alt Hacker NewsWTF is any of this, is there some ELI5/OOTL explanation?
I work in big tech and have never heard anyone talk about "peptides". Is this a startup scene thing or just an SF thing? (I live in New York)
all of my coworkers are pretty normal, sure there are the stereotypical fitness types that are marathon training, cycling, or have a climbing gym membership but no one is talking about buying weird Chinese drugs
Replies
Derek Lowe had a good blog post about it, mostly about the problems: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ah-peptides-where-...
This recent NYer article is a pretty good overview, written by a practicing physician:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...
I work in big tech and several of my older colleagues are ALL IN on peptides. Fountain of youth stuff.
Frankly as I am aging myself and noticing a lot of changes to recovery time and overall physically feeling good, I can totally understand getting on testosterone, for example, but random peptides that show up in white bags from random Chinese labs? no.
Wegovy/Ozempic (semaglutide), Zepbound/Monjourno (trizepitide), etc are the GPL-1 drugs sold today for diabetes and weight loss. Technically they are peptides. So if people you know have "finally" lost a lot of weight, they are likely on peptides.
Peptide manufacture is not as difficult as other drugs because they are injected.
Because the brand names cost a lot, and their manufacture is not too difficult, obviously lots of people got in on the action. Compounding pharmacies, gray market providers, and lots of cheap chinese copies. For one month cost of the name brand you could get many years worth of chinese copies. That is a pretty good hook.
Now that you are injecting one chinese peptide, and it works amazingly well, it is pretty common to check out some of the others. And it is hard to avoid since by the time you find the gray market / chinese suppliers, it is only one of the things they sell.