Non-medical anon here.
I fell down some health maxxing rabbit hole about peptides and research-grade GLP-1s. There were lots of warnings about the difference between the compounded/pharmacy/human-use versions by prescription vs. the non-human research use ones. People have been using a lot of these since the 60s/70s. While some things like the steroids get a bit extreme, the others seems fairly benign and even good for you if taken correctly. That said, most of them are all banned from professional sports for good reason.
The specific conversation started about MOTS-C which is like some type of mitochondrial stimulate. Basically, discovered in the early 60s, it fell outside later FDA regulation. Similar to yesterday's ZeroHedge article: https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/strange-case-nac-supplement-fda-says-isnt-one
Basically there's a whole world of possibility with these things, but Big Pharma and the bureaucracy is blocking it all. I assume things are going on in the background because since '21/'22, it's getting more and more liberalized.
The other point was that a lot of this was getting produced in Chinese/Asian labs, particularly the research quality stuff. Endotoxins, bacteria, heavy metals and other metrics of sterilization weren't/aren't being tested in those, hence the research grading. In the last few years, there are a bunch of claimed US-based labs with much more rigid standards, but they still can't make human-use claims. Regardless, the health-maxxing/body-maxxing community is going to do what they're going to do because for most people, going through these functional health clinics to get the "approved" stuff is too expensive, mostly with the up front costs. There's a whole debate on going this way or taking your chances, but I'll leave that for another day.
What I found interesting is that when certain doses of certain compounds aren't correct or when things like endotoxins or bacteria get in that the body can't handle, you can basically get the same symptoms of Covid, e.g. cytokine storm, etc. There was a strong allusion that some of what we saw during covid, particularly with these healthy athletes dropping dead in the middle of games might be linked to them getting bad batches, purposefully or not, of some of these chemicals.
Has anyone dug on these themes or come across this? Preferably someone who knows WTF they're talking about…