How to read the evidence
Nobody funds a trial on a molecule they cannot own.
Plate 20
Funding story
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Where the money actually goes
A proper trial in a few hundred people costs millions of dollars. The money almost always comes from whoever will own the drug at the end. That is not a plot. It is just how the system is paid for. A company spends the money because a patent lets it earn the money back.
Now look at what most of this catalogue actually is. A piece of a protein your body already makes. A recipe published in the 1970s. A substance a dozen suppliers sell cheaply. Nobody can own any of those. So no company pays, so the trial never happens. The published record just stops where university money ran out. Usually that is the animal stage.
Read that record at face value and you decide the compound is unproven. Read it with the money in mind and you reach a smaller, truer answer: nobody with the money to answer the question had a reason to ask it.
So we publish what does exist
The usual habit is to treat a missing trial as the end of the talk. We think that is lazy. It throws away most of what is actually known. So this site shows every kind of evidence there is. Each one is labeled for exactly what it is, and you weigh it yourself.
- Studies in people1181 cited
- What was measured in people, and how many people. The strongest thing we can show you. On many pages it does not exist.
- What people reporton most profiles
- People describing their own use, with nobody checking. It does not show that anything works. It is often the only account of what to actually expect, and dropping it would be its own kind of dishonesty.
- Animal studies370 cited
- We name the animal, and we never wave these away. For a compound nobody can patent, this is often the whole published record. A result in mice is a real result about mice.
- Lab work (cells in a dish)103 cited
- How the thing might work. It shows why it could work. It does not show an effect in a person, and we keep those two ideas apart.
70 of the 453 compounds here have no study in people at all. They get a full profile anyway, not hidden. Knowing exactly what has and has not been tested in a person is why you came. The main counts used across the site, and what each one means, are on Methodology.
Where this argument stops
The money argument explains why evidence is missing. It does not create evidence, and it cuts both ways just as hard. With no trial, three compounds look the same: one that does nothing, one that causes rare harm, and one with no problems. Missing evidence really is missing, both ways. Nothing on this site is a hidden thumbs up.
One related claim is worth naming, because you hear it all the time: that peptides are low risk because the body already makes them. Where something comes from does not decide the risk. Dose and situation do. Your body makes insulin all day, and insulin is one of the most dangerous drugs in any hospital. The same goes for thyroid hormone, cortisol and growth hormone. In this catalogue, MK-677 is not quite a peptide but sits close to them, and it failed a large final-stage trial. Several others have real, recorded side effects. Those are evidence too, and they stay on the page.
None of that makes the money argument weaker. It makes it hold up, which matters more. An argument that goes too far on safety hands a critic one easy sentence to knock down, and the true part goes down with it.
Not approved is paperwork, not biology
A compound can be unapproved because a trial tested it and it did no better than a dummy pill. Or it can be unapproved because no company ever applied. Those are opposite situations with the same label. This site tells them apart wherever the record allows. Approval tells you what a government signed off on. It does not tell you what is true.
What we are actually claiming
Only this. We have read the studies. We list every one under the claim it backs. We say what animal it was run in, or how many people were in it. We never squash that into a grade. You are not being asked to trust our judgement. You get the sources and the reasoning, so you can disagree with us.