who is medical doctor in Florida. And he said, hey, why don't you try some peptides? So he turned me on to this peptide called cerebral lysine and then another peptide called C Max. And when I started Using those. Cerebralysin was an injection. C max was a nasal spray. I just noticed that my brain performed so much better. I could focus better, my memory was better. I mean, I just felt really good. And then I ended up doing a procedure, an intranasal stem cell treatment by using a device called a sphenocath. And we put stem cells right back in the back of my sinuses. And there's a nerve called the sphenopalentine ganglion where the stem cells can get into the brain and calm neural inflammation. And that combination completely quieted my brain. It was. It's been phenome then writing books. I create medical curriculums. It's like getting. Getting a reset on my brain like, like nothing else.

Do you still take that one today? Is that like, was it one of those things you have to cycle or do you still do that?

You know, I have not done cerebralysin in quite some time just because the FDA has, has classified it not as a peptide, but as a biologic because it has more than 60amino acid chains. And so, you know, the FDA is put some criteria around what peptides are, and generally they're considered safe. And so the FDA is kind of like, yeah, well, so far they look really good, but. But with cerebralysin, because it's a different structure of amino acids, they. It's really hard to get it from a reputable source. So I haven't done that, but I've maintained the benefits.

Wow. Okay, so tell me now. So you had this whole experience with it. It helped your ADD big time. You saw this. And so obviously, I'm assuming that lit a spark. Like, I want to learn more about peptides. Is that sort of what happened? Or tell me, tell me how you continued on this journey.

Well, then, you know, then as, you know, clinically, as we're doing, I. I was just exposed to the nootropic version. So, you know, aniracetam, paracetam, and I was just really started nerding out on those. But then I started looking into peptides deeper and I said, oh, there's peptides for muscle recovery. There's peptides that can actually help reverse aging, like epitalin. I started to see that there's this plethora of peptides, and so much research has been done on these, but nobody was talking about it. And so I started taking it upon myself to start interviewing experts. And I created a medical course in 2019 for doctors to learn how to use peptides in their practice. And so since then, my clinics, East West Health We've, we've deployed more peptides, prescriptions and almost any other clinic in the country, but we've done that because, you know, we have the knowledge. And so it was just basically me being a bit obsessive compulsive. When I'm fascinated with something, I like to go deep into it. And I just started another ADD trait.

Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, big time. Yes. Single minded when it's needed. And fortunately I have more impulse control than I did before the treatments. And so I was able to get some of the world's leading researchers and put this curriculum together. And I just saw the results with patients skyrocket. So now what would take us three years to get somebody's, you know, Hashimoto's reversed or to help somebody lose weight, you know, lose 50 pounds? We, we can do that in a matter of, you know, three to six months.

Okay, so I want to start, I want to dive into some of the ones that people have heard about or at least that I've experimented with, because I want to, I want to. There's one that's really popular right now, like everyone's talking about semi glutide. Can we talk about that? Is that something else? Let's start with that because that's the one that's weight loss for type 2 diabetes and it's just like the trendy thing right now. So what is that? Who needs it? Who doesn't need it? What? Tell me more about that one. Let's start with that.

Yeah, so semaglutide or Semaglutide, whatever you want to pronounce it, it's no big deal. It also goes by the, the drug name Ozembic or Wegovy. And these are GLP1 agonists. And there's one that's even more powerful. And I'll just whisper it. It's Tirizepatide.

If somebody's stuck and you're not losing weight and you have another level you want to get to, there's even another GLP1 agonist that also opens up another pathway in the pancreas called tirzepatide that we're finding really good success with. But semaglutide, if you think of what a GLP1 agonist, imagine your pancreas is, you know, its major role is to secrete insulin. And the more insulin sensitive we are, the more you can put on muscle mass, the more you burn fat as energy, the less inflamed you are. If you become insulin resistant, then your body starts breaking down and that's really what accelerates disease patterns. And that's where people get like, hanger and they make, they say mean things to their spouse or their kids that they don't mean to. But. But it's. It's really this GOP one agonist. What happens is it creates more insulin sensitivity in the body, which is where it's used as a diabetes medication. But what we're finding is people who use this, this peptide, they actually had similar amounts of weight loss as people who experienced bariatric surgery, so up to 30% of their body weight in using this with lifestyle. And so the problem with semaglutide or Semagl is that you lose muscle mass if you don't do it the right way. So in Western medicine, we say, well, the problem is the fat. Let's use a GLP1 agonist to get rid of the fat. But that's not the way we look at the body. I look at peptides as turning on pathways and then getting your body to lose weight on its own. So we just use it temporarily. But we use BPC157 with semaglutide. And when you stack those together, you don't lose muscle mass because the goal is to. The goal for most people is you're not overweight or you're not, you know, you don't have too much fat, you have too little muscles, you're muscle deficient. And so BPC157 helps you maintain the muscle mass. It also mitigates some of the side effects like nausea because it delays gastric.

Emptying when you would that also help? I did have a few people tell me that they had more cravings on semi glutide. Is that. Would that help bypass that as well, or no. Or is that an unusual thing?

Big time. Most. Most people, the cravings go away. But There are about 5% of the POP patient who. The cravings actually increase. And I've seen a couple of those patients. And part of that is because the ghrelin pathway is. Is a bit overactive because they're leptin resistant. I don't mean to throw out all these. These.

Yeah, no, that's fine.

But. But that's where you. You need to go upstream and fix some of those other pathways before you get on semaglutide. Which is why, you know, running a comprehensive blood panel is something that we do with every patient so that we put you on the right peptide at the right time. For what?

If you, if you jumped on and you're doing the semi glutide, what I'm hearing and you are that 5% having the cravings, you might need to back it away and look at this pathway and the leptin resistance and address that first is. Am I hearing that correct?

Totally. 100%.

Okay. Because, because this is like the trendy thing and I, and I, it's, it's interesting. It's actually a little scary to me because I understand the need for it medically for a lot of people, but I see people, they just want to lose 5 or 10 pounds doing this and I think it's a slippery SL slope, especially when they, they're messing with their insulin.

Yeah.

And I'm certainly not a doctor, but that's what I'm thinking.

Yeah. Well you can, you can really do some long term damage if you're not looking at the right labs. And, and semaglutide is, is not intended for someone who wants to lose five or ten pounds. It's.

It'S really what it does too is it can put a burden on your digestive system and you can end up with more intestinal permeability because you're not moving your food through your body. It's delaying gastric emptying so you're full all the time, so you can't overeat. But the real thing is, you know, and this is where we always combine it with accountability because you know, making the changes in your exercise, your eating patterns, you'll get 10 times the outcome for sure. And then making sure that you've got the right detoxification strategies going, otherwise you'll get nauseated on it.

That makes sense. Okay, let's talk about that next one that you just mentioned. BBC 157. That was something that I actually did some cycles on when I was having all my injuries and I never fully understand stood why I was doing that but I had a biologist suggesting that to me and it did seem to make a difference for a while. BPC157 seems to be another trendy one. Can we talk about what that's meant for? I heard you say something about keeping muscle retention when used with the other one, but talk to me more about why you would or would not want to explore. BBC 157 and why does it need to be cycled?

BPC is, it's known as the wolverine peptide. So it's, it's a peptide that stimulates nitric oxide which helps with better circulation and vasodilation so you get nice nourishment. To your muscles. That the other thing with BPC is it helps heal any kind of intestinal barriers. So if you think of with intestinal permeability, one of the early studies that was done in the Czech Republic is on patients who had irritable bowel disease and ulcerative colitis. And they found that it was very effective for gut issues. Another interesting study is where they took rats and they. They basically took the hepatic portal vein, that's the big vein that enters into the liver, and they severed it entirely. And one group of rats got BPC157 in the water, the other group just water. And within about a week, all these rats started becoming jaundice. But the group that got bpc, they had a massive recovery really quick, whereas the group that just got water, they didn't recover. They died eventually of it. So.

Wow.

So it's. It's very powerful. You, you. There's other studies where they've seen, you know, using BPC and like Achilles injuries in rabbits where they've seen massive recoveries there. But. But the main function is it does help stem cells in the area and nitric oxide.

So maybe that. I'm assuming that's why I was told to take it more for that reason.

Totally.

Because. For recovery. Yeah. And why do you need to cycle it or why do most peptides. It sounds like with all peptides, really, you should be cycling not on them all the time. Is that accurate?

Yes. Because with. With peptides, if, if you're pushing a pathway too long.

Okay.

Then what happens is your body doesn't resp as well. And so it's a diminishing result. And really what you want to do is every month we change our patients peptides out. And some peptides will keep patients on maybe two or three months. But in general, you want to be opening up different pathways at the same time because it turns up the volume. So instead of just using a single peptide, where you get, you know, kind of a singular result, you can stack them on top of each other and get a 10 times better result.

So I want to fully understand. I want to. And I know you've touched on this a little bit, but I want to make sure I'm understanding how does a peptide work? So, like it's. You're saying it's stimulating what your body already has. So is that why people relate them to growth hormones?

Well, there, there are peptides that do stimulate the growth hormone pathways. So in your pituitary gland, you have growth hormone side, and then you have the ghrelin side, both of which relate to an increase in growth hormone and the growth hormone pedagogues like Sermorelin, which you mentioned before we started, that is a really powerful, what's called a growth hormone releasing peptide. There's other ones that are called like Tessamorelin. Tessamorelin is FDA approved to treat lipodystrophy in HIV patients. So when you have fat accumulation around the stomach, but Tessamorelin also will help build muscle mass. It's been shown to improve cognitive decline in people over 60. There's also really powerful research that shows it lowers cholesterol and it's cardio protective. So and Tessamerel, in one of the studies they took patients in, in human studies and they had fibrosis of the liver where it was up to 90% fibrotic livers. And using Tessamorel and using this peptide, the liver was able to regenerate itself and have like 90% of the patients recovered from the fibrotic liver. So. So we use Tessamorelin for people who have issues in their liver panel when.

We do the blood and you mentioned high cholesterol. So with that. That fall into that too, or that's a different one. That's a testament. Okay. Interesting to know because there's. Okay, so this is where it can get confusing for people. And I'm sorry if I'm getting really basic here, but I'm just thinking what I'm asking in my head. So I'm assuming others are asking these too. There's so many choices when it comes to our health. Like obviously you can go the pharmaceutical route, which is the traditional, like, let's treat the symptom and the pharmaceutical. And then we know about all the side effects of that. For instance, you mentioned cholesterol. You take cholesterol medicine. There's known side effects with that that you're going to have muscle soreness. There's other things that happens. So then you can look at like homeopathic where you give trace amounts and there's a whole thought process behind homeopathic treatment. And then there's the whole just general supplement around like, well, you can take fish oil for your cholesterol and you can take, you know, bromeline and you can like there's a whole. There's all these different choices. Where does do peptides fit in? Is this an. Instead of. In addition to. And like it gets so confusing we don't know where to, where to look first.

Well, and I think that's a really good point because if you don't have your basics built up if you don't have good nutrition. I mean, yes, if you want to raise HDL cholesterol, fish oil is one of the best ways to do it. It's really powerful. But, but we use peptides in conjunction with nutrition and with exercise. We don't use them to treat disease. And, and I think that's where it differs from Western medicine, which is to diagnose a disease and there's a singular cause and then a singular treatment. And a lot of doctors are using peptides in that way. What we're doing is just optimizing health. So if you're already healthy and you've got good nutrition, good habits, good lifestyle, use peptides, you're just going to feel better, you're going to age slower and you're going to, you know, put on more muscle.

Okay, and then this is another question to layer on top of that. How you said some peptides are used as growth hormones, like some morellin. Is that dangerous if you've got underlying things like a cancer, tumor, maybe in stage one that you don't know about, could that s. Escalate that?

Sure. That would be, you know, something that the peptides, the, you know, using growth hormone itself is going to be longer acting. The growth hormone secretagogues like Sermorelin is, is anywhere from. It lasts seven minutes to 30 minutes. So if you think about it, it's very.

Oh wow. It's a very short acting thing. I didn't realize that at all.

Yeah, very short acting. But just getting that pulse is actually it can be really powerful for recovery. It doesn't take a lot of time for your body to recover. It just takes the.

Okay, that makes sense why that was like for example, some more Elon's like a first thing in the morning under the tongue or whatever it is. Like there's a reason, I'm assuming for the timings of it then yeah, it.

Has to be fasted. If there is insulin will turn it off. You won't get the pulse if you have in the presence of insulin. So once again, this is where using them at the right time with the right people, if somebody does have any kind of cancer, we wouldn't use virtually any peptides on them if it's known. But I haven't seen any research that would show that using peptides actually facilitates the growth of cancer. But using growth hormone, absolutely, you can do that.

Okay.

Because it's longer acting.

So that makes sense. Okay, so now the big question, because I know most of my Audience here, midlife, you know, we're dealing with the hormone swings, guys and girls, mostly girls. We're dealing with the perimenopause and the menopause. And the answer is right now is either suck it up, buttercup, don't do anything. It's go on synthetic birth control pills, which is I'm not personally a fan of. And then there's either going into hormone replacement therapy or bioidentical. Talk to me about where peptides play a role. Is this in addition to. Instead of what do we need to know there?

And, man, I'm sounding like a good scientist by saying it depends. And I don't mean to not give you a cut and dried answer, but there's certain cases where hormones are necessary to build the bridge. If you have. If your ovaries are entirely shut down, you've got. Essentially with females, if you've got good adrenal health, the adrenal glands are designed to produce the estrogen and progesterone and have all those hormones that you need. They pick up the slack when your ovaries stop producing some of those hormones. But in most cases, I'd say over 80% of our female patients, we can use a peptide like gonadorelin or kisspectin, and even some of the bioregulators like ghk, Copper, kpv. And those peptides can actually help your body. It stimulates the pituitary so that your body can produce those hormones even after menopause, when that's really stopped, even in menopause. And it. But once again, it requires. Okay, let's get the right foundation from a nutritional level if you've got any insulin resistance. Once again, if insulin resistance is there.

Okay.

And you've got blood sugar issues, that always has to be corrected first because insulin is such a powerful hormone. And then if cortisol is not regulated, cortisol is like the alpha hormone in the body. And if it's mad, then nothing's going to work downstream.

Yeah. I personally struggle with cortisol all the time. I can feel it. 3:00am Constantly. Yeah, yeah. And it's gotten. I think it gets worse in midlife for women a lot of times. Times. That's the stress hormone. For those of you that don't know, and we can. It's when you, when you feel like you've had caffeine but you haven't, that's usually cortisol.

Yeah. At the wrong time. Ideally it's at the beginning of the day. That's great. That's when you need.

I get it at 3 in the morning. It's a little too early. It would be great at five or six, but not three.

You're a go getter.

Yeah. Yeah. It wakes me up every day at three. So this is so, so much. So talk to me about why most doctors don't even touch this. Like I would say mo. I would be fair to say probably 95% of doctors don't talk Peptides at all.

And they, and they really haven't spent the time. I mean, if you put yourself in their shoes, it's, it's not their fault. The system that the conventional medicine has built is not conducive to learning new, innovative things. Yes, they can go to conferences. And we, we've trained over, I think we've had over 150 doctors enroll in our program. So we have, you know, there's a lot of educational opportunities, but that's just, just a, not even a drop in the bucket. I mean there's so many doctors out there. And I think what we're finding is now that, you know, these GOP1 agonists are so popular, more people are asking about it that now I have more doctors reaching out. My phone is blowing up all the time with, hey, what about that? I got this patient. What do I do? What are the peptides? So this is one reason I created the course is to free myself up. But is the course and the course.

Is for clinicians or do you have something for general people to too?

Actually starting in two weeks, we'll have Peptide masterclasses for both.

Great.

So, so yeah, people want to learn more. You can go to the peptide expert.com and you can. We'll give you a free bundle, including my Peptide handbook and but, but then you'll get a chance to jump into those master classes.

So how does one get like if someone's listening, they're like, okay, I need to learn more. I want my doctor to talk to me about this. Do you recommend. Do they go to their doctor and bring it up? Do they go to you? Do they go a naturopath? Like, where do they even start? And just by quick Internet search, which is kind of scary to me. I got to be honest. It looks like you can buy them like literally on your own. Like you could go put in BPC157 and order your own same with some more. And that's scary to me because I should not be able to order that stuff and not know how to use it.

It's so true. And I Just met with a patient, literally today, and he said, this doctor put me on a peptide that's said for lab use only as a chiropractic physician, just trying it out, and the dude's hair fell out. All of his hair fell out. Then it was because four out of five peptides that people use are from the black market. They're not done. So you need to have a compounding pharmacy. This is prescriptive based.

Okay, so the same place you'd be getting your bioidenticals.

Exactly. Yes, you do. Not if it says for research use only, there's only a couple places that are safe. But it's so much better to do it the right way because they're expensive, and it's even more expensive if you have poor outcomes from them, so.

Oh, for sure.

So.

So if your doctor is like, I don't know what you're talking about or tries to talk you out of it, you would recommend seeing who. Like, who would.

We do consults all over. And so all over the state, we have patients. Patients in Pakistan, in Monaco, which is by France. We have a patient in Spain. So, I mean, we work with people all over. Actually, I have a patient in Singapore who's really amazing to work with, so. So everywhere. But, yeah, people can just go and reach out to us, and we're happy to help out. If your doctor doesn't know a lot about peptides, if they do, then great. That is a awesome place to start.

Start or send them to your course.

Exactly. Yeah.

No, this is great, Reagan. This was so helpful today, and I'm sure I'm gonna have to have you back on at some point, because I'm gonna have more questions that come in from this, but I. I hope this to the listeners listening gave them at least a general understanding of what peptides are and where they can be used for. You know, at the beginning, you mentioned so many things that my ears perked up. Longevity, building muscle, cognitive hormones, weight loss. And like you said, um, you know, I'm fully aligned that. You know, I always give this water analogy that if you throw a piece of trash into a really dirty body of water, yelling and see the trash. But if you clean up the water first and you throw a piece of trash in, you know what exactly what's creating the eyesore or what's making it bad. So I feel strong that the first line of a defense for everything is your nutrition, is your workouts, is your mindset, is your stress management. Like, you got to get that stuff. The hydration the basics that we all know about, you don't even need a Google search for them. But just those have to be first before we're even tampering with our blood work and hormones and peptides and all of that. Because I think that's all so amazing. But it's the layer on top of that, not in place of I. And I want to make sure I'm clear about that because in this world of fast quick fixes, too many people are looking for that quick fix. They think that taking testosterone or taking some Morellin is going to solve all their problems. And we've got to have that baseline first.

Man. Yeah, couldn't agree more. I love that analogy of the water and the trash. That's it makes a lot of sense. And, and this has been exciting. I'm happy to come back anytime or answer any questions that your audience has or that you've got.

Where can people find you? Where do you want them to go?

The peptidexpert.com is a very easy place to go and you know, that's where they can learn more about peptides. Download the free bundle that we we made for your listeners today and there's a wealth of resources there.

Amazing. Thank you so much for being here.

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