#536 Peptides to Boost Immunity and the Microbiome
with Awais Spall
Awais Spall
That is the way I think about peptides is they should not be the four components of protocols, health protocols, and treatment plans should have many other components, but they’re sort of these accelerators and they can just get people to those goals faster and get people feeling better faster.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hello everyone. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. Today, we have a fantastic guest. We have Awais Spall on the show, and he’s going to be talking about peptides and how they boost immunity. And we talked about a lot of different peptides on the show, and what they can do for your health and the many benefits of them. And we’ll also touch on the microbiome and how that all ties into improving immunity.
Our guest today, Awais Spall, FDNP, is a functional medicine practitioner based out of Venice, California. And his practice integrates functional medicine, regenerative medicine, and Ayurveda to optimize gut health. And prior to becoming a health practitioner, Awais worked as a formulation chemist, developing various functional foods. As a product formulator, Awais combined his knowledge of formulation chemistry with his background in Ayurvedic herbalism. He has inherited much of his knowledge around Ayurveda from his grandfather. He was a renowned herbalist in Pakistan, and Awais eventually left the formulation world to launch Integrative Oasis, a microbiome-focused health practice. So his practice integrates peptide medicine, bioregulators, exosomes, ozone therapy, plant medicines, polyvagal interventions, among various biohacking tech through health optimization. Awais aims to redefine the boundaries of human potential and allow people to further align with our highest level of service. And you can learn more about Awais and his work and work with him at IntegrativeOasis.com. Awais, thank you so much for joining the show.
Awais Spall
Amazing to be here, Wendy.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. So, what I tell people, a little bit about yourself and how you got into health and integrative medicine.
Awais Spall
Amazing. So, when I got into integrative medicine about 12 or 13 years ago, I had a shoulder injury on both of my front shoulders, and I was trying everything I could to get that resolved. The pain was pretty unbearable, and I ended up working with a doctor that works with a lot of professional athletes, and he injected me at that time with some peptides in my shoulders, and that actually resolved the pain issues, where everything else had failed. PRP, Prolo, and a few other treatments that he did, they failed. And at that time, peptides were so cutting edge. And the fact that they were able to sort of aim really spiked my interest and, this one of these doctors, he sort of became a mentor of mine, very early on and started sharing a lot about peptide medicine at that time. And since then, I’ve just been so into integrative medicine, part of my own healing journey led me there. And gut issues during my early adult life after I started experimenting with these peptides led me down the rabbit hole with microbiome medicine and some of my own roots in Ayurvedic medicine, some of the work that my grandfather had done. I started connecting with that and, yeah, my deeper roots there. So sort of that’s sort of how I became interested in all these things and how I sort of developed some of that passion.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, and why don’t you tell us what peptides are exactly? Because I love peptides too. I’m delving more and more into it. And so, doing this podcast about it, but I’ve been helped a lot too. I had been pulling lots of muscles and just wondering like, why is my body falling apart? Do I need some collagen? Like, what is going on? Am I not stretching enough? Like, why do I keep pulling muscles? And they just wouldn’t heal. And it just obviously interferes in your workouts and quality of life. And the other peptides, boom, one injection, one and done. I continue to take them. But yeah, I was really, really impressed with how quickly they work. And there, there’s so many different kinds. But first, let’s get into what peptides are.
Awais Spall
Peptides are small amino acid chains that do many things in the human body. We’ve documented about 3000 plus peptides in the human body and the various biologic functions that they have. There are some AI projects that are looking at just peptides in nature, and some of them have found about 6 million peptides that exist across different plants. And there’s a few companies that are turning those into a sort of human use, plant-derived peptides. But I think more often this discussion is about, quote-unquote, the biologic peptides, which are sort of occurring in the human body already, right? So you’re not adding something new, and they are involved in a lot of biochemical processes. Some people refer to them as super supplements because for the goals that you have, they just work a lot better than a lot of supplements, and there’s peptides in just about every category. Gut healing, collagen, inflammation, brain support, among many, skin health, right? So, we’re constantly bringing new peptides to the market, and It’s a really exciting and interesting area.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. I know Pharmacists are really interested in this as well because the peptides work so well. In fact, their blockbuster drug, the Ozempic and some of the other ones, are just peptides. That’s essentially what it is. They put a thousand dollar a month price tag on those peptides, which is pretty crazy. And, but really the Ozempic is just a peptide. It’s just really that simple. But unfortunately, because they’re making so much money on some of these peptides and putting the drug or prescription paywall behind it, they’re really trying to go into regulating some of these peptides and taking some of them off the market saying, “Oh, there needs to be further study.” No, they just want to make money off of them.
Awais Spall
Yeah, definitely. There’s been a lot of pharmaceutical interest, especially with some of the immune peptides, with the GLP class that’s become a lot more popular recently, the pharmaceutical interests there. And then some people are sort of like talking about the FDA ruling that happened in conjunction with some of that. But we saw the same thing with immune peptides, thymus and alpha one becoming regulated, right? Like, being super, super duper helpful for a lot of people dealing with viral issues, dealing with all sorts of health issues. And then it became regulated around 2020. So, yeah, there’s been a lot of pharmaceutical interest in different peptides.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. And so don’t let that deter you. There’s not, there’s not like safety issues around these. They just want to make some cash off of it. So I can’t blame them. But yeah, so let’s talk about what we can do, some of the peptides that we can use for our health. I want to go over a few of them. So you mentioned the TA1. So, tell us what that is exactly and what it do, why you recommend it.
Awais Spall
So Thymosin alpha 1 is an immune modulating peptide, and it comes sort of from the thymus gland. It’s a class of thymic peptide along with thymulin, thymosin beta 4,, thymogen, among a few other types of thymus peptides. And TA1 is incredibly powerful when it comes to just the immune system. It regulates cytokine production. It can reduce some coagulopathy used in higher doses. And I was, I’ve been speaking to a few clinicians that have been using TA1 in the context of food-related food sensitivity treatment. So they’re using higher doses of TA1 over the course of a two-month period to see if that can reduce some immune-related food sensitivity responses in the body. Now, I think that TA1 is sort of working along by modulating the immune system, it’s actually supporting the limbic system. And it’s almost like a limbic-regulating intervention in some ways. So I wouldn’t say that it can treat, like, celiac or anything like that. But some of the clinical data we’re seeing is like when someone develops, let’s say they have mold illness and they developed a dairy sensitivity. During their mold illness, they’ve now treated mold illness and that dairy sensitivity is lingering. Oftentimes, it’s just a data point we’re observing, I don’t think that anybody’s trying to make claims about it or try to figure out even what’s going on because we don’t know exactly how that might be happening, but we’ll notice that after like a two-month sort of treatment with one milligram a day dosing, those food sensitivities will begin to disappear, right? So that’s just the latest in what we see TA1 being able to do, but it’s very, very immune modulating and immune balancing, and it can, people dealing with viral issues, it can sometimes help them regulate their immune system and sort of tone down that cytokine storm and immune inflammation in just a few days of treatment.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, fantastic. Yeah, and I’ve heard it just has amazing, amazing results for like, is it working for autoimmune as well? Like any kind of autoimmune issues?
Awais Spall:
Yes. It’s used in quite a few contexts with autoimmune disease. Dr. Holtorf, here in the South Beach, L.A. area. He’s been doing a lot of work with TA1 for different autoimmune things. There’s quite a bit of research with the thymus and alpha 1 in cancer as well, in the oncological setting. So yeah, those are some of those applications.
Dr. Wendy Myer
Okay. Great. And then let’s talk about KPV. So what is it? What the heck is that? What does it do?
Awais Spall
Yeah. So KPV is one of my favorites and it doesn’t get a lot of love. It’s just three peptides. It’s lysine, proline, and valine, and it’s really neat. Now it’s considered an anti-inflammatory peptide. There’s some research looking at some of the inflammatory pathways and cascades that it will sort of quell and interfere with. So some of those are like the NF-kB pathways. But what a lot of the clinical data is finding is that KPV is really powerful as a mast cell stabilizer. And there’s some research looking at what pathways on the basophils and the mast cells that KPV is able to sort of intervene on. And how it’s able to quell mast cells. Like my personal clinical experience with this, it’s one of the most powerful tools for very upstream regulation of mast cell stuff and just histamine regulation, right? Yes, if you’re having a histamine flare you can take quercetin every two hours, right? Quercetin, vitamin C to degranulate, to break down and metabolize that histamine. But I find that with KPV, we can regulate that upstream.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. And that is such a frustrating condition. When you go to your conventional doctor, I mean, forget it. They don’t even know what it is or what to do with it or, or whatnot. There’s no medication for it. So what are you going to do? And it’s so debilitating and so what do you do for that? So I think peptides hold a ton of promise and modulate your immune system to calm down that reaction. I just love that. Yeah. And then let’s talk about TB4.
Awais Spall
Yeah. So, thymosin beta 4 is another thymic peptide. It’s probably, I would say, one of the OGs, right? One of the originals, one of the ones that’s been around for quite a while before we started using it in functional innovative medicine. It was really popular in bodybuilding circles. And this is one of the peptides that the doctor that was treating me 12, 13 years ago, what he would be injecting in himself and, he was quite the athlete and he would tell me that like, like I injured my chest doing really heavy chest presses and this guy was, in his, he was about 60 at that time and he would say that he would do a few rounds of TB4, high dose, and he would be back on it. Like a few days later, right? So it’s one that’s been popular for a while in bodybuilding circles. Now in the immune system integrative medicine side, we find that it’s very antifibrinolytic. So what does that mean? It means that it helps to prevent the buildup of fibrin. So, fibrin can build up after you have surgery, after you have lung injury, after you have tissue scarring, right? Fibrin is sort of the body’s natural defense mechanism, but it can create fibrotic tissue, right? Too much fibrin buildup and that can actually impair the healing process. So TB4 can regulate some of that fibrin activity and obviously we know how important this can be from a pulmonary and lung perspective to sort of not have that. And then I think a big theme that’s just been emerging over the past two years is coagulopathy, which is just like factors that lead to platelet aggregation, just thick blood, right? Now if you have just thick blood, for a lack of better words, right, like coagulopathy is a whole domain of what leads to having those coagulated blood factors that’s exposing you to more risk of viral diseases, that’s exposing you to higher risk of fungal issues. And then if you have those fungal issues and you have coagulopathy, it’s going to be a lot worse, right? Like that isn’t a really important just clinical discussion right now is like what leads to coagulopathy. So TB4 is anti coagulopathic by being antifibrinolytic, and also immune modulating, regulating. It’s a very powerful, I would say, like a very masculine peptide.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay. Fantastic. We’d love that. And then what about cerebrolysin?
Awais Spall
Yeah, so Cerebrolysin is really great stuff. This is like one that is fairly regulated like many of these other peptides and can only be used in certain contexts. And it’s actually not really a peptide. It’s more of a blend of peptides and proteins from porcine brain tissue. So it’s, meaning pig brain tissue. So some people just call it pig brain sauce. And a little gross fact about it is that if you work with it and I’ve worked with it and you do a higher dose of it, you can kind of taste the pig brain a little bit. And you can even have a pig brain burp doing an IV of it. So Dr. Bredesen, with the reversing Alzheimer’s protocol, he’s talked about this a little bit, and there’s nothing as neuroprotective and neuroregenerative as Cerebrolysin. I have never seen anything, even if you were to compare it against some stem cells and some more advanced regenerative interventions for the brain. It’s so utterly regenerative. My own experience with it, this is going to sound a little bit philosophical, but I did it for just a few weeks. And just after the first three treatments, it started changing my relationship to language and language is symbols, right? And I started to, words started to feel different. I started to feel certain things a little bit more and, just like how we are, I’m a very science-y person and I’m always visualizing and sort of modeling like biochemistry. It shifted things and simplified things, and it just felt like this clarity, like this fog is being lifted, and I didn’t have brain fog, I felt like I was clear beforehand, so it’s very, very popular for just improving neurocognition in that sense.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Fantastic, we all want some more of that, for sure. I’m gonna, I need to sign up for some more of that, too. And so, do you think that we have any possibility of helping with things like the blood-brain barrier and sealing the blood-brain barrier or whatnot? Cause I thought that that’s really a huge problem with toxins getting into the brain when we have so-called leaky brain with opportunistic infections getting into the brain and causing a lot of these problems that lead to neurodegeneration and dementia.
Awais Spall
That’s an interesting discussion. Should we use it to support what we’re calling a leaky blood-brain barrier, or should it come after you’ve resolved some leaky blood-brain barrier? Now, I think when we’re improving neuroplasticity and we’re increasing, like, neurotrophic factors in the brain, we’re gonna automatically help support the blood-brain barrier function. And I think some of the experience with some of the IV treatments of Cerebrolysin that a few doctors have been doing, I think what we’re finding is that it does seem to support the blood-brain barrier function. But though that can be hard to test, we’re just using anecdotal clues to sort of figure that out and the blood-brain barrier stuff gets into an interesting area.
You can have a leaky blood-brain barrier. But we do want to take some things into the brain sometimes, right? We want the highway to be working both ways. We want the glymphatic functions, right? The brain detox functions to be working too so that that highway is taking stuff out and then we want to be able to take the right things in the brain as well.
So taking in the right things up to the brain, like some of these regenerative compounds, some healing compounds can have that protective effect. And I think we’re going to find a lot out about this area, especially as we delve into more research and as we’re improving some of these diagnostic techniques and research metrics. And this is going to become a more interesting area, especially as we learn more about what is the brain’s microbiome, right? And some preliminary research that’s coming out about that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, we’ll get to the microbiome stuff in a minute. Super fascinating how you approached that. And so let’s talk about Epitalon.
Awais Spall
Amazing. So Epitalon is actually Nathalie Niddam has spoken about, people think Pinealon is the pineal gland bioregulator. But actually, epitalon is the pineal gland bioregulator. So, meaning that it has a direct relationship to the pineal gland. So, there was a lot of debate about how to, how to do this, right? How to take epitalon. But, in a nutshell, what is it, what is it used for? It’s used in a lot of longevity contexts and it would sort of interfere with telomere development. And then that’s why it became really popular. It was considered like an anti-aging peptide because it’s sort of like slowing down telomere production in the body. And I think since we’ve been using it over the past, maybe just a few decades, we found that there’s a lot more use cases and applications of it. There’s been some debate about dosage and protocol, but one of the popular sort of protocols is doing a slightly higher dose for 10 days, and that can just be so regular for the pineal gland, kind of like a little pineal gland reset, and just resetting certain endocrine pathways in the body.
I’ve worked with a few women’s hormone clinics that have used epitalon and they reported back data talking about how it’s so restorative for endocrine function for women. For , again, kind of like a similar example I gave where women experience some sort of autoimmune disease and then they’ve sort of healed from it, but endocrine function is still not happening. Estradiol is not being produced, progesterone is not being produced. They’re on bioidenticals for really long periods of time and we don’t know exactly why this is happening. But it seems to be endocrine restorative in some cases for women. So yeah, I think epitalon is a super unique one.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. It seems like it would also help with increasing melatonin production. I think a lot of people have issues with that, a lot of epidemic issues of sleep and we just need more melatonin, making it naturally not taking melatonin every night.
Awais Spall:
Absolutely. From the pineal gland. I think some of the research is finding that a lot of melatonin is produced like in the cells, as some people have talked about on your podcast and there’s an intracellular sort of melatonin that’s being produced and especially in our relationship to light. But I think that it is still produced in the pineal gland and that may have a different function in restoring that. Pineal melatonin may have different effects on the body and it’s obviously very necessary. So I think you’re absolutely right that epitalon is important for that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, let’s talk about one of the other ones here that you like, Larazotide.
Awais Spall
Larazotide has become one of my favorites over the past two years. It’s incredibly powerful. It’s one of the most powerful things I have personally seen for just healing gut junction and gut permeability. It sort of works on the zonulin pathway. Some of the phase 3 research data, clinical data is sort of confused on what pathways it’s working on, like, is it just working on zonulin?
Are there other ways that it’s for reducing gastric inflammation? And they don’t exactly know what’s happening. I don’t think we need to know exactly what’s happening. I think the clinical data is very clear that this is super powerful for healing gut integrity and healing leaky gut. And it’s taken orally most of the time in clinical uses. And it’s a very simple sort of treatment. Now I’ll also mention that if you’re not removing the triggers, like microbes and other things in the gut, the healing of the gut junction is going to be a very short-term fix. And things are gonna come back. So, and I think that’s the context in which a lot of Western allopathic doctors are looking at larazotide. The few that are looking at it, they’re like, wait, it didn’t solve all the problems, forget about it, it’s useless, it’s a temporary fix. Well, no, remove the triggers, then add larazotide, along with other gut healing peptides, and you can make some really powerful lasting change.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. As anyone knows, trying to heal their gut, you can’t just take glutamine and avoid gluten and dairy and call it a day. There’s a lot to it. There’s a lot of complexity, and you have to reseed your gut microbiome and all these things. But, I think a lot of people are doing the bone broth and taking the glutamine, and they’ll do it for years, and it just really doesn’t move the needle at all. Or it’s just very slow. So, I love peptides like this to kind of speed things up because that’s what I want. I want quicker healing and things that can get the job done faster and easier.
Awais Spall
Absolutely. I think that’s the way I think about peptides. They should not be the core components of protocols. Health protocols and treatment plans should have many other components, but they’re sort of these accelerators, and they can just get people to those goals faster and get people feeling better faster.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and let’s talk about GHK-Cu. What does that one do?
Awais Spall
Yeah, so GHK is one of the most popular, probably globally, from what we’ve talked about thus far, because it’s the beauty peptide, right? Cosmetics is always going to be bigger than a lot of these other industries. So it’s this blue-colored peptide, and it’s very, very anti-inflammatory. There are all these crazy biohacking GHK protocols out there for resetting and healing your skin integrity. One of the protocols that some of my clients have done, which I think is absolutely bananas, is you inject it like 10 times a day for like 5 days or 10 days, which I can’t imagine doing 10 sub Q injections a day. I don’t think I have 10 subcutaneous sites on my body, and then just like doing that over the course of a few days. But one, two of my clients did it, it was unreal just how their skin looked over that period of time. I think just using it topically as well can be really, really powerful from a cosmetic sense. It is really great for wound healing. So sometimes we do use it in conjunction with KPV, BPC, TB4 to speed up some of the healing pathways to speed up, what do you call it, injury recovery. So it has that use case. And I’ve always been excited about that use case, but using it myself cosmetically, I’m very, very impressed with it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Nice. I will inject myself 10 times a day to have better skin. I have no problem doing that. I will go the lengths that I need to go to have good skin. I haven’t tried this one, so I’m gonna have to check and consult with you on that. So let’s talk about BPC 157. So this is one I take personally. I love it. I felt like it, well, I lift weights, so I felt like it helped my recovery. I get better workouts. I just felt like it contributed to recovering from pulled muscles faster. I love this one.
Awais Spall
BPC is an all-star, probably one of the most popular peptides out there, and this was one of the ones I did many years ago for my own healing journey. It’s the ultimate Swiss army knife of peptides. It does so much for the body: gut healing, brain healing, tissue healing, collagen healing. I’ve used this with my parents. It’s crazy to think that I’ve used some of these peptides since I was like 18 years old and just seeing how your body responds at different times of your life to some of these things, right? When you’re that young, you don’t notice much because your body’s in such a healing state already. But for my mom, using BPC, kind of like from that collagen synthesis perspective, it was an absolute game changer. She was like, I have more motivation, like my joints feel better, my collagen feels better, my gut feels better, and I’m just like, I’m actually just more motivated to do things and my quality of life has improved.
So it’s super duper powerful, and I love combination therapies, combining these peptides with other peptides. Not all combinations are appropriate for everyone, right? Like the most common peptide combination is BPC plus TB4 in a blended vial. And to do injections of that, that’s great for a lot of people, but that’s not the best combination for everybody. So just a little note there.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. And I have read that the BPC 157 can also have great gut healing benefits as well, which again, I guess I can’t reiterate this enough. I think there’s so many things working against the gut in our environment, and so many people are having absorption issues, and they’re eating all this organic food and supplements, and they’re just not absorbing them. So I think that it’s really important to think about using peptides for gut healing.
Awais Spall
Absolutely. Especially in the context of certain IBS and IBD related gut disorders, right, like Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis. Dane Johnson, who is a health practitioner focusing on Crohn’s and UC, he presented some of the data on just what BPC did a few years ago at a conference and it was pretty incredible, just helping some of his clients gain weight really quickly because it’s just so powerfully healing for the gut. When you take it, you kind of understand why people call it the Wolverine peptide. But it’s just repairing, and it’s found in gastric tissue. So I think that makes a lot of sense.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, yes. And then let’s talk about VIP. What is that? What is that peptide?
Awais Spall
So VIP is popular in the mold treatment world, the Shoemaker world. It’s often compounded as a nasal spray but can be injected as well. I personally find it to be a little bit spicy when it’s injected, and I call any injectable compound spicy like that. And I’m injection sensitive, so not everybody’s going to be super injection sensitive, but I call it spicy when you inject it and it has a tiny little sting, and that’s because of the pH. So I prefer the nasal spray, and that’s why doctors like Ritchie Shoemaker recommend the nasal spray for treatment. It’s very much, I was kind of thinking about, well, how do you think about what’s the best way to think about VIP? Well, I’ll say it was kind of like the thymic peptides before the thymic peptides. And part of the mold treatment protocol is still to remove the triggers, treat the body, bind the mold toxins, and then to use VIP nasal spray to balance out and clean up the immune system and just modulate the immune system, right? Because the immune system is kind of like it’s doing things and we want the immune system to work appropriately, but sometimes those surveillance cameras are left on, right? And that leads to a lot of symptoms when the threats are gone. So VIP is very immune modulating, especially in the context of like mycotoxin triggers. I can’t feed the discourse around, sorry if this is technical, but like Th1 Th2 imbalance, which is just like this theory around how the immune system modulates, right? And that we want to keep them in balance. I think the immune system is a lot more complicated than that, than like, these two like seesaw scales that you’re just like balancing a little bit. So, but I do think that it does balance different sections of the immune system and tones down that inflammatory response. And it’s so good for the brain. And, and, and there’s also, it’s always great when we have somebody that has that long-used clinical data, right? So you don’t feel like you’re a renegade explorer, just experimenting with something.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Talking about this, I just want to take all of them. Oh, why not just stack all of these? And I’m sure you can just, for me, I started with some of the ones that help with my muscles and collagen and things like that, but I’m definitely ready. Let’s go to the next level. I’m going to be doing some immune modulating ones and just doing a couple of others, I want to do the pig brain one. That sounds really, really good. But yeah, so talk to us about how we can kind of stack these and just how they’re taken, etc. How many can you take at the same time?
Awais Spall
That’s a great question. So how many at the same time? I think the first time some practitioners start with this, they’re just stacking so many peptides together, right? I’ve seen some treatment plans that some clients have shown me where they’re taking 12 peptides at the same time. I think that’s a bit much, right? It’s just information overload for the body. A lot of biochemistry is information that your cells have to process. So I think it’s all about intention. What are you doing? And then, where are you introducing them, right? Where in a protocol, where in an intervention? If you have a ton of Candida in the body, if you have a ton of, if you literally, you stick your tongue out, you have thrush, you have other symptoms of candidiasis, fungal overgrowth in the body, and you’re like, “Oh my god, I need to modulate my immune system.” It’s like, maybe let’s not modulate the immune system just yet. Maybe let’s spend a month or two cleaning up the body, right? Like doing some antifungal herbals, maybe even pharmaceuticals, maybe ozone, maybe other types of interventions. Sure, maybe we can use an antimicrobial peptide during that time period. But let’s wait until we introduce something like an immune-modulating peptide. But then when we do introduce that, we can kind of use that to tonify the immune system and also combine that with mast cell regulation, right? So, that TA1 and KPV combo is just so powerful, and that’s across all the clinical data that I’m seeing in sort of my use cases, use cases of fellow clinicians and practitioners in the space. That TA1 KPV combo, it’s gold, and it’s just so utterly powerful. And then with some of the brain peptides, just knowing again, when are you introducing it, right? Kind of like you brought up the blood-brain barrier, do you have a leaky blood-brain barrier? Is it really the right time to introduce some of these things, right? And when it is time, there’s more peptides than I can possibly talk about, but sometimes combining a few neuropeptides can be a good idea. And that can be super Neurologically restorative. It’s just all about figuring out what are the places we want to Accelerate the healing and just having a good clinical pulse on a person’s physiology. In some cases doing a neuropeptide can be more gut healing Than gut stuff. So, there’s something that One of my mentors would say, like, you break the brain, you break the gut. You break the gut, you break the brain. So cerebral lysine treatment, some of the doctors doing cerebral lysine IVs, their patients will report afterwards, like, wait a second, that really sealed up my gut barrier. I can really feel it. And it’s because of these deep connections and mimetics between different systems of the body.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, let’s talk about LL37. You recommend doing that maybe in combo with the TA1 that you mentioned in the beginning.
Awais Spall
Yeah, so LL37 is an antimicrobial peptide, and it’s a strong one. There’s some reasons to not do LL37 alone. And if you do, it should just be done in short courses. And some of the strange side effects that people are reporting when they do LL37 alone for long periods of time. But it can really work on that viral plane. It can also, also, it’s just a cool intervention, right? It’s a subcutaneous injection of an antimicrobial that’s going into the tissues in a different way than a gut peptide. It is, for example, more like a gut antimicrobial that you take orally, right? Or a pharmaceutical that you take orally, and then it’s hitting the gut, it’s passing through the liver, and then it’s entering circulation. So it’s a different circulatory mechanism. And I think that for certain treatment applications, it can be necessary to have something like LL37, but it can be really powerful with viral stuff. There’s also so many microbial things people go through that are more complex, right? Like post surgical issues sometimes where there’s sort of an infection, post surgical infection and just many, many use cases where LL37 in conjunction with TA1 can be just really powerful.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. Then let’s talk about vesugen. Like what is that peptide? What does that do?
Awais Spall
So, Vesugen is a bioregulator. Some people just look at the names of these peptides and then they think that it means that it, oh, that must be like blood vessels, but it’s really, really good for the liver, and sort of liver cirrhosis and, reducing liver inflammation among a few other positive effects. This is one of those like OG, Khavinson, Russian bioregulators, right? Like, Dr. Khavinson was the godfather of bioregulators and liked a lot of the peptide research. This is maybe it feels like it’s newer in the US, but it’s been used a little bit more in England, used a lot more in the Slavic world in Russia. And it’s on the liver. I’ve seen some remarkable things for people who have elevated liver enzymes, certain markers of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. It can be a really, really powerful tool. don’t skip the other hepatic supports, right? Like, it’s all about doing things in conjunction. Don’t skip the Phosphatidylcholine or the bitters or the milk thistle or some of the other all-star nutrients and support the liver needs. But in conjunction, it’s just extremely powerful.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and let’s talk about Selank. So what does that do?
Awais Spall
Selank, it’s a neuropeptide. Often, again, this was one of those that was, up until a few years ago, you would have to, like, import this from a shady website that was sending it from Russia or whatnot. There were, like, some clinical use cases in the US, but it’s a powerful neuropeptide. Some people use it in the context of ADHD and ADD for focus. And they use it in combination with another peptide called C Max, so they’ll compound a spray together with Selank and C Max for ADD and ADHD. I love that. I think that’s great. Now, I personally have seen some people have some side effects with C Max. Some strange side effects, some like slight autoimmune flares. So, I’m cautious. That’s just my experience. Other people may have different experiences, but because of that, I just kind of stick to C Link, my own experience. It just improves focus and gives you a little, like a light edge when you’re working. And then over the course of like a month, you kind of just think back and you’re like, wait a second, there’s definitely some neuroplasticity from this. Right?
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay. Great, and then what about CJC-1295 Ipamorelin? That’s one that I take, really, really like it. What are some of those benefits?
Awais Spall
Yeah, so the GH secretagogues are some of the oldest used peptides in the US and especially in the bodybuilding world. Now I put this sort of in some of my favorites because there’s a lot of GH peptides. There’s GHRP6, there’s Hexarelin, right?
There’s Tesamorelin, there’s mod GH peptides, and they’re just, there’s so many of them. And I think, some of them come out and people are like, “Oh my God, this has, you’re going to burn fat and increase your growth hormone with this one.” But I think that the use cases are showing that the CJC Ipamorelin combo is the best for most people. I do use other GH peptides because we look at their blood work and it just seems like it’s going to be better for them, some other peptides for the growth hormone pathways. But yeah, growth hormone has so many clinical applications. I’m not going to comment on the bodybuilding uses of that or like the anabolic uses of that, but just from an immune system perspective, it can be so important. It can be so healing, right? And like something we had talked about previously was like certain people who’ve had sinus issues, right? Sinus inflammation is a huge issue today, especially if people are exposed to mycotoxins and mold and other sorts of water damage stuff, right? Now sometimes there’s some research that’s looking at can that sinus inflammation affect the pituitary gland and its production of growth hormone, right? And if that’s the case, should we sort of increase circulating growth hormone and GH secretions to help that healing path. And I think, yes, it does. It does help a lot. It helps people sleep, right? Like, some of Holter’s patients that I’ve spoken with, they’ll talk about how, after they did CJC IPA, they’re just sleeping for the first time in a long time. And we know that growth hormone helps with that, just that slight increase in lean mass, right? That slight ability to burn fat kind of like it takes you back to when you were younger and had higher growth hormone circulating in the body. and I think just to zoom out that mental state shifts when our bodies have been dealing with so much trauma, so much healing crisis, so many things. And just to have that growth and just to have like, “Oh my gosh, I’m healing,” it’s so good for our minds and that can just do wonders for the healing journey.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I mean after 30, the growth hormone just starts to take a big old nosedive along with your body, wth your ability to regenerate, remain tone and all that stuff. A lot of people maybe started out with taking human and growth hormone injections. And it’s, can you talk about that versus taking the CJC Ipamorelin, which is more like growth hormone secretagogues and what the differences are and what you recommend?
Awais Spall
Taking actual growth hormone is going to facilitate growth hormone production in the body. Whereas using a secretagogues is sort of working a lot more indirectly in those pathways. Now, some of the research I was talking about in the sinuses. Now, some of these youth who’ve had pituitary damage from having these inflammatory issues, the doctors feel that they’re not going to respond to the secretagogues. And I think maybe this is the case for some adults as well. That had some damage as early adults. They’re just not going to respond that well to secretagogues. So they do need just actual growth hormone and you know just prescription HGH to sort of facilitate those pathways and to facilitate that healing. But the indirect approach can just be an easier starting point for a lot of people. Growth hormone is really expensive for one, it’s very hard to access and it’s, yeah, so there’s a lot of sort of limitations there. A protocol with GH just needs to be guided a little bit more. And there’s a little bit, there’s a few more factors we want to think about than doing like CJC and Ipamorelin. I think the clinical data shows that by supporting these different rhythms in the body, right, like CJC and Ipamorelin are used in combination. Because they’re supporting different GH rhythms, right? And, different IGF rhythms. And, by creating that balance, it’s just a great cycle to do for six months. To get some nice restoration, which is kind of how a lot of people want to do these things anyways.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I just can’t even tell you how much I’ve been helped by taking peptides and I’m going to continue to take different ones and experiment with different ones. Definitely, I want to try a lot of these that you mentioned today and just enjoy some of the various benefits from those. But you’re very much an expert on the microbiome and improving the microbiome, modulating the microbiome. So what other modalities do you find critical for supporting microbiome health?
Awais Spall
So one of my mentors in this space is Dr. Grace Liu, who was an early, one of your OG podcast guests. And, yeah, so Dr. Grace Liu has done a lot of work in this field called microbiome medicine and just how to intervene in the microbiome, right? And I think this area is poorly understood. There’s people who are a little bit too traditional. They use TCM and Ayurveda, which is amazing. And I’m very passionate about Ayurveda and I use a lot of Ayurveda in my practice, and it’s quite literally part of my legacy. And that’s really, really important, but we want to use that in conjunction with some of the newer science around antimicrobials, right? Some like modern day herbalism, right? Let’s call it like Botanical Medicine 2.0 or like 3.0, right? Because the microbiome has changed a lot. And there’s been a lot more threats to our gut health over the past few decades, right? Seed oils, pesticides, antibiotic use, among many, the hundred thousand sort of chemicals that are unregulated and untested that can often wreak havoc on our gut health, right? So there’s so many factors going into damaging our gut lining. So a lot of this is antimicrobial medicine. How do we address the microbes that are overgrown, right? We all have these terrains that facilitate some of these pathogenic microbes from overgrowing, right? Like parasites that love heavy metals. So a lot of these microbes are very, very adaptive for our gut, but it’s not good for our outcome, right? For how we want to feel. So most people I find have parasites, overgrown, have some sort of fungal overgrowth in the body, have some sort of bacterial dysbiosis, viral sort of overgrowth, right? There’s some research in Germany looking at gut-associated viruses, enteric viral overgrowth, and how that may be leading to certain types of Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Irritable Bowel Disease. And I think that these are all really, really important things to sort of resolve. And in a very simplistic nutshell, it’s all about cleaning up that terrain, pulling those weeds out, strategically, systematically using the Ayurveda, using the TCM. Using that botanical medicine 2.0, right? 3.0. Sometimes using some newer compounds like LL37 to sort of regulate that. Let’s say if there’s some systemic fungal stuff happening. You need some tools like that. Sometimes you need pharmaceuticals too. Like, I am absolutely not against the use of pharmaceuticals. I think pharmaceutical antifungals are very important in a lot of cases as the sort of fungi have evolved a little bit and built a little bit of resistance. And then after we’ve kind of cleaned that terrain up, we can talk about seeding, we can talk about fertilizing, and just creating a beautiful garden that just feels good and makes good neurotransmitters. And makes you feel calm, collected, and happy.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and I know it sounds kind of cliche to like, “Oh, work on your gut and heal your microbiome” and things like that. But it is so, so very important for so many reasons. And I do think that. So many people, like I mentioned before, there’s so many things working against the gut. People develop leaky gut, then they start developing food sensitivities. They have poor absorption. They’re constantly craving food because they’re not absorbing nutrients. They gain weight. It just creates like this vicious cycle that I think peptides hold so much promise to kind of quickly strengthen the immune system so it can fight some of these opportunistic infections. But they’re still, like you mentioned, they’re an adjunct to healthy diet and lifestyle choices and other things that you can do to improve the microbiome.
Awais Spall
Yeah, absolutely, that the nutrition is sort of the legs on which you want to add all these interventions on top of. I like to think about protocols and interventions as “What do you need to do so you don’t need to keep doing that thing,” right? I see so many people that are like, “Oh, I’m taking Now there’s some things you want to take, like, for longer periods of time because they’re a part of your protocol that make you feel good, right? But Some people will just be on certain things, certain peptides just permanently for years because they’re like, “oh, this just makes me feel good.” It’s like, well, how can we change that underlying terrain, right? So you don’t need to be on that Larazotide and BPC combo all the time. That’s very expensive too, right? So changing the terrain of the microbiome can just shift how your body interacts with all these pathways and signaling and just make it so you don’t need as much.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. And what do you like to do to optimize the microbiome? I mean, of course the first thing people go to is taking probiotics and what are some of the things that you recommend that are kind of out of the box thinking?
Awais Spall
So I’m big on the science of antimicrobials. I think that’s very, very important. A lot of my work is focused on strategic multiphasic use of antimicrobials, right? What do you target first? Right? So, that question is different for everybody. Like, some of the gut protocols are big to small, right? Like, let’s clean up the bigger microbes before the smaller microbes. So, start with the parasites, then go with the fungi, because fungi are very opportunistic, then hit bacterial dysbiosis, then hit the viruses, because viruses are the smallest, right? So, I think that that’s not always appropriate for everybody, because someone can have more vitally associated issues that need to be addressed earlier, right? So the art and science, I think, of microbiome medicine and microbiome reconditioning is really all about how do we introduce antimicrobials in the right fashion. And, as I work with people, as I look at some schools of thought, this is where I see sort of mistakes, for lack of better words, like just issues, where someone’s taking just one antimicrobial for a month, and then they’re like, cool, that fixed my parasites, my fungi, that fixed everything, and it’s like, it’s just not that simple, it’s like, there’s layers to it, there’s biofilm, right, there’s a book I really like, by Jon Lieff called, The Secret Language of Cells and he goes into some of the ways that these microbes live in the gut and sort of what we’re finding about how they’re existing. What is biofilm, right? The protective coating that some of these pathogenic and healthy commensal microbes can live under, right? So he describes them as like these apartment complexes, where you can have good stuff and bad stuff living in them at the same time, right? So you can’t necessarily just drop a heavy-duty nuclear antimicrobial and get rid of the whole thing, right? You have to piece away the biofilm over time, and then we know that pathogenic fungi and pathogenic bacteria can communicate via quorum scent to help each other out, to evade detection, right? So I find that to be really, really interesting. And, yeah, the antimicrobials are a big component of it. But then once you’ve done that, the strategic use of prebiotics can be really, really important fibers to fertilize the soil, right? Again, it’s going to be so different for everybody. Like what’s the best prebiotic for them? Do they need something like the oligosaccharides, like XOS, FOS? or do they need something like apple peel fiber, oat bran fiber, fennel fiber, right? and stool testing can be helpful for guiding some of that process. Some of that like microbiome mapping, along with organic acid testing can also help that process as well. And then when we seed, there’s steps to seeding and some of the things that Grace Liu has taught me, some of the protocols that we were trained in using bifido, for example, right? Like dosing bifido a little bit higher when we’re trying to reseed the gut. And what are the roles of some of these heavy-hitter probiotics, right? These heavy-hitter commensal bacteria, Akkermansia, Bifidobacteria, Christensenella, right, Faecalibacterium, among a few others, just like real heavy hitters. How do we get them to stay and cleave and become residents, right? That’s, I think, the key question. Once I built those residents in my gut, everything changed, right? It unlocks a new level of resiliency for the body.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So always. Thanks so much for joining us for the show. Why don’t you tell us where we can learn more about you, work with you, what’s your social media and your website.
Awais Spall
Amazing. Yeah. It’s been a great discussion. So my website is integrative oasis, like integrative medicine, like oasis of the desert, integrativeoasis.com. And that’s also my Instagram integrative oasis. And yeah, if you’re interested in working with me, you can reach out to me on Instagram. You can schedule a time through my website. We can do a discovery call and just see if it’s the right fit for you.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. Fantastic. Awais thanks so much for coming on the show. I’m so happy I met you at the anti-aging conference in Las Vegas. And I was very impressed by you and liked your knowledge and your energy and everything. So I just really wanted to have you on the show. And so thanks for coming on and everyone. Thanks for tuning in. I’m just so thrilled that the Myers Detox podcast has been in the top 20 of the alternative health category. And just so thrilled that so many of you guys are tuning in. I’m just spending this time every week with you guys to help you learn. And that’s just really what I’ve wanted, for the last 10 years doing this show, it’s just really having an audience too, just to help teach you and give you some of those pieces of the puzzle that you’re missing on your health journey. So thanks so much for tuning in. I have so much gratitude for you guys listening every week. I’ll see you very soon.
Disclaimer
The Myers detox podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast including Wendy Myers and the producers disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have direct or indirect financial interest and products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem consult a licensed physician.
