It begins with an Instagram reel: an influencer touting the most potent weight-loss peptides. Two taps, and the feed is flooded with peptide-fuelled weight-loss journeys. Then the descent into rabbit hole begins: YouTube explainers, AIsimplified scientific papers, Reddit thread obsessions, private chat groups. It ends with a shipment from China of powdered weight-loss medication, unapproved, still in trials.Hundreds across India rely on these imports, partly to beat the prices of doctor-prescribed medications like Mounjaro, which can cost Rs 16,000 for a month. Semaglutide (brand name Ozempic) has become cheaper, but even that is unlikely to dent the market for “Chinese peptides”. What fuels it is people’s desperate hunt 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 medication. Stopping them leads to gradual weight regain.
