You type "best peptides" into a search bar and forty minutes later you're looking at a list of compounds that read like router passwords, every one of them described as the one that changed everything. So you buy six, run them all at once for three weeks, and quit, because you have no idea which one did anything or whether anything happened at all. That's an expensive way to learn nothing.
Dr. Ashley Froese, a family medicine physician who runs the YouTube channel This Is Not Covered, put the problem this way in a recent video: most people aren't buying the wrong peptides, they're buying them in the wrong order. Her roadmap is worth borrowing, so we've laid it out below and translated it for the person who usually reads this site.
Pick one thing to fix first
Just one. Weight, energy, recovery and repair, or skin and hair. Most people arrive with all four and want to solve all four, and that instinct is exactly what turns a research protocol into a shopping cart.
Choosing one isn't about restraint for its own sake, it's about attribution. If you change four variables in the same month, you can't read the result. You've spent the money either way, so you may as well end up with information you can use.
Weight usually goes first, when there's meaningful weight involved
Froese's reasoning is that fixing weight tends to improve several of the other complaints at the same time, so it does more work per dollar than anything else on the list. Sleep, joint load, energy, and blood sugar all tend to move with it.
This is the tier where the GLP-1 class lives, semaglutide and tirzepatide and the newer retatrutide, and it's the one part of the peptide world with large human trials behind it. If that's your starting point, our semaglutide and tirzepatide comparison is the better place to begin than this page.
Then energy, which usually means mitochondria and sleep
If you're lighter and moving better and still wake up feeling like nobody plugged you in overnight, the next place to look is your mitochondria, the structures inside your cells that turn food into usable energy.
SS-31 gets described as a mitochondrial booster and that isn't quite what the research is examining. It's studied as a stabilizer, closer to repairing an engine than asking it for more horsepower. MOTS-c is the one studied for encouraging your body to build more of them, alongside effects on insulin sensitivity. Repair what you have, then build more. That order has a logic to it, and we've written a longer piece on how to sequence the mitochondrial compounds if this is where you're headed.
Then growth hormone signalling, and pick only one
This is where the most common and most expensive beginner mistake happens. Tesamorelin, sermorelin, and CJC-1295 are all growth hormone releasing hormone peptides, meaning they work through the same door. Running two of them together is a popular idea online and Froese doesn't think it's necessary. Pick one.
Which one depends on what you're after. Tesamorelin has the visceral fat research behind it, sermorelin gets chosen more often when sleep and recovery are the priority, and ipamorelin works through a different pathway entirely, which is why it sometimes gets added rather than swapped. Our CJC-1295 and sermorelin comparison and the ipamorelin and sermorelin piece both go deeper than we can here.
Then repair, for the things that still hurt
BPC-157 and TB-500 are the two most people land on. In the rodent work, BPC-157 is studied for drawing blood flow and healing attention toward damaged tissue, and TB-500 for encouraging cells to migrate into an area and rebuild. They're often described as complementary for that reason.
One thing that confuses almost everyone new to this: these are systemic, meaning they circulate. Researchers don't inject them into the sore knee. If inflammation is more the story than injury, KPV is the one Froese expects to hear more about over the next few years, mostly for its anti-inflammatory work rather than the gut angle it's better known for.
Then skin, hair, and tissue remodelling
GHK-Cu gets filed under "skin peptide" and that undersells what it's studied for. The research covers collagen, wound healing, and hair follicle regeneration, which makes it a tissue remodelling compound that happens to show up first in your mirror. For a lot of the women who read this site, this tier is the reason they started looking in the first place, and there's no rule saying it has to come last. It's just the one that's easiest to evaluate once the rest is steadier.
The advanced tier can wait
Thymosin alpha-1 for immune function, epithalon for longevity, semax and dihexa for cognition, selank for anxiety. These are interesting and they are not a starting point. Nothing about them rewards a person who hasn't yet established what a single compound feels like on its own.
Froese's line for this, and it's the one worth keeping: you're building a person, not collecting trading cards. Owning every compound on the list isn't a protocol, it's a collection.
What sequencing actually saves you
Two things, and both of them are money. The first is that you stop paying for compounds you can't evaluate. The second is that when something does work, you know which one it was, so the next vial you buy is a deliberate purchase instead of a guess.
The third saving is the one this site exists for. Research-grade compounds sit close to raw cost, while the approved versions carry the markup that comes with a brand and a trial program, and the gap between those two numbers is large enough to be worth ten minutes of your attention. Whichever tier you start in, compare the real price per milligram rather than the price on the vial, and buy from vendors who publish third-party purity and identity testing. Our price comparison tool runs that math across vetted vendors so you're not doing reconstitution arithmetic in a notes app at midnight.
Most of these compounds are sold for research, and outside the GLP-1 class there are no large human trials establishing a safe dose or a long-term profile in people. You already know that. You're an adult making an informed call about your own body, and that call is yours.
Where to go from here
If you've picked your first tier, the goal-based guides go one level deeper than this page does. We have separate write-ups for fat loss and body composition, sleep and stress, recovery and injury, skin and hair, and longevity, each written for women rather than adapted from men's protocols.
If you haven't bought anything yet, read what to check before your first order and our guide to evaluating a vendor first. Those two will save you more than any sequencing decision on this page.