10. Part 1: Peptides 101 - What, Why & How?!

If you're doing everything right — the protein, the lifting, the sleep — and still feel inflamed, foggy, or stuck, this episode is for you. Dr. Mary Pines breaks down what peptides actually are, how they signal your body differently from hormones, and why midlife women who are already on HRT are now looking at peptides as the missing layer. Part 1 of a three-part series. No hype, no shortcuts — just the mechanism and a clear framework for where peptides fit (and where they don't).

00:00:00 – Three-part series intro & why peptides deserve the space.
00:01:14 – Who this is for: doing everything right and still stuck.
00:04:47 – What peptides actually are — and why small protein misses it.
00:10:22 – Peptides vs. hormones: loudspeaker vs. precise text message.
00:13:39 – Why big pharma modified natural peptides to patent them.
00:16:42 – How fast they work and how long a course runs.
00:19:43 – Lifestyle, hormones, peptides — why the order matters.
00:22:29 – Injections, cycles, healing reactions — what to expect.
00:26:58 – Preview: BPC-157, GLP-1s, copper & brain peptides.

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Peptides Mentioned in this Episode:

BPC-157
TB-500 / Thymosin beta-4 fragment 17-23
Thymosin alpha-1
GLP-1 class (semaglutide, tirzepatide, retatrutide)
GHK-Cu / "The Copper Peptide"
Selank + Semax

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Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. It does not replace the guidance of a licensed healthcare provider and should not be used to diagnose, treat, or inform medication decisions. Consult a qualified professional before starting any new health protocol. This content does not establish a patient-provider relationship with Dr. Mary Pines.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey friends, before we dive in, I just want to let you know that today's episode is part one of a special three-part series about peptides. Ooh, love them. It's a big topic, and I wanted to give it the space it deserves. So we're breaking it into three episodes. And if you're new here, welcome. If you're a regular, you know I don't do anything halfway. So let's start at the beginning. Thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the Better Beyond 40 Formula podcast, where smart-driven women and those who support them dish the confusion and cut through the midlife wellness nonsense. I'm Dr. Mary Pines, award-winning PhD biomedical scientist of 25 years, with a decade in women's health and longevity consulting. I specialize in transforming the health and lives of midlife women around the world from their late 30s to early 60s by delivering clarity and practical real-life solutions with honesty, compassion, and a little humor. And in this podcast, I'm gonna share my top tips and tricks from within my one-on-one coaching program to help you redefine what's possible for yourself and feel unmistakably better beyond 40. Today we're diving into the world of peptides, what they actually are, how they differ from hormones, and where they might fit for women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and on who are already doing so many things right, but still feel stuck. So I have to say from the outside, if you read the hype in the major news sources like The Economist, New York Times, or maybe from people like Andrew Schuberman, please suspend your judgment about peptides for now. I hate to say it, but at this point, most people still don't know what they're talking about when it comes to peptides because to them they're new. And frankly, as someone who's been in the space for many years, going to the conferences, reading the science, talking to clinicians, I'm freaking tired of it. Most of it is pretty negative, and that sucks. So if you're living with, say, inflammation, injuries, you struggle with slow recovery, a weak immune system, allergies, metabolic dysfunction, pain, anxiety, you're worried about your brain health. Maybe you've been trying to eat less and exercise more, but seeing zero results in your weight loss journey, even though your hormones are optimized, so many different things. This episode could help you. We'll unpack some of my favorite peptides. We'll talk about repair peptides, immune peptides. I'll take a totally different view of GLP1s you have not heard, I'm guessing. We'll look at the famous copper peptide, the darling of the beauty industry, and then we'll touch on some brain-focused peptides, and we'll do it all in the context of solid health foundations, not peptides as magical shortcuts. I want to start off by saying something that might make me a little unpopular in some medical circles. I think a lot of you are really doing a lot of things right, but you're still not getting the results you want. You've done all the things your doctor says. You devour all the health advice and all the health groups, and you just hear the same things over and over, and you're doing it all. You know, just exercise, eat clean, prioritize your sleep, manage your stress, be social, and you know, things will fall in place. Helen, but some of you are thinking, Mary, I'm doing all those things. I'm so fed up. I lift, I walk, I eat buckets of protein, I track my sleep, all the things, and I'm still inflamed. Slabish, puffy, I've got brain fog, or I feel like I'm stuck in a body that doesn't respond like it used to. I see this all the time in my practice. Women come in after seeing multiple doctors and they're told everything looks fine, your bloods are good, or worse, you must not be exercising enough, eating right, living healthily, blah blah blah. When actually they're absolutely doing everything to a T. They're disciplined, motivated, and yet they're still tired. They're inflamed overweight, can't build muscle, their brain isn't firing on all cylinders. So I'm gonna take a different stance today. How about this? It's not always that you are doing the wrong things. It could be that you're actually missing an essential piece or pieces of the puzzle. The signaling inside your body is maybe missing or not loud enough. So today we're gonna talk about that signaling. And instead of talking about hormones as I usually do, we'll look at the role of peptides, especially for midlife women who are already taking action to support their hormones, metabolic health, and longevity. Because, like hormones, peptides are naturally produced by your body and decline with age and with poor health status. I will never recommend peptides to somebody who is not already doing all of the pillars of natural functional health, all of the pillars that support your best health outcomes in terms of lifestyle. So by the end of this, you'll understand what peptides actually are in plain English, how and when they fit alongside lifestyle-based medicine and hormone replacement, not instead of it, how some of the most popular peptides can help us in midlife health, recovery, and cognitive function, and what those specific peptides are. And we'll have our honest reality check about sourcing safety and why you can't outpeptide a chaotic lifestyle. So, this is not about selling you magic injections, because honestly, that's not what I want to do. And it's not how I make money, it takes a lot of time. It's about helping you to be an informed, resilient queen of your own body. So let's dive in. Let's start high-level. Who even cares about peptides? What's the big deal? 10,000 But Bew peptides are amazing. They're naturally occurring signaling molecules in your body that can slow, stop, or even reverse some of the major health issues that conventional Western medicine cannot or does not support well. Bam! That's really big. So this ranges from everything from like concussions to chronic pain, dementia, IBS, Crohn's, long COVID Lyme, diabetes, inflammatory and immune conditions, allergies, and so many more. They can also massively accelerate healing from injuries or surgeries, help reinstate healthy sleep and circadian rhythms, boost energy and hormones, and support healthy weight loss in those who've struggled for many years or maybe cannot lose weight by any other mechanism. Remarkably, there's even a little bit of evidence to support that some peptides can even slow or reverse to some degree natural cellular aging in both human and animal models. Now, there's not a lot of data for that, so I won't push on that button. That's nascent, but I'm excited to see more there. Many longevity experts, biohackers, and health optimizers among functional medicine providers are also using them as anti-aging medicines, so to speak, and for performance enhancement and aesthetic purposes, and at relatively little cost compared to other elective therapies out there, things like stem cell treatments. They're big in parts of Europe and Asia, and in fact they came out of a Russian science, which is amazing. And they've been around for a while, you know, probably 30 to 40 years in those circles. But in North America, we're lagging behind, and this is partially due to the dominance of big pharma and the lack of properly funded research towards natural health supports. And side note, many people don't know, but being natural molecules, peptides aren't patentable unless a slight change is made to their structure by scientist, Big Pharma. And that's the case now for the GLP1s, now the world's most popular peptides alongside insulin. So that tells you something. When I started using peptides myself about probably eight years ago now, I noticed significant improvements in many aspects of my health, despite already being in really good shape, actually. Some aspects changed quickly, others quite gradually. And I'll talk today about the kinds of things you might expect to see with peptides. Actually, back it up a second, Mary, what are peptides? Peptide is just a fancy term for a small protein, or put it another way, short chains of amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. So the important part about the term peptide is not the length, it's the function. And there's different kinds of peptides. And in the case of the peptides we're talking about today, there's a subclass that are messengers or signaling molecules. Kind of like text messages your body uses within itself to say, hey, uh repair this tendon, calm this over-reactive immune cell, release more growth hormone tonight so we can do deeper repair. Strengthen this brain connection. In the therapeutic sense, peptides act a little bit like stem cells in the way that they can heal and rejuvenate the body. And I've heard this analogy made by a few experts in this space. I really quite like it. Some experts think that peptides beat stem cells in utility because while stem cells must land, so to speak, in the right tissues to have the desired effect most of the time, peptides are so small that they diffuse through the body and act systematically, quite quickly, meaning that they work anywhere they're most needed in the body. Pretty amazing. Your body has a natural intelligence about how it uses peptides and will prioritize their function in the areas they need to work. For example, the repair peptides seem to target the tissues they need to go to in order to do specific healing functions. It's really interesting. We don't know how that works yet. So if you're thinking, mmm, peptides sound a lot like hormones, you'd be right. And actually, some peptides are also hormones like insulin, oxytocin, growth hormone. Those are all little chains of amino acids that have wide-ranging signaling functions. But in general, mechanistically, hormones and peptides act kind of like cousins. They're related, but they're they behave slightly differently. Here's how hormones, things like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, they go into the cell and into the nucleus, changing gene expression more slowly and broadly. They're like loudspeaker announcements over a whole city. Peptides, by contrast, usually dock on the surfaces of the cell, triggering specific cascades within or outside. They're more like precise text messages to the right department of your city, so to speak. So, in short, peptides are very tissue and cellular specific, and they're more precise than hormones. Hormones towards treating a problem are like hitting it with a baseball bat, whereas peptides are kind of more like using a scalpel. Most of the peptides we're talking about are copies of signals your own body makes, and they plug into feedback loops that are built to help keep you in balance rather than shove you into an extreme. In practice, that looks like this. A peptide doesn't usually force a process to stay on full blast. Rather, it nudges your own system to do its job better and then lets your natural breaks and sensors, your feedback systems, kick in when it's too much. If your body doesn't want to respond, say, for example, a tissue is already saturated or a receptor is downregulated for that peptide, that peptide's effect often plateaus rather than climbing higher and higher. So you're working with existing physiology, restoring or amplifying a signal you used to have instead of say bolting on an artificial effect that ignores the rest of the network. If that's confusing, let's compare that with, say, cranking a drug that blocks maybe one enzyme or floods your system with a large fixed hormone dose. One can easily overshoot because those things aren't tied tightly to your built-in sensors and feedback mechanisms. So to summarize, peptides remind your body system of what to do and then let your natural checks and balances decide how big the response should be. They're wired to move you back towards balance, not bulldoze the system past it. That is called homeostasis. There is nothing else that is homeostatic like peptides are, and that's the really cool thing. That's probably what makes them incredible therapeutics. Hormones are not homeostatic. Too much is gonna do you harm. It's really hard to do harm with most peptides. You can, for sure, but in general they work with your body, and they're in general very safe, and that's in part due to this homeostatic mechanism. Okay, so moving on, we want to distinguish between a couple types of peptides. There's the endogenous ones, that's the ones you naturally make in your body. Insulin, as we've talked about, a peptide hormone. GLP1, a peptide your gut makes, BPC157, compounds made in your gastric juice. Limocin peptides are made in your thymus when you're young, and your brain makes neuropeptides. There are thousands of them in your body. Different things doing different jobs. Exogenous peptides are the lab-made, synthetic versions. Some are identical to what your body makes, and others are tweaked a little bit to last longer or be more stable. And this is why some, like the GLP ones, say it was Impic, are patented and sold as prescription drugs. They're modified a little bit. Natural molecules, as I said, can't be patented. So my guess is that Big Pharma are working really hard on being able to modify some of the other peptides to patent them and make billions on, but also to help us. So yay. Since we're talking about distinctions, we hear about other kinds of peptides. I get asked all the time, what about collagen peptides? Are these the same? No. This is a bit confusing because the term peptide in broad strokes just means broken down protein. Collagen exists as a massive structural sort of scaffolding protein inside your body in cells. It's a cellular scaffold. So it gets broken down during processing and is sold as collagen peptides. Collagen peptides don't have the same signaling functions as other peptides I'm talking about today have. Anything that has a protein can be broken down and have peptides in it. So that's tricky. So there was a company, somebody emailed me about, a bunch of people emailed me about, which is selling sort of yeast extracts that have peptides or just they're selling peptides on their website, but that's not, those aren't the same. I know it's confusing and annoying. Anyway, the key insight is this. Many of the peptides that help you stay resilient, repair tissues, balance your immune system, support your brain, they decline with age, just like estrogen and progesterone. You and I can't give you whole new ovaries for hormones, but we can replace the hormones your ovaries used to make. Similarly, we can't regrow a robust thymus or pineal gland, or give you back 20-year-old mitochondria. But we can, in some cases, give you back the peptides those organs use to produce in abundance, or the signals your mitochondria used to revive some of their functions. Peptides are natural. So these exact molecules exist in your body throughout life but simply decline with age, as I mentioned. So unlike pharmaceutical drugs or even hormones, there's no risky side effects or off-target effects associated with using most of the peptides I would recommend in the dosages that I would recommend them, or a good clinician who understands peptides would recommend them. You still have to be careful and work with someone who knows what they're doing. But yeah, quite safe. Number two, they act relatively quickly. And sometimes the effects are notable in days. Other times it takes, you know, a week or two, several weeks or a few months, depending on the issue at hand. It totally varies. For example, when I started taking one called BPC157, I noticed within a week I felt better and more energetic on a daily basis. I recovered from workouts faster, I built muscle faster. And I noticed that inside of a week, my clients have had similar experiences. Other times it takes, you know, eight to twelve weeks. And on that note, you don't need to take them on an ongoing basis. A course of peptides generally runs eight to twelve weeks, leaning towards 12. 12 is a really good sort of target for most. And that depends on the peptide and the application. This can often be completely sufficient for healing, requiring no further use, which is pretty awesome. In more extreme cases, it can take six months plus to heal difficult conditions with using peptides as an adjunct but important therapy. Things like chronic Lyme, mold, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, those sorts of things. For longevity and optimization purposes, however, in the way that I would use them personally, many experts will cycle them. Say four to six times or more per year. And some experts I know use certain peptides nearly all the time, taking short breaks between cycles, which is important. So that would be more like treating them like hormone replacement therapy rather than a short-term therapeutic. This is very safe for some peptides, we think, but not others. Again, long-term data in humans in North America from North American research is limited, but in other places like Russia, they're just common part and parcel in healthcare, and we have lots of insight into their long-term safety from their clinical lens. To get the most out of peptides, as I've not even alluded to, as I've boldly stated, it's important to dial in and maintain your healthy habits to keep stress low, including cellular stress, like inflammation or nutrient imbalances. Because, like little construction workers, let's say, they can't build and repair or heal tissues or rejig your system if we don't give them the proper materials, things like nutrients, if we don't give them enough energy, things like sleep or rest to do their functions. Before we go any further, I just want to expand on a point here. I want to be absolutely clear that peptides are not the foundation of your health. They are not magic, they are not the only thing you need to do. And if you ever heard me on a podcast or social post before and came away thinking I said peptides alone will save you, let me correct that right now. So for the midlife woman or anyone for that matter, men, women, any age who wants to feel and age better, here's the order I would think in. Number one is lifestyle foundations. So these are the pillars I speak to, I teach, I support women with one-on-one in my Better Beyond 40 formula program. We've got circadian rhythm and sleep optimization. We've got protein metabolic balance, nutritional balance, glucose regulation. We've got strength training, walking, appropriate levels of cardio, a little head training, stress and trauma work, big T on little T, calming the cortisol, nervous system balance. We've got gut health and nutrient repletion, and so on. There's more to that story. You get it. Number two is hormones. So there's no realistic path to optimal healthy aging for us without addressing our hormones as we rise beyond 40. Your estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, and others, they will decline no matter how clean your diet is or how much you meditate. Hormone replacement can be very helpful at the right time in terms of your body, but also supporting those peptides you might want to take to work better. In fact, the GLP1s have been shown to work 30% better, 30% better results with hormone replacement on board in postmenopausal women. That's huge. So HRT done well. This is a hard thing to find. Another thing I help women uh connect with in my program. Ideally, you would start in early perimenopause, but you know, as soon as you can, it's never too late. Don't let doctors tell you 10 years out of menopause is too late. We know that's not true anymore. Super powerful combo there peptides and hormones. HRT, I talk about it. Ad nauseum. Number three, then maybe we add in peptides as layered tools to help restore and support specific signaling. Repair, immune. Mitochondrial brain signaling, metabolic signaling. We'll talk about that shortly. If your cortisol is through the roof because of unresolved trauma, you're sleeping five hours, you're under eating protein, I'm not gonna throw a bunch of supplements at you and call it a day. That's not gonna work. It's gonna be a waste of your time and money. But if you have done a lot of those things and you're still stuck, or you want to optimize from there, that's when we start to think about whether you're missing some key signaling messages. So, what to expect when using peptides? How does this go? Most peptides are effective as injections. Some have oral forms now available, like BPC157 and semaglutide, but most don't work in oral form. Lots of dodgy companies will try to sell those to you, but be warned. Also be warned that you'll see a lot of peptide blends out there. Do not buy these, please. Especially in injectable form. When you mix fragile amino acid chains in a vial, they recombine into unknown frankin peptides. Now we didn't know this until a few years ago. There was a lot of debate back and forth among experts, but now we we understand actually that's a bad practice. So if you were like, I read the dude's fine, that's old news. You might feel fine now, but you have no idea what those are doing and if they're actually effective long term. These sort of peptide blends, there's a really popular one called Glow. They can cause weird allergic reactions and swelling, which I have seen in my clients who have accidentally bought them that way. Anyway, injecting things. That might sound kind of weird and scary to most people, and maybe you know it is at first, but honestly, those injections are super easy and relatively painless. They're teeny, tiny diabetes needles, you barely feel them. Once you do it once, you'll be like, oh. I've had to walk three people nearly having a panic attack trying to do this for the first time, and then other people are like, I don't know, I didn't feel it. So, you know, once those people panic attacking from two at once to like, oh, that was that I feel really silly. So rest assured, it is actually lazy. Most you would inject daily or five out of seven days a week, but the GLP ones, because they're modified to hang around longer in the bloodstream, are just once weekly. Since peptides are so small, they diffuse through the body in minutes. Pretty cool. And that means they act systemically. That means you're through your whole body. So a huge bonus of peptides is that they can help to treat the whole body regardless of where they are injected. And there's a caveat on that for injuries and wounds, which I'll come to later. But generally speaking, they go everywhere. They kind of have a natural intelligence about where they need to be active and the good they go there and conservate there. This means they can address many underlying issues, like even things people aren't necessarily conscious of, like a niggling pain, say, old scar that's causing some sort of discomfort, general chronic pain, wear and tear on the gut, heart, liver, kidneys, digestive system. We can all benefit from this kind of generalist repair. And one of the favorite peptides across the board is something that does just that. And that's BPC-157. This broad scope healing, you should know though, can cause some degree of fatigue or even dull aches and pains for a short time as tissues heal and remodel. That is common. It's kind of like a healing reaction that passes in a you know a matter of days if it happens at all. For immune-regulating peptides, it is quite common to feel under the weather for 24 to 36 hours following the first injection or two. That would be like thymus and alpha 1, or some of the others I won't talk about today that specifically target immune support. But that depends on, you know, what pathogens you're harboring under the surface. A nice thing about peptides is you don't necessarily need to know what the pathogen is. They can be effective nonetheless. So when using them for general health optimization, once your pain points are healed, most people will feel either like a little boost, like just sort of a nondescript, ah, I feel better. I can't describe it. I've heard this so many times. Or they just really don't notice anything at all by way of physical sensation. It can be weeks or months later that someone actually realizes, hey, I have better sleep or skin or energy or mobility, or they see their blood work's really improved after three months. That's exciting. I've had that happen personally. So that's part one. Friends, next week we're getting into the actual peptides themselves. Repair, immune, growth hormone, GLP1s, brain peptides, the copper peptide for skin. It's yummy and it's gonna be great. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Alright, my friend, thank you so much for listening and thanks to my wonderful producer, Kale Gosen. This episode is for education purposes only. It's not personal medical advice. Please work with a qualified provider before starting or injecting anything. If this episode helped you feel seen or supported and you want to go deeper, you're ready for clarity, support, and a roadmap to feel truly better beyond 40, visit my website, drmarypines.com, and explore my Better Beyond 40 program. Be sure to join my newsletter for weekly guidance, my free community group on school. That's S-K-O-O-L.com, also called the Better Beyond 40 formula, because in it I offer tips and tricks to keep you informed of the latest. You can also follow me on Instagram at Dr. MaryPines for day-to-day inspo, and I'm working real hard on getting my YouTube channel going as a prime source of awesome info on peptides and more for all y'all. You are not alone in this journey, we are in it together, and you deserve to feel incredible. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the colour.