Indians hunger for untested Chinese weight-loss peptides | India News
It starts with an Instagram reel: an influencer talking about the most powerful weight-loss peptide. Two taps, and the feed is inundated with a peptide-fueled weight-loss journey. Then the descent down the rabbit hole begins: YouTube explainers, AI simplified scientific papers, Reddit thread obsessions, private chat groups. It ends with a shipment of powdered weight-loss drugs from China, unapproved, still in testing.Hundreds of people across India depend on these imports, partly to beat the cost of doctor-prescribed drugs like Mounjaro, which can cost as much as Rs 16,000 for a month’s supply. Semaglutide (brand name Ozempic) has become cheaper, but it is unlikely to dent the market for “Chinese peptides”. What fuels people’s desperate search for ways to delay weight loss plateaus. Even the most potent GLP-1s only work up to a point, as the gut eventually adapts to the drug. Stopping them leads to gradual weight gain.
