BPC-157: The Truth Behind the Hype | BLA 117

as a sports medicine physician I've been asked numerous times by my patients about peptides specifically bpc 1557 if you just go off of what you read online you'd swear that it's magical Elixir that cures everything based on every Fitness influencer swearing that this is the best thing ever since sliced bread but does this compound actually live up to the hype today we dive into what the actual data shows about BBC 157 and why they might be a little bit more surprising than you think let's get started welcome back to the building lifelong athletes podcast thanks so much for stopping by appreciate it my name is Jordan re we haven't met yet and I'm a dual certified physician in Sports and Family Medicine and the goal of this podcast to keep you active and healthy for life through actional evidence and form education and today we're talking all about peptides right these naturally occurring compounds in the body and people talk about them like they are the most magic thing in the world today we're talking like a mentioned bpc 157 it's a specific peptide that has gained huge attention for its potential healing and performance- enhancing effects and in this podcast we're going to explore the science separate the hype from the facts and discuss the pental risks so let's dive in so first things first what actually are peptides well they are naturally occurring chains of amino acids generally between two and 100 amino acids in length so a longer chain of amino acids are usually considered proteins right so amino acids are the building block of proteins these little tiny things you kind of make these change them into different proteins and peptides are essentially just part of these chains and some people say like if you're less than 50 it can be a peptide what not but long story short peptides are just chains of amino acids essentially is what we're looking at here and what they do then is these peptides then bind into specific cell recept ctors and then this binding triggers an intracellular Cascade of events that is well beyond the scope of this podcast to talk like what's actually going on in terms of G protein coupled receptors and da da all this stuff but they essentially go in there they bind to a cell receptor and then exert some effect on the cell that's essentially how they work and what they are and they typically have a short halflife and can have multiple effects and some peptides that we see and hear about quite a bit are things like insulin glp1 collagen peptides which are synthetically made so you know people are talking about buying collagen peptides for your skin for your tendons for whatever that's a peptide is what they're talking about there and other things to hormones like thyroid stimulating hormone your your adrenal corop hormones so act growth hormone all those things and these are typically found in nature so they're natural right and you make your body makes these and specifically we know insulin is a huge one that we all have and if you don't have it you end up having type 1 diabetes and that can lead to lots of issues so peptides are nothing new they're not all dreamed up by Pharma they come from our body lot of times the inspiration from them come from the body quite a bit necessarily not necessar all from the body but peptides are just kind of these short amino acid sequences that are a lot of times found in our body and that's why people are so excited about them right because they're like oh this is something that we can naturally have and it's a natural substance and so peptides that's generally what they are when we're talking about peptides and then what is specifically bpc 157 well bpc 157 or body protection compound 157 it's a synthetic peptide derived from a natural cre protein found in the stomach and that naturally occurring protein is something called body protection compound and it's found in the gut and this is just a portion of that so big picture here this body protective compound is found in gastric secretions so stomach secretions and bbc7 is a little short portion of that so it's just a clip of it that's where they initially found it and got the idea from it it is made of 15 amino acids and it's synthetically made based off of that natural peptide I talked about that's found in the stomach and it was identified as a fragment of that larger bpc so this kind of 15 amino acid sequence they said hey this seems to be a crucial part what's going on and overall it is a stable peptide it seems to be relatively stable in the body and so they found this thing and said oh this is cool and so now what they do is they synthetically make it so most people are like this is natural and what what they're not doing is they're not harvesting gastric secretions from people and then just giving you this no they found the inspiration from that and now in the lab they put these peptides together these amino acids together to make this peptide so it is inspired by a natural peptide but is surely syn atically made um the ones that we're talking about here and as I mentioned it is natural but is not known to exist in nature meaning it's inspired from the the gut stuff but it is comes from another protein and BBC 157 is being studied for potential to accelerate healing and this includes tendons ligaments muscles bone pretty much like anything if you read it online people say like oh just like eat it or inject it and it'll magically cure everything is literally what I've seen some people say and so um it's quite the claim and so that's what we're looking at more so specifically here today but that's essentially what bpc is we talked about pepti peptides and then what bpc 1 fo7 is and why is there hyper balance why is everyone saying that it's amazing well the initial research on this was done for protecting the the healing stomach so essentially they had either gastric ulcers or something going on in the stomach and they found that hey exposure to this started to heal that stomach and of course when you see healing anywhere they say hey what where can we extrapolate this else and so they've kind of lots of stuff research then expanded to include other areas with tons of animal studies suggesting a range of healing properties specifically looked at you know accelerating healing of various tenons including you know Achilles Tenon quad Tenon they looked at ligaments as well they looked at muscles they looked at bone they say there's enhanced cell survival meaning bpc helps cells stay alive longer under stressful situations it enhanced cell migration so specifically help promote the migration of tendon fibroblasts which we step back fibbr blasts are kind of the precursor to tendons so you need fiber blast to lay down important stuff to then become tendons so fiberblast last um moving and increasing of that is theoretically increasing your tendons potentially also has some angiogenic effects so they may increase V blood vessel formation specifically and increase blood flow which is important for healing and uh also was associated with activation of veg F which veg f as we know is is important for angiogenesis angiogenesis meaning the creation of blood vessels so they're saying hey this peptide Also may enhance the creation of blood vessels good or bad we'll talk about that later also there's sometimes in some studies showing some an anti-inflammatory effects some cytoprotective effects meaning kind of inhibiting damage from other stressful situations it may counteract some of the negative sign side effects of nids and it also may help increase muscle growth after muscle crust injuries they looked at some of the studies as well and U May counteract muscle wasting way looked at kind of tumor cells and tumor muscle Associated wasting and seem to slow that down and it may promote recovery from in different ways as well so increasing smooth muscle creation and all that fun stuff so the big thing is these results are from animal models so what they did started in the gut and said we're trying to protect the gut can it work at somewhere else and they said hey well let's try and so they took various random rat models rat stomach rat Achilles patella bone whatever Peter dish all these things all these studies I'm mentioning all come from animal studies and they pretty much were all not all of them a lot of them were Peter dish so so they took out some of the cells and looked at them in the Peter dish not necessarily living animals even so a few steps removed from what we consider really high quality evidence but that's really where all this came from so lots of stuff from animals and then it led to BBC 1.7 and why the hype was so much is because you know they saw these things in there but also they found that you could give it a bunch of different ways you could give it from an injection you could give it they said inog gastic so you could inject it in there you could give it orally could a bunch of different ways and they found that overall is pretty stable and you could take it multiple different ways and that's why they're super interested about this but the big thing is you see all those things right tendon bone you know growth factors like all these amazing things and this is where people take a little tiny bit of Science and then extrapolate saying it's the most amazing thing in the world so those things are all awesome very cool and it's very um academically interesting to see these arguments and these results that we found because this is awesome this is how we learn things right you start somewhere but to say we saw that here in like a Peter dish like literally they took out like an Achilles transected Achilles and put it in a Peacher dish and observed what happened and then to take that and extrapolate to saying hey it's going to help you as a human recover that's a big leap that's a big leap I'm not quite ready to talk about and that's why I wanted to talk about this cuz I was so I just was quite honestly shocked when I was looking at you know what was going on um but that's really why the hype is here and what do what does research actually say well almost all the research as I mentioned on bpc 157 has been conducted in animal models I literally look through every single published paper on peped looking at BBC 157 they're about 190 is something like that I look through all of them and there were like literally only a handful like I'm not joking like less than a handful of like any involving a human most of times it was you even then is a human cell might be interested but actual human experiments like on humans like incredibly small almost none and on top of that as well there's very few authors this one person out of Croatia skiri I'm sure I'm butchering the name I apologize that person had like well over 40 publications related to this so obviously that's his area of expertise and that's phenomenal not you know that's awesome to dedicate your life to do something not knocking that at all but when a large percentage of the studies come from one single person I worry a little bit there might be a little bias right right they've invested a lot of time and effort into this and this is their baby and they want to see this shine and so just something to think about as well but it was like at least 40 for like primary so I didn't even count how many times they were secondary which I'm sure were multiple as well and so a large SWA of the data comes from one specific you know research group and that's something you just have to consider right it doesn't negate the science by any means I'm not saying it doesn't count but but if you were out there in the world and someone says hey this magical compound does this that and the other thing and you say almost all the researchers coming from one group you'd kind of scratch your head say hey do they have a bias for this do they have a commercial interest who knows what but that's just what I saw as well so um yeah being a huge nerd going through all of them I just just reading through it took quite a bit but not a lot of human studies and that's really really important there was the one specifically when it looked at muscle regeneration so there might have been other adult one and I should say human ones but I looked specifically at like muscle tendon ligament anything like in the sports medicine or regener medicine or like being lifelong athletes realm I looked at and there was like a single study a single study looking at humans and so I you know props those people for doing it but that's what it was it was a retrospective study meaning that the researchers looked back on uh previous data from things they already did and it was not perspective and so what they did though is took place in Orlando Florida and there were 17 participants so step one 17 hey I love that we're doing research I'm not knocking that at all but what am I going to learn from 17 nothing concrete that's for sure but hey 17 we'll keep going here average age about 60 years old but it ranged from 17 19 to 77 and these people all had knee pain that's so they're coming here for knee pain there about nine women seven men and most patients were white with one of his fan accent so and one of Korean so pretty homogeneous group and then 16 of 17 people were actually contacted for the followup I'm not sure why one of them wasn't but they weren't and the treatment included an intraarticular injection of bpc 157 into their knee however some patients also received um tb4 which is another peptide that may be helpful for healing as well so but 12 of the 16 just got BBC 157 and this study aimed to determine if BBC 157 helped with multiple types of knee pains in a primary care setting so multiple types that is pretty nebulous in terms of like it's not just like specifically you know mild or moderate OA or what it was just like knee pain you got it and you got money here you can get peptides essentially what it came down to but that's that's how I read that what they did once again 12 of 16 got that and for follow-up the follow-up took place it was uh varied most patients were contacted about 6 months to one year so there wasn't even a set like hey this is our one time point we're going to look at there anything like that and patients were then asked to rate their pain prior to the injection the length of time the peptides helped to ease the pain and the degree to which the injection helps them but there was no specific tool which measured the function so one thing in studies that we do a lot is we have validated measures right so specifically for arthritis you use things like the wo Max score it's like a validated thing of um hey what's your pain like here it's a validated scale and you measure pre and then after this wac or the V visual analog scale or there's a ton of of them right and this they pretty much just ask them like hey do you feel better and you know this happened retrospectively right so this they got this injection they say hey how long were you in pain how bad was it before you know at this point six or 12 months later how bad was it before and now you feeling better you know you you can't ask me what I ate yesterday I'm not going to remember but you're certainly not going to be able to definitively know what your pain was before the injection you definitely can know direct directionally like I'm not saying that at all you definitely be like oh yeah I got better or not but to say like this is what it was before 6 months ago or 12 months ago and where is it now that's it's not necessarily ideal from a study design perspective but so yeah that's what it was and overall though 11 of the 12 patients or what 91% who received the bpc 1.7 have significant Improvement in knee pain however as I mentioned before this was retrospective and there's lots of confounders there and the biggest one is there's no control group right making it impossible to determine if the improvements was due to BBC 157 or other factors like Placebo or spontaneous recovery so these people theoretically went to this clinic right and I guess I didn't necessarily see about the funding um of that but they went to this Clinic expecting to get something injected to them most likely right you know this this Clinic is probably advertising that and or not they're involved in the study either way they're expecting to get that and they get something injected to them and we know from the data that if you get something injected to you a percentage of people would feel better like we do steroid versus saline placebos and people in Placebo some of them get better so the question is how much is this worth bpc 157 how much is this worth the injection how much is this just natural time course you go someone 6 to 12 months will their knee pain get better a lot of them will absolutely and so with no comparator group it's really hard to determine is this coming from bpc 157 once again this is not a knock on the data I'm never going to knock a single study saying hey we tried to learn something and this is helpful because we don't have any human data so that can be helpful for that perspective but just understand the limitations of studies like this that's something I really wanted to mention and it was also a pretty small participant only 16 people with the followup and um yeah there were no objective measures and so overall it seemed to suggest that it may be helpful and maybe in alternative steroids is what they're trying to say I'm not ready to say that yet but we need much more information and you know on on top of this one study in humans another reason I just want to talk about other data is there are multiple studies showing improved signs of healing whether that's muscles tendons whatever you know there's one of a a radices tendon where BBC 57 was used and showed complete healing of a detached Tenon so essentially cut it and then grew back together which is what they're saying in the rat Achilles so that's you know that caused a lot of people to get up an arm saying well look at the incredible healing properties of that that's another reason why they said that once again though on rats um not necessarily there and then also there's also shown increase of tendon fiber blast like I mentioned and tendon explants so they essentially took tendons took them out and they saw improved healing on that and yeah overall very very limited human data though and um we need a lot more rigorous studies to make this more confident that we can that we can make more confident saying hey like this actually is doing something uh you know I think it's great that we had this study this one study in human we have these rat studies but overall it's not the most robust data set but that's okay we're we're you know that's we take what we got and we go from there and so that was kind of what the research was saying overall on that and now what are the risks right so we were saying hey Jordan This sounds good what's going well the first things first is BBC 157 is not approved for human use by Regulatory Agencies like the FDA so that's like the first thing if it's not approved by the FDA you kind of got to put a little pause and I know some people might be saying oh the FDA like it's all corrupt like okay at the end of the day they are our governing Agency for trying to make sure things are safe and whatever your opinions are about the FDA we have to recognize that they do have a decently stringent process of approving something and so if something's FDA approved I at least feel better that they're being manufactured in a good way and that odard is probably going to be safe whereas if the FDA doesn't approve something then you don't know how it's being made so that's just the first thing here there's also lack of safety data in humans so there have been really no randomized control trials in humans to determine the safety of it we have no idea what the actual dosage should be so there's no like one set dose of bpc 157 we're kind of just guessing based off of studies that we've read it's a completely unregulated Market it is not regulated by the FDA so therefore there's no guarantee for any sort of quality or safety so where is this being manufactured no idea no idea it's not an FDA approved facility um you know if literally if you try to buy this online it's only for research use only they say hey this is only for research use only it should not be consumed by humans like literally they say that but then people buy it and they you know use it in some way shape or form and the FDA is actually cracked down recently on peptides making it harder so it's harder for compounding pharmacies to make this as well so compounding pharmacies are essentially they take an idea from paper or you know a known substance and they can make it themselves the FDA is kind of cracked down that as well so it's hard to get this so you're literally just buying it from like some random website hoping that it's pure and it's supposed to be for research purposes only so that's another big thing as well and uh the wada the world anti-d doit agency also has it um it's legal it's on their list so we can't have it and then one thing that I I just kind of thought about reading this is cancer risk right not the saying there's study showing that it causes cancer but some growth factors that they've seen in there have been associated with several tumor lines um that's one thing also increase antig Genesis increasing blood vessels also can alter and theoretically can increase cell growth and cancer cell growth and there have been some studies showing that bpc157 maybe decreased some of these initial tumor lines when look at some things but overall if you're telling me you're increasing growth factors and blood U vessels and all that stuff yes could those be a good thing absolutely but also if Tak into the extreme could be a bad thing and so there's zero data at all about like long-term BBC stuff right so the risks that we are when we're taking this if someone's taking this the risk is that we literally know nothing about long-term effects right we have people saying hey I took it it's fine no big deal that's fine but I'm not hanging my hat on that's for sure like I saw a comment on another YouTube post about BBC 157 and someone's like I don't get what the plus is about I've been taking this for five years and I'm fine well that's like saying hey I've been taking anabolic steroids for 5 years and nothing's nothing's happened hey I've been taking meth for 5 years and nothing substantially bad has happened to me it's like literally pick anything and just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't necessar mean that you're in the clear right specifically cancer right that can take years and years to develop and so that's one of those things anecdotes this is strong on anecdotes this compound and what they talk about is just anecdote after anecdote after anecdote of someone saying this happened this happened this happened and is there something to anecdotes absolutely but do I hang my hat on anecdotes in terms of safety and reliability and Purity absolutely I do not I do not do that so but that is what's happening those are kind of the risks that we do have and then in terms of Alternatives you know we're trying to heal ourselves right we're trying to get healing there there definitely alternatives to that and the big things we talk about are physical therapy and essentially PRP or rich plasma you know if someone wants to have a fancy compound PRP would be a reason one has a really good side effect profile you're injecting your own C in you so you're not worried about something um you know the Purity wise of that but for most injuries like the reason most people take this is from injury perspective right not necessarily performance enhancing but from injuries most people get better with time that's just how it works and just a little bit of guidance I always say just a little bit of nudge with physical therapy a lot of times all we need but Physical Therapy would be my main say I certainly wouldn't skip forward on that by any means saying like oh let's get PT just get bpc 157 PT is the Bedrock of everything and then if you need like an injectable or something to take you there PRP is what I'd probably recommend that can be expensive as well but better we have lots and lots of data on that in humans that it seems to be relatively safe um and that's just kind of what I'm thinking if you're like hey I need to help healing then PRP is probably where I'd go before I do bpc 157 just cuz I have no idea if you're actually getting bpc 157 or not but those are kind of the Alternatives I think about and overall just kind of you know conclusions with this though the potential benefits of BBC 1507 are based pretty much on animal studies with no real human data and we have no idea what this thing actually does or could do good or bad right it could be the most incredible healing compound in the world and that'd be awesome I would love that but it also could be a cancer-causing agent that we didn't know anything about yet we just don't have the studies and a lot of people what they'll say online is they say well this this can't be patented it's natural and that's why big farmer will never get a hold of it and that's why there's no money in this so that's why nobody's marketing well I just challenge that assumption because first of all what what are those peptides I mentioned earlier right like insulin and gp1 like Pharma makes those and Pharma makes a butt ton of money on them so they absolutely could come up with a you know BBC 157 proprietary blend you know whatever some Pharma grade of it they can make that and they could present it they absolutely could do that like 100 100% And so why hasn't it been done yet I don't know maybe they're not aware of it maybe they don't think it's that helpful maybe they've done studies and realize this is garbage we're not going to go forward with this there could be multiple different options but when someone says there's no money to be made in this I don't think that's true I think if this worked and farmer wanted to they could make enormous amounts of money on it so I just want to step you know a lot of times people say Pharma doesn't want this so that there therefore it must actually work right this is like a hidden secret like Pharma has no control over this like that's not the case they could absolutely develop their own version of this and make money on it so I just want to take that argument off off the table as well which I I saw online as well people saying there's no money to be made on this there if something works farmer will find a way to make money on it that's for sure but so that's kind of an argu for me like almost another reason why I don't want to use this is if Pharma most likely has probably found this right they I'm sure there people much smarter than me looking at the studies and saying hey should we pursue this maybe they even pursued a little bit found it wasn't worth it you know they're really good at one thing and that's making money and if something works then they're going to make a lot of money on it and so if something doesn't work and they scrap it then I think okay you know maybe that's a reason why it hasn't come to market yet just absolute speculation there absolute speculation but that's another argument I've seen on line saying that oh they can't make money off it I definitely think they could but that's just something something to mention as well um there's no way to actually get pure BBC 157 so we have no idea if it's safe to use like literally no idea when you buy it online for experimental use like what you're getting you could be getting something completely different but there's no guarantee maybe it's one you know maybe it's actually pure maybe people making it take a lot of pride in their work and do great work and I'm not saying they don't but there's just way of knowing right because nobody's checking they're not batch testing and saying Yep this is pure and there's no regulation of it and there's no studies proven that they've done the process they've gone through it and we understand it's safe understanding it safe in humans all that stuff right so if something comes to the market from the FDA it's done in rats and labs and hey what does it look there C perfect that's like first step maybe stage one and clinical trials and then stage two is like human feasibility and then we go to animals and then we go to humans so like we have lots and lots of different steps going on there and we haven't done any of those things yet so we don't know how safe this thing actually is and so I would say out exercise Extreme Caution when considering any sort of unregulated substance and for me personally I I wouldn't feel comfortable using this yet just to the UN unregulated nature of it you know I I've known people I've had patients who've done it and tried it and some have said it's been helpful some have said it has not been helpful and so once again I'm not here to tell you yes or no I'm not your doctor listening to this I'm not your doctor we're just having out having a good time hanging out and learning but so I but I personally just don't feel comfortable with it yet for me the risk reward is not quite there you may determine it is you may say it's it's fine that's good but U for me I'm just not quite there yet but um you know hey that can change for everybody and I I said I'm not judging here this is just I'm one beggar to another beggar telling me we're to find food meaning I this is just what I've seen this is kind of where it comes from and so I just want to take a step back saying this is you know on social media touted a lot and very confidently in that that you know the I can do these things these things these things but based on the actual data I'm not sure and obviously yeah you're not data right you're not you're just one single person you're not a huge group of people or anything like that but based off of what I see I just wanted to share that saying hey this is actually what's out there and sometimes people are advertising this like we have a lot more data than we actually do so just want to put it out there but if you uh made to the end I appreciate you sticking with me it's kind of a a niche nerdy one but yeah I really appreciate you stopping by and uh if you would it mean the world to me if you either liked this video commented or subscribed on YouTube or shared with a friend that's like the biggest com you can ever give me um and yeah I just really appreciate you stopping by now get off your phone get outside have a gr of your day and we'll see you next time