The world of peptides is a little bit sketchy territory for some people. They don't understand where they fall in the realm of natural versus not, and there's practical applications for them, especially when it comes down to recovery. So I've got Dr. Kyle Gillette

here, who is a repeat offender on this channel. So I want to talk about, uh, sort of the basic peptides for recovery, but let's start with what is a peptide in the first place. As you know, I like to talk about peptides and I approach them similarly

to any medication or supplements, and really peptides are more in the medication category than the supplement category, but some people consider them in both. And all a peptide is is a string of amino acids, which is a protein, between two and a couple hundred amino acids. Interesting, so how does that

impact the human body just in general? If someone takes in, you know, a peptide and it's just a string of amino acids, doesn't that just ultimately end up in the pool of amino acids in our body? After today's video, I encourage you to try colostrum. You've probably heard

people talking about it before. There's a company called Armra. Now colostrum is not a supplement, it's more of a whole food, okay? So in this particular case, Armra is 100% bovine colostrum that comes after the calves have been fed, so it's

perfectly sustainable, but also comes from grass-fed cows, but also from a co-op of dairy farmers, so it's ensuring really high-quality product. Now what's interesting about this colostrum from Armra is that it is not heat pasteurized.

like most colostrum making it the most bioavailable colostrum that you can find what that means is that like when you heat pasteurize it it breaks everything down the 400 different living nutrients that are in colostrum so with their cold

chain technology makes it so that it's ensuring the delivery of this stuff the way that I've been using colostrum is to help with recovery there's some literature that suggests that it's up to a 50% increase in recovery obviously very

good for the gut it can help rebuild that gut barrier but overall just gives you a good sense of feeling energized and feeling recovered so that link down below is going to get you 15% off it's tryarmara.com Thomas again that's tryarmara.com Thomas so check them out

and depending on how you take it and depending on what peptide it is a good example of this is insulin insulin was one of the first peptides that was discovered and I do consider it my favorite peptide because it is a life-saving peptide and when we

discovered insulin it was less than a year until we were injecting it into diabetics in order to save their life if you take a bottle of insulin and drink it you are not going to absorb it and you'll still die of diabetes it was

initially used mostly for type 1 diabetes which is a different conversation that we can have but initially type 1 was much more common than type 2 diabetes but if you injected this insulin then it's bioavailability is better and it can save your life interesting okay so

jumping around sort of the recovery aspect I think one that people know a lot of or hear a lot about is one called BPC-157. This is one where, you know, my own anecdotal experience with it, I mean I texted you about this because uh I had

never used BPC-157 before. I had it via IV when I was in Hawaii because I actually had kind of thrown out my back and like I'm just going to try it. What the heck, I'm getting a, you know, some vitamins anyway. I don't know if it was placebo effect or

what, but I mean I felt significantly better and pretty quick. And uh, you know, I'm not opposed to the use of peptides, especially in this case of recovery. So like what is BPC and what are some of these other ones that people can talk to their doctors about? Yeah, BPC is

essentially a bioidentical peptide and it is a medication. There is clinical trials on it. There's not great ones if people are more interested in the specifics of the clinical trials that have been done, they can check out my new podcast, Gillette Health podcast on our

YouTube channel. But it is exactly what it sounds like. It is a compound that protects the body, a body protective compound. And the initial theory behind use is that there's a lot of research on PRP, just for, well, for aesthetic reasons and also for musculoskeletal injury.

Certain areas that have high amounts of collagen like ligaments and tendons are not well vascularized, for example, even in your meniscus which is not a ligament or a tendon, there are some areas that are vascularized well and some areas that are not well vascularized, and

VEGF, which is an angiogenic cytokine. VEGF is technically a cytokine, but VEGF is how BPC-157 works in PRP. You have VEGF and a lot of growth factors, and you can replicate this with BPC-157.

with the angiogenic potential of VEGF and also various growth factors like GHK-copper peptide or GHRPs or um TB500, which is part of thymus and beta 4, which we can get into, but basically it's replicating the way that

your body heals itself naturally via plasma. When you injure, say your knee or your back, it's normal for it to swell and have pain because what happens is the capillaries are leaky and they're leaking out VEGF among other things.

and you're essentially delivering your own platelet-rich plasma. You're delivering your own plasma with those growth factors and peptides to the area, and this is the way that we replicate it exogenously. Interesting, okay. So, and VEGF is one of these things, I guess.

Angiogenesis, for those of you that don't know, that's just the formation of new blood vessels. So, especially in an area that may not get good blood flow to begin with, you're essentially kind of like kick-starting it a tiny bit. Yeah, it's one of the re, and it's not

without risk as well. There's other medications that work on VEGF. Usually, they block VEGF. Avastin is one of these - A-V-A-S-T-I-N - and it's actually on the World Health Organization list of essential medications as a chemotherapy med because it's taken by people that

have many different types of cancer. Cancer, as many people know, loves blood flow and it expresses certain markers that are going to steal that blood flow away from other parts of the body using things like VEGF. So if you're able to block VEGF, you can stop cancer

progression. So the dose makes the poison with almost any medication including BPC-157. It's one of the reasons why, as I've mentioned on my podcast, I've used it personally, but never continuously, only for acute injury and usually not for periods of time more

than about six weeks at a time. Now when you say six weeks at a time, I mean is that every day? Is that what kind of protocol are people looking at in sort of a safer way of this for an injury where your goal is angiogenesis to an area with poor blood

flow? Then often you can inject it, you can take an IV, even if you inject it in the area that's close. For example, if you injure your knee and you inject it subcutaneously near the knee, try to massage it in a little bit of it does go

disproportionately more in that area, which can be therapeutic. And you obviously want to minimize risk. So in cases of, let's say, a 40-year-old individual that has a knee injured, I would certainly more often prescribe injected subcutaneous BPC-157 and teach the patient or inject

the patient myself in an area that is near that spot rather than taking pills where theoretically you're going to have an even higher risk of growing a pre-cancerous tumor, which are often already forming in the gut around age 40. But in another situation if

someone's gotten all their cancer screenings and cancer early detections out of the way, then perhaps we talk about the risk and the benefit and weigh that balance and be a bit more aggressive now. I've seen some stuff, some literature on uh, BPC 157 potentially

increasing sort of growth hormone receptors in a given area, and I know that's still rodent model literature, but could that be part of the recovery aspect? And it could also be part of why some of the muscle building community likes to take this stuff a little bit

more chronically, yeah. It's pretty likely, in fact, that's one of the reasons why BPC 157 is studied in Crohn's disease. So you have things like LDN, low-dose naltrexone, that's studied in Crohn's. You also have growth hormone, HGH, has

actually been studied in Crohn's disease as well, but BPC 157 has also been studied. If you think about it, it's an inflammatory condition and they have trouble maintaining the brush border. They have a lot of inflammation of the gut. You would think that putting a cytokine like VEGF and

increasing the activity of an inflammatory cytokine would make it worse, but it does not. So it probably, it likely does have other mechanisms of action as well. Interesting. Now I think the most popular study that people have probably seen or heard about is the

Achilles tendon study, the uh, now that one, although it's rodents, it's pretty interesting. I mean, can you give it kind of in a nutshell just so people, I mean that was one of the first studies that I saw on BPC and I was like, Wow, even

though that's a rodent model that's pretty darn like they would sever this Achilles tendon and it was pretty interesting stuff yeah and again obviously with the rodent model um you know that's a caveat that you can say well you still don't know if it can be

applied to humans however there have been many humans that have also taken bpc157 where you think about the Achilles tendon in a human um if especially if it's a full thickness tear that is just 100% a surgical intervention there's some

Achilles tears or partial tears that are not necessarily a surgical intervention but even in cases like that the Achilles really isn't ever the same um it it's usually looked at as a career ending or a career altering pathology but there's a case famously I

think Derek talked about it there's a Russian gymnast and I guess we don't know what that individual may have used or may have not used but I believe it was only a couple months after an Achilles tendon tear that he was doing the vault

in the Olympics as a as a gymnast so there there's definitely potential for uh cross reactivity to humans Okay so we've covered bpc157 pretty well here you mentioned a couple other ones that are potential recovery agents think uh you know tb500 which is another one that

they put in that little cocktail of mine that I had in Hawaii which again I don't know if maybe that's why I felt so good too but it just got me extra interested now how does that work and how does that potentially aid in recovery so tb500 is

a fragment of what's called, what used to be called, thymus and beta 4, which is another technically bioidentical peptide. You have the thymus unless an individual has myasthenia gravis or other rare conditions, there's residual thymus, but usually children

have a thymus and then it shrinks to a point where you can no longer detect it when you're an adult. It's a small organ in the mediastinum, which is this area of the chest, and it makes a couple different peptides

that are important for immunity and important for healing. If I miss in beta 4 is what they chopped up to make TB500, and it does appear to work as a growth factor. So again, back to the PRP analogy, you have angiogenic potential and then you have growth factors other than

growth hormone, and it can be seen as something that's arguably bioidentical that can be used in place of HGH. A lot of physicians prescribe HGH off-label for injury healing in certain situations and always when they think the benefit outweighs

the risk. However, in my point of view, if you're looking at HGH, it's like a shotgun approach. You're using something that increases, that works on multiple different systems with multiple mechanisms of action and it is, it lacks the specificity um to minimize harm potential.

So you look at TB500 as something that can take place of that for injury healing. You look at AOD9604 or GH frag as something that can take a place of growth hormone if you're looking for topical aesthetic benefit and then you

look at GHK Copper peptide especially if someone is at an older age category or has a less healthy liver that's another bioidentical that can help with very likely injury healing but also has the potential to help with immunity as well where does something like thymus

beta 4 or TB500 come into play with general recovery you know that's again and full disclaimer I guess it's safe to say Kyle's my doctor so I mean can I say that I don't yeah okay I mean so he's actually my doctor as well and uh for

the record anyone that's interested in an amazing doctor like Gillette Health has a plethora of amazing docs but anyway uh that being said I inquired with you about this I'm like okay what about like I'm getting to an age now where like I don't want to go on TRT

it's not really an option for me right now I think I've got pretty enough juice in the tank still but like the more I train the more I run like I'm trying to do more than ever right now and I want to aid in recovery does something like

TB500 does it help with recovery in that sense you know I'm stiff a lot right the amount of running I do the amount of lifting I do I mean or is that not really a use case for that yeah that is a question that can't be

answered with good medical evidence but anecdotally it can help recovery the recovery would be a secondary benefit that you would derive from it so in the case where you took HGH or pushed up your growth hormone or IGF-1 that would likely help recovery to some

degree, but I don't think that you would say something like thymus and beta 4 or TB500 would help recovery for sure, but there is a chance. So if there's something else that you're trying to achieve a different benefit that you're trying to achieve

with it, for example, um an injury to your back or an injury to your knee, then that's a nice secondary benefit. But in general, I don't recommend using it all the time continuously because that's when the risks start to creep up, it's a

cumulative risk. Gotcha. So with TB500, same sort of strategy as with peptides like no more than six weeks, like a couple times a week, something like that. Yeah, similar strategy. The one caveat with it is it's not quite as important if that if you're concerned with tissue

like the vascularization of a tissue or not, because it doesn't work on VEGF for angiogenesis, but very similar risk mitigation strategy. So if someone is, I mean this hypothetically, let's say they have a shoulder injury and it's not bad, but it's nagging them and it's an

encumbrance to their training, that's the kind of application where maybe it might help expedite the recovery of that, so they can still continue training in a moderate fashion. Is that appropriate to say? Yes. And as I've talked about, I've personally used

it for that myself as well. Yeah, that's interesting. So that's one, and is that one that's still kind of the same idea like site injection sort of deal, or is it more just systemic? Um, it it also works systemic, and both of those always do go systemic, but I

I recommend sight injection. It it's going to maximize your benefit while somewhat minimizing your risk. Interesting. Okay. What else do we have in this category? TB500, BPC157, GHK copper peptide is another one. So I also like to talk about the origin of these peptides. I talked about the thymus.

BPC157 a lot of times it's correlated with a gut and gut health and also the stomach. So that's probably another reason why it's helpful for individuals with Crohn's is that they have inflammation in the entire gut all the way from the

mouth all the way through the anus. Yeah, let me interject there for just a second. So if someone has an inflamed gut and they've got, you know, LPS lipopolysaccharides leaking in, they I mean they can essentially be chronically

inflamed. I know LDN works in a similar pathway so maybe there's I mean people that are just feeling chronically inflamed, is there an application for BPC157 in that? There could be, but at this time it's hard to say because when you're thinking

about the gut, for example, Crohn's disease, that's probably the only scenario you can think of where you would consider oral BPC157 capsules. Okay, and most other people and also if you have Crohn's disease or gut inflammation, you're probably getting regularly in

regular colonoscopy and EGD. Interesting. So if there's a pre-cancerous tumor then it's probably not there anymore. Yeah, so they have less risk and more benefit as well in other cases of gut health maybe, but it's not one of my go-to's. Got it. As

far as prescribing BPC-157 capsules, I don't think I've done it yet, other than in cases of Crohn's Disease, got it, um but anyway, back to the GHK copper peptide, that's more related with liver health. They're I found an interesting

product that claims to increase endogenous production of G of GHK copper peptide, and you put a patch on, almost like you would put a NAD plus iontophoresis patch on, and I have no idea if it works, but they advertise it to individuals that are at very advanced

age, um, and as you age, your liver loses its function, and we know as you age, your GHK copper peptide levels decrease significantly, so that might have to do with immunity, might have to do with healing. We certainly know that children heal much

faster than individuals who are in the 80 plus category, and GHK copper peptide is likely one of those compounds that helps, interesting. Okay, so, and that's just specifically for the liver, in which case, what is just kind of like re-prioritizing, if the liver is

taking a hit, then other recovery aspects kind of take a back seat, is that sort of what happens? It's just it's active systemically, got it, in all tissues, interesting. Okay, so any, so okay, we've got GHK, we've got BPC, we've got TB500.

Are those sort of the trifecta or they're more in the recovery aspect? What what are some ones that might possibly be safe for people to talk to their doctors about for more continual use that might help recovery, or once you get into that world, the recovery world, is it

really a dose makes the poisoning kind of thing, specifically for Recovery. The next group that you'd probably talk about is GHRPs, which at this time are only indicated for very specific pathologies like lipodystrophy, which is an abnormally high amount of body fat in the visceral

peritoneum, which is the abdomen inside the abdomen. And then some, I think there's a GHRP that's indicated in rare types of leptin receptor deficiencies as well, but they're also indicated for various growth hormone deficiencies or have been in the past.

Um, but those are usually not added in specifically for Recovery. If you have a borderline growth hormone deficiency or a lower IGF-1, the Goldilocks zone for IGF-1 in general is between about 100 and about 250, but it depends on the

individual. It depends on what your age is. If you're 15 years old and in your growth spurt, you probably don't want your IGF-1 to be 110 because you're not going to have enough growth velocity. If you're 80 years old and your IGF-1 is

110, and that might be great. An IGF-1 of 60 in that case might be acceptable, but uh if you're 25 or 30 years old and an IGF-1 of 60 would not only not be acceptable, it would also be clinically

deficient, and your insurance company would even likely cover HGH. So I guess I say those examples just to explain the importance of individualized care when it comes to your growth hormone and IGF-1 axis. That's where GHRPs work.

whether or not they're in the ghrelin agonist class or whether or not they're in the ghrh analog class, interesting. And I guess within that same vein, if someone's 80 years old and their IGF is 300, they have more potential mutations.

more like abnormal growth that you could be accelerating. So I think that's something, although it sounds very simple and basic, it's like the older you get, the higher the risk of sort of this, you know, going off in a way you don't want it to.

Yeah, one of the scariest cases that I ever saw was an individual who was, um, I wouldn't say in a geriatric age category, but certainly a bit older, 50s or 60s, and diagnosed actively with colon cancer. I believe status post colectomy.

So it had a part of the colon removed, had some of the surgery for the colon cancer, and um, was actually not on a GHRP that I knew of, so you wouldn't think that his IGF-1 would be particularly high, but was on

BPC 157 and TB 500, and was on those medications for many months, and IGF-1 lab came back and it was around 400. So it's hard to say. I do think that BPC 157 and possibly thymus and beta 4 can increase IGF-1, but

that just seemed way out of proportion. Um, and anecdotally, I do notice that a lot of my patients with both benign and malignant tumors do have very high IGF-1s, over 300. A low IGF-1 is correlated with a long life and longevity, but a

mid-range IGF-1 is likely going to give you better functional outcomes and a better healthspan. That's why I call it the Goldilocks zone between about 100 and 250. I mean, I guess while we're at this, are there things that people can do

even, you know, nutritionally or with their exercise or anything to keep IGF-1 within a healthy range whether they're on peptides or not, or is it something that's really just governed by, you know, you hear all this stuff, right, like it's, and you know, kind of cutting through the

noise on it. Yeah, the answer to that won't be extremely exciting. People probably want to talk about, you know, fasting making diets or time-restricted feeding or intermittent fasting or carbohydrate content or macronutrients, but at the end of the day, for the

average American, the best way to modulate IGF-1 is to get your fasting insulin back into an acceptable range, which is depending on the person, about eight or below or six or below if you're really concerned with risk of insulin resistance. So you want your HOMA-IR, that's your

insulin resistance due to glucose and carbs, about two or below. And you want your LPIR below about 50 or below, that's your insulin resistance due to lipids and triglycerides. So think of IGF-1, IGF-1 is mostly made

in the liver, but there's also IGF-2. There's central IGF-1 which is made secondary to growth hormone secretion. Growth hormone comes from the pituitary, binds to the liver, and then increases IGF-1 and IGFBP production. IGFBPs are

like shpg think of them as taxis to take IGF-1 around to prevent it from being metabolized and there are several of them IGF BP1 is what metformin is going to increase IGF BP3 is mostly genetic but also

secondary to growth hormone just like there's a whole whole bunch of sirtuins and sirts there's a whole bunch of IGF BPS so it's a fairly complicated interplay but at a thousand foot view the rule of thumb is you think of

insulin plus growth hormone equals IGF-1 that's a very good way to put it and I think you know most of the people that watch my channel probably have some methodologies at least to reduce insulin levels and although it doesn't sound like an exciting answer it's actually a

very solid answer because most people just say caloric restriction you know I think that's a very so that's a much better answer than most people would think the other thing that I would say to that is I usually don't recommend trying to decrease your growth hormone

level in order to decrease IGF.  War interesting just to uh two different systems halting well not two different systems but I guess by trying I mean growth hormone is broad IGF is a little bit more specific and then obviously it gets more specific from there correct

unless that individual happens to be on a high dose of a GHRP like tesamorelin ipamorelin ibutamorelin which is now known as Loom 201 there's a whole bunch of these growth hormone releasing peptides and it's not uncommon to have people come

into clinic when they're on a dose that's usually meant for someone with lipodystrophy or someone with profound muscle wasting disease and visceral adiposity and they just don't need it and they have an IGF-1 of 500.

usually when it's used off-label for borderline growth hormone deficiencies it's only about one-tenth the dose and again it's individualized like everything else but in general it's a much lower dose than what is the on-label dosing. Very good, very good. So I

mean I guess at the end of the day and you know don't be getting the stuff on the black market where you don't know what you're getting. Yeah, it's just like any other medication and peptides is a great buzzword and I love talking about

peptides because a lot of them have recent FDA indications. We could talk about uh, volotalis, we could talk about agrifta, tesamorelin's other name is agrifta, and we could talk about the melanocortin receptor agonists like set

The 4 Best Peptides for Performance Enhancement & Injury Repair | Dr. Kyle Gillett

Thomas DeLauer has built his name around helping the busiest people in all corners of the world find the time to make small, easy changes within their diets and their lifestyles to not only become healthier, but to become top performers within their respective areas.

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