The red list: peptides and products we will not recommend

Why publish a red list at all

Most peptide-adjacent media is either uniformly enthusiastic or uniformly alarmist. Neither serves the user. A red list is more useful: a finite, reasoned set of compounds we have decided not to cover, with the reasoning visible so you can disagree if you want to. We will be wrong about some of these over time. When we are, we will move the molecule and say why.

Compounds with active safety signals

These are not 'peptides we are unsure about'. They are compounds with documented harm signals at doses that users in this market are realistically taking.

• 2,4-Dinitrophenol (DNP) — not a peptide, but adjacent in the bodybuilding-supplement market. Lethal hyperthermia is a documented outcome. The therapeutic window is small enough that experienced users have died.
• Triiodothyronine (T3) at supraphysiologic doses for fat loss — outside a hypothyroid indication, you are inducing iatrogenic hyperthyroidism with all the cardiac and bone consequences.
• Sermorelin sold as 'oral' — sermorelin is not orally bioavailable in any meaningful sense; products marketed this way are mislabeled or fraudulent.
• DSIP (delta sleep-inducing peptide) sold at gram-level doses — the published evidence is thin and the marketing has run far ahead of the data.

Compounds with credibility-destroying marketing

Some compounds may have legitimate niches but are sold in ways that disqualify the supply chain.

• 'Generic GHK-Cu' creams that are not pH-stable or contain copper-deactivating co-ingredients — the molecule on the box is fine; the formulation is doing nothing.
• Combination 'wellness shots' that mix five peptides at undisclosed ratios — you cannot dose what you cannot measure, and you cannot attribute side effects.
• Any peptide sold via MLM-style structures with downstream resellers — quality control breaks at the second or third resale step.
• Vendors marketing peptides as 'FDA-approved' when they are not. That is a hard exit signal — if they will lie about regulatory status, they will lie about purity.

Compounds we are watching but not yet recommending

Different category from the above — these are molecules with interesting mechanisms but where the human evidence, sourcing reliability, or both are not yet at our editorial bar. We expect some of them to migrate into the main index over the next 12–24 months.

• Dihexa — strong cognition signal in animal models, no controlled human data, unstable supply chain.
• FOXO4-DRI — senolytic interest, very limited human data, formulation challenges.
• Various 'gene therapy peptides' marketed by clinics — until the clinical-trial pipeline catches up, these are positioned beyond what the data supports.

How we decide

Our exclusion criteria are explicit:

• Documented serious adverse events at realistic doses without an offsetting clinical use case.
• A supply chain that cannot reliably deliver what the label claims.
• Marketing that materially misrepresents legal or regulatory status.
• Mechanism that is incompatible with the route or dose at which the product is sold.

What this is not

We do not red-list a compound because it is unconventional, because it lacks FDA approval, or because the evidence is anecdotal. Most of the PepVault index would fail those tests. We red-list when the cost-benefit math for a typical user is clearly negative or when the supply chain is so unreliable that the molecule on the label is not the molecule in the bottle.