How to read a peptide study without getting fooled

A short field guide, because half the arguments on this board come down to people not knowing how to read a paper before they pin something. Run through these in order before starting a cycle or trusting a vendor write-up: 1. What was studied: Petri dish, rodents, or humans? In vitro just proves a biological pathway exists. Animal papers show mechanism in a live organism, but rat metabolism isn't human metabolism. A cell culture isn't a sub-q injection in a person. 2. Was there a randomized control group? Without controls, you can't separate the peptide from time, placebo, or the fact that someone starting a new compound usually fixes their diet and PT at the same time. Uncontrolled logs are just hypothesis generators. 3. What was the actual endpoint measured? Histology on a slide isn't joint pain in the gym. Load-to-failure on an excised tendon isn't returning to heavy squats. Surrogate endpoints look great on paper but routinely fail to translate. 4. How many subjects? Tiny sample sizes produce huge effect sizes that collapse as soon as someone tries to replicate them. This is the main reason hyped compounds fail to deliver in real-world logs. 5. Who funded and ran the paper? Not an automatic dealbreaker, but always worth checking who stands to profit off the product line. 6. Does the vendor claim match the actual study population? A ligament paper cited on a BPC tendon listing. An acute strain protocol cited for ten-year chronic tendinopathy. This is where most seller hype lives. Apply this filter to the papers thrown around here and you will quickly spot the difference between legitimate mechanisms and pure marketing noise.