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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
This episode is brought to you by Beam Minerals. And you hear me talk a lot about minerals because I find more and more, both from guests on this podcast and from what I’m seeing in the research, that minerals are so important and that we are not able to get what we need only from food anymore. And I love that I found this company called Beam Minerals. They provide all the minerals, electrolytes, and micronutrients that your body needs in a single one-ounce liquid per day. Now, the interesting thing I love about these is that they are naturally formulated in the same ratios of minerals that your body uses. And as we know, minerals work in pairs and teams, so it’s not just about getting the minerals, but getting the right ratios if we want to thrive. These are also unique because they are ionic, which means they don’t require digestion. And that makes them almost 100% bioavailable so your cells get the benefit almost immediately. The other benefit is they taste essentially like water. So they’re great for kids. They don’t have a strong taste. And I have been experimenting with these. And because they’re ionic and so bioavailable, I really do notice an increase in energy almost instantly when I take them. And I’ve been giving these to my kids, especially my athletes, to help them stay fueled for competition and to recover more quickly. They also have a lot of great information on their website, but you can learn more about them by going to beamminerals.com. And if you go to beamminerals.com/wellnessmama and use the code wellnessmama, you can save 20%.
This podcast is brought to you by Wellnesse. And this is a company that I got to help co-found and formulate the products for and one that I care deeply about. Oral health has been a fun research topic for me for well over a decade. When I discovered I had some cavities and started learning about the process of remineralization and how our teeth have the ability to stay stronger and healthier, dependent on a lot of factors, including our nutrition, our oral microbiome, and the environment of our mouth. And this is why we use something called hydroxyapatite, which is a naturally occurring mineral that is used in the enamel of our teeth. And there’s some fascinating studies that show that this is really effective at helping keep teeth strong and healthy. And this is also why I chose not to use fluoride in my products. Hydroxyapatite has many of the same upsides without the potential downsides that come with fluoride and is certainly much safer for children as well.
I really delved into the research around the oral microbiome. And I love that this is now an emerging area of conversation and research. But when our oral microbiome is strong, that helps us avoid both ends of the spectrum. One would be things like strep mutans, which is the bacteria linked to cavities, as well as the host of bacteria that are linked to things like gingivitis. Both of those can be combated by having a really healthy oral microbiome.
So we’ve recently released probiotic mints that have four probiotic strains that help enhance the oral microbiome and by choosing microbiome safe ingredients, as well as hydroxyapatite for tooth enamel in the toothpaste. So you can check out those as well as our full line of haircare products and other oral health products as well by going to wellnesse.com.
Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode is all about peptides and understanding them and how to use them optimally. And I’m here with Nathalie Niddam, who is a podcast host and longevity biohacker, a holistic nutritionist of human potential, and epigenetic coach. She’s a self-proclaimed science geek with a passion for human health. And a few years ago, she did a deep dive into peptides as a health optimization option. And she was captivated by the potential of these tiny proteins. And this became the catalyst for the launch of her growing Facebook community, the Optimizing Superhuman Performance Group, to feed the growing interest in these incredible compounds. And a year later, she launched the Biohacking Superhuman Performance Podcast, which is now rated in the top 50 in her category. Her passion is looking at longevity through the lens of all we can do in every area of our lives to promote vibrant health, boundless energy, and more. She works with clients one-on-one and manages these communities, and we go deep on the topic of peptides today. So let’s join Nat. Nathalie, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Nathalie: Thank you so much for having me, Katie. It’s an honor to be here. I’ve been, I’ve heard about you for a couple of years, actually. Well, longer than a couple of years. Your reputation precedes you. But personally, there was a woman that came to a retreat that I ran in the Dominican Republic a couple of years ago. And she kept telling me, oh, my friend Katie, Wellness Mama, you need to meet her, need to meet her. And then finally, we met last November in person. So it’s really nice to reconnect.
Katie: I’m so excited to learn from you today. And we’re going to get to go deep on the topic of peptides, which is a topic I’m excited to learn about on a personal level. Before we jump into that, though, totally unrelated. I did not know until researching for this episode that your first language is French. I would never have guessed that. But that’s true that your first language is actually French?
Nathalie: It is. I didn’t actually speak a word of English until I went to school.
Katie: Wow. Well, that is incredible.
Nathalie: And I didn’t speak a word of English when I first went to school. So apparently I didn’t say much for a couple of months until I kind of figured it all out. And then it was like, all right, we got this.
Katie: Well, my mom speaks French. I unfortunately didn’t pick up any of that or I would try to say something in French to you, but that’s really cool. And then a topic that you are also extremely well-versed in and I’m most excited to learn from you about is the topic of peptides because I would guess most people have heard of peptides by this point, but they probably still seem a little mysterious or a little bit kind of high barrier to entry of understanding how to even use them. And they’re just not typically a normal supplement you can just add to your supplement regime. So to start off really broad, can you explain kind of the broad concepts of what peptides are and then we’ll get to dive into how they can be used?
Nathalie: A 100%. So peptides are, the word peptide means protein. So a peptide is a chain and proteins are made up of amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. And so a peptide by definition is a chain of amino acids that is 50 amino acids or fewer in length. A polypeptide would be, I believe it’s between 50 and 100 amino acids. And then anything above that is just a protein. And so proteins, as people may know, can be hundreds of amino acids long, and they’re very intricately folded. Peptides, because they’re a lot smaller, can also be folded. But basically, they’re just tiny little proteins in the body that act as signaling molecules. They’re, they generally, they’ve been isolated from our body. So, they’re naturally occurring in the human body. But what’s happened over the last few decades is people have kind of isolated them, and then use them in different ways to kind of trigger desired responses in the body by reapplying them.
Katie: Yeah, and that their capacity to be signaling is what’s most fascinating to me, because I think when we understand them broadly as essentially like amino acids and the building blocks of proteins, they seem like, okay, that seems like something that obviously would be already in our body that we can produce or we get from food. But then when they’re isolated like this, that’s when they sort of have their kind of elevated potential, I guess I would say. And I know that within the world of peptides, there are so, so, so many. How do these signaling mechanisms work within the body? So this would be different, for instance, than if we were just getting some of the same peptides from a food source when we’re getting them in this like isolated format?
Nathalie: Yeah, so the exact same peptides don’t necessarily come from a food source. I mean, I guess maybe you might get some from certain animal products, and we’ll talk later, or we’ll follow up with and talk about bioregulator peptides separately because those are definitely available in food. But the peptides that we’re talking about, and just to bring it to a place where people can get real clarity on this, there’s a very well-known peptide that almost everybody’s heard of, and that’s insulin. And so insulin is a peptide, and it is a signaling molecule in the body. And so we make insulin from our pancreas under normal circumstances. And sometimes in certain disease states, people’s, you know, either the beta islet cells get damaged or whatever happens. And we stop making insulin and we lose our ability to properly process glucose. And so what, you know, the big discovery was isolating insulin and then re-synthesizing it in a lab and then learning that by reapplying it to the body, we can kind of supplement the body’s supply of and get it to do what it would normally do if you had insulin, if you were making it yourself.
Katie: And I would guess a lot of people don’t even realize that insulin is a peptide. Are there other ones within the body that perhaps people have heard of and may not realize are actually classified as peptides?
Nathalie: Well, you know, oxytocin, for example, people think, you know, people have heard, a lot of people have heard of oxytocin. It’s the, you know, it’s the love hormone and or it can be administered to women in labor to kind of move things along. And so oxytocin is another peptide that is naturally made by our bodies and that can be synthesized in a lab and then readministered.
So all of these peptides that people are talking about really are either, are very often they’re fragments of naturally occurring peptides in the body. And so we can, so something like, for example, one of the ones that possibly people have heard of, so now I’m talking to the part of your audience that’s kind of been running ahead here, and maybe they’re a little bit further ahead. And so one of the ones they may have heard of is something called BPC 157. And so what we’ll notice is that in these peptides that people are quite excited about that have made quite a splash over the last number of years, the names of these peptides leaves a lot to be desired. It’s very often like a series of letters and numbers, and that’s because they were named by scientists who discovered them and isolated them. So BPC stands for Body Protective Compound. And 157 actually is number 1 to 57 because it’s that first to the, it’s where, you think it’s got to be 1 to 57, but actually it’s only 19 amino acids long, but it has some designation of where in the whole BPC 157 that’s naturally occurring in our guts, it has some indication about that fragment, where they isolated the fragment from. It can’t be 1 to 57 because then it would be 57 amino acids long. So…
Katie: That’s so fascinating. And probably that one is the most that has gotten the most mainstream attention. So I’d love to go a little deeper on BPC specifically because I know from my basic understanding that can be taken orally or it can be injected as many peptides are. And it seems like perhaps it does different things when in the different ways that it can be kind of put into the body. But can you elaborate on what BPC does and maybe some of the use cases that you find for it?
Nathalie: So, you know, not only can it be used orally and by subcutaneous injection. It can also be used topically. It can be used intranasally. It can be compounded as eye drops. So it’s a very, very versatile peptide. And so I will often refer to it as the Swiss Army knife of peptides because it has an impact on so many different tissues and systems in the body. But its major superpower and the thing that, the two things that people really identify with BPC 157 is healing the GI tract, healing the gut lining, and also healing musculoskeletal injuries.
So BPC 157 is the champion of stimulating healing various tissues in the body. And it does this primarily by acting as a signaling molecule so it will attach to certain receptors on the outside of the cells and initiate cascades. And also by doing so, sometimes it even influences the expression of certain genes that influence repair. But it also can be very useful for things like wound healing, like actual wounds, surgical wounds. It can be really good for healing of burns. It also is very powerful for certain neurological issues. It can help with remyelination of nerves. It is also an anti-inflammatory. It can help with pain. In animal studies, it was shown to be protective from TBIs. You know, if I think about it long enough, I could come up with another laundry list of things that it does, but you get the idea. The idea is that this little, tiny protein is a very versatile protein in the environment of our system.
The other thing that it does, and the reason why it is also so helpful for healing of injuries, is that it upregulates the production of the expression of growth hormone receptors. And so very often BPC 157 has been used in conjunction with another category of peptides called growth hormone secretagogues. And those peptides basically stimulate the brain to produce and release your own growth hormone. So you can imagine that now you’ve got your BPC 157 that’s initiating its own repair cascades, but it’s also pushing out these catcher’s mitts for growth hormone. And at the same time, you’ve got these growth hormone secretagogues that are increasing your production of growth hormone, which is going to accelerate healing as well.
Katie: And this is the one certainly that I have the most personal experience with, both on myself with injuries and also my older kids that are athletes. We’ve in our house recently had a torn quad and a torn meniscus and a sprained ankle. And I will say it’s been amazing how rapidly it seems to speed up that healing cascade. And I think anytime we’re talking about peptides, that’s an important point to highlight is because of the way they work, they’re actually enhancing what the body already knows how to do. This is not like going around the body’s natural mechanisms. It’s enhancing the body’s own healing capabilities versus like a pharmaceutical that might bypass something that’s going on within the body. And so these are sort of like upregulating the things your body already knows how to do. Just like anytime we’re talking about detox, I always like to remind people we’re actually just enhancing the body’s ability to detox. We’re not doing anything externally that’s causing this. The body knows what to do inherently. And I know peptides extend far beyond just BPC, even though that’s the most well-known. What are some of the other ones that you commonly find people benefit from?
Nathalie: So, you know, one thing we should say about peptides is they have, they are in a little bit of a gray zone right now from a regulatory perspective. The FDA has taken note of peptides and has reclassified them as Class 2 compounds, which means that technically we’re not supposed to be using them anymore. So I just want to put that out there. Obviously, that doesn’t stop a lot of people who take matters into their own hands and biohackers and such and so forth. But the FDA has decreed that they don’t feel that there’s enough research and information around them for them to just be available to the market.
So having said that, in terms of what I’ve seen over the last number of years, you know, it’s hard to pick. It’s a little bit like saying, well, who’s your favorite child? And you’re like, well, I don’t have a favorite. That just depends, right? I mean, they’re all my favorite. But another one that I think is very interesting and notable is Thymosin Alpha-1, which is a thymus peptide. So your thymus gland lives in your chest right behind your breastbone. It is, in many ways, the seat of your immunity. And our thymus gland will start to kind of involute as we get older. But it produces all of these compounds that trigger the immune system to do certain things. And so Thymosin Alpha-1 is a peptide that supports the innate immune system. So it can be very useful for people with certain types of autoimmune disease. So as long as they are not Th2 dominant, then Thymosin Alpha-1 is a great choice for them because it’s going to bring up Th1 side of the immune system, which is the innate immune system. It’s also been shown to be very effective when trying to deal with sickness, like somebody’s coming down with the flu, Thymosin Alpha-1 can really help to speed up that recovery, all kinds of viruses, as a matter of fact. And so it’s, you know, it’s a very powerful compound. It does have orphan drug status in the US, but it’s only approved for hepatitis B and C right now. But it’s a, it’s a really interesting peptide.
Another one that, you know, it could one day, you know, kind of push BPC 157 off the official Swiss Army knife seat. And that’s a peptide called GHK-C, well, it’s called GHK, but the symbol for it is GHK-Cu. Now the Cu stands for copper. And so very often people will refer to it as the copper peptide. And so what’s really interesting about GHK is that it is particularly beneficial for skin. And that’s where it kind of got its claim to fame. The doctor who discovered it and brought it to market is a doctor by the name of Dr. Loren Pickart, who’s an American doctor. And I believe it was in the early 1970s is when he discovered GHK copper. And what’s amazing about this peptide is it’s only three amino acids long. So it’s the tiniest of tiny peptides.
And what it can do, because it’s so tiny, is it can actually influence the expression of DNA. So it actually influences your gene expression. And it’s been studied and shown to reset many, many genes, like thousands of genes, back to their youthful settings. It can also be very helpful for healing. As it turns out, it’s also really great at healing wounds and particularly at reducing scarring. And there was something else that was crowding that thought out as it was getting out. I lost it. So it’s incredibly powerful for healing wounds. But interestingly enough, it also is now being shown to have some benefits for even anxiety, for some people. It acts on every tissue that needs to heal, including the gut. So it may actually work really well hand in hand with BPC 157 because they would kind of operate on different planes, but with a common goal. So it’s kind of like going at the same problem through a couple of different pathways. And then the other thing that GHK does is it helps with collagen and elastin in the body. So it helps, so this is why you will find a number of topical kind of I don’t like the word anti-aging particularly, but you will find a number of skincare brands that use GHK-Cu either in small proportion or as the main ingredient in their products.
Katie: So is GHK used topically primarily, or is it also used internally?
Nathalie: So it kind of depends what you’re doing with it. So it can be used topically 100%. It can also be used by subcutaneous injection. Because it’s so tiny, there are people who feel that it can also be taken orally. I haven’t seen a lot of data on that, but there’s definitely a couple of supplement companies out there that offer it. And I think it can also be used intranasally.
So the intranasal administration is always really interesting, right? Because we don’t think of our nose as a point of entry necessarily, other than maybe to the sinuses. But this is where it’s going across the intranasal membrane and being absorbed straight into the bloodstream. And to some degree, even might have an impact on the brain through that route as well.
And so one of the communities of people that I’ve seen using GHK-Cu and even BPC 157, both of them, are people who have a condition, a genetic condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, EDS. And so these are people who very often are hypermobile. They don’t make collagen properly. And they can have issues all over the spectrum, it could show up as just being super flexible. But in some cases, they have they suffer from POTS, where their body’s not able to regulate their blood pressure properly. These are people who can lift up their hand and dislocate an elbow or a wrist like they, it can get very extreme. And those populations of people have found that both GHK and BPC 157 seems to have enough of an impact on their on their tissues, that it helps them to be a little bit stronger. The only thing is that because their condition is genetic, you kind of have to keep using the peptides to keep getting the benefits because they’re not going to fix your genes, they’re just going to maybe influence the way they express.
Katie: That makes sense. My first experience with that one has been recently, actually, I cut off on a diagonal, the part of like a top part of my finger. And I was wondering if it would actually regenerate or if I would have kind of like a pointy finger. And it actually, I think between that and I was already in a pretty advanced growth hormone state from fasting, it has fully regenerated in less than two weeks. So I don’t know that that’s entirely from the GHK, but it certainly didn’t hurt to have that on board as well.
I think also when it comes to the peptide conversation, where it gets mystifying for a lot of people is you mentioned like subcutaneous injection. And I think there’s, of course, the category of anything involving needles can feel very scary to a lot of people, but also there’s a lot of seemingly difficult math involved when you’re talking about reconstituting and dosing. And there’s so much that goes into that. Any tips on demystifying that process a little bit? Because this might be a totally new area for a lot of people.
Nathalie: Yeah. So the subcutaneous injection, to be honest, is a barrier of entry for most people, right? A lot of people, you don’t meet too many people who just love poking themselves with needles. Like it’s just not a thing. I personally thought of myself as needle phobic until I kind of got into this space. But what we’re talking about here is essentially like an, it is an insulin needle. So it’s a tiny little needle. It is administered in the layer of fat right underneath the skin. So that’s where we’re saying subcutaneous. And I think that for people who decide to kind of move into this space, you do have to educate yourself. You have to be, to me, you have to be fastidious about cleanliness. We’re talking about alcohol, like everything that you see your doctor or a nurse doing before they give you a shot, you have to be prepared to kind of take that on. You want to make sure that the area is super clean, that you’ve wiped it with alcohol. You’re never going to reuse needles. People ask me that all the time. You want to swab the top of the vial before you put the needle in.
And so the way that people reconstitute these peptides, particularly if they’re not getting them from a compounding pharmacy, is they will very often, they will arrive in a tiny little vial that half the time is going to look almost empty. And that’s because we’re talking about very small amounts of product. And unless the manufacturer you’re getting it, the lab you’re getting it from is using fillers like Mannitol, if it’s just the peptide, sometimes it looks like there’s a couple of grains of stuff in there. Nothing else. So that takes a little bit of getting used to.
What will then happen is people would have to reconstitute their peptides. And what that means is you’re basically mixing it with a liquid to turn it into a solution, right? And if it’s being used for subcutaneous injection, it’s that solution that’s most commonly used is called bacteriostatic water. And what bacteriostatic water is, is water with a very low concentration of alcohol. And it’s just enough alcohol that it stops the growth of bacteria. Now, what’s important to mention here is it doesn’t stop, it doesn’t kill bacteria. So that’s why you have to be so careful when you’re mixing things up or whenever you’re introducing a needle into the vial, because if you introduce bacteria, it will stay. It won’t grow, but it will stay.
So in terms of doing the math, you mentioned math and the math is really baffling to people. I’m not going to lie. It was pretty darn baffling to me at the beginning. I think that, you know, this is where getting help from a coach or someone who knows what they’re doing just to teach you the math is a really great idea. But, or you can use, there are some online peptide calculators. The trick there is you need to know what dose you’re after, right? So, you can’t not know the dose. And what I’ll say is that what you need to get it down to is how many milligrams of peptide are there in the vial per milliliter. And that gives you your concentration. And once you have an idea of that, now we can start going through math to understand how much of this solution do I need to draw out to get my desired dose? Is that what you were after?
Katie: Exactly. Yes. Yeah, I feel like that’s the big hurdle for a lot of people. And you touched on the FDA stuff. And I know that like anytime, especially when we’re talking about injecting anything, safety is, of course, a concern. Are there any things to know on the safety side or risks that people might need to be aware of before they would consider even researching and going down the peptide road?
Nathalie: Yeah. So, I mean, look, peptides are, on the one hand, there are people who’ve been using peptides for a couple of decades, at least. But for the most part, let’s just say it’s a last 10- to 15-year phenomenon. And it’s really bubbled up into the mainstream in the last five years. And so while there is some research out there around peptides, there’s not a whole lot of human research, and there’s certainly not a whole lot of long-term human studies. So there’s always uncertainty. I think that there’s a couple of things. On the one hand, what we’ve observed is that they have a fairly good safety profile. On the other hand, it is not inconceivable, nor is it unheard of, that people might have an allergic or histamine response to certain peptides. And it depends on the person. So the idea that, oh, nothing could possibly go wrong, actually is not true.
Secondly, it is possible that people sometimes have adverse reactions to certain peptides because of pre-existing conditions that they already have. So for example, I would say that like with the growth hormone secretagogues that I mentioned earlier, very often, not very often, but it’s not uncommon to see people have a histamine response to those. And what that looks like is at the injection site, they will get like a hot red bump, almost like a mosquito bite. If they continue, one of two things happens. Either the bump gets bigger, hotter, and more itchy, which is a definite sign by the body to back down. Don’t do that again because that can escalate. Or sometimes, the immune system, it’s almost like it has an initial reaction and then it backs down.
But the other thing that can happen with growth hormone secretagogues is it can cause a slight increase in blood pressure. That increase should be transient, but for some people, it’s not. So you have to be very cognizant of where you’re at, what your baselines are. BPC 157 on paper is supposed to balance the dopaminergic, serotonergic, and GABAergic systems in the brain. And yet there are some people that get very severe anxiety from BPC 157.
So I think the takeaway is that there’s a lot we don’t know because we know that the companies that really have the money to spend on that kind of research are big pharma companies. Because they can’t patent the peptides as they are, their motivation to do that research is fairly low. And that big research hasn’t been done yet. I think what’s happening and what some people believe might be happening with this whole FDA thing is that just like with the GLP-1 agonists, so things like Mounjaro and Ozempic that have made quite a splash over the last couple of years, those are peptides. And what happened with those is that the pharma companies did the research and figured out a way to, and it’s not just that they figured out a way. They modified the molecules so that it would have a much longer half-life in the body and therefore deliver a certain outcome.
So in doing that, they did something that they were able to patent. With BPC-157, I think what we’re going to see is we’re going to, at some point, we’re going to see some medication come out that is based on or a derivative of BPC-157. So I guess to answer your question is, people need to know that they are, that peptides are very powerful. They’re on the one hand, they seem to be fairly safe because they come from our bodies, but on the other hand, there are certain pathways that might get activated that we’re not familiar with yet. And in situations where someone, for example, has active cancer or certain health conditions, I think it’s really important to seek out a practitioner or a physician who is familiar with peptides and really how they work at a cellular level so that they can properly guide you and avoid you know, going the wrong way. Like with Thymosin Alpha 1, which many people think is super safe and great for everybody, I’ve seen people have really bad reactions because they were already TH2 dominant, and it just pushed them over the edge.
Katie: And it sounds like we’re in a time of like sort of to be continued on the conversation as everything unravels with the FDA and as these things push for approval in different avenues. But it’s like a fascinating topic and one that hopefully we get to do more follow up in the future as those pieces start to unravel. For people who want to keep learning more about peptides, I know you have a lot of resources available online. Where can people find you and keep learning from you?
Nathalie: So the best place to go is my website, which is natniddam.com. And on that website, there’s a tab at the top that says BSP Community, like Bob, Susan, and Peter community. And that community is a private membership community that I run on Mighty Networks. And if you join as an annual member, you actually get access to my peptide crash course. Which I put together a couple of years ago, just really to help people kind of get their ground, their footing in this whole peptide space and really understand the basics about some of the most common peptides. And they can also follow me on Instagram, which is just my name @NathalieNiddam. And then I’ve got a Facebook group that I started about four years ago, I want to say, that I’m not in as much anymore. But it’s a really, it’s a, I’ll call it a very vibrant and active community. It’s gotten pretty big. It’s around 22,000 members right now. And so it’s called Optimizing Superhuman Performance. And mostly it’s run by a couple of admins, but I’m in there every once in a while as well.
Katie: Awesome. Well, I will make sure all of those are linked in the show notes for you guys listening on the go. And this has been such a fun conversation. And like I said, this is a new area for me. I’m just beginning experimentation with it. So we can have follow-up conversations in the future, but thank you so much for your time and for everything you shared today.
Nathalie: Thank you, Katie. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Katie: And thanks to all of you for listening. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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