Vol. 13 · August 1, 2026

Coffee first lads, then time to talk about peptides again.

The Research

I get asked about peptides more than just about anything else right now.

Ipamorelin and BPC-157 are the big names most of you have heard about. Be it from your brother-in-law, some guy at the gym, or Jimmy in accounting who won't shut up about his bodybuilding split and how excellent his recovery has been. His Whoop band told him so.

So let's have an honest conversation about it, because once you have spent some time in the literature, the answer is not as sexy as the tabloids make it out to be.

First, let's define our terms.

Peptides are simply short chains of amino acids. The long chains we call proteins. Your body makes lots of its own peptides and uses them to run hundreds of different processes — digesting your food, signaling satiety, signaling hunger, repairing muscle, and on and on. The peptides you make are completely normal and completely healthy. You are, at this very moment, absolutely swimming in them.

The ones we're talking about today are different. These are exogenous, synthetic peptides made in a lab. That distinction matters. Nobody is arguing that peptides are bad. The question is whether these particular manufactured ones do what a stranger on the internet says they do.

Start with BPC-157.

Last year a group out of Case Western and University Hospitals Cleveland did something nobody had bothered to do — they sat down and systematically reviewed the entire BPC-157 literature from a sports medicine angle. Every study they could find going back to 1993. Five hundred forty-four articles screened. Thirty-six made the cut.

Thirty-five of those thirty-six were preclinical. Rats. Rabbits. Cells in a dish.

One was a human study. Twelve people with chronic knee pain got an injection. Seven of them said they felt better six months out. No control group. No blinding. No imaging. Just twelve folks who paid for a shot and reported back.

And here's the kicker: the reviewers report finding no safety data in humans. A good old goose egg.

Generally not a good thing when it comes to a class of drugs you're selling to humans specifically. But I'll be sure to let you know if Ratatouille needs an injection for the patellar tendonitis he's got going from all that standing and cooking.

That is the whole thing, fellas. The entire human evidence base behind BPC-157 being sold to you as a recovery and inflammation miracle.

Vasireddi N, et al. Emerging Use of BPC-157 in Orthopaedic Sports Medicine: A Systematic Review. HSS J. 2025 Jul 31. PMID: 40756949

Onto ipamorelin.

The big difference between BPC-157 and ipamorelin is simple: they actually ran a proper trial.

Outside of that? Same issues.

Ipamorelin came out of Novo Nordisk — real pharmaceutical company, real money, real pipeline. And it got what BPC-157 did not — yet. A hundred and seventeen patients, multiple centers, double-blind, placebo-controlled, testing whether it could get the gut moving again after bowel surgery.

It didn't beat the placebo. They shut the program down.

Just sit on that for a second. Ipamorelin had its moment in the lab. A legitimate one, run by people who wanted it to work and had every financial reason to make it work. And it still came up short.

Beck DE, Sweeney WB, McCarter MD; Ipamorelin 201 Study Group. Int J Colorectal Dis. 2014 Dec;29(12):1527-34. PMID: 25331030

Ipamorelin belongs to a family of drugs called growth hormone secretagogues — they tell your pituitary to put out more growth hormone. And we do have solid long-term human data on that family. The best of it is a two-year randomized controlled trial of a cousin compound, MK-677, in sixty-five healthy older adults.

The drug did exactly what it was built to do. Growth hormone went up — that's the master signal from your pituitary telling the body to build tissue, repair itself, and pull fat out of storage for fuel. IGF-1 went up too, all the way into young-adult range. IGF-1 is what growth hormone tells your liver to make, and it's the messenger that does most of the actual work down at the tissue level. It's also the number we can measure reliably, which is why researchers watch it. Fat-free mass climbed about 1.6 kilos over placebo.

On paper, a home run.

And strength? Function? Could these men actually do more than the placebo group?

The authors couldn't show it. They wrapped up the paper asking for the studies that would settle it.

Meanwhile, two other numbers moved the wrong way. Fasting glucose went up and insulin sensitivity went down. Without getting too long-winded, that's essentially the ingredients for type 2 diabetes. Blood sugar climbs while your cells get worse at listening. We'll save that one for another article.

Before I get too far ahead of myself here — MK-677 is a different molecule than ipamorelin. Oral, not injectable. Same receptor, same family, different drug. Take it as a family resemblance, not a verdict.

The moral of the story: nothing seems to be doing a whole lot.

Nass R, et al. Ann Intern Med. 2008 Nov 4;149(9):601-11. PMID: 18981485

So what is the Wolverine Stack I keep hearing about?

In my most recent client onboarding calls, I've heard the Wolverine Stack brought up more and more.

It's BPC-157 paired with TB-500, and it's named after the comic book fella with the healing factor — who I might have idolized in high school. Though everyone said I looked like his brother Sabretooth, which I rejected on the grounds that he didn't have adamantium and wasn't nearly as cool. Still upsets me. But hey, not everyone can be super cool.

As someone who loved those movies and daydreamed about having bones of steel and the ability to heal, that is one heck of a pitch. I'd sign up.

Sorry in advance for the following.

Two things about it.

First, TB-500 is not what most men think they're buying. It gets sold as thymosin beta-4, which is a real protein your body actually makes and concentrates at wound sites. But TB-500 isn't thymosin beta-4. It's a seven-amino-acid fragment of a forty-three-amino-acid protein. Related, sure. The same thing? Not remotely. That's a distinction the marketing copy tends to blur, and that is probably not an accident.

Second — there are no published studies on the combination. Not a human trial. Not even a trial on our boy Ratatouille. Nothing.

Combine those two and you get this: the most popular healing peptide protocol on the planet has zero published research behind it as a protocol.

Every argument for stacking them is built by taking studies of each compound separately and reasoning that the pathways ought to complement each other. That's a hypothesis — which, by the way, we absolutely need for science to work at all. And it's a reasonable one. An awfully cool one, even. But it is not a FINDING, and nobody has, to this point, bothered to test it.

Both compounds are also banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, in and out of competition, if that matters for anyone in your house.

Eric Topol — cardiologist, one of the more careful voices in medicine — reviewed fifteen of these compounds and landed where I have: no randomized human trials showing they do what people claim. He called the whole craze "unfounded."

And then last week happened.

On Thursday the 23rd, the FDA's Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee voted 8 to 6, one abstention, to recommend adding BPC-157 to the list of substances compounding pharmacies are allowed to make. TB-500 cleared on the identical split the same afternoon. The FDA's own career scientists had gone through the evidence and recommended against both — against all seven peptides they looked at that week. The panel went the other way anyway. Reporters in the room said you could hear the gasp.

Now, this vote isn't binding. It isn't approval. Nothing became legal last Thursday that wasn't legal on Wednesday. And the condition BPC-157 was actually evaluated for was ulcerative colitis. Not your Achilles. Not your shoulder.

You're going to see "FDA approved!" plastered across peptide marketing in the next few weeks. It won't be true.

Now don't get me wrong — FDA approved doesn't mean a ton on its own. Plenty of garbage is FDA approved, and that stamp doesn't make something good, or healthy, or in some cases even well tested. That's exactly why we look at each study on its own merit and draw our conclusions from there rather than outsourcing our thinking to a logo.

BPC-157 has been in FDA Category 2 since September of 2023. Category 2 is the agency's list of bulk substances that raise significant safety risks — the shelf they put something on when the concerns are serious enough that compounding pharmacies shouldn't be making it at all. BPC-157 landed there for three reasons: immunogenicity risk, impurity problems, and the plain difficulty of even characterizing what's in the vial.

Immunogenicity means your immune system may decide this compound is a foreign invader and mount a response against it. With synthetic peptides that can run anywhere from a local reaction at the injection site to your body producing antibodies that cross-react with something you actually needed.

So what IS in the vial?

Whatever you order off a website — or even pick up at your local wellness clinic — was not made in the lab that ran the study. No monograph. No assay. No chain of custody. You're taking a powder from a stranger and putting it under your skin on his word alone.

So where do I land?

I want to be fair here and not come across as hyperbolic.

I'm not telling you these are junk. The preclinical work on BPC-157 is genuinely interesting. The mechanism is plausible. That's exactly why somebody ought to run the trials.

I'm telling you it's unproven. Which is a different word from bad, and a different word from good. It means nobody knows yet, including the fellow charging you four hundred dollars a month.

And there's a cost to not knowing that I think we all underestimate. Every dollar and every hour you throw at a maybe is a dollar and an hour you didn't put toward the things we've proven over and over, in thousands of people, for decades: picking up heavy things on a schedule. Six to eight hours of sleep. Enough protein. Getting your weight where it ought to be. Showing up on the mornings you'd rather not.

Nobody's selling those in a vial.

My job is to guide you on this health journey and open your eyes to what's actually out there. And this is still somewhat risky. Fix all the big things first before you start injecting compounds we still know very little about.

Could all this change? Absolutely. Run the trials. Publish the data. I'll move the day the evidence catches up to the claims. Research is not everything, but we still need some form of guiding light.

Worth Remembering

Quick note before we go further: historians argue about whether the number was ever really seven. The old texts tell leaders to look out for the generations still unborn, but they don't put a figure on it. I'll leave that fight to the historians. It's the sentiment of this message that resonates with me.

Seven generations is somewhere around a hundred and fifty years. Not one person alive will ever meet the man you're supposedly deciding for. Although, there is apparently talk these days of freezing people so they can live longer, so who knows. Anyways.

Most of us are just trying to make the best of our Tuesday. Getting through the week. Making the quarter look clean. What feels good today.

The next generation — and certainly seven of them — asks something far more important. Is the man I am today somebody worth being descended from? Not because you deserve some kind of reward for being a good man, but because you should want better for those who come after you.

My godfather's advice rings true here: take the good I have done and pull it forward, learn from the bad, so that you and yours can live a better life.

Try This Week

Time to food prep, fellas.

I've noticed there's a fair amount of pushback on food prep. I get it, sort of, but let me give you some of the issues I hear from guys and my approach to them.

Most of it comes down to variety. Guys will tell you they can't eat the same lunch five days running, that it's miserable, that food is one of life's genuine pleasures and why would you sand all the joy off it. And you know what? I understand. I like a good meal as much as the next man.

But here's the other half of that. We are overeating at historic rates. Not a little. Historically. And food prep is one of the most reliable tools I know for putting a hand on that wheel — it keeps you fed, keeps you healthier, and takes the guesswork out of the whole business.

Could you cook something different every single day? Of course you could. Go for it, and I'll cheer you on. But I'll die on this hill: prepping ahead is the superior way to keep your calories, your macros, and your consistency where they're supposed to be. Nothing else comes close for the effort involved.

You make one decision — 30 to 60 minutes on a Saturday or a Sunday, making a week of food — versus five decisions made badly at a quarter past noon.

Otherwise, you could fall into the trap of being starving and reaching for the potato chips, the sixty-second mac and cheese, and the Little Debbies who are lustfully calling out to you.

So here's one of the meals I've been making for my lunches, and my wife's, recently. Try it out yourself.

The whole thing comes from Costco — which, by the way, economically speaking, is the best way you can grocery shop.

1. The chicken. Kevin's Hawaiian-Style Chicken. 32 oz bag, usually $11 or $12. The instructions are on the back and you can read. No more than 15 minutes and you're done. Roughly 20 grams of protein a serving, and I'll be honest with you, it tastes a lot better than it has any right to.

2. The rice. Ready Rice, or the quinoa and brown rice blend if you're feeling fancy. Ninety seconds in the microwave. That's the recipe. Split the bag in half and throw it in the glass tupperware.

3. The broccoli. Steam-in-bag florets. A hint with the veggies: put them in the microwave about a minute less than the bag tells you, then throw them onto a medium-heat skillet and let them finish cooking there. Just tends to taste better.

4. Build it. Five containers, ideally glass. Rice on the bottom, chicken over the top, broccoli off to the side.

And to the variety question — rotate the protein. Kevin's has some other options, or make some ground beef or turkey. Swap broccoli for green beans or Brussels sprouts. The shape and rhythm stays the same, and you don't feel like you're eating the same thing over and over again while you slowly slip into madness.

Here's some math to maybe think this is a better option.

A lunch out runs $15 to $50 depending on what you get. Five days of that is $75 to $250 — and I know guys spending more than that JUST on lunch each week.

Sunday's build lands around $4 or $5 a container. Call it $25 for the week.

If you're trying to stay on a budget, eating out every day is not helping.

And that's before we get to the part I actually care about — that you stop eating something you didn't choose, at a time you didn't pick, because you'd run clean out of options.

We talk an awful lot about discipline around here. I've come around to thinking that sometimes discipline is merely removing the moment where a decision has to be made at all.

Try it out. If you hate it, well — try it again, and stop being a prima donna about your food.

From the Bookshelf

The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It Warren Farrell, PhD, and John Gray, PhD

This is a book I come back to once or twice a year, and I've currently got it back in the rotation.

Farrell and Gray build the whole thing around one variable they call dad-deprivation, and they follow it through everything happening to boys. School. Mental health. Suicide. Prison. Employment. Purpose. Their argument is that what's going on with our boys isn't actually a mystery, and it isn't mainly about schools or screens or masculinity as some abstract idea. It's about fathers being gone or diminished, and about what specifically walks out the door with them.

You won't necessarily agree with every conclusion. But I appreciate the research they put in, and that what you're getting isn't just "what we think" — it's what the evidence says, with their opinions laid on top of it.

This is a big book to go through, but it's worth investing your time into.

Closing Thought

I had a call with a client earlier this week. After about twenty minutes of talking through where he was at and our game plan moving forward, he paused and asked me for some advice on a personal matter with his son.

A question I was by no means "qualified" to answer, seeing as I have a mere fifteen-month-old little girl.

But he asked my opinion, and I gave it to him.

Two things I want you to take with you from that.

First — when a man asks your opinion, give it to him. You can be up front that you're no expert. But he wants to know what you think. Don't sugarcoat it. Be direct, be honest, be kind.

Second — it takes a lot for a man to be vulnerable with another man. It opens him up and lays him bare. That's a leap of faith. You need brothers you can be vulnerable with. Men you can drop your difficulties and your questions on, who will sit there and listen, be honest with you, and help guide you forward.

There are layers to this, of course. But don't deprive a man of a listening ear, and make sure you find the ones you can be vulnerable with yourself.

That's all for this week, fellas.