Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:01 Welcome my outside the box thinkers to the Anti-Aging Unraveled podcast, where I am your host, Dr. Lori Gerber. In this podcast, we will explore the fascinating world of personalized anti-aging medicine that considers the whole person inside and out and how all systems are interconnected to each other. In today's world of modern medicine, we often find ourselves like just another number in a system that prioritizes quick fixes over sustainable and more natural solutions. Well, let's get ready for a paradigm shift. In health and beauty, we look far beyond treating symptoms and aim to get to the root cause of our health and cosmetic issues. This podcast is your go-to source for all things natural outside the box and innovative and integrative medicine and cosmetic dermatology. So sit back, relax, and get ready to dive deep into the world of functional medicine and aesthetics. With me, Dr. Lori Gerber, let's take a trip down the Real Skin Revolution pathway together.
Speaker 0 00:01:05 Hello to all of my integrative health junkies looking for more information and for anti-aging unraveled. You have found me. This is Dr. Lori Gerber and I'm really excited to bring you a series today on peptides. This is going to be my word of 2023. It might have been my word of 2022, but don't tell anybody. But anyone that knows me well knows that I've been talking about peptides for several years and I really am excited about the world of peptides and what they bring to our body and our skin. So I think this is a great time for me to introduce a concept that I've been working on in my industry that's called Integrative Aesthetics, and it's called My Real Skin Revolution. And what that is is integrating gut health and integrative medicine into your skincare routine for optimal results. So I'm really excited to bring up these peptides today because I think they're the first step in many functional medicine, integrative medicine steps that can help to preserve our skin, preserve our body, and keep us feeling young longer, which is really why you're listening to this podcast, right?
Speaker 0 00:02:11 We all want our skin and our body to feel as good as possible and look as good as possible. And that's why I'm happy to bring you anti-aging unraveled. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about peptides. I will try not to go into too much minutiae for you guys. I get really excited about these and they kind of have a special place in my heart. So let's just get to it. So what is a peptide and the basics of peptides? It's really, they're just amino acids. You guys remember your biology and junior higher high school, it's just the precursors to proteins. So we're talking about short chains of peptides that actually work to create a sequence that is really a signaling sequence. So they are very specific and tell your body things to do. So for example, they activate cellular regeneration. So some of them can help with our mitochondria, our powerhouses of the cell.
Speaker 0 00:03:04 Some of them can help with sugar regulation, some of them can help with clearing out collagen and helping with elastic tissue regeneration in the skin. So all of these regulatory processes can be mediated by these peptides or short chains of amino acids. And I find history to be quite interesting, at least now that I'm older, I do. So let's talk a little bit about how these were discovered. And I think it's really interesting to think about. These have been studied for a really long time. So you know, the Russians actually started playing around with these during the Cold War and realize that they're, their military was just aging at a much faster pace than the general population. So of course the Russian government wanted to find a solution to this. So they started going back to some old data, actually Vladimir Ka sin who was commissioned to tackle this process or problem started looking at old research on peptides and these signaling regulatory peptides and what they would do to your body if you introduce them into the system.
Speaker 0 00:04:05 And what they realized is there was a lot of them that would regulate the immune system, that would regulate healing, that would help to regulate performance energy levels. And they use these peptides throughout the Cold War to try to stop the premature aging of their military. And the great thing about the peptides is there's very little to no side effects on those and they haven't been able to really find too many to be honest, other than just some symptomatic things, nothing really long term. So we know they're a unique sequence, right? They're already in your body. So they're natural. So what that means is typically that big pharma can't really come and take these and mass produce them. Although more recently we are having a uh, whole lot of press and talk about semaglutide, which we'll get to a little bit in this podcast. But they are really a natural substance.
Speaker 0 00:04:56 They control gene activity and bind to a very specific D N A sequence. All right, so let's think about this for a minute. We need these peptides and some of us are deficient, these peptides, we can't always check to see what they are in our blood, but we can always put some back and see what happens, which is really what I think is super fascinating. We can try these for a couple months to a couple weeks and see how they do in your, in your system. I think it's really important that a lot of these help with methylation. And many of us have a defect in methylation and I know you guys are, most of you are saying, what the heck is methylation? Dr. Lori Methylation? I like to think of it as a way of putting carbon and hydrogen onto things and taking it off.
Speaker 0 00:05:37 So methylate and demethylate in the body, all that means to you is it's a transfer mechanism. It's to utilize different vitamins, different nutrients, make your estrogen being usable and non-cancerous. It's a very good way for our body to transfer things and use them in the system. And we use carbon and hydrogen and some of us aren't very good at doing that process. Well, there's peptides that actually help us with what's called methyltransferase and that will actually help the peptide transcription and help the things that are down the line. Meaning like estrogen regulation, thyroid regulation, immune health, so that your body can do it more efficiently than it would naturally do. So let's talk a little bit of why we wanna use these things. And we see all these regenerative clinics popping up for regenerative medicine, especially in orthopedics. They are wonderful for helping with regenerating tissue and taking down inflammation.
Speaker 0 00:06:32 They have been used actually after the Chernobyl disaster. They were used there. They were used for victims of earthquakes, nuclear accidents, also an ophthalmology actually to help with drug penetration into the eye, almost like a carrier molecule. They've been used. We've even found more recently that peptide formation is actually possible in space and indicates that there is a possibility of life just from these formation of peptides, which is absolutely fascinating. If you're someone like me that loves to follow kind of the shows that are about space and the supernatural and even about alien encounters, you know, the, to me finding peptides and being able to create peptides in a vacuum or in space is pretty phenomenal. So let's talk a little bit more about why we're gonna use these for the skin. Well elastin, one of my favorite skincare products, which we do have a website too.
Speaker 0 00:07:24 If you decide you wanna go to that, it's elastin.com/dr Laurie. So it's d r l o R i. Or you can look me right up on Elastin Skin Cares website. But they have peptides in their creams which are really innovative. It's called their Trex technology. And it actually will decrease cellular debris that builds up underneath the skin and increase elastic tissue and actually increase collagen formation. So these peptides are telling your body to create more of these things that our body doesn't wanna do is we age. That is why our skin starts to sag, right? We one of the reasons that it starts to sag. So these products to me are fabulous. I do find that they work better than oral collagen powders. People ask me this all the time. I think collagen powders work very well for joints but not as great for skin.
Speaker 0 00:08:13 They work for hair and nails actually quite well, which should probably see. But I really do find that elastins eptide creams, which are their restorative cream and they're regenerating serum, all work really well for helping to regenerate elastic tissue and collagen in the skin. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about what symptoms we can help with these peptides. And I'm sure this is gonna ring true with a lot of my listeners here. So how many of you have insomnia, fatigue, depression, anxiety, weight gain, poor muscle mass, memory issues, concentration problems, autoimmune disorders, hormone imbalances, hair loss, inflammatory diseases, insomnia, chronic stress, sexual disorders, osteoporosis, oxidative stress, which you would only know by labs or other inflammation, that's all of us, right? That's every single one of us is going through menopause perimenopause that eats a traditional sad American diet. So what do we need from these peptides?
Speaker 0 00:09:14 What we want to reduce inflammation, we wanna improve wound healing, enhance immune function, help with muscle mass and bone density and brain function, help with sleep. So all of these things are benefits and I'm gonna talk briefly about some of my favorite peptides that are out there and one of them, and they're all initials. So I'm really sorry about these names. Guys, we don't get very creative in medicine. We name them after kind of whatever peptide number somebody found and all these things. We use letters and numbers. So it's called B BPC 1 57 and B BPC 1 57 when we're on the subject of inflammation, is one of the most commonly used peptides for leaky gut and inflammation from leaky gut. And we know that it's a stable gastric peptide, so it actually is stable, taken orally and can be used injectable as well, which is really interesting.
Speaker 0 00:10:07 So even on topical wounds, it's actually been shown to improve healing. It increases circulation, increases collagen production, reduces muscle sprains, strains, helps with ligament damage. I love this for injury and recovering from sports injury. I use it as an injectable a lot and sometimes I'll even do the injection around the area of injury for gut. We'll take it orally to heal up the gut and speed up recovery and and help to heal leaky gut. And just as a byproduct of working on the stomach and the gut, we do get improved brain cognition, serotonin production, some actually some hormone production by the hypothalamus and pituitary circulation, which actually will give you a little bit of hormone regulation help. So even with your sex hormones and some of your other hormones that are being produced, to give you a little bit of a wellbeing feeling, I love BPC 1 57, very little side effect profile to it.
Speaker 0 00:11:03 And like I said, it is the go-to for gut and for rapid recovery of, to me ligament and tendon injury or joint repair. So we can get that ordered for you as well. Just so you know, all of these can be ordered through one of our compounding pharmacies that we would use and ship directly to your house and we would walk you through how to use these and we can do that all virtually around the country, which is a lot of fun. And I have some help in my armament these days. So we have some new nurses to help you guys out as well that are trained on these as well. So let's talk about my second one that I wanted to bring up today. It's called you ready drum roll please. CJC 1295. And it can be combined with ipa morlin. Ipa morlin in and Sam Morlin are both basically growth hormone stimulators.
Speaker 0 00:11:51 Okay, so growth hormone, we all kind of know about H G H and growth hormone. It leans us out. It has the ability to help regulate cortisol levels, helps with sleep, helps with over-training, helps with those type A personalities that have totally burn themselves out. So when we actually give this, it actually will help to increase your H D H levels, which is really good. If we're trying to lose weight, it's really good if we're trying to help sleep, it's really good for recovery from injury. So it sounds really similar to BPC 1 57, except this stimulates growth hormone, which B BPC 1 57 does not. And also we'll help with increasing muscle mass. So if we're trying to lean out and kind of get the muscles larger, but it also does a really good job with brain function. A lot of my patients that are complaining of brain fog that are menopausal or ine CJC 1295 and IPA Morlin does a really nice job for that.
Speaker 0 00:12:44 I love it for my athletes, but I also love it for even just my generalized muscle disorders or even my fibromyalgia or my patients that have these muscle aches and pains that we can't really figure out. So this is also an injection. We do this at night and it's about five or six nights a week and we usually cycle it, it's about three months on. And then depending we can give a couple months off and then we recycle. And what we do is our goal is to really help your body to stimulate some of its own natural growth hormone for recovery. Now you'll see that it, it's used majority in athletes, but what I've been finding more recently, like I said, is it has a really strong patient population that does a really good job for with my menopausal females. And myos meant, so let's kind of skip to one that maybe gets overlooked sometimes, but I actually think it's a really good addition for sexual health in my hormone patients.
Speaker 0 00:13:37 And you know, a lot of the time I'll get men that have borderline testosterone where they're having a erectile dysfunction where it might not all be just from androgenic or lack of androgens. And this is called PT 1 41. It's also known as omelet. I can never say this, gimme a second, guys. Bide, which is a natural solution to decrease libido. So it's another peptide that is actually gonna stimulate the melanocortin receptors, which can also give you some skin pigmentation. But the other thing that it does is it actually helps the nervous system instead of the vascular system like Viagra and Cialis and some of the other ED drugs on the market to help with arousal for erectile dysfunction. So it is actually pretty fabulous. It's a great way to regain some of the confidence back, if you will, in the bedroom with erectile dysfunction. And we can use it in addition to testosterones so, or even some testosterone stimulator.
Speaker 0 00:14:36 So it does not have to be used by itself. So if you do have low testosterone and your libido is quite not there, even with replacement, this is a really great option. You know, we have to realize that this is multisystem related. It's not just the vascular system. The nervous system plays a huge role in a erectile dysfunction and libido for women as well, to be honest and painful intercourse for females, it does help with that. It helps with inability to orgasm but and sensation. So we know that it can help for men and women in that regard. And it does work for a prolonged period of time. Someone was just asking me the other day about, you know, do you have to take it right before sex or anything like that, like Cialis and some of the other medications? And the answer is no.
Speaker 0 00:15:18 So I think it's a really awesome option for people for the nonvascular issues related to erectile dysfunction or for females to the mental component of lo libido. Let's talk a little bit about something called thymus in beta four or TB 500. These are what we would call thymus stimulators. They're peptides that actually are great anti-inflammatories and wound healers. So I like to think of the as kind of the massive immune boosters. Okay, these are gonna stimulate our T-cells to do what they're supposed to do. Increase our B cells to make antibodies, help with tissue repair by regulating what's called actin, which helps with wound healing. And it is wonderful for arthritis soft tissue damage. Chronic, I like it for chronic conditions like chronic autoimmune disease that has pain associated with it. Traumatic brain injury, it has some really good data for and actually has been shown to help with cardiovascular regeneration.
Speaker 0 00:16:22 So blood vessel formation. To me this is just the tip of the iceberg with with these medications or these peptides and I'm really excited to expand into these a little bit more in the next year. I find that these peptides have so much utility. We're talking about so many systems and people that we really can't figure out because they're autoimmune or their immune system is so either over the top or under-regulated. This just helps with regulatory function. So I love these TB 500 s or thymosin type peptides. One of the ones that I use the most frequently, I think with my menopausal women specifically is called cell. Cell is really interesting. Cell is a nose spray peptide that actually inhibits anxiety. So for all you people out there that post covid specifically where anxiety has been a significant problem in our society, I love cell, it actually helps to regulate cortisol levels.
Speaker 0 00:17:25 It has what's called a new tropic effect, which means it helps with memory and learning processes. So for people that are having trouble with like their brain staying on track, not necessarily a d d, but they're so anxious that their brain keeps going, they actually have been compared to like a benzo effect, which is like a, a Xanax or something like that guys because it has that powerful property to take down anxiety, but it also has really good neuroprotective effects. So we know that it actually helps with memory learning can strengthen some of your immune functions and reduce stress. So I really like this. It's a very benign peptide, but we know that it does interact with the cortisol level and helps to regulate that pretty significantly. Those people that I usually give this to are either my type A people that are going, going, going, going and they can't shut it off at night to go to bed or their anxiety is so over the top that they are having trouble functioning.
Speaker 0 00:18:19 Or my women that are going through menopause that are anxious because of usually low progesterone. And as we're putting that progesterone back, sometimes it helps to use a little selling to take the edge off, especially in the evenings. Okay, I'm not gonna go into detail about the mitochondrial ones, but we have actually a couple of really good ones that help our powerhouses of ourselves, the mitochondria, to be more effective. We are all in mitochondrial disarray, truthfully, most of us anyway. And that really means that our powerhouses of ourselves either don't have the nutrients they need or they're working on overdrive really just to clean out our system. They are responsible for so much work and if they can't make at t p properly for your body, then our energy levels suffer. So we have a couple that are called, one's called epi thon, which actually works really, really well.
Speaker 0 00:19:09 It's super popular. And another one is called mo C M O T S C. And that one actually does a really nice job for mitochondrial repair and helping it to work more efficiently. So for those of us who kind of have been toxic for a while, we know that our, our system is not really doing well or maybe we just need some help with, even with osteoporosis, I know that MOK does a really nice job with osteoporosis and creating new bone. These are really great peptides to help with insulin regulation, metabolism, getting your energy back and kind of fixing what's going wrong in our system that's basically been plaguing us for a long period of time. So for people where we can't really get you regulated and we can't figure out what's going on, we usually have to go all the way down to these tiny little powerhouses, these mitochondria, believe it or not, once we get those working, well man, can it help?
Speaker 0 00:19:57 Like I said, it can improve glucose, it can help with bone formation, it can help with weight loss, it can help with the liver and getting the fatty acids to be metabolized in the liver more efficiently so that you don't have, you know, especially with cholesterol formation. So we really find that these mitochondrial helpers can be amazingly beneficial. And then I'm gonna spend my last couple minutes with you guys talking about one that's a hot topic. Everybody's been asking me to reiterate some of these. And one, it's called semaglutide. I will not put the uh, farm trade names out there for you guys, but it's really the one that's all over the news right now for weight loss, that's for diabetes. And this particular peptide has been around for quite some time. This is not new, it's only new really to pharma. So let's talk a little bit about what it does.
Speaker 0 00:20:43 It actually will stimulate the G L P receptor. So it's a GLP one agonist and all that means in English is it tells your body that you have enough sugar and it won't let your body release sugar into the bloodstream. So it actually will stop your body from putting new sugar from New York storage or reserves into the bloodstream. It also will slow down your stomach's movement. So it'll actually make you not feel hungry. It'll make you feel fuller quicker. So you get an overall reduction in the hunger effect, which will decrease the amount of calories that you take in. The other thing too is that it will actually stimulate the brain to think you need, don't need as many calories. It actually decreases cravings. It's very neuroprotective, it has an anti-inflammatory effect in the brain. So we see that when people take this, they're able to control their cravings, control their eating habits, feel fuller quicker, eat less calories, and actually have less glucose submitted into the bloodstream, basically erroneously by our body and make our insulin work better.
Speaker 0 00:21:48 All great things, right? So for people that are insulin resistant, primarily my women that are menopausal, my men that are menopausal, my people that have that belly obesity or that truncal obesity that haven't been able to get weight off no matter what they do, this semaglutide peptide is a great natural way to stimulate our body to get weight down. Now everybody wants to know what to do to get off of it. And truthfully, if you really have insulin resistance and we think that you're going through some of these changes, you may not have to go off of it. So I wanna kind of put that out there. It is a peptide, it is a, it's a natural product that's already in our system and you can stay on it once a month. You can stay on it once every other week. You can decrease the dose to half or a quarter of the therapeutic dose every week.
Speaker 0 00:22:34 There's lots of different ways to do this. So just so you know, we can also wean down and look at the calories that you had to take in to maintain that weight. And that's really what it comes down to, right? So as we wean down, you find other ways to control appetite and what you're feeling. So you know, it, it avoids the whole yo-yo effect really, because really all we're doing is we're getting your body to do what it's supposed to do already. Usually those people that no matter what they do, they can eat healthy, they can do everything right and they're still not losing weight or they're injured and they can't work out like they used to and they're gaining weight for that purpose, right? Cuz their metabolism is changing. It's really great for polycystic ovary patients that have hyperinsulinemia. It's really great for osteoporosis patients.
Speaker 0 00:23:18 It does help with putting down bone, it helps with cardiac and vascular elasticity. It actually helps you lower cholesterol, lower triglycerides. It is fabulous for your insulin levels and your sugars. So, very little downside to this. The two things we do watch out for or that would preclude you from using this is a history of pancreatitis or a medullary thyroid cancer. And those are the two things that really basically make you not a candidate for this medication. Other than that, it is very safe and extremely effective. Side effect profile really just goes along with all the gastric stuff. Your stomach doesn't empty. So there's some nausea and some full feeling and maybe some reflux, some headaches from low blood sugars. But if you remember to eat and eat regularly, I will tell you that you'll find this is a really successful peptide and it will do you a lot of good.
Speaker 0 00:24:12 If you don't eat correctly and you try to push past it, then you'll find that you don't feel good. And if you don't eat at all, you'll find that you don't feel good. So it's, it actually trains you to be prepared and to really think about food instead of a a, an impulse. It makes you plan it out. It's a very thoughtful process, which is important for continued weight loss and continued maintenance of your weight. So I hope that gives you guys a really good overview of peptides. When you hear the word peptide, hopefully it won't sound far in anymore. It's really just a series or a sequence of amino acids that is used to basically make a protein essentially, right? It's, it's just a short chained amino acid chain. So they're signaling, they tell your body things to do, they're already in our body, generally speaking, the ones that we're using, it's just they're in different quantities.
Speaker 0 00:25:03 So we're manipulating the aging process as we decline in some of these peptides and we're putting them back in. And I hope you'll realize that there's a lot more out there that traditional medicine is not offering that works. That's not just a vitamin, that's not just a supplement to try to boost, you know, your vitamin levels or your mineral levels. We're really trying to adjust the aging pathway and make this truly regenerative, which is why I know that some of these peptides are fabulous for helping to maintain skin elasticity, decreasing inflammation, and the breakdown of collagen and elastic tissue. And we're gonna talk more about how it affects the skin and how gut health affects the skin as well, specifically in my future podcast. So keep listening guys. But if you have any questions, you can always go to my website, which is my dr lori.com.
Speaker 0 00:25:54 So M Y D R L O R i.com. You can shoot me a message as well on Instagram, just go to Lori Gerber d o, so l O R I G E R B E R D o, and shoot me a personal message. I'm always happy to answer questions or if you just wanna get started, you can go to our website and fill out one of our intakes online and I can start getting you all the information you need to get healthy and to stay young and hopefully prevent this aging process. So I hope I unraveled some answers for you on Anti-Aging Unraveled, and I'll see you at my next podcast, which will be an additional peptide podcast. So keep listening for the series on integrative aesthetics. Bye guys.
