Influencers are pushing suspicious peptides. How much are you willing to risk?

"In most, influencers hold up a vial of gray-market retatrutide, an unapproved weight loss drug colloquially known variously as GLP-3 (because it adds two extra agonists, glucagon and GIP), reta, and ratatouille. The other supplies on hand are alcohol swabs, syringes, and bacteriostatic water. These kitchen-counter chemists say how easy it is to turn a powdery substance in a bottle into a peptide that can be injected into the body. To figure out dosages, just use an online peptide calculator."

"Most tutorials don't include simple, crucial instructions like "wash your hands" or "disinfect all surfaces." The vast majority of influencers don't wear latex gloves. The most anyone does is swipe an alcohol swab over the lids of the retatrutide and bacteriostatic water vials. When I show these clips to a bona fide pharmacist and compounding specialist, her face falls. For the last month, I've been haunted by a vial of retatrutide in my freezer."

"After researching so-called GLP-3s last month, I obtained a bottle through a TikTok influencer's linktree. The problem with gray-market peptides is you don't really know what you're buying. Sites that sell these peptides - whether they're GLP-1 or others - sometimes say their product is 99 percent pure and post an official-seeming certificate of authentication. You want to make sure your vendor is the real deal, influencers say."

TikTok influencers frequently show how to reconstitute powdered peptides like retatrutide using alcohol swabs, syringes, and bacteriostatic water. Tutorials commonly omit basic sterile technique, and most creators do not wear gloves or disinfect surfaces adequately. Storage and dosing instructions vary widely, with many pointing to online calculators. Gray-market peptides are unapproved and often come with inconsistent purity claims and purported third-party certificates. Purchasing from influencer-linked vendors yields uncertain product composition, creating risks of contamination, incorrect dosing, and exposure to unknown or impure compounds due to lack of regulation and oversight.

Read at The Verge