Beyond Ozempic: The Peptides That Calm Inflammation and Fatigue and Promote Longevity
with Awais Spall
Welcome to the Myers Detox podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and on this podcast, we talk about everything related to heavy metals and chemical toxicity, the health issues caused by those toxins, and more advanced topics on health than you’ll hear on other podcasts. Today, we’re going to be talking about peptides. They’re super popular, one of the most researched terms on the internet, and for a good reason. Peptides are so beneficial. There are a thousand different peptides with so many different use cases. So I have Awais Spall on the show, who’s going to be talking about all of the different uses for GLP-1s like Ozempic, semaglutide, tirzepatide, and all classes of weight loss peptides and blood sugar control peptides.
We’re also going to talk about ones that aid human growth hormone. We will discuss the ones that help to modulate your immune system and reduce food sensitivity reactions, and reduce the cytokine storm that people have when they’re sick, when they have a cold, flu, or even autoimmune diseases. So many different uses for peptides.
I personally use them, and absolutely love them. We’re going to talk about BPC 157, which is one of my favorite peptides to help to repair after injury and many other uses. So, such a good show today. Got to tune in. Awais, thank you so much for joining the show.
Awais Spall
So great to be back, Wendy.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, you’ve been on before talking about peptides, and I wanted to have you come on again because peptides are so popular. I’m using them, and a lot of people are very curious if they’re right for them and where to start. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of how you got into peptides and got so focused on them to a point where you’re speaking about them now?
Awais Spall
Absolutely. So my health journey started around 2011 when I graduated high school. I developed really intense chronic pain and muscle spasms. It started in my shoulders, then it spread to my mid-back, then to my lower back, and then eventually my whole body was just spasming and cramping.
I was not okay with starting my adult life like that. So I reached out to various doctors. My primary care physician prescribed me opioids and said, “We’ll just bump up your dose of opioids.” I was not okay with that. I found a physician who was working with NBA athletes at the time, and he was doing some really cutting-edge stuff.
He was super kind-hearted, and actually just felt a lot of sympathy for my journey. He treated me for free, essentially. We tried a few regenerative interventions, and nothing was really moving the needle. Then he said, “I’m going to give you the NBA treatment.” And I’m like, “What is that?”
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I’ll take it.
Awais Spall
He said, “That’s peptides.” And I was like, “What the heck are peptides?” I still remember that moment. He ran to his printer and printed out some research articles about peptides, and particularly sermorelin, which was popular around that time. Well, it wasn’t necessarily popular. It was extremely limited in how many people knew about it, but it was popular among the handful of regenerative physicians that were working on the cutting edge at that time, and that’s a growth hormone secretagogue. He combined that with a few other modalities, but it was profoundly helpful. It really opened my eyes to this world of small molecules and regenerative medicine.
So it’s been really cool to follow this world and its evolution from that starting point. And without going into all the little details of my journey, I was a scientist for a short period of time, worked in formulation chemistry, and from there, I decided to launch an integrative medicine practice.
I’m trained in a lot of GI stuff, a lot of gastroenterology, microbiome, and all the good old-fashioned functional medicine and integrative medicine. I’m very passionate about mold and CIRS. It’s been a real privilege to work with some incredible humans and to be a problem solver in this area. Also, I have been an educator on the peptide side as well. So I have been a clinical educator for a few years since I was so early on and got exposure very early.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So peptides are so popular right now that so many biohackers are talking about them and using them, and people are wanting to try them. Can you tell us a little bit about what peptides are exactly and the use cases for some of them?
Awais Spall
Peptides are short chains of amino acids. They’re essentially small fragments of proteins that act as signaling molecules in your body, and there are thousands of peptides working in your body right now. There are immune peptides, repair peptides, skin peptides, neuropeptides, and neuroimmune peptides. So they’re just incredible. What I found to be so exciting, even as early as 2011 when I was looking at the growth hormone secretagogues, is that you have these biologic pathways in your body.
So it’s not like they’re going in the way that ibuprofen does or Advil, which is sort of borrowing and taking something away. It’s working on COX-1 and COX-2 anti-inflammatory pathways. It’s borrowing something and damaging the gut lining in the process. Oftentimes in my practice, I get to see high-level athletes, and very often they’ve had histories of using 600 to 800 to 1,000 milligrams of ibuprofen every day to get through the season. We see that their guts are just wrecked. They have so much leaky gut. They have so much gastric permeability.
So going back to peptides, we find that when we support these biologic pathways, we don’t get that same borrowing from the body or, I like to say, borrowing from the future.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about some of the most popular peptides out there. GLP-1s are super popular. We’ll get into those. I really like BPC 157. That has helped me so much with recovery, or if you get an injury, like you’re just lifting weights and you pull a muscle and you’re like, “Gee! Damn, I’m going to be out for like a week or so working out.” But you can just do the BPC 157, and you’re ready to go, like the next day or maybe two days. But it’s just amazing what you can do with these peptides to dramatically repair your body or just focus on so many things (there’s a thousand of them), whatever you’re looking to optimize.
Awais Spall
Absolutely. I think BPC is obviously the most popular peptide, the Wolverine peptide. Extremely reparative. I’ll share my own journey with BPC. I remember I was at a GI conference around 2017, and I heard a speaker talking about Crohn’s disease patients taking BPC and how reparative and regenerative it was for them. They would be dying, and they would look sickly on one side, and then three months later, they’re fully restored and off the biologic medications that GI doctors prescribe, which are tens of thousands of dollars a year, and they often don’t work. There are tremendous side effects and consequences of that class of drugs.
I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is a peptide.” I was introduced to these peptides in 2011, so I saw that and I was just blown away. I was like, “Okay, how do I get my hands on this?” I was actually going for a walk in the park in the Bay Area, and I randomly ran into a doctor, and she’s like, “Oh yeah, I can happily prescribe you that.” I remember the day I picked up BPC, gave myself an injection, it was profound, the amount of energy I got, the amount of repair I got.
At that time, I had a little bit of a mold exposure journey, and it was a difference for me being in bed versus me going out for a run. It is life-giving. It was really cool to follow that trajectory. BPC was not around in 2010 in the US. It was developed by a Croatian researcher, and it starts coming here, like, 2016, 2017. Later in 2018, 2019 is when it’s becoming more popular. So that’s very popular.
Then we can talk a little about the GLPs, which are also peptides, and probably the reason that people are talking about peptides today is because they are the ones that just open people’s horizons into thinking, “Wait, I can get these benefits from this molecule. Well, what class is this? Oh, it’s a peptide. Oh, let me look into other peptides”. So we can thank GLPs. GLPs are…
Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s like the gateway drug.
Awais Spall
It’s exactly the gateway drug.
Dr. Wendy Myers
To other healthy addictions to peptides.
Awais Spall
Exactly. So 50% of Americans are obese. It’s been popular for a reason. GLP is a hormone released by the gut after eating. It modulates insulin. It slows gastric emptying. It improves blood sugar control. The first class of GLPs was semaglutide, and that’s working primarily on that GLP-1. It modulates insulin, slowing gastric emptying, and leads to rapid weight loss. It became very popular. People did notice muscle loss on it. So then we get the Class 2, which is tirzepatide. It is working on GLP and GIP receptors, so it’s increasing insulin secretion and modulating energy expenditure. And the GIP I like to think of as reducing inflammation in the fat cells.
In this regard, we see better weight loss and better lean mass control just according to the studies. Then people’s user experiences are also finding that same thing as well. Then we get to Retatrutide, which is not out yet conventionally. Eli Lilly has the patent on it. But people have gotten it into their hands and are utilizing it. There’s a ton of user data out there for Retatrutide. Then there’s also some from the clinical studies, we’re having some data emerging as well.
Retta is phenomenal. It’s GLP, GIP, and glucagon as well. So it’s upregulating AMPK, and it’s really muscle preserving. It’s very thermogenic and fat burning while being very muscle preserving. It’s been very popular among the gray market, bodybuilding crowd. They’ve gotten their hands on it and if you just type it in, R-E-T-A into TikTok, you’ll see a bunch of broski videos of just young dudes taking it. You see a before picture of when they are overweight and unhappy, and then it looks like a different person three months later.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. You can search for GLP-3 also to try to find it. It’s available for sale on some websites for sure. But less available because it is coming out as a prescription medication, I think this year or next year, correct?
Awais Spall
Absolutely.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I’ve taken Retatrutide for a little over a year now and just had amazing results because I did a Prenuvo scan. I had about 10% fatty liver, which I was really unhappy about. I read a study that showed that within four months it was really an astounding result with reduction in fatty liver. This is because it’s burning up the glucagon in your liver. So that’s one of the reasons I wanted to take it. It had nothing to do with weight loss or anything. I definitely have lost some weight and have been super happy about it, and it’s no side effects whatsoever, which has been just really simple.
I think so many people that have insulin resistance or even that are diabetic, the GLP-1s are just absolutely lifesaving because that high blood sugar causes so much damage and inflammation. So many people really need to be on it.
Awais Spall
Absolutely. I think you touched on a really important pathway, which is that we’re finding from Eli Lilly’s, some of the studies that they’re putting out, that it is burning fat. It’s helping reduce fatty liver and some of the fat burden in lean mass as well, because the lean tissue can also have fatty deposits. So it seems to just help tissue health in general, and that just makes it so powerfully anti-inflammatory. I just love you sharing your story with that because that’s quite a transformation.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. You know, for a lot of people, they think, “Oh, what’s the safety of it? I’m losing muscle,” and yada, yada, yada, and all the different things objections that people have. But it’s much unhealthier to be 40 pounds overweight, inflamed, hard on your knees, and then you don’t want to work out because you’re struggling so much.
I think it’s very difficult for many people to lose weight, especially when they get into their 50s, but it’s really critical for longevity to control your blood sugar and to take off that excess weight. So it’s the lesser of two evils, in my opinion.
Awais Spall
Absolutely. Then there’s a whole other paradigm and perspective to consider, and that’s how industrialized and post-industrialized food production, processed foods, and hyper-processed foods have altered not only our palates, but our physiology.
When we shop for healthy foods, there’s still the reference point and the benchmark is still processed foods. That’s what shaped our palate, and that has shifted our neuroendocrine signaling in our body. Our biology has been hacked by the food system and by capitalist interests. That requires some intervention to kind of work to help us shift and alter our relationship to food, restoring it kind of back to a pre-industrialized level.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and the bonus that you no longer crave food anymore.
Awais Spall
Exactly.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It just turns off that food noise where you’re just not craving sugar. You’re not craving snacks. You’re not craving ice cream. You don’t even think about it anymore. It just turns off that addiction, so to speak, including other addictions that they’ve found in the research.
Awais Spall
Absolutely. I was in London recently, and I was talking to a few gentlemen that worked for a pharmaceutical company, which I will not name. But this company they mention is very stressed about this turning off of food noise and they’re working actively on engineering certain food molecules that will override some of that signaling and turn that food noise back on. It’s unbelievable. So yeah.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s really crazy. It just tells you if we got, you know…
Awais Spall
Some of these companies worry that this is working.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and I think there is some purposeful media relations or public relations, social media campaigns going on to make GLP-1s look really scary, problematic and negatively impacting your health because there are many classes of drugs that are not going to sell as well when people are not overweight, have high cholesterol and diabetes.
Awais Spall
Absolutely. I think the same applies to the other peptides as well, which is why some of these studies go back, like, 30, 40 years. They were sitting in research shelves, never being utilized.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. And GLP-1s have been used for over 20, 30 years. I mean, there is a lot of safety data on them.
Awais Spall
Absolutely.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t we talk about some of the other peptides out there? We talked about GLP-1. Let’s talk about immune modulation because a lot of people have problems with immunity, especially if they’ve taken different types of medications, and a lot of people are really struggling with that. How can peptides help?
Awais Spall
Absolutely. So to preface this point around immune modulation, and I think this goes for any use of peptides, right now every clinician and practitioner knows this, people come to the door and they’re no longer asking you, “Hey, I have this GI issue. What can we do to help my GI issue?” Now the questions are, “Hey, what peptide can I take for this GI issue?” And sometimes we have to talk about cleaning up the terrain first. So for immune modulation, I think it’s important that before we try to modulate the immune system with some of these peptides, to adjunctly work on the terrain and shifting whether it’s a microbial burden or something.
Sometimes people will have something like Lyme or a vector, and they just want to rebalance their immune system. But sometimes we have to target that microbe or do something else from a detox perspective for the body, improve drainage and open up lymphatic pathways. As you’re doing that and you’re working with someone, immune modulating peptides are so powerful. They are unbelievable things that I saw with them, especially during the pandemic.
So Thymosin Alpha1 is the most popular of these, and it’s actually approved in 35 countries, and it’s used in HIV populations even in the US. Again, not to rabbit hole into the politics, but there is a lot of politics around the patent with this and the desire to control and own those patents from pharmaceutical companies.
What is Thymosin Alpha1 doing? Without being overly reductionist, it’s helping to balance out the different segments of the immune system. Our immune system, we have TH1, TH2, and TH17. An autoimmune state or an inflammatory state can have high immune function where we do not want it and low immune function where we would want it. That’s the essence of immune dysfunction. People that had Ebola during the Ebola outbreak, what was lethal was the cytokine storm. So it’s the immune kind of response, and it’s the imbalance that becomes really important for a lot of autoimmune diseases.
That’s what the discussion is around. So TA-1, sort of like a seesaw, can be powerfully helpful in balancing that seesaw out. It helps the immune system go where it needs to go and turns off sort of the excess cytokine storm that’s not necessary. During the pandemic when I caught the virus, I used TA-1, and it was just unbelievable. It was like a week of struggle and kind of not feeling that much better, taking all the nutraceuticals, functional medicine stuff, and slowly feeling better. But the integrative medicine community was struggling at this time as well.
I remember the day I took TA-1, I woke up the next morning and I was like, “Wait, was I sick? Like, what was going on?” It was so much better. Then in two days, I had forgotten that I had been struggling for two weeks. The histamine responses got regulated. The GI symptoms went away, and then it kind of really opened my eyes to the fact that there’s an imbalance with the immune system, with how our immune system is directing energy. So that modulation, that nuclear factor kappa beta modulation, the T cell signaling and supporting T regulatory cells helps so many conditions.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, that’s just essentially what a cold or flu is. You’re just dealing with the immune response. That’s what all the sneezing, coughing and all the symptoms are from. It’s amazing you can just turn that off, essentially. That could be life-saving for someone with sepsis as well. It’s just this cytokine storm that eventually shuts down all of the organs and whatnot. It would be absolutely life-saving.
Awais Spall
It’s so perfectly modulatory as well, just like with adaptogens. It’s not going to drive too high, it’s not going to drive it too low. It’s kind of going there and supporting. And then on the T regulatory side, it can help with the killing as well, because it’s also helping the immune system where there’s low output where we want higher output. So it’s very beautiful in that sense.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So let’s talk about longevity peptides. What are you most excited about when it comes to, from a standpoint of biological age reversal and using peptides for that?
Awais Spall
I think epitalon or epithalon has been very exciting, and it’s starting to be more exciting now as we have a lot more clinical data. We have a lot more patient data around how it’s been helpful to people. So initially, epitalon is the pineal gland bioregulator. And initially it was popular because it sort of works on telomerase and telomere pathways, and we felt like that was anti-aging in a sense.
Obviously, we would need a lot of data to demonstrate: how is it anti-aging? What does it mean for a molecule like that to be anti-aging? And since then, we’ve just had a lot of data emerging where it’s helping people sleep and to restore neuroimmune signaling. So a lot of these disease states and challenges people go through, the end product is a dysregulation in sort of our neuroendocrine system or our neuroimmune signaling pathways. So it seems to have a reparative effect on that. How that shows up is people will sleep better, and sometimes we see endocrine rhythms restore. I know a few women’s hormone practitioners that shared that data with me around four or five years ago, and I thought that was really interesting. Since then, we’ve had more sort of exploration around how that could be happening.
I think to your question around what’s exciting from a longevity perspective right now, what’s interesting is we’ve just kind of come back to the Khavinson peptides. Dr. Khavinson was the researcher who sort of has given us peptides. He worked with the Kremlin in Russia and the Soviet Union at the time, and he was given resources from the government to help soldiers and cosmonauts kind of feel better and recover. So he discovered bioregulators, which are super small chains of amino acids and super small peptides, and we have different bioregulators in different organ tissues, and that’s kind of what put peptides on the map and opened the door to where we are today.
As we think about where we are today, a lot of people are going back to those bioregulator pathways. They are finding that supporting the system with two or three bioregulators over the course of like a month or two months is a powerful longevity stack because you can target organs. Like there’s liver bioregulators, there’s pancreas bioregulators. So with some of the examples you provided, some of the optimizations you’ve worked on, like a triple stack of a Vesugen, which is a vascular bioregulator combined with like epitalon combined with maybe a liver bioregulator, maybe some other non-bioregulator peptides as well just serves for a really powerful longevity protocol.
I think longevity should really start with what are the things that we can improve in the body. There’s a lot of like longevity molecules that people are interested in that are just supporting mitochondria and supporting cellular health, senolytics, autophagy like cellular cleanup and cellular regeneration. Obviously I’m very into stem cells and a lot of regenerative molecules, and I’m always very excited about those and what’s happening in that world. But I think we also have to really consider what does our body need? How is my heart? What’s my heart’s age? How’s my heart health? That might be different from your organ needs for that time. So I think what’s been really exciting with the peptide discussions around longevity.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You had mentioned sermorelin before. Can you talk a little bit more about that? You said it’s a secretagogue, helps with making human growth hormone. I know in the past and maybe still today people would just inject human growth hormone. They can have all kinds of problems with their veins and jaws growing really thick. This is evident in some of these weightlifters. Talk about how the secretagogues like sermorelin are the better choice when you’re trying to improve your human growth hormone.
Awais Spall
So secretagogues like sermorelin, which was one of the first secretagogues to hit the market, it’s a GHRH. It stimulates the pituitary to release its own GH pulsatile, which is very different from you taking exogenous human growth hormone. And how you can kind of modulate that. There’s an upper limit that you can achieve with using a GHRH, like sermorelin or tesamorelin or CJC. Whereas with HGH, you can hit these like massive volumes. A lot of bodybuilders are taking 10 IUs, 20 IUs a day, which sounds ridiculous, which is what has led to the famous GH gut in bodybuilding.
We see the GH gut emerging when bodybuilders decided to start taking more than like two, four IUs a day, which are already like pretty high doses going up to these ridiculous numbers just to become like mass monsters. So differently, GHRHs like sermorelin, they hit a ceiling and it has a shorter half-life. It has a super safe track record. It was FDA approved for a period of time, and it just works incredibly well. I mean, similar to human growth hormone without some of those like negative potential contraindications.
Sleep, my God, when I took sermorelin the first time, I was like, “Am I in a coma?” I was waking up after nine hours of the deepest sleep ever. And to be honest, it was almost problematic for me. My response is very unique to a lot of things, and I’m hypersensitive, so that was almost problematic, like how much I slept on it. But at the same time, that restoration that I felt from like nine hours a night of the deepest sleep ever was great. It just felt like my brain was defragmenting and like forming new connections. I felt like I was becoming a new person every day. It was like, “What’s happening to my brain,” when I sleep and truly like to restore myself. So sleep is profound.
It seems to also, in the same fashion of HGH, have a thermogenic effect, a fat-burning effect, a metabolically activating effect. We see that a little bit more with tesamorelin than we see with sermorelin. But we find that oftentimes people pair it with ipamorelin, which is a ghrelin-signaling, a peptide, and the combination of those two can help people also put on lean mass. There’s a brain effect as well anytime we modulate GHRH and support growth hormone, where people feel really good.
I think for me that it’s been really cool seeing how people feel, the energy that they get and the zeal for life. I’ve had my parents on various GHRHs and they really love it. They have a hard time going off of it because they’re like, “I feel like I felt 20, 30 years ago,” So it’s hard to get off of something that makes you feel like that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, especially when you’re taking that to optimize growth hormone, you’re repairing so much more and retaining muscle so much better. It’s just so many benefits.
Awais Spall
Absolutely.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Are there any other peptides that you want to talk about that you think would be helpful for the audience to hear about?
Awais Spall
Absolutely. I mean, there’s so many that are just fascinating, and since we did this, (we’ve done this podcast previously) what I’ve seen in the clinical discussions (I’ve had communities of doctors and clinicians that I’ve worked with, and I’m a part of other communities) KPV has been a real all-star and demands more attention.
So it’s an alpha melanocyte-stimulating hormone-derived peptide. It works on inflammatory cytokines, immune modulation, and nuclear factor kappa beta. It is so potent and powerful in its anti-inflammatory cascades, and it seems to have an effect on MCAS, on mast cell degranulation, and supporting sort of MCAS pathways upstream. People find this to be very regulatory. I’ve had a few ENT patients that I’ve worked with that have used nasal sprays of KPV and helped restore tissue. I’ve seen a case where someone used KPV successfully as a nasal spray and got off of an addiction to nasal steroids that they had had for years and years.
KPV has powerful skin effects and calms that neuroimmune sort of cascade that happens with histamine. The term neuroimmune becomes very important when we talk about histamine because it is a neurotransmitter. It has that effect on the brain and that edgy feeling that so many people experience. Histamine and MCAS is like the bridge across all these dysfunctions that we deal with in functional medicine. So I…
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. So many people are dealing with food sensitivities and now alpha-gal and all these different inflammatory reactions to foods.
Awais Spall
Absolutely. So KPV I’ve seen to be very helpful for people dealing with these types of food sensitivities, especially when they’re histamine related, and combining that with TA-1 I find has been very powerful. I’d say one of my single favorite stacks is TA-1 and, and KPV, and I think MOTS-c and SS-31, the mitochondrial peptides, have also become really popular as well. We’re learning a little bit more about them.
And, repairing mitochondria sometimes works well earlier on a health journey as well. We used to think it was best to use later on in a health journey. When we’ve optimized other pathways, then we’re cleaning up mitochondria. But kickstarting the AMPK-associated metabolic signaling that MOTS-c does, supporting glucose utilization, has a powerful effect for some people earlier on in their journey in kickstarting that cellular hardware, getting energy.
Later on in health journeys, MOTS-c works really well pre-workout as well for many people. It helps them really get that glucose into their muscle cells, and it just feels good to do that. Same thing with SS-31. I was working with a woman, and she said that she used SS-31 to successfully quit caffeine, and she’d been a coffee drinker for 20 years. She said, “It really feels like I get better, calmer energy, and then I don’t feel like I’m constantly borrowing caffeine.” She said it felt like you’re borrowing and your body’s becoming acidic. You’re borrowing, it’s becoming acidic. And SS-31 almost restored her cellular energy.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I’ll have to try the MOTS-c Pre-Workout, because I have some and I kind of stopped taking it. Because sometimes you take some of the peptides and you don’t really feel an effect. They can still be having a very positive effect even if you don’t feel anything. And, some people are more sensitive than others. But I’ll have to try the MOTS-c before I go to the gym.
Awais Spall
Yeah, absolutely. You’ve also done so many now, and so many pathways have become optimized. So I’m curious if now you’ll do that and get a “whoa”. Like a little response from that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, at this point I need that Limitless pill because I think I’ve optimized so many things. So are there any other peptides that you really like? There are so many choices. I think we talked about some of the most popular ones, but it can be hard to choose or know what to try based on what you need. There are just so many options.
Awais Spall
Absolutely. I think we’d need a couple hours for me to go through the classical ones that we’re using. Then also some of the newer molecules that have come out. But I’ll just share what I’ve found to be very interesting lately, and sort of use cases that have evolved for certain peptides.
IP (vasoactive intestinal peptide) is a very powerful peptide, and it works on vasodilation. The pathways are VPAC1, cAMP, PKA pathways, and it has an effect on microcirculation. Obviously, this is classically used in CIRS, and it’s a part of the Shoemaker protocol. Once people are at a certain point of recovery, the CIRS protocol involves nasal sprays of VIP to help regrow the brain, restore gray matter, to help MSH, to help restore the immune system from the damaging effects of mold and chronic inflammatory response syndrome.
But I’ve recently seen some really interesting use cases of VIPs, almost like a nootropic. Like, really small doses of that combined with Selank or Semax. The microcirculation seems to have, like, a dopamine-regulating effect. It helps people really lock in. There was this client of mine that shared this data point with me. Gosh, it must be, like, five or six years ago now. And he was using it, and I was like, “Why, why do you love it so much?” He’s an ADHD patient, been on Ritalin, and, he’s on prescribed Adderall and all these things. And he’s like: “Look, for me, a small dose of it just really helps me focus and helps me lock in.” So that really helped me start thinking and being a little bit more innovative with how we think about peptides and their use cases.
I think that’s what’s going to emerge as peptides have become so popular. So many clinicians are using them and we’re now expanding sort of how we can use certain peptides. Might GH peptides have an immune regulating effect? How might some of these bioregulators be regulating terrains beyond the organ system that they’re targeting? How do we stack them to get the best clinical outcomes, the most transformative outcomes possible? So I think that’s what’s really exciting to me right now.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You mentioned Semax. Can we talk a little about that? Because that’s supposed to help really optimize brain functioning, which a lot of people are very interested in. So can you talk about the possibility there?
Awais Spall
Absolutely. So Semax works on BDNF-related signaling and it’s working on melanocortin. It’s an ACTH-derived peptide. Semax and Selank are the two popular brain peptides. People often put them in nasal sprays or do sub-Q injections with them. Then Selank is more GABAergic. It has potentially more immune effects and anxiolytic, meaning it calms down anxiety and calms that edginess down. And Semax seems to have more of a direct effect on neurotransmitters, and people use it for focus a little bit more. So that being said, between the two of them, I used to really like Selank back in the day because my brain was always just wired. If I could just calm my brain down, calm that edginess down, I felt like I could focus a lot more.
These days, if I want a little bit more of a boost, I’m finding incredible benefit with Semax, where I’m just locked in, getting work done and moving through projects. I have so much dopamine balance. And then I’m wondering, “Wait, how did I get so locked in?” I’ll forget, “Oh yeah, I took Semax, this morning.” So yeah, I’ve really had a total flip with my relationship to the two of them. Semax is really incredible for focus.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Any other peptides for ADHD? Because I know a lot of people really struggle with that. I think a lot of people need help with that besides just the medications that they’re recommended.
Awais Spall
Absolutely. This is where thinking a little bit outside of the box becomes helpful. So GLPs, a microdose of GLPs, can actually have downstream neuroregulatory effects. That food noise is also connected to other noises in the body. Other addictive potentials. A lot of people that have addictive personalities, have gone through alcohol addictions, are using GLPs to regulate themselves. Which is a lot better than a lot of the other pharmaceutical options that have existed.
Oftentimes a microdose can be really powerful and helpful. Then I mentioned the VIP. Supporting microcirculation can also have an effect. And Semax, Selank we spoke about. Epitalon we talked about a little bit as well as a brain sort of a pineal gland bioregulator.
Then there’s Pinealon, which also seems to have a neuroregulatory effect. Some of the protocols that I’ve seen involve taking it for 30 days straight at a relatively high dose, and it’ll just have a powerful, almost a reset effect and this super calming effect on the other side of that intensive 30-day protocol.
For some people, it’s understanding the unique phenotypes and archetypes of the ADHD or that neuroterrain that’s in front of you. And for some people, supporting mitochondria can help with ADHD. It’s sometimes a lack of energy that’s leading to the inflammatory states in the body, and that edgy sort of manic state that the body is stuck in is due to poor mitochondrial function in some cases. So yeah, lots of different ways we can address and support ADHD.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Fantastic. So you work with clients and help them figure out what peptides would be best for them, among other things. How do people find you and work with you?
Awais Spall
So I have an integrative practice called Integrative Oasis, and that’s just integrativeoasis.com. I’m on Instagram just as Integrative Oasis. And I really zoom out beyond peptides, and I’m looking for all the various root causes that someone could be having. I like to think about the broadest set of tools possible that we can utilize. Like, I’m very passionate about some of my own roots with Ayurveda.
Sometimes some Ayurvedic protocols are very helpful. Then I am always on the cutting edge with everything happening in regenerative medicine and peptides and functional medicine. So putting together different modalities and tools. I love the GI terrain, the microbiome and all the beautiful sort of science we’ve been discovering about the biome, metabolomics and all these different things.
Alongside my practice, I also have a sort of clinical education community, and that is on Skool. It’s free for now. Hopefully it’s still free by the time this podcast comes out. But it’s free. I host webinars, two every month, and I love having these deep, rich discussions. I’ve had the privilege of training and working with some clinics across the world that see thousands of patients. So then we get beautiful insights and it’s like an ever-evolving landscape of peptides.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Fantastic. And you also have been working with an app called The Peptide App. Can you talk about that? Because peptides are so popular. They’re one of the top researched health products right now in the search engines, and people need information on what to use and how to use them. It can be confusing. A lot of them need to be injected, which people get weird about, and they’ve got to have measurements to put the right amount of the reconstitution solution in them. It can get kind of daunting for some people. So can you talk about how this app can really help people figure out what they need and what to do?
Awais Spall
So the Peptide app is a phenomenal tool that was developed to demystify peptides and to help people who have no background and experience with them go from zero to feeling fluency and comfortable. Peptides are a tool that people are learning that can enhance their life and build a relationship with it. It’s becoming like the new supplement cabinet in a way. Obviously, I’m not giving any medical advice and nothing on the app is medical advice, but it’s been a really powerful tool, and it has a live peptide database that’s constantly updated. There’s some dosage information on the web app side.
It’s super cool because we have a few clinicians kind of working on that live database and updating it as information is evolving. It has progress tracking. It has a smart reconstitution calculator as well because when you’re reconstituting, how do I know how much water to put in? So it gives you suggestions based on the peptide like, “Hey, this is a good reconstitution ratio.” Then it automatically starts tracking for you as well, and so then you can kind of see what’s working for you. You can kind of see what protocols work best for you. There’s protocol information in there.
There’s also a little explore feature which will drop articles in there around research and other just information around what’s happening in the peptide landscape. So it’s a phenomenal tool. I’ve loved working with that developer team, and my idea was to help people have a simple tool for that. We’re offering Wendy’s listeners 50% off for a year. The code is Wendy, and you get 50% off for a year membership. It’s like such a cool tool.
If you know nothing about peptides, it’s phenomenal. It walks you through everything. There’s a walkthrough system that we beta tested thoroughly if you are more fluent and you want to get even more fluent, like the database. The live database is so interesting and helpful, and I personally find myself using it all the time.
Dr. Wendy Myers
That’s so important because people get so confused. Even when you’re working with people and telling them what to do, how to reconstitute it and how much, it’s still really helpful to have that calculation, a function, and just learn more about it. It is helpful if you want to do a deep dive into the research on what you’re taking and try something new. It’s just a really helpful app versus taking a shot at the internet, which could give you wrong info or just weird sales websites from China and things like that.
Awais Spall
It’s just like regurgitated information that’s cycling across the internet right now, combined with bro science and resources like a company’s website that traces back to China. It’s a mess.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, it’s like the Wild West out there. But that’s why we love it.
Awais Spall
You know, we’re on the cutting edge.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Absolutely. Well, Awais, thank you so much for coming on the show and telling us all about peptides and getting people excited about them. Because I want people to try peptides. They’re not getting this info from their medical doctors. There’s a lot of relief that people can have from using peptides if they just kind of get some info and a little push to try them. So definitely really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your knowledge and expertise.
Awais Spall
Thank you, Wendy. This was so much fun. Always love talking about this with you, and you’re so on the cutting edge, so this is really great.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, so why don’t you tell people again where they can find you and work with you?
Awais Spall
So Instagram is a fantastic place to find me. Integrative Oasis, like oasis of the desert. It’s just integrative oasis. I also have a Skool community called Peptide Protocol Academy that’s free right now. So those are the two main places you can find me. If you’re interested in working with me, either on a clinical mentorship or with my practice, feel free to send me a DM on Instagram.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, Awais, thanks so much for coming on the show. And everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Thanks for tuning in to the Myers Detox podcast, where I have all these different guests to help you upgrade your life. I want you to feel good. You deserve that, so thanks for taking the time to listen to the show every week.
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, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The 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 guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
