That is why we built Peptide Decoding. One place to get a straight answer, in plain words, with the source it came from.
Some peptides are FDA approved. Some have never been tested in a single human being. Some have one mouse study behind them and a hundred websites acting like that settles it. Vendors sell in a legal gray area. Reddit threads argue with each other and nobody wins. Influencers hand out doses between sponsor codes. Almost everyone talking has something to sell you, and hardly anyone explains the basics in words a normal person can use.
We read the research, then we tell you where the answer came from.
Every compound on this site carries one of six labels — the same six you can filter by on Explore.
Approved by the FDA for at least one use, on the back of large human trials. We say what it was approved for, because that is often not the reason people are taking it.
Being studied in people right now, or already studied and never approved. We say how many people, for how long, and whether it hit what it was testing for.
Prescribed or administered in clinical settings, often compounded. Real-world use is not the same as a finished trial, so we say what is actually behind it.
Tested in rats, mice, or cells in a dish, or not tested at all. Neither one is proof in a person.
Available without a prescription as a supplement or topical. Being easy to buy says nothing about whether it works, so it still gets the same treatment.
No study exists. This is what people report doing.
Those six things get treated as the same thing almost everywhere else on the internet. Here they never are.
Plenty of compounds have never been studied in people at all.
We go looking anyway. We read through Reddit, forums, and Discord servers, find the answers that keep coming up, and report what the common practice is.
Community consensus is not evidence. A thousand people repeating a number does not make it a tested number. We label it so you can see exactly what kind of answer you are getting.
Some of those numbers trace back to nothing at all. When we chase a widely repeated figure and cannot find a study under it, we say so and leave the number out.
A lot of sites say to run ipamorelin five days on and two days off.
We went looking for the study behind that schedule and could not find one. Not a small study, not a weak study, nothing. So our ipamorelin page says the schedule is common practice with no published research under it.
Who pays for this
Readers do. A Pro subscription is the only subscription revenue this site has, and that is deliberate.
Pro subscriptions
The compound library, the guides, the reconstitution and dose maths, the cost calculator and the comparison tool are free, and they stay free. Anything that stops somebody hurting themselves belongs outside a paywall.
Pro pays for the seven tools that track your own protocol: saved peptides and dose plans, a weekly schedule, inventory and reorder dates, vendor cost-per-mg comparison, monthly cost and cost per dose, spend history, and CSV exports of your stacks.
Affiliate commissions
Some vendor links earn a commission. Every one is marked where it appears and listed on the disclosure page.
A commission has never decided whether a vendor is listed, how it is rated, or what is written about it. The pricing data is collected the same way for every vendor, commission or not.
No vendor pays for coverage
No vendor pays to be listed, ranked, reviewed or written about. Not for a fee, not for a discount code, not for early access, not for a friendlier write-up. When a vendor comes out badly here, it is because of what we found.
If that ever changes
Nobody sees a page before it goes live. No vendor has ever been given the chance to respond to, soften, or remove anything written here. If our funding model ever changes, it gets written on this page first, with the date, before it appears anywhere else on the site.
We are not doctors. We are not a clinic.
We do not diagnose anything and we do not tell you what to take.
Doctors disagree about most of these compounds too, and that is not a knock on doctors. Most peptides have never been through a large human trial, so there is no settled answer for anyone to give you. What we can do is read the studies, the FDA documents, and the arguments, all the way through, and lay them out clearly enough that you can have a real conversation with a clinician.
This site is education. It is not medical advice, and reading it does not create a doctor patient relationship.
Research changes. Approvals change. Several peptides moved regulatory categories in 2026 alone. We go back through published pages against the original sources, and every page shows the date it was last reviewed.
We have found errors in our own work and fixed them. We have also found errors in claims that the entire internet repeats.
Tell us when we get it wrong.
If you spot a mistake, email us. We check it against the source, we fix it, and we say what changed.
hello@decodedsciences.comPeptide Decoding is published by Decoded Sciences LLC, a registered company in the United States.
5831 Forward Ave #1361
Pittsburgh, PA 15217
hello@decodedsciences.com
Read more about how we grade evidence and how we handle corrections.