As peptides gain more traction in things like the cosmetic industry, it's no surprise that they are being covetted for their uses in other areas of health. What other areas can they help with? Things like gut health, muscle maintenance and so much more. But can they live up to their reputation?
What are Peptides?
In the most basic terms, peptides are strings of amino acids. These amino acid chains should not be confused with proteins. What sets them apart is the amount of aminos in the different chains. For peptides, they tend to top out at 50 amino acids; whereas, proteins exceed that limit. This is a divider between the two as well as what makes peptides so much more sought after. Why? Because of their size. The smaller a molecule is, the easier it can be to break it down within our bodies.
The nice thing is that these peptides tend to occur naturally within our bodies over it's lifetime. However, in most cases, they eb and flow. As we age, our bodies produce fewer and fewer natural peptides, prompting the need for synthetic peptide development, which can be conveniently accessed through options to buy peptides online.
Are Peptides Limitless?
Peptides, whether natural or synthetic, help our bodies function normally. Each one has a different role within our body and a different mechanism in which it works. Are they limitless? In a sense, yes. Peptides have an astute power to heal wounds, enhance healing, give our skin much needed collagen and so on. But it all comes down to knowing what peptides do what.
Anti-Aging: The most common peptides used for anti-aging purposes can be found in many cosmetics. They are much coveted. Why? Because they can help do things like reduce fine lines and wrinkles, give back some skin elasticity, and even improve the opacity of your skin. But not all collagen peptides are created equal and therefore doing research is an absolute necessity so that you're not wasting your money and seeing zero results.
Muscle Repair: Something else that may seem astounding is the fact that, while we are taught the basics on how our bodies heal in primary school. We aren't taught about peptides that aid that healing. One such peptide is BPC-157. This particular healing peptide is popular as a wound and soft tissue healing aid. It speeds up healing within the body when administered at just the right point.
Muscle Growth: When it comes to fitness and exercise, most bodybuilders or fitness enthusiasts tend to lean more into the protein and SARMs side of things. This is because they are more commonly used as muscle building agents. However, peptides can be just as effective when the correct ones are chosen.
Weight Loss: As weight loss culture and fitness influencers become more and more popular, so do different ways to lose weight. And believe it or not, there are peptides that exist for things like this as well. When paired with the right diet and exercise, peptides like Tesamorelin from Paradigm Peptides can enhance your game and even help you lose that stubborn belly fat.
Medical Conditions: Last but not least, different peptides are either in clinical trials or have been approved by the FDA to treat different medical conditions. Whether that be peptides like PT-141 that helps with sexual disorders in both men and women. Or IGF-1 which research shows, has the ability to reduce inflammation.
Properly Mixing and Storing Peptides
Of course, as with most things. Peptides need to be properly mixed and stored so as to obtain the results you're looking for.
Let's start with the reconstitution process. Typically peptides come in what is called lyophilized crystalline powder. This is just a fancy way of saying it comes as a powder form usually in a glass bottle. They come this way because they are more shelf stable and can be more easily transported in their powder form.
Reconstitution
Because they come as a powder form, you'll need one of two solutions. You'll either need bacteriostatic water or sterile water. This is usually a personal preference kind of thing and just really depends on your needs for the peptides. Bacteriostatic water can be used several times within a 28 hour time window. Meaning that once it is opened and used once you can use it again. In the case of sterile water this is not the same. Once used once you would either have to use all of it or discard it as it is susceptible to contamination.
In the process of reconstituting your peptide you will need your choice of the solutions named above, a syringe, and an alcohol pad and your vial of peptide. You'll want to first start by wiping down the top of your vial of the bacteriostatic or sterile water with an alcohol wipe. You'll then take the needle of your syringe and pull your desired amount of fluid into it.
From there you would inject your syringe full of water into your peptide vial. Two things to note, you do not want to spray the peptide with the solution, nor do you want to touch the needle to the peptide. If you essentially just spray your peptide with the solution you'll render it completely useless.
Instead the trick is to let the solution trickle down the side of the vial. This will begin the process of reconstitution without ultimately destroying your peptide. Once your syringe is emptied of its contents, you can remove it from the vial. If need be you can lightly swirl your vial to get everything. However, in most cases this is not necessary and the bacteriostatic or sterile water will penetrate the product enough to properly reconstitute it on its own.
Storing
As for storing your peptides, you'll want to maintain them at a temperature of 36 to 46 degrees fahrenheit, or 2 to 8 degrees celsius. Where should you store them? In most cases, your freezer is the perfect place as it is typically within the range of the temperatures mentioned. When properly stored, your peptides shelf life can be up to 5 years in length, with 2 years being the minimum.
Dosing Peptides
Let's start with the basics. An insulin syringe is typically 1mL of fluid with each tick mark on the side measuring 2 units. Now, this is where some math and conversion comes into play. One milligram converts to 1000 micrograms. When looking at your syringe, each tick mark is 200mcg.
A lot of the dosing will also depend on how much liquid you use to reconstitute your peptide. For example, if you use 1mL to reconstitute your peptide, the tick marks will be 200mcg. However, if you decide to use 2mL of fluid, that then changes each tick mark's dose to 100mcg each. Basically, the dose per tick mark reduces as the liquid increases.
Dosing really comes down to how much fluid you want to physically inject into your body. If you're wanting to introduce less fluid, then you'll want to reconstitute your peptide with less bacteriostatic or sterile water. For example, if you reconstitute a peptide that is a 2mg vial with 1 syringe full (1mL) of solution and the dose is 200mcg, you would pull up to the 5th tick mark. In that same scenario if you reconstitute your peptide with 2mL of solution, you'd have to pull up to the 10th tick mark to get that same 200mcg dose.
Of course, dosing for each peptide varies as well and in most cases are just theoretical doses based on animal studies. And each person uses slightly different doses based on other factors including age, weight, family medical history, and so on. So dosing protocol really is on a person to person basis.
