NYT piece on peptide therapy hype, worth a read before adding anything new
Posted by elle_z in Cognitive & Nootropic - 1 points, 4 comments.
NYT put out a pretty grounded piece on the whole peptide therapy wave, skin, muscle, longevity, all the usual promises. They walk through what peptides actually are and ask the question most of us skip over: do they work?
My take is the article is a little too cute about lumping everything together. Throwing BPC-157, GHK-Cu, and GLP-1s into one bucket is a bit of a strawman. Still, the skepticism is fair, because the marketing is genuinely out of control right now. I tried selank for a couple of weeks and felt calmer, but I have no idea if that was the peptide or just expecting to feel calmer. Could be placebo, probably partly was.
The part I wish they dug into more is cognitive peptides specifically, since the evidence bar there is all over the place. For anyone here stacking selank or semax, did this piece change anything for you or just confirm what you already thought?
Comments
- vet_former: Yeah I read it too, and honestly the lumping thing bugged me as well. Those three buckets you mentioned work through totally different pathways, and pretending they're the same conversation just muddies the water for people who actually want to learn. On selank specifically, the nasal studies I looked at were tiny and mostly Russian, and now I'm doubting my own calm feeling a bit more after reading their take on the evidence base. Could just be I was in a good week, you know? The cognitive ang
- tired_gains: Yeah the selank evidence is shaky at best, most of it is older and not replicated widely. The cognitive piece is murky for the same reason, semax has interesting papers but almost nobody outside a couple labs has touched it. Not gonna lie, if it makes you feel sharper that could just as easily be sleep or training landing right that week.
- elle_z: Honestly yeah that's the thing that bugs me most, the selank studies I'm finding are like 10+ years old and tiny. The semax papers out of Russia look more interesting on paper but you basically can't find independent replication. You're right that sleep is probably doing more heavy lifting than I want to admit, I tracked my HRV that week and it was trash so 😅
- elle_z: Haha yeah the "good week" thing is honestly the hardest part to rule out, I keep coming back to that too. Were those Russian selank studies the ones with the GAD scales, or different ones? I keep meaning to dig into that properly.
Community discussion - research and educational context only. Not medical advice.