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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

Sweeping statements in biochemistry must be made with caution. It is well known that there are some small peptides that are absorbed following oral administration.

...BPC-157 itself is said to be among this class. As are certain milk tripeptides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactotripeptides

Interestingly enough, those two, as well as Gly-Pro-Hyp, are proline/hydroxyproline-rich, which might suggest that proline-rich small peptides are resistant to degradation in the gut.

Anyway, in general oral proteins and peptides are broken down prior to systemic absorption, but not always...

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> It is well known that there are some small peptides that are absorbed following oral administration. ...BPC-157 itself is said to be among this class

Do you know of any studies that suggest BPC-157 absorption from gut?

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jor.21107

Among others. If you read the paper, it's actually apparent that there's little difference between i.p. and oral administration in terms of efficacy -- both were roughly equally effective in improving MCL ligament healing.

Admittedly the paper's in rats -- as are 99% of the others -- as there's no incentive for anybody to run human trials.

You should note that your study is not controlled.

There are two groups, those with oral administration those with sub-q administration. There is not group without administration.

This means you can't say that oral vs injected is "equally effective" because you can't assert that BPC 157 is effective at all. You can't tease out the effect size because you don't know if any or all of the MCL ligament healing was done via normal pathways

You just read the abstract and didn't read the full paper.

There were control groups.

> Methods:

> [administration] as follows: (i) BPC 157 10 mg or 10 ng/kg or saline 5.0 ml/kg (controls), intraperitoneally, or (ii) BPC 157 in neutral cream (1.0 mg dissolved in distilled water/g commercial neutral cream) or commercial neutral cream (controls), as a thin layer, locally, at the site of injury, administered once daily with the first application 30 min after surgery and the final application 24 h before sacrifice; (iii) BPC 157 0.16 mg/ml or nothing (controls) in the drinking water (12 ml/day/rat) until sacrifice.

There was a big difference vs. the control groups.

> This means you can't say that oral vs injected is "equally effective" because you can't assert that BPC 157 is effective at all

Is that true? It seems that you can say that they were equally effective without quantifying an effect. It could be the case that both are equal in that neither has an effect, which this would validate. Then you can just point to other studies to claim effectiveness of injected.

I'm in agreement. It's the article that made the sweeping statement.

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