Wellness's Experimental Jab
My Playboy investigation into peptides
“Do you remember that term ‘experimental jab’?”
Dr. Adrian Chavez is sitting in his Austin home, a city many health contrarians and wellness influencers recently fled to in search of “medical freedom.” Armed with a PhD in nutrition, he’s spent years pushing back on medical misinformation on social media. I nod, well aware of the so-called renegade doctors wrongly applying the phrase to mRNA-based COVID vaccines.
“There’s no better way to describe peptides than that derogatory term that was used during COVID.”
We laugh at the irony: some of the same people claiming COVID vaccines weren’t properly tested (they were) are injecting themselves with peptides, which they say are well-tested (they’re not). Peptides are chains of amino acids, thousands of which naturally occur in our bodies and serve important functions, like fighting disease and aiding in muscle recovery. Synthetic peptides, artificial versions of our natural ones, have been used therapeutically for a century—insulin launched the field of peptide therapeutics in 1921. Some of these peptides, like insulin and now GLP-1 weight loss drugs are incredibly well tested, studied and scrutinized by researchers before making their way safely to consumers via the pharmaceutical industry. Other peptides, like human growth hormone, have boomed among the bodybuilding crowd—which still heavily traffics in peptides—and have been circulating the wellness grey market for years in off-label and potentially unsafe capacities.
Now, wellness influencers have gotten a hold of peptides and marketed them to treat and heal everything imaginable. Online, people are buying untested injectable peptides that promise all kinds of purported benefits, from weight loss to better sleep to better athletic performance. Influencers are hawking these substances in “stacks,” or combinations of potentially unsafe injections that claim to better your health, but really might contain totally unknown substances. In Chavez’s view, these are the real experimental jabs.