Beware the peptide Übermensch – UnHerd

Tucked in between the avocados and under-eye patches of a Manhattan medspa maven, you’ll often find a slim pen of GLP-1 which she has scored for a thousand bucks a month, sans insurance. With this she’ll finally win the battle against her own body after years of slurping cabbage soups, choking down cottage cheese and averting her gaze from the dessert menu. Appetite? Vanquished. She’ll trade tips for managing side-effects with the growing number of shrinking Mounjaro dames in her lunch circle; while at first she was coy about her miracle short-cut, these days it seems everyone’s on the jab. Now, if only this thing was around in the Nineties!

Across the river, in an all-male houseshare, a warren of twenty-something Bushwick bros live amid permanent clouds of vape smoke. In their fridge is scarcely anything: a takeout box half-consumed; glossy chicken breasts thawing in the open air; a White Claw left by some girl. But there at the back is a small cluster of vials with funny names — CJC-1295; BPC-157; semax; MOTS-c. The roommates ordered them on WhatsApp from a warehouse in China; they’ve joined the biohacking gold rush, and delight in boring women at parties with insights on fat loss, boosted sleep, ligament healing and telomere extension. Much of it is experimental; the vials declare them only to be “research peptides”, but the bros believe they are at some frontier, and everything — from their hairlines to their form at CrossFit — can now be optimised. 

What unites these fridge owners is this: peptides. These are substances made of short chains of amino acids; essentially, they are signalling molecules. Many, like GLP-1s, have been approved by regulators and are used by millions of people. Some of these drugs are making it into more user-friendly pill formats: Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill was released last month. These kinds of peptides can be prescribed or purchased. Two years ago, a mini culture war began when run-of-the-mill fatties were clearing the shelves of Ozempic to the detriment of “real” patients. 

Other peptides exist on a very grey market indeed: compounds principally sourced from Chinese labs have extremely limited human data, and they are marketed carefully so as to avoid seizure at borders. These off-label peptides are coveted by young men knee-deep in optimisation culture — the looksmaxxers, the bonesmashers, the Hinge no-hopers shooting up growth-hormone secretagogues with the determination of doping cyclists. Clavicular, the 20-year-old streamer who hawks courses to help his followers mog, was filmed injecting his 17-year-old girlfriend with a peptide. This is a young man who thinks the problem with JD Vance isn’t his politics — it’s that he’s “fat”. For these new-gen biohackers, nothing matters more than a defined jaw. 

Until very recently, most people’s everyday interactions with medicine were centred on managing pathology. Meanwhile, the hazy border between pharmaceuticals and cosmetics was the realm of our Manhattan lady’s spenny medspa. But the mainstreaming of biohacking culture has dissolved this boundary — peptides, one way or another, are now available to all. The taboo of using compounds to self-enhance was once comparable to that around plastic surgery: as with invasive general-anaesthetic-assisted procedures, the question was always why take the risk? But an injection of Silicon Valley frontierism has transformed peptides from a plausible element of Patrick Bateman’s weird morning routine to a casual addition to the daily life of a young man about town: Minoxidil, peptides, coffee. Their meaning is not contained in physical results — gym gains, better REM sleep — so much as their pseudo-spiritual claim: that biology is not destiny; the body is becoming negotiable. 

“Somewhere out there, a poor peptide bro is fighting the worst nausea of his life with only a rudimentary Chinese chat support box to save him.”

To the uninitiated, all this must seem baffling and dangerous. One imagines an elite of glossy, perfected superhumans whose performance and endurance have been tinkered with, leaving the rest of us stuck in a stumpy, unbeautiful, thin-haired underclass. There is something frightening about peptide culture’s Ayn Rand-ness: a brutality, an aggressive individualism that shuns the public good and tramples on the collective. 

The fear might be that peptide culture is the preserve of the rich: it doesn’t help that the initial, and very expensive, release of Ozempic catalysed an anorexia epidemic among celebrities. And yet the truth is, if peptides are to be agents of inequality, the problem will lie in the asymmetric risk taken on by white- and grey-market consumers. The former can pay more and will be taking better, safer substances under the supervision of medical professionals. Meanwhile, somewhere out there, a poor peptide bro is fighting the worst nausea of his life with only a rudimentary Chinese chat support box to save him.

The New Man of 2026 — and coverage of the peptide craze has tended to code it masculine — is too daring for the glacial normies in the FDA or MHRA. Time is of the essence: just like with crypto, the key is to jump in now. It wouldn’t do to be outpaced by a bigger, faster, stronger league of intrepid chads. This sense of urgency should light a fire under government health bodies, which may end up entrusting their citizens’ wellbeing to a laboratory in Shenzhen. 

Before our eyes, pharmaceuticals are warping from a public-health resource to a consumer luxury. The problem is that the lines are blurred. These compounds might not just give us glossier hair and deeper sleep: downstream, they could secure cardiovascular health, delay frailty, even curb addiction. At what point do these effects become public entitlements to be subsidised by taxpayers? Collectively we invest in childhood vaccines, but we’d never blow state money on anti-ageing serums. So what happens when pharmaceuticals invade both categories? Our medicinal morality has scarcely evolved from the age of public sanitation in the Industrial Revolution; preventing, not perfecting, is the responsibility of governments. The decisive variable in whether peptides help general populations is not chemistry but policy. 

In the end this isn’t about the drugs themselves, revolutionary though their manufacturers tout them to be. It’s about a psychic shift in our perceptions of the body, from a constantly degrading old banger which limps through MOTs and is periodically fitted with new wheels to an infinitely customisable kit car that can be souped up at the driver’s will. There’s something of the magic potion about these odd little pens and vials stored in the fridges of those who can stomach the cost and side effects. What remains to be seen is whether, as always must happen in fairytales, these particular potions incur a hidden cost.