In a recent episode of the Palumbo Podcast on RxMuscle, peptide researcher and industry veteran Anthony Roberts joined hosts Dave Palumbo and John Romano to break down which peptides actually deliver results and which ones amount to nothing more than an expensive placebo.
Roberts was direct about where he draws the line. Growth hormone releasing peptides, he argued, are the one category that can be objectively verified.
“All of the growth hormone releasing peptides where you can read a study and the study says the guy’s growth hormone was at one and now it’s at two. All of those work,” he said. His reasoning is straightforward: there is a measurable, objective metric confirming the effect.
Everything else, however, is a different story. “The others, everything besides those fall into the ‘I think it’s working’ category,” Roberts said, pointing to the psychological tendency of buyers to justify their spending rather than admit a product did nothing.
The sharpest critique Roberts leveled was against BPC-157, a peptide widely marketed for injury recovery.
He called it “the best placebo effect in the world.” His argument centers on a basic biological reality: injuries heal on their own over time.
He stated: “You take BPC-157 and obviously time goes by. You buy one bottle and at the end of the month you go, ‘Oh, like my hamstring used to hurt and now it doesn’t.’ It’s like, yeah, but that month went by. That month would have gone by anyway.”
Roberts noted that existing placebo research supports this conclusion. “If you look at studies on placebo effect and you look at what causes the greatest placebo effect, it’s painkillers,” he noted. “So when people say I took BPC-157 and then it hurt less and then it healed, that exactly follows the way the placebo effect works in every painkiller.”
AOD-9604, marketed as an anti-obesity d**g, fared no better in his assessment. The peptide “failed to produce meaningful results above placebo” during phase 2B clinical trials, causing the company behind it to collapse overnight.
Rather than accept defeat, the developer self-affirmed GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status and began marketing the failed d**g as a dietary supplement, a move Roberts called out as a regulatory loophole.
Host Dave Palumbo also offered a practical rule of thumb for spotting peptides unlikely to deliver: “The more a peptide promises, the less likely it is to do anything. So when it says it’s longevity, it’s increasing mitochondria, it’s burning fat, it’s building muscle, it’s immune system, it’s mental cognition, that peptide doesn’t do anything.”
