Thanks.... I think I got it through all the sarcasm. It's all chinese.
Well two places one of them very expensive claim to be made in the U.S.
Is that true? Who knows...
But I don't have a specific problem with peptides synthesized in China. In particular one peptide synthesizer that I am aware of operates in a GMP facility. Surely there are others and surely there are those that do not.
What I would conjecture is the bigger issue is the purity of the peptide. For the most part the impurity is simply incomplete amino acid chains, nothing toxic.
But because it takes time, effort & resources to eliminate all of the amino acids that did not take, peptide synthesizers charge based on purity level.
Pricing is based on the following categories:
Crude Desalted >75% >85% >90% >95% >98% >99%
Crude = still toxic chemical remain
Desalted = toxic chemical removed
Purity percentages = percent of peptide made up of active amino acid chains
Pricing ratios per x amount of an amino acid are for example as follows:
Crude - Desalted - >75% >85% >90% >95% >98% >99%
$4.10 -- $5.40 - $9.20 $11.90 $13.94 $14.91 $22.23 negotiated
So from this you can see that:
- No retailer is ever going to spend money on 99% purity. Even if they did, unless they independently lab test it, they may not be sure that they didn't get ripped off.
- Pricing per amino acid is getting close to double between 95% and 98%!! So what retailer is going to spend that kind of money, when they can buy twice as much for 3% less purity.
This gives us the premise that no retailer (and unless you hold a wholesalers feet to the fire, no wholesaler) is selling peptides of greater then 95% of ANYTHING.
95% is fine. But the concern is that a retailer or their source will then decide to cut costs further to save a little. The economic incentive is not huge to do so BUT for longer amino acid chains the incentive is measurable.
Chriswhat once tested a peptide and it turned out to be about 80% purity w/ no contaminants. The retailer was repeatedly told and given a COA indicating much higher purity by the Chinese peptide synthesizer. Eventually the Chinese peptide synthesizer came clean and admitted that it was only 80% purity.
What you can expect:
- There is really no incentive not to remove the toxicity.
- There is no incentive to supply greater then 95% purity because even the end user is not willing to pay double for 3% points more.
- In the end you will receive between 75% and 95% purity no matter what is advertised. Factors to consider:
- length of time a retailer has been in business because if he sticks around then that means he has acquired experience in dealing with multiple purchases of product from his peptide synthesizer.
- the reputation of the retailer, because if he cares about taking care of the customer that means he treats things as a business and desires to have repeat customers.
- the reports of users...the more reports from people familiar with that particular peptide (not a first time user so much) the better.
- does the retailer also sell a tanning peptide? If so there is a huge community of people that use tanning peptides and they are sensitive to quality. Not only that you do have some objective evidence to view. This can serve as a proxy for the retailers other peptides...meaning it probably increases the likelihood that the rest of the peptides are good.
- most importantly I would avoid retailers that have a current substance abuse problem and/or also sell illegal to possess items domestically.