Honestly, if you Google ‘peptide therapy', you’ll get overwhelmed by TMI (‘too much information’). Then you might be put off by claims that sound terrific (“Burn fat! Combat mental decline!” “Heal wounds! Reverse aging!”) but then make you feel, well, skeptical.
Let’s face it, we’d all like ‘enhanced fat burning,’ ‘better wound healing’, ‘smoother skin’, ‘better blood pressure’, ‘sexual energy’, ‘slowed aging’, ‘reversed bone loss'. We’d like a step up when fighting any chronic diseases.
In fact, maybe during your recent visit with a WholeHealth Chicago practitioner, it’s been suggested that you consider a course of peptide therapy.
You listened carefully and maybe thought, “I’ve been feeling tired and achy for such a long time….” and decided that maybe there was something to learn.
Despite sounding almost too remarkable to be true, there is a logic to peptide therapy. Just about seventy peptides are already FDA approved for treating illness. Now consider the most famous peptide of them all: insulin, discovered exactly one hundred years ago and responsible for saving the lives of tens of millions of diabetics around the world. Less well known are calcitonin (for osteoporosis), adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) for adrenal disease, and growth hormone (for short stature kids).
To understand exactly what peptides are, think about a ‘protein’. We all need ‘protein’, one of the Big Three in our diet: proteins, fats, carbohydrates. Every protein is an immensely long string of amino acids, hundreds, sometimes thousands, and termed the “building blocks” of protein. Individually each of the twenty amino acids is a relatively small molecule.
A peptide is simply one part of a more complex protein. Instead of hundreds of amino acids, a peptide can be extracted or synthesized from two or three dozen. Insulin was first extracted from the pancreas of a pig. Nowadays, it is synthesized.
Thymosin Alpha-1 Peptide
