Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is poised to declare victory on widening access to one of the country’s biggest wellness fads: peptides, the building blocks of proteins that biohackers claim help quickly heal injuries and promote muscle growth and fat loss.
Kennedy’s supporters in the Make America Healthy Again Movement, which include social media influencers selling popular peptide treatments, and his pharmacist allies have applauded his remarks and say they expect bold action from him any day now.
Yet some pharmacists and doctors warn that any move by the FDA to loosen current regulations around peptides could pose serious health risks because of the lack of scientific data to support many of them.
“We’re about to unleash one of the biggest medical experiments in the history of America onto Americans as the test subjects,” Alec Ginsberg, chief operating officer at C.O. Bigelow, the country’s oldest pharmacy, said, referring to the lack of clinical data on peptide use.
On one hand, yes.
ReplyDeleteOn the other, consider the lack of regulation around vitamins and nutrition supplements. You go into a pharmacy and pick up a bottle that says Ginseng 600 mg. There actually no proof that the bottle contains that. None at all and it's been shown in studies. Poor quality control. Errors on the label. No one shouts about that.
Or go into the Chinese medicine market where there's no oversight at all and there are multiple incidents of these "medicines" containing active ingredients not listed on the bottle or toxins. But no one screams.
If anything, peptides are probably the least harmful thing out there but RKFJr likes them so suddenly people care.