For the past four weeks, I’ve woken up, stumbled out of bed into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, fetched a tiny bottle of something called “BPC-157” and proceeded to stab myself with an insulin syringe to inject it into various parts of my body. Using this strategy, in just one month, I have…

…shut down gut inflammation from a bout of travel, racing, and stress…

…completely healed golfer’s elbow, medial epicondylitis, and inner elbow pain…

…and healed a torn upper hamstring with lightning speed.

This stuff should be illegal.

It probably will be soon.

But I simply couldn’t keep this potent healing tactic to myself. Enjoy, and proceed at your own risk.

 

What Is BPC-157?

BPC-157 is, in a word, a peptide. A peptide is simply a sequence of amino acids. OK, OK, lest you be donning a white lab coat and cringing from that simple description, then I’ll be more specific: a peptide is a compound consisting of two or more amino acids linked in a chain, the carboxyl group of each acid being joined to the amino group of the next by a bond like this: OC-NH.

In the case of BPC-157, the peptide is a sequence of amino acids with a molecular formula of 62 carbons, 98 hydrogens, 16 nitrogens, and 22 oxygen atoms (C62-H98-N16-O22).

Should you care to know the nitty-gritty specifics, that comes out to a fifteen amino acid sequence of the following:

L-Valine, glycyl-L-alpha-glutamyl-L-prolyl-L-prolyl-L-prolylglycyl-L-lysyl-L-prolyl-L-alanyl-L-alpha-aspartyl-L-alpha-aspartyl-L-alanylglycyl-L-leucyl-; glycyl-L-alpha-glutamyl-L-prolyl-L-prolyl-L-prolylglycyllysyl-L-prolyl-L-alanyl-L-alpha-aspartyl-L-alpha-aspartyl-L-alanylglycyl-L-leucyl-L-valine.

Yep, that’s the long, fancy name for BPC-157.

BPC, for reasons you’re about to discover, stands for “Body Protecting Compound.” Your body already makes it in your own gastric juices in very small amounts, where it serves to protect and heal your gut. But if you can get the super-concentrated version and get it into your system, it has an extremely high level of biological healing activity just about anywhere you put it

And if many of the amino acids above look familiar to you, there’s good reason. I’ve talked about them before. I’ve used them orally for quite some time to heal injuries more quickly, to keep the body in anabolic state during or post-exercise, and to stave off central nervous system fatigue during long bouts of exercise. I have a quite comprehensive article about the oral use of amino acid tablets here.

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What Does It Do?

BPC-157 is surprisingly free of side effects, and has been shown in research that’s been happening since 1991 to repair tendon, muscle, intestines, teeth, bone and more, both in in-vitro laboratory “test-tube” studies, in in-vivo human and rodent studies, and when used orally or inject subcutaneously (under your skin) or intramuscularly (into your muscle).

Just take a look at the following, all of which was hunted down and identified by the good folks at Suppversity in their article on BPC-157. BPC-157 has been shown to:

• Promote tendon and ligament healing by tendon outgrowth, cell survival, and cell migration in a rodent model of Achilles tendon rupture, and also when administered in drinking water to rats with damaged medial collateral ligaments
• Tendon-to-bone healing effective enough that they may actually “successfully exchange the present reconstructive surgical methods”
• Counter the damaging effects of NSAIDs like ibuprofen or advil on the gut lining so effectively that scientists termed BPC-157 “a NSAIDs antidote” one of which they say that “no other single agent has portrayed a similar array of effects“
• Repair the damage from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) within just days of oral administration in a rodent model of IBD
• Help cure perdidontitis when administered in a rodent model of periodontitis, significantly enough to have scientists conclude that “BPC 157 may represent a new peptide candidate in the treatment of periodontal disease“
• Reverse systemic corticosteroid-impaired muscle healing, in rodent models where BPC-157 was administered orally once daily for 14 days to rats with crushed gastrocnemius muscle. Similar benefits were demonstrated in a rodent study by Novinscak et al.
• Accelerate bone healing in rabbits who suffered segmental bone defect before being treated with BPC-157 .

BPC-157 is also known as a “stable gastric pentadecapeptide” primarily because it is stable in human gastric juice, can cause an anabolic healing effect in both the upper and lower GI tract, has an antiulcer effect, and produces a therapeutic effect on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)—all again surprisingly free of side effects.

As demonstrated in the research studies cited above, BPC-157 also accelerates wound healing, and—via interaction with the Nitric Oxide (NO) system—causes protection of endothelial tissue and an “angiogenic” (blood vessel building) wound-healing effect. This occurs even in severely impaired conditions, such as in advanced and poorly controlled irritable bowel disease, in which it stimulates expression of genes responsible for cytokine and growth factor generation and also extracellular matrix (collagen) formation, along with intestinal anastomosis healing, reversal of short bowel syndrome and fistula healing—all of which can extremely frustrating issues in people who have gut pain, constipation, diarrhea, and bowel inflammation.

So if you have frustrating joint pain that won’t go away, some kind of muscle tear, sprain or strain, or gut “issues”, you should definitely keep reading.

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How To Get BPC-157

So how can you get our paws on this stuff? You can find BPC-157 at a few different peptide suppliers on the internet.

I’ll warn you though: kind of like online pharmacies, the websites are cheesy, and they technically aren’t allowed to sell or advertise these kinds of peptides as something appropriate for human consumption or human injection, but you can pretty easily find it and buy it if you know how to use your Googling skills properly.

I can’t ethically say any of these forms of BPC-157 are “superior” since none of it is technically legal to sell for human use (you’ll notice each site specifies that it is for laboratory chemical research only).

For reasons you’re about to discover, I also ordered, from MedLabGear:

• One box of insulin syringes, preferably 1ml/1cc, with 28 gauge 1/2 inch attached needles (the slang term for these syringes), among self-injectors of peptides and hormones, is a “slin pin.”

• One 30ml bottle of bacteriostatic water.

• One package of alcohol cleaning wipes.

Compared to spending several thousand dollars to fly over to Europe for a stem cell injection, that is, cost-wise, a tiny drop in the bucket, especially when you consider the fact that this stuff can permanently heal and strengthen weak joints, connective tissues, muscles and gut. 

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How To Mix BPC-157

When you get your bottle of BPC-157, it is going to look like this:

See how it’s a powder? You have to “reconstitute” that powder.

This is where the bacteriostatic water (also known as “BAC water”) comes in. Here’s what to do with the BPC-157 powder and BAC water:

1. Pop the caps off both the BPC-157 and BAC.
2. Gently alcohol swab the rubber stopper on the BPC-157, then let it dry. Same goes with the BAC vial.
3. Dose out the correct amount of BAC. In the case of a 30ml bottle of BAC, if you fill three insulin syringes full of water, then very slowly and carefully (peptides are extremely fragile) inject each of those syringes into a 5mg bottle of BPC-157, you are going to nearly completely fill the 5mg bottle of BPC-157.
4. Once the 5mg bottle of BPC-157 is full, then based on this very handy Peptide Mixing & Dosing Calculator, each time you inject a 1ml/1cc syringe into it and pull that syringe back to the eight tick mark (15 Unit mark), you are going to have yourself approximately 250mcg of BPC-157.

Voila. You’re done. You now have a  bottle of completely reconstituted and ready-to-rumble BPC-157. It will look something like this.

Before and after reconstitution, keep your BPC-157 away from UV rays, sunlight, and heat. It will remain stable at room temperature for up to ten weeks, but for the best storage and results, you should store in your refrigerator, in which case it will stay stable for up to six months. It will stay stable in a freezer for up to two years.

The stuff is super fragile. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of very slow and patient reconstitution. When you spray the BAC into the BPC, aim for the sides of the BPC bottle, and don’t spray directly onto the BPC powder itself. When you draw the BPC up into the syringe for injection or oral use, turn the bottle of BPC upside down very carefully and then draw the liquid up into the syringe very slowly. When you inject it or spray it into your mouth, inject it very slowly. If you keep it in the refrigerator, keep it away from things that might knock it over or jostle it around.

You get the idea. Treat your BPC like the fragile, million-dollar healing elixir that it is.

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How Much Should You Take

There is an abundance of research on BPC-157 and it has been shown to be effective systematically when injected once daily at anywhere from 1-10mcg per kg of body weight. In most cases, this comes out to a dose of anywhere from 200mcg up to 800mcg. Some folks report the most success dosing twice per day with 250-350mcg for a total of 500-700mcg per day.

So as you can see, there’s quite a bit of variability in dosage recommendations.

I initially began to use BPC-157 for golfer’s elbow (inner elbow pain also known as “climber’s elbow” or “medial epicondylitis), and I personally, based on the majority of the research studies in humans, settled upon a self-administered subcutaneous BPC-157 injection of 250mcg in my left elbow on one day, then 250mcg in my right elbow the next day, for a total of two weeks. At this point, my elbow pain had completely disappeared, so I stopped.

Although, as I’ve mentioned, BPC-157 is free of side effects at normal dosages, I can tell you that the first time I used it, I accidentally dosed with 2500mcg instead of the 250mcg I planned to initially trial with, and I felt for about the next four hours what I would best describe as a slight amount of irritability and grumpiness, which was likely due to the anabolic cortisol response from a very minor overdose. This feeling passed within four hours, and I’ve felt no ill-effects since with daily dosing of 250mcg.

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How To Inject BPC-157 Or Take It Orally

BPC-157 acts systemically. This means that whether you inject it subcutaneously (an easier and more-pain free under-the-skin method that you should do as close to the area of pain as possible), intramuscularly (the more painful and teeth-gritting version of essentially “stabbing” the needle into the muscle as close to the injury as possible), or you simply spray it into your mouth orally…

…the BPC-157 going to render some amount of benefit in whichever part of your body needs healing.

Oral administration of BPC-157 is quite straightforward. Just spray it into your mouth (remember: very slowly), hold it in your mouth for 90-120 seconds, then swallow.

Subcutaneous injections are also relatively simple, as long as you’re cool with needles. You can either pinch an area of skin near the injury site and thrust the needle into that pinched area of skin, or if (as was the case of my elbow) it’s too tough to simultaneously pinch your skin and inject yourself, you can recruit a helper or just “angle” the needle so it slips under unpinched skin.

Remember, always clean the rubber stopper with an alcohol swab and clean the area of injection with an alcohol swab. Always.

 

How Long To Take BPC-157

As I mentioned above, my bilateral inner elbow pain completely disappeared after I self-injected subcutaneously with 250mcg BPC-157 on alternating days to either the left elbow or right elbow for a total of two weeks.

After the elbow pain was gone, I strained my right hamstring while hill sprinting, and began daily intramuscular “lower-butt” injections of BPC-157 for a total of ten days, at which point, my hamstring was completely healed and pain-free.

Finally, for the pure joy of oral self-experimentation, I sprayed from a syringe 250mcg of BPC-157 into my mouth for a total of seven days. The BPC-157 induced a very similar feeling to the feeling I experience when drinking a cup of bone broth or eating a bowl of soaked chia seeds: a feeling of the GI tract being “coated” with some kind of protection, and a complete lack of any digestive issues, gas or bloating following any meals during that week-long time frame. I realize that’s a bit of a woo-woo explanation, and didn’t actually involve me gut testing for inflammatory markers like calmodulin or lactoferrin, but from an N=1 standpoint, it certainly seemed to me as a quite viable option for anyone who struggles with irritable bowel issues or gut inflammation.

Based on the current human studies to date, BPC-157 can be safely administered for four weeks, followed by a two-week rest. Speaking from my own personal experience, in which pain subsided after no more than two weeks of injections, I wouldn’t imagine you’d need to repeat this cycle unless you re-injured yourself.

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Summary

OK, so you may be now wondering why in the heck your physician, physical therapist, surgeon, gastroenterologist, etc. hasn’t told you about this stuff.

Here’s the deal: since BPC-157 is a completely natural gastric juice peptide, it’s technically not patentable, period. That means big pharma can’t make money off BPC-157, and that means it’s not getting marketed to your local doctor or hospital or anywhere else in the health care system. It’s also not available as an FDA regulated drug, or even considered to be “sellable” for human use.

You may also be wondering if it’s legal for sports governed by bodies such as USADA or WADA.

Here’s the deal: although some “peptide hormones, growth factors, related substances, and mimetics” are indeed illegal for use in sports governed by these organizations, BPC-157 is not currently listed as one of those illegal compounds. Yet.

I’ll readily admit that when it comes to BPC-157, despite it being a peptide you can actually find in your own gastric juices, long term studies in humans are relatively sparse. It may also eventually be banned by sport governing bodies such as USADA and WADA.

But in the meantime, since no adverse reactions have been seen in any of the short-term human clinical trials to date, I’m taking full advantage of this stuff, and if you’re injured, have gut inflammation, or have any other nagging issue addressed by the research I’ve mentioned in this article, you may want to seriously consider adding BPC-157 to your rapid recovery arsenal.

Do you have comments or feedback about BPC-157? Have you used it yourself? Do you have your own peptide experiences or tips to add? Leave your thoughts below and I promise to reply.

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