OS 17: Baldness cure? (actual); tooth elevation, Condé vs. Peptides and a secret Manhattan run locker
Plus the most thorough cotton round-up out and the best way to compete as a gym rat
Passover wrapping up. Two more days until we eat bread again. Back from Ontario, God’s Country, back in New York where it’s warm during the day and frigid at night—desert styles. Carry two times your body weight in water, carry one time your quad size in steak. I’m still thinking about the kebab place attached to the gas station and the blood/brain soup at the pho spot a little bit outside Toronto.
What we cover here, for those new to the program: peptides, CASEIN protein powder, other (animal) protein (powders… not powders), running, SPRINTING, gelatin, linoleic-acid removal mechanisms (for health), citrus-peel to the face and maybe blended up with some water, skincare as diet, nicotine patches, nicotine tabs and the people that love them, nerve flossing AKA reverse Tai Chi aka high-level band work, thoracic spine mobility, lower back strength (super strength) post-DHT/bloodflow theories of hair growth, post-calories in/out models of fat loss, severe macros mastery, GHk-Cu and Wolverine, Dr. Raymond Peat, sunlight titration, understanding written coverage of obscure and basic fitness and dark wellness concepts, EMOM workouts (look it up), pleasant-looking zero-drop shoes, vibratory therapy (movement), cotton head to toe, cave-person skincare, strength, curly hair, eye color lightening and more. Nobody who understands these topics writes about this. Snake Super Health Open Secrets.
This week’s edition covers: a free locker/changing place in Midtown for runners, the Times betting big on health coverage, a skincare/nail health hack that is pretty easy and which may or may not involve beer, Bryan Johnson kind of pranks himself, my new tooth care routine (I found a better toothpaste on vacation; blew my mind), a drop-in BJJ thing in Manhattan for cool peeps, the best candy bar in America gets even more BASED, how tai chi explains hockey, Nike’s dip from Manhattan and the most thorough cotton workout wear roundup I’ve seen. Plus, a cure for baldness (actually).
Onto it.
NY Times is looking for a fitness reporter, per this job posting. Looks fun; they’ve been publishing way more stories on lifting, strength, peptides lately. Reminds me of when they were hiring for the sin and vice beat a decade ago. Awesome field to cover—everyone’s trying to get something over. Real free-for-all.
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Catch up on news updates here. The latest dispatch covers aa run club in Gaza, the mental benefits of superloading creatine, a new S-tier veg. oil free taco place in Brooklyn, a natural/non-sketchy tea hack for better sleep and the soy/testosterone debate.
Listen to the Snake Super Health podcast. New episode being edited ATM.
Snake Super Health group workout recap: was a rain or shine thing Easter Sunday, movement under slight sprinkles. Jointwarmup, pull-ups (some with bands), push, Ozzy pull, jump squats, foot and calf work, light cardio. Half the gang went to the gym after, half the gang couldn’t walk the next day. Calisthenics, good for the joints and muscles Free every Sunday, location details here or on the Snake Super Health IG later this week
Plus: Lots of chatter in the app chat today. Running, diet, lore. Start a thread, get some wisdom:
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More news:
The David lawsuit’s been dropped—about their labels being misleading. Fishy from the start; I called this last month. Maybe paid for by the companies who went out of business or lost market share after David Group bought the EPG fat manufacturer? (David bought a calorie-free veg. oil-derived fat to make their bars a macros miracle.) It’s a competitive world, though the news cycle didn’t seem to dent David’s business.
Thorough New Yorker feature on peptides. Dr. Dhruv Khullar (discussed his Ozempic piece on the peptide pod) is the author. It’s a skeptical, long, and clear piece of writing that talks to a number of people—inventor of BPC-157, BJJ users, the guy who’s Rick Rubin and Hubes’ peptide guy, ex-compounding pharmacy employees, ex-FDA people, researchers, lifters—and has some nice dish quotes re: Huberman and the new spate of grey-space peptide manufacturers.
In the story Khular gets peptides for himself… setting up an n=1 experiment, but doesn’t take them and instead gets them tested (and writes about that). The consumer takeaway for me is longevity influencer/biohacker Gary Brecka’s firm, Ultimate Human, passed the test. (Or at least one batch did; impressive either way.) Service journalism! The other is that peptides are very complicated (been saying). Two more relevant passages:
Many of our era’s health trends have something in common: they strive not only to mitigate disease, as mainstream medicine has always been expected to do, but also to optimize health, an aim that many doctors shy away from. I’m not convinced I can offer unproven treatments and still uphold my oath to do no harm. And, even if I knew how to help people attain “peak performance” in their fitness, their careers, or their sex lives, I’m not sure that’s my job. If traditional doctors don’t promise their patients these things, however, others surely will.
….
But the science underpinning the current peptide craze dates to the turn of the century, when Pinchas Cohen, a respected pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, started to focus on age-related diseases. For one project, Cohen tried to disrupt a protein associated with insulin resistance and diabetes. By injecting human DNA into yeast cells, he was able to produce several chains of amino acids that clung to his target. Cohen told me that the first two chains were known proteins, but the third was “this ridiculous little thing” made up of only twenty-four amino acids. Strangely, he couldn’t figure out where it had come from. According to the conventional wisdom of the day, the DNA he’d injected shouldn’t have coded for it.
Emphasis mine. First quote is Khullar saying this. It’s so refreshing, honest and clear here. Good for him. Respect. Second quote shows the whitespace—what it means for health consumers. Ultimately, conventional medical wisdom is binary: wait for the research… wait for new products to live up to received wisdom, like the conviction that “junk DNA”—most of what’s coded—was “worthless.” I don’t want to tar doctors, but it seems clear that junk DNA was there for some reason. Why be so black and white about it? And if black becomes white, it explains why consumers are confident playing in the grey space: in unproven interventions. Ultimately, the article is pro-peptide in a way I didn’t expect: It clearly shows some interventions with real benefits for the folks here. I think this means that