Pete Wright:
There is a war happening right now inside the FDA. It’s got a secret list, it’s got renegade scientists, it’s got influencers with syringes. And at the center of it is a molecule you might not have even heard of a year ago: the peptide. This week an FDA panel voted on whether your pharmacy should be allowed to make these things, and it was close. RFK Jr. wanted one answer. The FDA’s own scientists wanted another. So today, trainer Srdjan Injac tells me what a peptide actually is, why half the internet is injecting them, why the government’s fighting about it, and what a normal person should do.
Spoiler: it involves your doctor, not a DM to a guy named Chad. I’m Pete Wright, he’s Srdjan Injac. This is Build for Health.
Here we go.
Srdjan Injac:
Hello.
Pete Wright:
Everybody’s talking about it. This is the thing.
Srdjan Injac:
Oh yeah.
Pete Wright:
I don’t know why. You wanted to do this. You wanted to wade into this conversation. So here we are. Start me at zero, please.
Srdjan Injac:
Okay, so to understand peptides —
Pete Wright:
What is a peptide?
Srdjan Injac:
— it helps to compare them to a traditional drug. Many medications are what’s called small molecules. They’re tiny chemical compounds, usually taken as pills, and they can have broad effects throughout the body. Now, peptides are different. They’re made from short chains of amino acids, the same building blocks your body uses to make proteins. Think of amino acids like Lego bricks. When you snap a handful of those bricks together, you create a peptide. String many more together and you get a protein.
So scientists can design these small protein fragments to interact with very specific receptors in the body. Instead of affecting lots of different systems, peptides are often designed to target one particular pathway or one specific cell type. The easiest way to think about this is that a peptide is like a custom-made key designed to fit one very specific lock. When it finds that lock — a receptor on the cell — it unlocks a specific biological response. Whether that’s stimulating growth hormone, regulating appetite, or helping coordinate tissue repair. It can be many other things.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Right. So that’s what a peptide is. It’s a chain of amino acids.
Pete Wright:
Okay. So a chain of amino acids. You and I were just training, like hours ago, and one of the things you said with some enthusiasm is that insulin and Ozempic are peptides. They’re all peptides.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Why does “it’s a peptide” tell me nothing about whether it’s safe? Because that appears to be what everybody’s talking about. This is like the basil versus nightshade point. They’re both plants. One is dinner and one is poison. So why are we fighting about peptides right now?
Srdjan Injac:
That’s crazy to me. I don’t know why Ozempic, which is a peptide, is FDA approved, but the ones that will help you with muscle tissue repair — the ones that I’m actually going to try to get in a couple of weeks when I go see my doctor, like BPC-157 and TB-500, those two are known to be for muscle repair.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
So it’s like they’re banned, but Ozempic is not. And we’ve seen what Ozempic does. We’ve talked about it a little bit — everything, the side effects, and people —
Pete Wright:
We have.
Srdjan Injac:
— coming out and saying what they’ve seen and what they’re experiencing. So there are a lot of side effects. And if you use them in the wrong way for the wrong reasons, you’re going to get those side effects.
This is kind of the same thing, I think. All these other peptides, if they’re used in the right way and for the right reasons, they can be very, very beneficial.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
It’s just that some of these peptides — they’ve been prescribing them since 2013, 2014. For over ten years, they’ve been out there. You’ve been getting them from the doctor. You just have to go through a compounding pharmacy to get them. So now that’s where the work comes in — the compounding pharmacies, big pharma, the FDA.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Who was getting money for it, who was not, all that stuff. That plays a huge role in all of this. But all these peptides, they’re actually very effective.
Pete Wright:
And so this gets to — I think you’ve already answered one of my questions, which was: do we consider a peptide closer to a supplement or closer to a drug? And I think you said it’s closer to a drug.
Srdjan Injac:
Yes, yes. It’s closer to a drug.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
But it’s a lot safer. It’s more targeted.
Pete Wright:
Okay. So if people have been injecting these, compounding them since 2013 or so — great. But why is it that all of a sudden people are chasing these peptides down? It seems like I’m finally seeing the wave that has been cresting behind me for ten years. What is it that people are chasing when they’re chasing these peptides? What can these Lego bricks do?
Srdjan Injac:
They do help a lot. There are a lot of benefits. It’s just that you still had to get the prescription from the doctor. You couldn’t just get them anywhere, however you wanted. Now you can do that, because now they’re banning them, and all these other companies are coming out saying, “Hey, we are selling them, we have them” — but they’re labeling it as used for research purposes, so that nobody can come after them. But all these other companies, you don’t really know much about them, or whether they’re third-party tested, or how good they are, how legit and standardized they are. It’s like going to a gas station and getting sushi. Are you going to get a little stomachache from it?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, gas station sushi.
Srdjan Injac:
Is it going to hurt or not? It might work. Yeah, exactly. So that’s how it comes down.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
But now they’re trying to ban them so people can’t even get them from the compounding pharmacies. That’s completely different. All of a sudden, around 2023 — I found out, I did a little research — they started putting bans on some of these, and doctors were not able to prescribe them, or they started putting restrictions on them.
Pete Wright:
Right, right.
Srdjan Injac:
And then a lot of doctors didn’t want to deal with all that, so they stopped prescribing them, saying, “Well, I can’t do it.” Some other ones will prescribe them. And even compounding pharmacists were like, “Well, we can’t do it now, because the FDA banned those.” So it’s a huge —
Pete Wright:
How did this come up in your circles? Did this catch fire because of the fitness, the lifting audience? Is that why this is coming up now? Because we have legislators who are particularly into fitness, strength, physique.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, because it’s not just fitness. NFL, NBA — all these athletes have been using them for a long time.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
For recovery, to speed up the recovery. You see a lot of athletes get hurt, and before you know it, they’re back on the field, back on the court.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
And it’s just like, man, I wish I could recover that fast. But they get help. Peptides. That’s how I got interested in actually getting some, after I hurt my arm, broke my bone, and hurt my shoulder.
I’m like, okay, this is going to take a long time. This is a little bit more serious injury than when I would tear a muscle here and there, or just the soft tissue, and I can recover faster — I don’t need this stuff. But now this could help me. So then I started getting into this, and I’m like, oh, all of a sudden you can’t really get them that easily. Before, it was okay, it was fine.
And that’s why a lot of bodybuilders — that’s how they got into it. It helps them recover faster from their injuries and things like that. And then there are also some peptides that help them with muscle growth.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
There are a lot of those things that don’t really directly help the muscle to grow. You still have to go to the gym, you still have to lift weights. The way they do it is they signal a particular gland to release more of your body’s own natural growth hormone.
Pete Wright:
Uh-huh.
Srdjan Injac:
So that can lead to higher levels of IGF-1, and that’s another peptide. That’s the only one — or hormone — that’s actually involved in muscle repair, recovery, collagen production, bone remodeling, and fat metabolism.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
It works a little differently than all the other peptides. But a lot of them are much more popular in bodybuilding now.
So think of it — IGF-1, the hormone. It’s a hormone that your body naturally produces, and it responds to growth hormone.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, the GLP-1s.
Srdjan Injac:
Think of growth hormone as the coach, and IGF-1 as the player that gets the job done. So it helps.
Pete Wright:
Okay. I can see it. It’s a really alluring proposition, right? The story is: heal faster, rebuild after injury, age slower, cutting-edge science. And it seems like the other side of this is saying, look, we’re just way out ahead of the evidence — that there are some more conservative academics and researchers in the medical community who are saying we just don’t know. That’s my understanding of it.
Srdjan Injac:
Yes, that’s one of the main reasons why they’re —
Pete Wright:
Right?
Srdjan Injac:
— banning it. Because they don’t have enough evidence on humans. They haven’t tested on humans. But they had this whole time to test on humans. Why haven’t they tested on humans, when they have such great results on animals? They tested Ozempic, but not all the other ones. And they’ve been prescribing them for a long time already. The athletes have been using them for years, decades.
There are a lot of these peptides. It’s not just for recovery. There are some that will help your skin, your gut health, your sleep — improve the sleep and all these things. There are so many different types of peptides out there. And they’re trying to ban all of these, saying, “Well, we haven’t really tested them on humans, so we don’t really know what’s going to happen.” They’re not saying they’re bad. They just say we don’t know.
Pete Wright:
Just a sidebar on what happened as we record this — it just happened today; as you’re listening to this, last week. The FDA panel did vote to let pharmacies make some of these compounds. And what the vote actually does and does not do is important. The big one is that legal to compound does not mean FDA approved. It’s legal to make the thing, but it’s not an approved substance by the FDA.
The best honest argument, I think, for loosening access is something we’ve seen time and again, which is that cutting off a legal supply of a substance in an area where there is high demand just pushes people to sketchy overseas gray markets. Again and again and again. We’ve seen it again and again and again. And we’re still seeing it with gas station sushi and supplements.
On the other side are the FDA scientists, who are saying — their argument for “not enough evidence” is that there are just no big human trials, as you said. And “legal to compound” ends up getting sold as “endorsed.” That is a thing people are really nervous about on the panel: that the folks who are advocating for these things to be legal to compound don’t want it to be represented as “everybody’s okay with this, it’s endorsed by the FDA.”
And some of the panel members on this thing are people who work in the peptide industry as marketers. And I wonder how much that should color how we read into this. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and it feels like there’s no clean good guy here. Everybody is fighting over the same missing data. And in the meantime, these things are actively helping people, it sounds like, to recover, to rebuild, and to achieve their goals.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Does that all ring fair to you? Am I overstating or understating anything that you’re hearing?
Srdjan Injac:
No. I know a lot of people who have used these peptides for their injuries, and they helped. And they didn’t really have any side effects. But they’ve been prescribed by doctors, and they do the blood test and the lab and make sure that everything’s fine, and it’s been great. So that’s why I consider it.
Pete Wright:
How often does it come into the gym? How often do people come into the gym and say, “Tell me about peptides”? You’re a walking laboratory for fitness. Are you using peptides? Is it increasing right now? Is that why we’re talking about this?
Srdjan Injac:
Not a lot, actually, because a lot of people don’t really know about peptides. They don’t even know what it is. The first peptide people heard about is Ozempic, and they started asking questions about it, because they didn’t even know that insulin is a peptide, that Ozempic is a peptide, that that’s what a peptide is. So now they start asking questions: what is it, what does it do, is it for me? So now people are more curious about it. That’s why it’s coming to light a lot more — because now all of a sudden it’s being banned. It’s like forbidden fruit, and everyone wants to know why all of a sudden.
Pete Wright:
Well, it sounds like it’s in the process of being unbanned. If we’re looking at anything, they’re undoing Biden-era restrictions left and right. And so it seems like — if we look at Ozempic as the yardstick — you’re talking about these peptides in terms of letters and number combinations. The fact that they’re still being used in compounding pharmacies exclusively means there’s nothing branded yet. Nobody has taken hold of it and put money to it to be able to actually market it and sell it. As soon as some enterprising pharmaceutical company figures out how to get it approved and sold, it will be branded. You will be able to get this stuff done.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because there’s no branding when you get it from the compounding pharmacies — big pharma doesn’t make any money out of it. So instead of going after them and suing them forever, because it’s going to cost them a lot of money, it’s easier to go to the FDA, and the FDA just puts a ban on it. And then they can just fight with the FDA and try to get it approved. Because it’s not patented — that’s what the problem is.
Pete Wright:
Okay. So you’ve broken your arm, you’ve got a bummed shoulder, you’re recovering from injuries. And you said that you’re going to start looking out for these. So just put yourself in my shoes. I’m curious about a peptide. What’s step one? What are you going to do first?
Srdjan Injac:
Well, I have to talk to my doctor to see if I can get a prescription from her, and get her opinion, and see if I qualify for that, if I would be a good patient for that. I wouldn’t mind trying it and seeing what it does. Everything that I put in my body, I do a lot of research. I don’t put everything in my body. I’m very particular about that. But I’d be willing to try this, and from all the research and everything I’ve done, it seems pretty safe — as long as I work with her and I do the lab regularly and all that stuff.
And it’s not something that I’ll take forever. It’s just until it gets better, and then you stop.
Pete Wright:
That’s important.
Srdjan Injac:
I already take one drug that’s from the compounding pharmacy. It’s hCG.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
It’s been fine. It’s been great. I just did the lab last week and my results look great.
Pete Wright:
Everything’s okay.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. I’m taking hCG, I’m taking testosterone, which is actually a hormone itself.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So I’m taking all these drugs, and those are just some stuff that I’m going to be taking for the rest of my life. This is not. This is just to speed up and help the recovery.
Pete Wright:
So if I’m playing devil’s advocate here: you want to recover. Before peptides are even a question, do you feel like you have exhausted all the boring proven stuff that someone should do first? I’m looking for what the red flags are that you should be looking at — are you looking at them authentically, the reason you’re getting this done?
Srdjan Injac:
It’s just because I’m older, and it takes a lot longer now to recover than in my twenties, when I was able to recover a lot faster. And yeah, I could take care of this without taking a peptide — do a lot of physical therapy, just be patient and work on it. And it might take me maybe four, five, six months. This can fix the problem in like two months.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
Maybe even less, depending on what it is.
Pete Wright:
Why not explore the opportunity?
Srdjan Injac:
So why not? Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
How many times — I know a lot of listeners have gone to the doctor and they had injuries where they get an injection, and they’ll start feeling better and recover a little faster, but they still have to go through physical therapy and all that stuff.
So this is the thing. It just helps. It creates a better environment for healing. That’s what the peptides do. They don’t directly do the thing; they just help create that environment. So I think there’s really no harm in that. It will help my body heal faster and do the work.
Pete Wright:
Which of the peptides will make me smarter and prettier?
Srdjan Injac:
Well, I have to do the research on that one.
Pete Wright:
Is there a peptide that could even do that?
Srdjan Injac:
I haven’t done that one yet. I know there is one for skin — it will help your skin, it will probably make you prettier.
Pete Wright:
Okay. I want tight pores.
Srdjan Injac:
There is one for the brain too, and sleep, and all that stuff.
Pete Wright:
Okay. All right. There was the movie Limitless. You remember the movie with Bradley Cooper?
Srdjan Injac:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Is there a peptide for that? Is that what we’re looking at?
Okay, you guys — if you’re ever browsing the internet and you see an ad pop up for a peptide that will give you the Limitless feeling, don’t answer it. Don’t click on it. We’re not advocating that. This is just a joke. Don’t look at it.
Srdjan Injac:
Yes, I know.
Pete Wright:
Turn away. I feel like I’m probably the one who’s more conservative between us on trying these things.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
But I think this is a pretty balanced way to approach it. Talk to your doctor first, figure out if you’re a candidate for a peptide treatment, and see how it works.
I have a hard time not exploring the things that we can do with our own bodies to improve performance and healing. Why not?
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. I’m usually against a lot of supplements that are in the fitness industry and stuff like that, and I don’t recommend them. They’re not needed.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
But I’m all for it when it comes to peptides.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
Most of them. Ozempic — I had a little problem with that. People are using it for the wrong reasons.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, you’re on the record hardcore about Ozempic.
Srdjan Injac:
So as long as you’re using it for the right reasons —
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
— that’s fine. Don’t use them for the wrong reasons, for shortcuts and all that stuff. You don’t really need them. So unless you really need them and you qualify for that — that’s why you go to the doctor and you get a prescription for them.
Pete Wright:
I think we didn’t explode in this conversation. It’s a hot topic, but we’re okay.
Srdjan Injac:
No.
Pete Wright:
Thank you, everybody, for hanging out with us. I hope this little primer on peptides gives you something to think about, and certainly something to go talk to your doctor about. So glad you joined us today.
If you’ve got questions about training or recovery or how to make strength work for you in your life, or if you just want to keep up with Srdjan’s journey with peptides, we want to hear from you. Head to the show notes and use the link to send us your questions for the coach. And don’t forget to subscribe and share.
This is how we grow stronger together. Thanks for listening to Build for Health, and we’ll catch you next week in the gym.
