Peptides, wellness and woo: A linguistic analysis

My recent blog posts have mainly dealt with topics focusing on AI and metaphors; but for a while now I wanted to get back to writing something about biology, a field which has fascinated me for a long time. Then I saw an article in The Guardian on an injectable ‘peptide craze’ sweeping the US, the UK and Australia. I had seen this topic bubbling up now and again in the background but hadn’t taken much notice. Then I saw another article in The Atlantic and thought, that’s it – that’s something I could write about. Little did I know what I had let myself in for.

Peptides between science and wellness

In principle, peptides are just “short chains of amino acids – smaller versions of proteins – that play a role in regulating hormones, releasing neurotransmitters and repairing tissue”. Insulin is a peptide. Peptides are the “’P’ in GLP-1, the umbrella term in medicine for weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy”.

That sounds fine. But I soon found out that beyond a kernel of genuinely exciting science, and stretching well beyond what the evidence supports, there is now a commercial ecosystem that has raced far ahead of science and regulation. Influenced by influencers, people inject themselves with peptides to achieve all manner of (imagined) health benefits, such as longevity, weight loss, muscle growth, better skin, stopping hair loss, even an instant tan…

This reminded me of two topics I have written about in the past, namely epigenetic woo and hype, and microbiome hype, where commercialisation by the wellness industry also ran ahead of science and regulation.

So, what is this new peptide hype and how could I get to grips with it? In this post I’ll first provide a very short background section about this new wellness phenomenon, then provide an overview of how I went about ‘studying it’ or rather scratching desperately at the surface, followed by a rough analysis of a small sample of news items. I’ll then discuss my findings in light of some previous work dealing with a carbon (offsetting) gold rush and the appearance of ‘carbon cowboys’. In the case of peptides, one can perhaps talk about a peptide gold rush and the appearance of ‘peptide woo merchants’.

Peptides in context

Peptide marketing for wellness has been going on for a few years, but news reporting about ‘peptides’ spiked towards the end of 2025.

graph of use of peptides in news with spike in 2026

News coverage of ‘peptides’ plotted by the news database Nexis between 1970 and 2026

At that time, three news stories converged under the single word ‘peptides’: (1) On 22 December the US Food Drug Administration approved oral semaglutide (the first GLP-1 receptor agonist in pill form) for chronic weight management. This is peptide-based drug and more specifically a modified analogue of the human glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) hormone. (2) At the end of November an Associated Press investigative report exposed the grey market for unlicensed injectable peptides sold through wellness influencers and longevity clinics. (3) Speculations emerged that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as US Health Secretary, would deregulate the entire space.*

This provided opportunities for “influencers and self-described biohackers […] claiming peptides can transform everything from energy to appearance”. One report published in December 2025 announced that “Unapproved peptides ads surge 208% as marketplaces see 276% sales growth”.

The word ‘peptide’ is currently doing a lot of discursive work, simultaneously describing, on the one hand, a landmark pharmaceutical approval and, on the other, an unlicensed vial bought from a Chinese supplier via Instagram. Let’s look more closely at how that linguistic work is done by ‘peptides’ and its linguistic companions. Interestingly, according to one newspaper article, the word ‘peptide’ has a gentler feel to it than ‘hormones’ or ‘steroids’ that were supposed to do similar transformational body-work in the past. Still, there are, of course, lots of health and safety risks associated with the unregulated use of peptides.

Peptides in the news

One could do a whole research project on this new phenomenon of ‘internet peptides’, but I leave that to others. Instead, I just dip my toe into things in the usual fashion, using the news database Nexis. I first searched (on 24 February 2026) for ‘peptides’ alone and got hundreds of thousands of hits, with first attestations appearing in the 1970s. The timeline showed that there was a peak of reporting towards the end of December 2025 with over 16,000 hits (see graph above).

To narrow down my search and focus more on the controversy than the science I then searched for ‘peptides’ AND ‘unregulated’ and got 1719 hits (magazines and journals, followed by newspapers, web based publications and so on). After sorting them by relevance I downloaded the first fifty hits.

I then extracted all collocations around ‘peptides’, not just ‘unregulated’ but also ‘synthetic’, ‘Chinese’, ‘vacation’ and so on, as well as emerging metaphors, such as ‘wild west’, ‘perfect storm’ and so on.

The rhetoric of peptides

In the following I’ll take a closer look at the use of peptides in terms of the words that surround that word and contribute to shaping its meaning, namely collocations, and in terms of metaphors, that is, words that make the unfamiliar familiar.

The corpus

As explained above, I extracted 50 English-language news articles from Nexis, all published in 2026. They are published in broadsheets, in specialist health media, and by science wire services, and they span the UK, the US and Australia. The dominant registers adopted in the articles fluctuate between the critical and the alarmist, with journalists drawing on risk, quackery, and frontier metaphors to frame unregulated peptide use.

Collocations and collocates

The linguist J. R. Firth famously stated in 1957: “You shall know a word by the company it keeps”. Words often occur together in certain contexts, like ‘dark’ and ‘night’ and their meaning is shaped by this habitual combination or collocation. In the following I’ll study the meaning of ‘peptide(s)’ through the lens of collocation. I call the words preceding or following ‘peptide(s)’ collocates. These words modify the meaning of the word ‘peptide’ and give it a discursive function.

Pre-collocates of peptide(s)

Most pre-collocates (adjectives or nouns, preceding peptide/s) characterise peptides by their regulatory status, geographic origin, or biochemical type.

The most frequent pre-collocate is ‘signalling’ (×17). The collocate ‘signalling peptide(s)‘ appears almost entirely in scientific. Apart from this, the most frequent collocates preceding ‘peptide’ characterise peptides by administration, as in ‘injectable peptides’ (×14), regulatory status (‘research peptides’ ×13), geographic origin (‘Chinese peptides’ ×15) signalling geographic anxiety about Chinese supply, or biochemical type (‘synthetic’ peptides ×14). Regulatory status adjectives dominate, such as ’research peptides’, ‘unregulated’, ‘unapproved’, ‘experimental’, ‘bootlegged’, ‘off-label’, signalling a preoccupation with legal grey zones.

There is a gendered dimension to collocations depending on which ‘peptides’ are used. For example, one article reports: “Often referred to as the ‘Barbie drug’ or ‘vacation peptide’, melanotan has been growing in popularity and prevalence, largely thanks to social media, where it has been promoted.” This refers to synthetic peptides that mimic the skin’s natural production of melanin when exposed to the sun and can be used a pre-holiday tanning boost for example. This is distinct from the male ‘looksmaxxing’ use of peptides for example. The gendered marketing and use of peptides needs more research though. Just after writing this I saw an advert for a lip-gloss calling itself a “peptide lip treatment”…

One collocation which puzzled me at first is ‘research peptides‘, also sometimes called ‘research chemical‘. This innocent sounding phrase recurs across 8 articles as a headline term. It normally means “synthetic or isolated peptide sequences manufactured strictly as laboratory reagents—not pharmaceuticals” and are for “research use only’ or RUO.

However, more recently the phrase ‘research peptides’ can also be used as a marketing euphemism for compounds that are frequently sold for human consumption or enhancement and allows vendors can sell substances that are not approved by the FDA or other agencies for human consumption, thereby avoiding liability and strict pharmaceutical manufacturing standards. As wrote on 12 February 2026: “You can buy peptides legally, but on the proviso they are used for ‘research purposes only’ – not for human consumption.”

This is arguably the most consequential collocation in the corpus, as it enables a legally ambiguous market and is referenced critically across most articles. It functions as the hinge between the legitimate and illegitimate ends of the spectrum. The phrase sounds like a safety restriction but operates as a commercial enabler. Here is an example of the use of the phrase ‘research peptide’/’research use only’: “Australians are buying an unapproved weight-loss drug from suppliers whose websites list the product as ‘for research use only’ or ‘not for human consumption’ and who sell by the milligram and ship it to residential addresses. Retatrutide has been hailed the king of peptides by fitness influencers….”. ‘Re’ is also known as a ‘next-generation peptide’….

Post-collocates of peptide(s)

Post-collocates (nouns and adverbs following peptide/s) reveal how the discourse constructs the social and medical phenomenon around peptides.

‘Peptide therapy’ (×17) is the most frequent post-collocate or word following ‘peptide(s) and operates in a broadly neutral-to-positive register (clinical articles), contrasting sharply with the alarm register of most journalism. ‘Peptide craze’ (×9), ‘peptide enthusiasts’ (×6), and ‘peptide injections’ (×8), for example, co-anchor the alarm frame – there was even talk of ‘peptide sceptics’. Users are characterised as caught in a ‘craze’, administering injections without medical oversight. One article in The Guardian even talks about a ‘peptide rave’: “at least one San Francisco ‘peptide rave’ has seen partygoers entertained by a lab-coated man demonstrating how to inject liquid peptides.”

‘Peptide stacking’ (×8), referring to taking different types of injectables at once, is a specialist bodybuilding subculture term that has migrated into mainstream reporting and is often left unexplained, suggesting that it is now part of public discourse.

Having explored the words surrounding ‘peptide(s)’ and highlighted very briefly how they can skew discourse in terms of geographical anxiety, gender stereotyping or marketing, I now turn to metaphors to see what discursive functions they fulfil.

Peptides and metaphors

Here I draw, as usual, on Lakoff & Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory to examine how culturally entrenched narratives are used to frame complex, unfamiliar phenomena as either exciting opportunities or dangerous frauds. I have clustered the metaphors, as far as possible, by the ‘source domain’ from which they take their inspiration. The ‘target domain’ is ‘peptides’.

Regulatory/spatial metaphors: wild west, grey/gray area, frontier, underground market, dark side, murky world

The single most prominent metaphorical cluster positions the peptide market in uncharted, ungoverned space and as a lawless territory. The headline “Welcome to the new health wild west” immediately establishes lawlessness and frontier danger and links up with the ‘unregulated peptides’ collocation, as in this example: ”Peptides are also in a legal grey area, an unregulated wild west which is creating a perfect storm of toxic body ideals, online chatroom affirmation and DIY medicine.”

‘Grey / gray area’ (×5) invokes spatial ambiguity to characterise regulatory uncertainty. ‘Underground markets’ and ‘gray market’ extend the spatial framing downward, signalling concealment. ‘Murky’ and ‘dark’ add to the aura of unease and hidden danger.

The metaphor links up with the collocate ‘research peptide’ which operates at the wild west frontier or in the grey area of peptide marketing. This metaphor cluster is also linked to the next one.

Disaster/danger metaphors: perfect storm, ticking timebomb, epidemic, explosion, wave

A crisis cluster constructs urgency and inevitability. ‘Perfect storm’ (×1) (of toxic body ideals + online affirmation + DIY medicine) identifies converging trends in wellness discourse. ‘Ticking timebomb’ (×1) introduces a temporal dimension of pending catastrophe ‘for Gen Z’s health’). ‘Epidemic’ (×1) and ‘explosion’ (×2) medicalise and militarise the spread of peptide use, framing it as a contagion that has broken containment.

Self-experimentation metaphors: lab rat, guinea pig, DIY medicine, stacking, biohacking

‘Lab rat’ or ‘guinea pig’ appear in multiple headlines and body texts, characterising ordinary consumers as self-administered test subjects. This inverts the normal relationship between experimental subject and scientist while remaining, for practitioners, aspirational. ‘Biohacking’ (×17) is the most contested term in the corpus: used approvingly by practitioners, sceptically by journalists. It frames self-experimentation and technological transgression as a virtue, while also hiding the commercial exploitation that is going on. The stacking metaphor, as in the collocated ‘peptide stacking’ highlights experimentation with multiple supplements or injectables.

False promise/quackery metaphors: miracle, holy grail, silver bullet, cure-all, supersubstance, longevity scam

This cluster of metaphors invokes the language of medical hype – miracle (injection) (×4), holy grail (×1), silver bullet (×1), cure-all (×3), supersubstance (×1), longevity scam (×1). However, these terms typically appear in debunking rather than promoting discourse, like the next cluster of metaphors.

Hype/meta-discourse metaphors: buzzword, craze, hype, trend, rabbit hole

A meta-discursive cluster that names the social phenomenon itself as a communicative event driven by social media dynamics. ‘Buzzword’ (×2) and ‘craze’ (×9) frame peptide use as fashionable but transient; ‘hype’ (×7) specifically contrasts promise with evidence. The ‘rabbit hole’ metaphor (×3) describes individuals who start down a path of self-research leading to an obsessive and escalating use, a metaphor recently also studied by Tamsin Parnell in the context of eating disorder discourses on TikTok.

War/conflict metaphors: war on peptides, fuelled by (influencers / US politics)

The FDA’s response to unregulated peptides is framed as a ‘war on peptides’ (×1), invoking the established discourse of regulatory combat. One article says that “US Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said he would end the FDA’s ‘war on peptides’.” A peptide seller is quoted as saying: “’The FDA…they’ve got it stitched up,’ he said. ‘They don’t want people buying peptides because these are better than any drugs they can sell.’”

‘Fuelled’ (×6) constructs influencer culture and political context as accelerants – agents adding combustible material to a fire already burning (“fuelled by hype and promises”, “fuelled by influencers”). This framing makes the regulator the aggressor rather than the protector, a rhetorical move with an obvious political function.

Overall, these metaphor clusters form a coherent system: unregulated space (wild west, frontier, underground) + impending disaster (perfect storm, timebomb, epidemic) + quackery (miracle, holy grail) + amateur self-experimentation (lab rat, DIY, biohacking) + viral spread (craze, hype, trend, rabbit hole) all work together to construct a narrative of a socially contagious, medically dangerous, and legally uncontrolled phenomenon. (While I was writing this, the BBC published an article on peptides that contains mainy of these metaphors!)

Peptides between two discourses

Taking the findings of the collocation and metaphor analysis together, the corpus organises itself around two competing but related discourses: On the one hand, there is the clinical/scientific discourse using collocations like: ‘signalling peptides’, ‘bioactive peptides’, ‘peptide therapy’, ‘intercellular signalling peptides’. This is a neutral or positive register, found mainly in wire-service science articles and clinical practice publications. On the other hand, there is the risk/alarm discourse, using collocations like ‘unregulated peptides’, ‘Chinese peptides’, ‘bootlegged peptides’. Unlike the science discourse, this risk/alarm discourse is bolstered by clusters of metaphors around wild west, perfect storm, self-experimentation, quackery and war. The collocation ‘research peptides’ works as a sort of discursive hinge between the two discourses.

This dual framing of peptides as a scientific opportunity and a societal danger maps onto a similar dual framing that Nelya Koteyko and I have discussed in the context of environmental carbon offsetting discourses where we found on the one hand a ‘gold rush’ scenario (opportunity, adventure, transformation) and on the other a cowboy scenario (lawlessness, exploitation, the unregulated frontier). In the peptide discourse, a similar split is visible: GLP-1s and legitimate pharmacology attract the promissory gold rush framing, while grey-market injectables attract the cowboy framing, complete with platform crackdowns that mirror the ‘cowboy builders need standards’ narrative in the carbon paper.

In our environmental work we quoted from an article by my old colleague Peter Mühlhäusler on metaphors and metonymies in green advertising where he points to ‘the use of metaphor to reconcile economic and moral discourse about the environment’. This again maps quite well onto the peptide discourse in the sense that one can find here ‘the use of metaphor to reconcile economic and moral discourse about the body’. Peptide wellness culture uses scientific language to make consumption feel like a responsibility; the purchase of a research peptide is not spending, it is investment in the self, and biohacking is a virtue.

The results of my rough analysis also show that the peptide story has features that are quite different from the epigenetic or microbiome stories. The contrast between legitimate and illegitimate ends of the spectrum of peptide use is starker and the regulatory future of peptides is politically contingent in ways that the microbiome never was.

*I had just finished writing this post (5 March), when I saw this in Gizmodo for 2 March: “Get ready to hear a lot more buzz around peptides, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Over the weekend, the health secretary stated that he would soon loosen restrictions on a certain number of these popular, albeit unapproved, drugs.”