Willpower Is Out, Biohacking Is In

Is it possible to work smarter and harder?

For those of you new to the journalistic side of the Peptide Partners Corner, welcome! For those of you returning: it’s good to see you again!

You may be wondering why a Substack known for its articles about evidence-based findings in the world of peptide research would also publish journalism about topics like the dangerous peptide gray market and the numerous risks of unregulated peptide use. This is because Peptide Partners and its affiliates are committed to an understanding of peptides as research compounds with powerful medical and scientific potential. And in order to better understand how peptides can function as a public good, it is necessary to investigate instances of peptide misuse – not just so these increasingly popular trends can be warned against, but so the safe and regulated study of peptides can continue unimpeded.

What does this mean for you, reader of the Peptide Partners Corner? What it means is that along with our usual reportage about scientific advancements and safety protocols in the research peptide world, you can also expect to find investigative reports highlighting the perils of ignoring those advancements and protocols. In our investigative work, we aim to ask the following questions:

• What happens when a skeptical consumer base decides that “sovereign health” is more valuable than heeding the guidance of medical and scientific experts?

• What happens when medical consumerism allows any patient to become her own prescribing doctor for a price?

• What does it mean for profit and ideology to overtake proven scientific methodology?

We ask these questions not just because the research value of peptides is evident, but because the reckless misuse of peptides threatens to obfuscate that value and undermine scientific progress. Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of consumer medicine, where health is in demand and “solutions” are in supply but expertise runs woefully short.

The following investigative series tackles this issue with regards to the manufacture and sale of peptides, exploring how some Research Use Only (RUO) sales sites, motivated by consumer demand and an increasingly laissez faire medical market, are thumbing their noses at regulatory oversight — even some that could actually protect consumers.

How can you know who to trust? Read this series to find out.

Peptide Research, Done Cleanly — Peptide Partners. Independent HPLC/MS, batch COAs, and endotoxin screening to USP <85> validate identity and purity of peptides for research. Browse inventory and view certificates at Peptide Partners.

Part 1: Willpower Is Out, Biohacking Is In

In September of last year, the FDA announced “sweeping reforms to rein in misleading direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements.” In the ensuing months, the regulatory agency sent thousands of letters warning pharmaceutical companies to remove misleading ads, and approximately 100 cease and desist letters.

“For far too long, the FDA has permitted misleading drug advertisements, distorting the doctor-patient relationship and creating increased demand for medications regardless of clinical appropriateness,” said FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. “Drug companies spend up to 25% of their budget on advertising. Those billions of dollars would be better spent on lowering drug prices for millions of Americans.”

Dr. Makary’s point is a cogent one, and to fully understand the ramifications of the market forces he’s objecting to, it’s necessary to understand the strange ecosystem formed by direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical companies and the public’s waning faith in scientific best practices.

In an essay titled “Testosterone Gave Me My Life Back,” former professional poker player and current Astera CEO Cate Hall recounts the numerous ways beginning testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) has improved her life after 40. What began as an effort to restore a waning sex drive transformed into a large-scale solution to a variety of problems: sleep disturbances, cognitive issues, and dysregulated moods.

“The best way I can describe it is that it uniformly lowered the activation energy required for pretty much every activity,” Hall writes, going on to describe her new exercise habits, personal records for the Times crossword puzzles, and marked decrease in her anxiety levels. Why had she been trying for so many years to change her bad habits, only to encounter more and more resistance from her mind, body, and the world around her? Why try to make a broken system work for yourself when a better life wasn’t just close, but ready to hand? “Willpower is overrated; biochemistry is king,” Hall concludes.

And Hall isn’t the only one. Ours has always been a convenience-obsessed culture, keen to maximize impact while minimizing effort. The pejorative way to describe this tendency might be with the word “laziness,” but another way to think of it would be in terms of efficiency, or cost-benefit optimization. There is value in hard work, certainly, but not in hard work with ill-defined or poorly matched outcomes. And if a high-performing CEO of a multibillion dollar private foundation like Cate Hall is encountering resistance to effecting positive changes in her life, then what hope is there for the average American?

The answer is very little, or else this is how people seem to feel. A 2025 Gallup poll revealed that only 48.9 percent of respondents categorized their quality of life as “thriving,” only one of three sub-50 percent rates ever to be measured outside of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. While these rates were informed by the outcome of the 2024 election – Democrats saw a thriving rate decrease of 11 points, whereas Republicans jumped 5 points and Independents stayed roughly the same – it’s worth noting that the overall thriving rate was also 48.9 percent when it was measured in Q3 2023 during Joe Biden’s presidency.

Why such low rates? Gallup’s National Health and Wellbeing Index approaches the question of whether one is “thriving,” “struggling” or “suffering” with a battery of questions concerning topics like material stability and hope for the future. Tellingly, it was the following two questions that have driven the drop in the thriving rate: “Have you worried about money in the past seven days?” and “Is there a leader in your life who makes you enthusiastic about the future?” As it turns out, Americans were feeling just as cash-strapped and in want of competent leadership in 2023 as they were in 2025.

Material instability and political uncertainty combine to create an overall feeling of helplessness and precariousness. How can consumers be expected to afford the space and time to improve themselves when they can barely afford rising gas prices? Why invest in long-term solutions like diet, exercise, and meditation when the very idea of the long-term itself is in question? And why trust the clinical guidance of an expert, when the so-called “experts” elected to lead the country and its most time-honored institutions have proven feckless at best? When factoring the questions of happiness, agency and trust into the larger equation, it’s easy to see that it’s much more than laziness driving consumers’ search for easy solutions: it’s urgency fueled by widespread fear and uncertainty.

“The universe rewards calculated risk and passion,” noted wellness enthusiast and BPC-157 promoter Joe Rogan told his millions of podcast listeners. And what does biohacking promise, if not a reclamation of agency and a vanquishing of uncertainty? Optimize your biology with direct-to-consumer research compounds and you won’t have to worry about a good life that’s forever vanishing on the horizon. You can have it now, and you can have it with zero resistance, as long as you’re willing to take a little calculated risk and approach the project of your health with passion.

The only problem with this approach is that without the medical or scientific knowledge required for understanding what peptides are and how they function in the human body, there is no way to distinguish a calculated risk from a reckless one. The truth is that, while peptides can have an enormously positive impact on biological systems that influence longevity – e.g. growth hormone release, metabolism, and inflammation repair – that impact will only last when a given peptide protocol is done in concert with a healthy lifestyle. “Can peptides replace a healthy lifestyle?” writes Dr. Khanh Nguyen of Austin Regenerative Therapy. “Never. Peptides work best with lifestyle optimization–nutrition, exercise, sleep, and mindset are the foundation.”

“Can peptides replace a healthy lifestyle? Never.”

This is something that’s often forgotten in the consumer public’s rush to find a silver bullet for all their problems with the aid of a little “calculated risk” – silver bullets don’t exist. Peptides are complex proteins that support our bodies’ natural systems, but cannot override or rewire them. As Nguyen observes, peptides “encourage cells to repair, rejuvenate, and function more efficiently” and optimize existing systems by “helping the human body ‘remember’ how to heal and renew itself.” They cannot replace those systems in cyborgian fashion. This is what it means for peptides to be “naturally occurring.”

The aforementioned urgency, desperation, and promise of ease are all working against a more nuanced public understanding of these compounds. So are declining trust in medically trained experts and the regulatory guidance and oversight of the FDA. Unfortunately, these are conditions that certain major players in the direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical world have been all too keen to take advantage of.

Stay tuned next week for part 2 of this series, we’ll learn how telehealth companies and rapidly unfolding medical consumerist trends have contributed to the rise of untrustworthy peptide peddlers.