Peptides for Autoimmune Healing: When and How to Use Them

What’s Inside This Episode?

• What peptides really are and which ones actually support gut and immune healing

• When peptides might help restore tight junction integrity and reduce leaky gut

• The real risks: growth promotion, poor absorption, and overreliance

• Why “jumping on the peptide bandwagon” can backfire if root causes aren’t addressed

• How to time peptides with food, supplements, and protein intake

• Oral vs. subcutaneous vs. intranasal delivery—what the research actually says

• Items like dosage, pulsing, retesting, and client readiness

• Why peptides should support and not replace your root-cause solutions

• The power of true gut and autoimmune repair

Resources and Links:

• Download our FREE Metabolic Health Guide here.
• Join the Next-Level Health Practitioner Facebook group here for free resources and community support
• Reserve your spot for our Reinvent Healthcare Online Event Nov 7-9! It’s the event of the year for practitioners serious about root-cause healing.
• Visit INEMethod.com for advanced health practitioner training and tools to elevate your clinical skills and grow your practice by getting life-changing results.
• Check out other podcast episodes here

Guest Resources and Links

Steph Jackson

• Join the Friendly Flora Collective – Microbiome Membership

Jennifer Whitmire

• Join the Culinary Healing Circle

Steph Jackson

If you are ready to go deep with your digestive health and you need more than slippery elm, you will enjoy working with Nutritional Endocrinology coach, Steph Jackson. Steph loves customizing balancing programs for the micro biome, working with fermented foods, and looking at how the body systems work together. After finding and clearing the root cause of her severe physical pain and exhaustion, Steph has gone on to help others to do the same. She is also the proud founder of Crave Conscious, a non-dairy yogurt company based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Jennifer Whitmire 

On a mission to save body parts, Jennifer Whitmire is a culinary coach, health educator, and master herbalist specializing in autoimmune and thyroid health. Since 2017, she’s taught women how to heal with food by restoring energy, balancing hormones, and repairing the gut through science-backed, whole food plant-based cooking and kitchen-based strategies.

 

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Transcript

 

Dr Ritamarie  

Peptides have been in the popular press and talked a lot about in health circles, in functional medicine circles, particularly. And you would think that they are some sort of miracle cure, because of all the press they are getting. 

 

So we're here today to talk about peptides, and specifically, we're going to narrow it down to autoimmune conditions, and how to use peptides in autoimmune conditions, when to use peptides in autoimmune conditions, and what are some of the other things we're going to do along with the peptides to make them most effective. 

 

So I'm super excited here. I've got Stephanie Jackson, who is going to be our expert here on peptides to talk to us about what she's found in her practice. Jennifer Whitmire and I are going to pick her brain and ask the questions that I think most practitioners are thinking about with it. 

 

So let's get started. I'm really interested, and I know that Jennifer has a lot of questions, as well. But before we get into the specific application to autoimmune, I want to know specifically about, first of all, what are peptides? People go around saying peptides, peptides, what are they? 

 

Well, peptides. It  sounds like it's part of protein. It sounds like it's related to amino acids. But what are they? 

 

Steph Jackson (01:46)

We all know insulin, which is a very popular and important peptide. 

 

So we have protein, we have peptides, and we have amino acids. So amino acids are like the smaller building block. You could have lysine for instance, or we have a peptide that might be two amino acids, three amino acids, five amino acids, or longer. And this is going to be important when we start talking about peptides in the gut, how long these are.

 

You might have heard some people talk about peptides triggering allergies in the body, right? When we have leaky gut, we get these longer chains of polypeptides that go through. And then the body responds to that. So these are ones that we should have transporters for, two and three chain peptides. We actually have specific transporters in our gut to bring them across into the body. 

 

So those are good. We can absorb them. Things that are longer than five, we are not supposed to be able to absorb those, so that might be the ones that might be triggering. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (02:42)

So that's what peptides are, and what they do, how does that relate to leaky gut? You mentioned it a few times, and autoimmune conditions,s but when do we use them?

 

In other words, is it something that is a first line? When somebody comes in, and they're experiencing an autoimmune condition or leaky gut, and you go, you need this particular peptide to do it? Or at what point are we thinking, let's look at peptides?

 

Steph Jackson (03:20)

So none of our tools are the first thing that we do, right? And so it's asking questions, it's digging deeper, it's finding out why something is the way that it is and then asking why again.

 

And so there might be an environment in the gut that's leading to barrier integrity issues, right? We might call it leaky gut, whatever someone's called it for you. So we might have those barrier issues. 

 

And we might also have low digestive mucosa. So just low protection, low immunity in the gut, too. And so things could be going on. It could be a food. It could be not chewing a food well. It could be a bacteria or a byproduct of such bacteria that's going through into the body and triggering things. 

 

And so we can't use anything in place of doing those things. We need to remove the offender, whatever it is. We need to work on remodulating the environment so that it's a place that encourages healthy bacteria to grow rather than the ones that might be imbalanced. 

 

It's like falling down the stairs and then falling down the stairs again. Right? Which you said recently, and it's so apt here, because we can take something to fix something and then not actually resolve the underlying issue. 

 

So none of these tools are in place of that.

 

Dr Ritamarie (04:43)

To the root cause or causes. Then creating a lifestyle, a diet, a stress management system, or all the things that we know we need to do to help people to remove the root causes. 

 

Steph Jackson (04:56)

Yes, and there's no kind of, do this protocol, and your gut is fine. We're eating food every day. We're meant to be dynamic. Things change. Some of us fell off a horse or a bike. Maybe we're going to have to continue, or maybe we're going to have the opportunity to continue, to work on our gut health ongoing. And that just might be if there's thyroid imbalance or something like that.  If there's motility issues, we might just continue to work on that. It's not something that is done and fixed. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (05:23)

Okay. So when we talk about that, and I'll let Jennifer ask some hard questions, too, but I just want to know, so a new client comes in, and we do some lab testing, and they either tell us that they have Hashimoto's, or we do some lab testing, and we see that they have some antibodies to their thyroid. 

 

Where would peptides fit into that picture? 

 

Steph Jackson (05:44)

Antibodies to the thyroid. I'm going to first look at gut bacteria, and I'm going to look at E. coli. I'm going to look for some other things first to see if that's going through. 

 

Let's say we've done a bunch of investigation, and there's leaky gut, because that's where a lot of our questions were. And there are many, many things that we do for leaky gut. And it can begin with just making sure that the body has what it needs to build a healthy gut and to have healthy cell turnover. And so we're doing all that stuff. 

 

Peptides are a very exciting tool. So far, the research that we have looks like some of the gut peptides like KPV, larazotide, and BPC157 can really help to tighten those tight junctions. That can be so helpful for somebody who's had lifelong gut issues.  They are a tool that I would like to use. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (06:45)

Okay. Would you use that before or after something like glutamine, which has like the double-edged sword? 

 

Steph Jackson (06:50)

So like this depends, right? If there's a gut flora imbalance, L-glutamine can easily feed SIBO bacteria, and we haven't even talked about glutamates, right? And so it can really affect somebody. So it also depends on their state of mind. It affects like, are we getting an OAT test? I have many questions. Right. So I use it in place of that, or along with, right? 

 

We've been focused in the past on getting those specific amino acids that the body can use to heal the gut lining. And then now we are effectively really using things that our body makes anyway, just in higher amounts. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (07:33)

Higher amounts to facilitate healing. 

 

Steph Jackson (07:40)

So for me, the difference between taking single amino acids and taking a group of two or three amino acids, with the same goal. I don't feel like it's that big of a difference. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (07:49)

A choice would be with an individual looking for glutamine contraindicated in this person, because they have GAD SNPs, and they have a lot of anxiety, and we're not sure if they're converting their glutamate to GABA, or they have the SIBO. 

 

Yeah. Yeah. Then it might be dangerous for them. We're looking at it, but then there's the BPC. Does it contain glutamine? 

 

Steph Jackson (08:10)

No.  And it also doesn't mean that we don't need L-glutamine.. Or any of the others like proline, glycine, other gut healthy amino acids. Right.

 

Jennifer Whitmire (08:23)

So this would be added in addition to your other things. If you're using herbal remedies and things like that to help with that healing. 

 

Steph Jackson (08:33)

Yes, not instead of, and they all work differently. Right. Some of them really support our mucosa and barrier protection. 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (08:40)

So they support it. And you said it helps to tighten those junctions. How does it do that? Like what's actually happening there? 

 

Steph Jackson (08:47)

Okay, so there are three peptides that we can take orally that seem to, so far, be positively affecting gut healing, and they really do seem to do that in the studies that I've seen. 

 

So we've got the BPC157, the KPV, which is lysine, proline and valine together, 

and we have the larazotide. The only studies that are really seen are on celiac and people with IBD or people with IBS, like people that are gluten sensitive, have identified as gluten sensitive with IBS and having it really reduces their symptoms and reduces their barrier permeability as well. And so it's just in the early stages of even knowing why our bodies are producing this in the first place. 

 

So BPC 157 can help to increase circulation to an area. Can it help to increase the amount of growth hormone receptors in an area? And that's one of the ways that it helps. 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (09:46)

So my concern is we're increasing blood flow to an area, and we're helping with cell growth, I'm assuming, with the tight junctions. And so how do we make sure, or can it lead to growth of other things that we don't want to grow in the body? 

 

Steph Jackson (10:07)

Absolutely. Absolutely. We're increasing the growth hormone receptors, and it’s proliferative. So, I mean, if the person has had a recent colon cancer screening, because I think that's what we're talking about, and I think there have been some objections raised. Colon cancer screening, does it run in the family? 

 

The KPV, at least from the studies that I've read, seems to be almost as effective in helping to knit the tight junctions and reverse symptoms of IBD and IBS. So why not just use that on its own? 

 

Dr Ritamarie (10:45)

What's the difference between KPV and BPC?

 

Steph Jackson (10:50)

The KPV also impacts immune system communication. So it can also help to balance the microbes in the gut. We're not sure how. It's kind of correlational so far, and a lot of these, we are actually not sure how they're doing it, or what they're doing. 

 

KPV can also modulate inflammation, and so a lot of people are just taking it for their immune system in different ways, but it is one of the ones that we can ingest, because it is only three versus the long ones. And so that being said, there's transporter competition. 

 

So let's say you're into collagen peptides or some other peptide thing, like don't take them at the same time and don't take it with your meal, because as you break down those proteins, you will be breaking some down into peptides. You just don't know which ones, but they compete for the transporters. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (11:50)

And you said proline, lysine and….

 

Steph Jackson (11:54)

Proline, lysine and valine.

 

Dr Ritamarie (11:55)

 And at least proline and lysine are two, hydroxyproline is another one that is a part of collagen. So is how they are working on this healing by stimulating collagen production. 

 

Steph Jackson (12:05)

That's possible. And it might be part of the other, but we don't know.

 

And so many of our clients are low in amino acids. Especially if they're having mood stuff and gut stuff and autoimmune stuff. That might be a big issue for them. And we have to work on their gut, so they can absorb it. 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (12:33)

If you're already not absorbing your nutrients, then adding in the peptide, is that going to do you any good? Right.

 

Steph Jackson (12:30)

I think it's a lot better than taking protein powder if you're aiming to, you know, true. Right. 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (12:48)

Which makes me think of another question, because if your food breaks down into these peptides, can I eat food that contains these amino acids? 

 

Steph Jackson (12:57)

I mean, I think it probably depends. I'm assuming that we're working with people who have raised their hand to say, I've got a gut issue. 

 

I think that, at least for me, if I'm going to do something like a pharmacological plan with a nutrient or supplement or vitamin C or whatever, I want to try to take the amount that the human people in the studies took and had results. Especially if I'm trying to help someone, maybe they're brain fogged, and they're exhausted, and this is just part of the toolkit that we're using, but it might help them to have the energy to then make those changes. They can suddenly feel a little bit better, well 

not suddenly, but over a period of as short as a few weeks, feel better in their gut enough to digest things a little bit better and to then start working on diversifying their foods, and chewing, and all those things that we want to do. 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (13:51)

So how long does someone take peptides, and how do you decide? 

 

Steph Jackson (13:57)

Well, anything retest, retest. Okay. And so if you can do a gut test that has markers for leaky gut.

 

Dr Ritamarie (14:07)

And how long would you take it, before retesting? 

 

Steph Jackson (14:09)

No shorter than six weeks. 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (14:12)

So you can take them seven days a week for six weeks? 

 

Steph Jackson (14:16)

Yes. though I would also, even though they are shorter chains of amino acids, it's not something that I want to just continuously do. 

 

Okay. Yeah. So I might do, you know, three months max and then, and then do a retest. And if it's not having the effect that we want to have, then yeah, there's something missing. We've either neglected to take something out, the person's missing something that they still need.

 

Dr Ritamarie (14:37)

Some people talk about pulsing with peptides, on and off cycles. 

 

Steph Jackson (14:48)

I think for the longer chain peptides that people are using subcutaneously, that makes sense. And so just knowing if you are taking something internally, or if you're doing it rectally, like straight up, some people are doing these, the larazotide and the KPV as enemas. 

 

Yes, with anecdotal great results. So that's a thing. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (15:15)

So they dissolve it in the enema? Or are they making little suppositories, and dissolving in the enema? 

 

Steph Jackson (15:20_

Yes, bacteria static water, and do that. 

 

So the peptides that people are injecting subcutaneously are much longer chains. So most of the time people are talking about those.

 

Dr Ritamarie (15:33)

Insulin is a good example. 

 

Steph Jackson (15:24)

So those you can't take intranasally. You can't take orally. It's not going to be absorbed like that. And intranasally, just like if it's more than 400 Daltons, like you kind of have to look up the molecular weight of the thing that you're doing. So a lot of them can be taken intranasally and that can affect the gut as well.

 

Some that might be helpful for the nervous system, right? Like if we have a low motility, or if we have issues with our sleep wake cycle, it might be that some of those that you can do intranasally can help. I think those are more the ones that are longer chains that we're doing subcutaneously that people want to pulse.

 

Let's talk about the intranasally for a sec. 16:21-17:47 So there's C-Lanc and C-Max that both can affect if it's anxiety. We also don't know how these are doing that. But, they can help people to feel less anxious. 

 

There's some decent, although we need way more, studies. These things aren't like new, right? They've been used in other countries for a long time. So just see what the molecular weight is and see how long the peptide chain is. You can kind of decide for yourself if you can absorb it in different ways. 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (16:57)

What are the drawbacks? 

 

Steph Jackson (17:00)

Well, most of them are things that our bodies make anyway. So for me, the biggest drawback is wrong focus. We're going to be focusing on like the band-aid rather than right. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (17:15)

You still have to do all the other stuff. But what you said was, you know, it seems to me it could be useful when people are trying all the other things, and they need a jumpstart. They can't tolerate foods, and they're not getting progress. Almost like it's  a quick, do it for a while, get to the point where we can actually work on what we need to work on in the gut. And then is that reasonable? 

 

Steph Jackson (17:35)

Exactly. And some people when you are really exhausted and stressed and to the point of not being able to follow through with the plans. 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (17:47)

Okay. For the gut, would you do a gut test first, before you decide if they are a candidate?

 

Steph Jackson (17:53)

Yes, before, and as part of the whole, after all the other things you would do, a gut test first. Yes, and I want to redo that, and I tend to use the vibrant gut test, because it does have the Somnolent and that's one of the markers that you can see go down with this. That's what I want to see happening .

 

Dr Ritamarie (18:10)

And then, it seems, you're going to start with investigating what their eating habits are. They're chewing, and they're eating under stress, and fasting, and timing, and all that. Their foods, do they eat foods that are damaging to the gut lining? So you're to start with those things. But if somebody comes in, and they've done all that stuff, this could be a good place to jump in. 

 

Steph Jackson (18:35)

So far, it's really exciting. 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (18:37)

Now, a lot of the formulas contain the three. Is that necessary? Do you need to take the three, why would you do all three? 

 

And repeat what the three are. 

 

Steph Jackson (18:53)

Larazotide, the KPV, and the BPC157. And then a lot of the formulas I see also include copper peptide. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (18:59)

Copper peptide?. And what's the point of that? 

 

Steph Jackson (19:02)

Because we're talking about growth hormone, growth hormone receptors with the BPC157. And so, we just want to, I guess, have a holistic plan. We're not kitchen-sinking growth hormones, but we're trying to make sure that we've got our bases covered. 

 

So first of all, copper peptide, I think is better, absorbed intranasally than it is that prescription only intranasally? 

 

Well, I mean, you can make it yourself. You just have to watch the pH and would you guys be interested in what to make intranasally and what not to do. 

 

I've made some mistakes, but I've learned a lot in so doing. But it's better absorbed intranasally, or subcutaneously. And if we're not doing injections, I don't know how well that's absorbed in the gut. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (19:58)

And how do you make it intranasally, for intranasal? How do you make an intranasal peptide?

 

Steph Jackson (20:04)

You can use sterile saline, or bacteriostatic water, and you just get the peptide, and you rehydrate it. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (20:12)

So you get the one that's meant for oral use, or you get the one that's meant for subcutaneous. So that would be a prescription, though.

 

Steph Jackson (20:20)

Yes, unless you can find a trusted source. Yes. Okay. And there are some research sites that you can go to research that. 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (20:30)

How do you get bacteriostatic water?

 

Steph Jackson (20:32)

 That you can just get from the lab, or you can probably get it on Amazon. And then you're putting it in a nasal bulb and just figure out what the dosage is. 

 

But that aside, we don't need to take all three things. It's like when people make a probiotic formula. It needs to have all of this and this and this. That's cool. But if we're just looking for a bacteria that helps us to modulate inflammation, we don't need that specific one.

 

So with this, okay. It might not be the right one for the right time, right? 

 

Dr Ritamarie (21:06)

And there are formulas. There are oral formulas, there are companies that make these.

 

Steph Jackson (21:11)

There are a lot of them that do have all three of those things in them.

 

You just have to look, and some of them have butyrate, which can use, but you want to take it orally, some people don't. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (21:22)

So we're looking at these as a tool. Peptides as a tool adjunctively with our other approaches to helping people create a hospitable environment that is conducive to absorbing foods versus leaking in things that shouldn't be.

 

Steph Jackson (21:42)

With the goal of being less triggered, less triggering to the immune system-wise, right? Being able to diversify the things that we can eat over time but not include those things that we know are just not right. And help them to absorb the nutrients, so they can feel better and better. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (21:59)

And one of the downsides of them, they are expensive. It's going to cost you more than a bottle of vitamin C, or a bag of marshmallow root, or something like that. And those things can be used in adjunctive ways, although marshmallow is probably high in FODMAP for people sensitive to FODMAPS. At least it's a little antibacterial, like marshmallow versus…,

 

So it's just part of your toolkit. And not something you just jump in and go, I'm going to jump on the peptide bandwagon and get everybody on these expensive peptide supplements. 

 

Steph Jackson (22:32)

And it makes me feel a little bit sad in that it's another, “this is what I need. This is the thing outside of myself that will fix me.” Right. It's such an exciting thing. They're exciting tools. And yet. It's not like, this is just the searching and searching and searching for the answer.

 

Dr Ritamarie (22:54)

I found the answer. It's a part of a routine, and they have to take ownership, and chew their food, and eat under a calm environment, and eat the right foods and not even inflammatory foods, and blah, blah, blah. Eat the ferments. Find out if they have a histamine intolerance.

 

Any other questions you have? 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (23:19)

I think that I covered all of the ones that I was thinking about. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (21:21)

You were thinking about something specific, like that specific growth thing. 

 

Jennifer Whitmire (23:24)

Yes, I was worried about what those do to growth hormones and about absorption. But people with gut issues and with autoimmune disease, they're not absorbing their nutrients. And so are we spending a lot of money on something and then it's not even being absorbed anyway. 

 

Steph Jackson (23:40)

I think it's not as bad as how we take the single amino acid powders, because they can be so much more easily absorbed. It's closer to that than it is to like eating a whole block of tofu. And it's hoping that our stomach acid and all that is working.

 

Dr Ritamarie (23:58)

Yes. I appreciate all your insights, and I know that it's going to be helpful for our audience listening out there. There's literally hundreds of peptides out there that are used for various things. We chose to focus on autoimmune. With autoimmune we have to focus on the gut in order to help people with autoimmune. You haven't gotten that out of this conversation, that's the main thing, right? 

 

If you're not focusing on the gut, and healing the gut, in an autoimmune population, then you're not going to get very good results. But this is an extra tool, just like a specific probiotic or herbal protocol or whatever. It's another tool in your toolbox. And you can use this with people who are struggling with autoimmune, and leaky gut, and as a next level of something to do. 

 

So I appreciate you being here and talking about this and contributing to our listeners who are in some way, shape, or form functional medicine, I prefer the word functional health practitioners, right? 

 

You're focused on functional health, not let's kill the symptoms, let's kill whatever the bug is that's causing it. And we really want to help people get well. And this is just another tool in our toolbox. 

 

So just keep doing what you're doing, and being out there, and caring about people. That's a big piece. Safety is really an important piece of healing, and we have to have people feel safe, feel safe in their bodies, feel safe in their environment, and then the body's not going to attack.

 

 And I just wanted to, one more thing I wanted to add, because we mentioned it a bit ago is that the immune system is not derailed when there's an autoimmune autoimmune condition. The immune system is doing what it's supposed to do to protect you. And so there's oftentimes in autoimmune, you've got to discover the source of the stress, the source of the toxins, the source of what the immune system is up in arms against, and that's where we have to fix. And if we don't fix that, the immune system will keep doing its job. It's doing its job. We have to help it to do its job in a safe environment.

 

Thank you very much for being here and until next time, shine on.