What Marie Curie Can Teach Us About the Peptide Craze.

The body is not a machine we can endlessly optimize without consequence.

Good morning everyone.

I’m on my way back from D.C., where I did some light protesting against Bayer’s request to SCOTUS for legal immunity from glyphosate, also known as Roundup.

It was inspiritng spending time with the brilliant researchers who have dedicated their lives to researching glyphosate, the doctors who have devoted their practices to helping patients harmed by glyphosate, and the attorneys who have spent their careers defending farmers and gardeners who have been sickened—or killed—by Bayer’s Roundup.

At the same time, it was disheartening to sit in the House Rules Committee meeting and watch firsthand how many politicians—mostly Republicans—seemed uninterested in the potential harms of glyphosate, as the committee once again pushed legal immunity for pesticide manufacturers in the upcoming Farm Bill—an effort that ultimately failed, thanks to the aggressive MAHA advocates who dissuaded Congress from siding with the chemical giant.

Still, right now, Bayer is in the halls of the Capitol, courting the Trump administration, and petitioning SCOTUS—asking all three branches of government to provide legal protection so that average people like you and me, your friend who farms, or your grandma who gardens cannot sue if they’re harmed by RoundUp. It’s an effort that undercuts one of this nation’s most fundamental legal principles: the right, guaranteed by the Seventh Amendment, to have your day in court.

I cannot think of another issue where there is this level of coordination stemming from a single company. It should also be noted that Bayer is a foreign company.

I really wish the “just asking questions” crowd on social media would direct their queries toward this matter. If Bayer were an Israeli company (it’s German), I suspect Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson would be all over this topic. But alas—no Jews, no news.

• Allyson Felix is coming out of retirement, aiming to make her sixth Olympic Games in her hometown of Los Angeles. She’ll likely be racing the 400 meters—and, by the grace of our Lord Almighty, I managed to get tickets to the women’s 400m semifinals. Part of me was thrilled to snag the tickets. Another part of me felt a little defeated, because buying tickets to the Olympics means accepting the fact that I won’t be there competing. Acceptance, the final stage of grief. 🥲

• Two runners broke the 2-hour marathon in London. 4:33/mile pace. Insane.

• The latest workout trend is shock therapy. Athletes (a generous use of the word here) strap into wetsuit-like gear wired with electrical currents that stimulate their muscles for 20 minutes while lifting what appear to be eight-pound dumbbells. The setup relies on electrical muscle stimulation machines that cost $20,000 each. The business director behind one German company said Americans are their target audience. “The U.S. is a big market, there’s many lazy people,” he told the WSJ.

• Speaking of environmental toxins: a study from MIT found that NDMA—a toxic byproduct of several industrial processes—may be significantly more harmful to children than to adults. In the early 2000s, a Massachusetts community’s drinking water was contaminated with this chemical, and pediatric cancer rates there were higher than in surrounding areas. In this new lab experiment, researchers found that the same DNA damage had very different consequences depending on age. “The double-stranded breaks were exclusively observed in the young,” the study’s lead author explained. What I find—well, I don’t know—worth pointing out is that there seem to be some very serious ties between Germany and MIT. (one of the physics professor is from Munich.) Germany, as we know, is where Bayer operates—and it’s also where they’re making this shock-therapy-style workout equipment. What’s going on over there in Germany? Are the vibes off? Hard to say. But the ROB Central Europe bureau has some fascinating tips coming in. Our sources there run deep. We’re keeping our eyes on you, Germany.

• Two-thirds of babies under two watch screens daily, with 30% watching screens for more than three hours a day. Have we forgotten Matthew 18:6?

• A 71-year-old man is running 100 marathons in 100 days to raise awareness for Parkinson’s research. At face value, that sounds admirable. But hundreds of millions are already being poured into the search for treatments. What receives far less attention is prevention. There are dozens of studies linking pesticide exposure to Parkinson’s, yet we rarely talk about what might be driving the disease in the first place.

• Steak 'n Shake hired a “Chief MAHA Officer.”

• “A basketball court is essentially 94 feet of prefrontal cortex development opportunity,” says Dr. Matt Angove, the ROB Godfather. Read his excellent piece on why kids should play basketball.

  Want to Give Your Child A Hand Up in Life? Sign Them Up for Basketball.

• The White House is fast-tracking research of psychedelic drugs. Running On Butter has no official stance on—nor experience with—these substances, aside from that brief period when I started a commune in Ecuador. Wild times down there in South America.

• Celebrities seem to be abusing GLP-1 drugs and looking increasingly anemic and emaciated. Not good, but also not new. Drug experimenting is sort of a defining celebrity trait. Last year it was Adderall. This year it’s Ozempic. Next year? Probably psychedelics from Ecuador—which, again, can we please stop bringing that up? I told you it was just a season of my life.

We’re starting a new column here at Running On Butter. One that looks back at significant moments in health history: atrocities, miracle medical breakthroughs, and lost traditions that can help us think more critically about health and how it ought to shape our lives.

I’m your all-knowledgeable professor. Questions are encouraged. Questioning me? Strongly discouraged. Attendance is mandatory.

Now everyone sit down and listen.

Humans have been searching for the fountain of youth for millennia. It’s instinctive for us to chase rare potions and cutting-edge technologies that promise extended youth and restored beauty.

Sometimes this impulse has led to remarkable scientific discoveries. But it has also produced some of medicine’s most catastrophic mistakes—like at the beginning of the twentieth century, when people believed Marie Curie’s discovery of radium, a mysterious new substance that seemed to radiate endless energy, might reverse aging and restore vitality.

Marketers began putting radium in drinking water, cosmetics, even blankets—promising it as a cure-all for fatigue, aging, and illness. Today that sounds absurd. Of course drinking radioactive material causes harm. We look back and think: how could anyone have believed this?

And yet the mindset that produced the radium craze hasn’t disappeared. It has simply changed its vocabulary.

I think about the current peptide craze, and the way biohackers rattle off military-sounding code names—BPC-157, CJC-1295—as if they’re reciting coordinates to the future of human perfection. To be clear, peptides used as targeted medicine to restore something broken can be genuinely helpful. I know people who have recovered more quickly from injuries because of them.

But the broader promise behind much of the biohacking movement—the idea that we can engineer our bodies to live to 120 through stacks of synthetic compounds—is based on a troubling assumption: that the human body is a machine we can endlessly optimize without consequence.

Miracle drugs that promise extended life often underestimate the complexity of the body itself. Every day, millions of biochemical reactions interact in ways we still only partially understand. Introducing powerful synthetic compounds into that system for decades at a time is not the same thing as using medicine temporarily to treat disease.

Right now there is enormous hype coming out of places like Silicon Valley and Austin around secret protocols and longevity compounds that supposedly unlock radically extended life. Most of these claims are dramatically overstated. And there is an important difference between taking a short-term pharmaceutical intervention to treat illness—like antibiotics—and integrating synthetic compounds into your body as a permanent lifestyle strategy.

There’s also a growing concern that many peptides sold online do not contain what they claim. The FDA has warned that roughly one-quarter of tested peptide products include undisclosed ingredients. That alone should give us pause before treating them as the future of human health.

The lesson of the radium era isn’t that innovation is dangerous. It’s that innovation without humility—and without respect for the complexity of the human body—can lead to costly mistakes.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the reality is that the best way to live a long, healthy, and meaningful life isn’t to chase every new cutting-edge technology. More often than not, it’s simply to keep running on butter.