Welcome to The Peptide Memo.
If you're here, you've probably noticed something: peptides are about to become a story. Your group chats are starting to mention them. Your gym has a guy. Your cousin, somehow, already has opinions. And somewhere between the FDA, Joe Rogan, and a compounding pharmacy in Nevada, a $140 billion industry is repositioning for the next decade.
Most of the coverage you'll see about this will be bad. Not malicious; just bad. It will come from three directions: the wellness industry, which has a supplement to sell you; the mainstream press, which will oversimplify the regulation; and social media, which will confidently tell you things that are wrong.
The Peptide Memo is the fourth option.
Here is what we do:
One email, once a week. Short. Plain English. We translate the regulatory stuff: Category 1 vs Category 2, 503A compounding, advisory panels, rule making, into language you can use at dinner. We read the clinical data and tell you whether it's strong, weak, or mostly mice. We track the business: who's building, who's lobbying, and who's about to lose a billion dollars.
Here is what we don't do:
Sell you peptides. Recommend brands. Run affiliate links disguised as journalism. Tell you what to put in your body — that is a conversation between you and a physician who has seen your bloodwork.
The one rule we won't break:
If we don't know something, we say so. The peptide industry is, at this moment, full of people who are very confident about things that haven't been studied in humans at scale. We will not be one of them. When the evidence is strong, we'll say "strong." When it's twelve rats and a hunch, we'll say "twelve rats and a hunch." This will occasionally make us sound less fun than your cousin. We're okay with that.
Why now:
On July 23–24, the FDA will convene an advisory panel to discuss whether to allow compounding pharmacies to produce seven specific peptides again. This is not the same thing as "peptides being legalized." It is a meeting about whether to have more meetings. But it is the loudest regulatory moment this industry has had in THREE years, and the noise around it is going to be DEAFENING. Our job for the next few months is to keep you ahead of the noise.
What's next:
Issue 002 lands next week. It's a realistic read on the July 23 meeting — what's actually on the agenda, what a yes vote would and wouldn't mean, and why half the headlines you read about it will get it wrong. Issue 003 is a deep dive on BPC-157, the peptide everyone seems to have heard about and almost no one can describe accurately.
If you know someone who's been asking about this stuff, forward them this email. The easiest way to help us grow is to hit "forward."
Thanks for being here.
— The Peptide Memo
P.S. If you have a question you'd like us to answer in a future issue, reply to this email. It goes to a human.