What peptides is Gwyneth Paltrow using? What she has actually said
The honest answer is shorter than the headline. In an ELLE interview published on 26 January 2026, tied to the launch of Goop's Youth-Boost NAD+ Peptide Rich Cream, Gwyneth Paltrow named three things she puts into her body: NAD+ by intravenous drip, NAD+ by self-injection, and injectable vitamin B12. Asked about the drips: "I do. I also have a great little NAD+ pen where you can give yourself a shot when you need a boost. It's fantastic." And: "Injectable B12 is one of my biggest wellness tools. Same with NAD+ and peptides."
That last word is where the specificity ends. On peptides she offered a category, not a compound: "We're hearing a lot about certain peptides that are being formulated for longevity. They deal with inflammation and brain health. I think we're going to continue to hear a lot around injectable peptides." She did not name one: not BPC-157, not GHK-Cu, not a growth hormone secretagogue, not either Russian nootropic peptide. No verified interview, podcast or Goop statement fills that gap.
That makes her the least specific celebrity in this series: Hailey Bieber named GHK-Cu and BPC-157, Josh Duhamel a four-peptide stack. Paltrow's list is NAD+, B12 and the word peptides, plus a cream her own company sells. Her phrase is a clinic menu heading, not pharmacology: it tells us which menu she has seen, not what she ordered. Everything below about specific peptides translates that menu; none of it is a claim about what is in her refrigerator.
NAD+ is a coenzyme, not a peptide
Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide is what its name says: two nucleotides, one built on nicotinamide and one on adenine, joined through their phosphate groups. It weighs roughly 663 daltons, contains no amino acids and no peptide bond, and is not a peptide under any definition. Calling it one is a category error of the same order as calling caffeine a hormone.
It is, though, one of the most important small molecules in the cell. As NAD+ it accepts electrons from the breakdown of glucose and fat; as NADH it hands them to the mitochondrial chain that makes most of the body's ATP. It is also consumed by the sirtuins, the DNA-repairing PARPs and CD38, so the pool must be constantly rebuilt from dietary precursors. Tissue NAD+ falls with age in rodents, and small human studies point the same way. That observation is the entire premise of the NAD+ market. It is real, and it does not by itself show that pushing NAD+ back up does anything useful.
Why does a coenzyme sit on the same menu as injectable peptides? Because the menu is sorted by delivery and by story, not by chemistry. Both arrive as a vial and a syringe, both carry the word longevity, both come from the same compounders. "Same with NAD+ and peptides" is an accurate description of a price list and an inaccurate description of biochemistry.
NAD+ drip, NAD+ pen, or NMN and NR by mouth: three different things
The drip is the flagship. A bag of NAD+ in saline runs into a vein over anything from an hour to most of an afternoon. The awkward fact is that intact NAD+ does not enter cells in meaningful quantity; enzymes on the cell surface, CD38 and CD73 among them, break extracellular NAD+ into nicotinamide, nicotinamide mononucleotide and nicotinamide riboside, which the cell imports and reassembles. An infusion is an expensive way of delivering precursors.
The one peer-reviewed pharmacokinetic study says roughly that. In 2019 a group led by Ross Grant infused NAD+ over six hours into a small number of healthy volunteers. Plasma NAD+ and its metabolites did not change for the first two hours; by the end, urinary excretion of methylnicotinamide, a disposal product, had risen. No functional outcome was measured. The infusions are also notoriously unpleasant: in the only published tolerability dataset, a 2026 review of one clinic's records, all six NAD+ recipients reported moderate to severe cramping, nausea and chest pressure, and the authors all worked for the clinic, so weigh it accordingly.
The pen is a different product: NAD+ for subcutaneous self-injection, which in the United States means a compounded preparation, because no NAD+ injectable is FDA-approved for any indication. We can find no published human pharmacokinetic study of subcutaneous NAD+: nobody has shown what fraction survives the injection site intact, how fast it is degraded, or whether a pen's concentration and sterility match its label. NAD+ is not robustly stable in solution, so shelf life is a question the compounder, not a regulator, is answering.
Oral NMN and NR are the third thing, and the only one with a real trial literature. Both are absorbed, both are converted to NAD+ through the salvage pathway, and both reliably raise the NAD+ metabolome in blood. That much is settled. What happens after the blood test is not.
What the human trials of NMN and NR actually showed
The first placebo-controlled study of chronic nicotinamide riboside in healthy middle-aged and older adults, a six-week crossover published in 2018, raised blood NAD+ by about sixty percent with no significant effect on its functional measures. The same year, a twelve-week trial in obese, insulin-resistant men found NR raised NAD metabolites and changed nothing that mattered: not insulin sensitivity, not muscle mitochondrial function, not body composition, not energy expenditure. A 2019 study in older men landed in the same place. These careful negative trials get a fraction of the airtime the mouse papers get.
NMN's best result is a 2021 study in Science: ten weeks of oral NMN in twenty-five postmenopausal women with prediabetes improved muscle insulin sensitivity by about a quarter and nothing else. It is well run, small, single-centre and narrow. The 2024 meta-analyses pooling the NMN trials found a consistent rise in blood NAD and no significant effect on fasting glucose, insulin, glycated haemoglobin, insulin-resistance indices or lipids.
The most interesting NAD trial is in disease, not wellness. NADPARK, a thirty-day randomised phase 1 trial in newly diagnosed Parkinson's disease published in 2022, found oral NR raised brain NAD+ on magnetic resonance spectroscopy in a subset of patients, with a mild clinical signal among responders; a phase 3 is under way. That is a real translational programme, aimed at a neurodegenerative disease rather than a healthy person's boost.
The only NAD precursor with a completed, hard-endpoint, phase 3 result is the humblest: in 2015 the ONTRAC trial reported that a year of oral nicotinamide, plain vitamin B3, cut new non-melanoma skin cancers by about twenty-three percent in high-risk patients. Nothing comparable exists for NMN, NR, subcutaneous NAD+ or the drip. For the outcomes Paltrow invoked, energy and longevity, there is no controlled trial of intravenous NAD+ at all.
The FDA and NMN: excluded in 2022, reinstated in 2025
NMN's regulatory story is routinely garbled. In late 2022 the FDA told two ingredient suppliers that NMN could not be sold as a dietary supplement, not on safety or efficacy grounds but under the drug-preclusion clause of the 1994 supplement statute, which excludes a substance authorised for investigation as a new drug, with substantial public trials, before it was marketed as a supplement. NMN had entered drug development first, the agency concluded.
The industry fought it: a citizen petition in 2023, a lawsuit in 2024, and then a letter dated late September 2025 in which the FDA said it had reconsidered its reading of the clause and NMN was not excluded after all. As we read the record, that is a change of statutory interpretation, not a finding about what NMN does. Nicotinamide riboside cleared the new dietary ingredient process years ago and was never in dispute.
The drip and the pen sit in a different regime. No NAD+ injection or infusion product is FDA-approved for any indication, so what a clinic hangs on the pole is a compounded drug whose identity, concentration and sterility rest on the compounder's quality system rather than an approved label. The same fact applies to every injectable peptide below.
Peptides for inflammation and brain health: what the market means by the phrase
To be explicit: nothing here is a claim about what Gwyneth Paltrow injects. It is a translation. On a longevity clinic's list, inflammation almost always means BPC-157, the fifteen-residue peptide sold for gut, tendon and joint recovery. It has hundreds of rodent studies, overwhelmingly from one Zagreb group, and no published randomised controlled trial in humans for any indication. The FDA barred it from pharmacy compounding in September 2023 as a significant safety risk; in April 2026 the agency moved twelve peptides out of that category ahead of advisory review, and at its 23 to 24 July 2026 meeting the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee voted 8 to 6, with one abstention, in favour of compounding BPC-157 for ulcerative colitis. The vote binds nobody.
Brain health means the Russian pair, Semax and Selank. Semax is a seven-residue fragment of the stress hormone ACTH with a stabilising Pro-Gly-Pro tail, stripped of hormonal activity, given as nasal drops, and a prescription medicine in Russia since the 1990s for stroke and cognitive impairment. Selank is its anxiolytic sibling, built on the immune peptide tuftsin with the same tail. Both have a substantial domestic literature and essentially no Western replication to a standard a US or European regulator would accept, and both went onto the 2023 list. In July 2026 the committee voted 8 to 5 in favour of Semax; Selank was not put to a vote.
What the votes mean is easy to overstate. The FDA's own scientists told the panel they lacked the evidence to assess safety and effectiveness, and that several substances had no universally accepted chemical definition, so identity and batch comparability cannot be verified. Moving any onto the lawful compounding list requires notice-and-comment rulemaking, realistically eight to twelve months, so nothing becomes legal compounded medicine before 2027. A second meeting on five more peptides is due by the end of February 2027.
Longevity peptides: epitalon and the growth hormone secretagogues
Longevity on the same menu points first at epitalon, a four-residue synthetic peptide derived from bovine pineal extract by Vladimir Khavinson's group in St Petersburg. Its headline claims, telomerase activation in cultured human cells and reduced mortality in long-term open studies of elderly patients, come from one research lineage over decades and have never been independently replicated. It is approved nowhere, was on the 2023 list, and drew a 7 to 5 advisory vote in July 2026 on the same non-binding terms.
The heading also covers the growth hormone secretagogues CJC-1295 and ipamorelin, usually sold together. CJC-1295 is a GHRH analogue whose long-acting form binds albumin and turns pulsatile growth hormone release into a continuous bleed; ipamorelin is a selective ghrelin-receptor agonist. Human data for both stop at early-phase pharmacokinetics and a discontinued phase 2 programme in an unrelated indication, and controlled trials of raising growth hormone in healthy older adults have consistently failed to show benefit worth the fluid retention, joint pain and insulin resistance. Both were on the 2023 list.
GHK-Cu, the copper peptide Hailey Bieber named, is what clinics file under skin longevity. Its controlled human evidence is topical; there is no controlled trial of the injected form for anything, and reporting this year documented grey-market vials testing positive for arsenic and lead. Paltrow did not mention it. We include it because it is what a reader who searched her name will be offered next.
The Goop NAD+ cream and the peptide-washing critique
The product behind the interview is the Youth-Boost NAD+ Peptide Rich Cream. Paltrow's pitch: "NAD+ is obviously a buzz word in longevity. We wanted to make something that would push the conversation around skin care at the moment and were excited about the idea of putting it into a product. It's such an amazing compound for cellular metabolism and repair, and it works well topically." WWD covered the launch as a beauty-industry story, which is what it was.
On 8 May 2026 the Scientific American podcast Science Quickly, hosted by Rachel Feltman, had Victoria Song of The Verge on to discuss the social-media peptide boom, and she used the Goop cream as her example of what she called peptide washing: marketing a product on peptides when the peptide is a trace ingredient. On her reading of the label, the cream carries a trace of a single peptide and does not list NAD+ itself at all. We have not independently audited the declaration, so we report her reading as hers.
The chemistry makes the critique plausible before any label is read. NAD+ at about 663 daltons, and charged, sits well beyond the 500 dalton rule for passive penetration of intact skin. The molecule with real topical evidence is not NAD+ but its precursor niacinamide, less than a fifth the size, with decades of controlled cosmetic data. Two disclosures: Goop is Paltrow's company, so "it works well topically" is a founder's claim about her own product in a launch interview; and peptide rich is a marketing phrase with no regulatory definition, permitted at any concentration so long as the cream does not promise to treat, heal or cure.
Injectable B12: the one approved drug on her list
Injectable vitamin B12, as cyanocobalamin or hydroxocobalamin, is an FDA-approved prescription medicine of long standing for B12 deficiency and pernicious anaemia, where the gut cannot absorb the vitamin. In those patients it is unambiguously effective and can reverse anaemia and nerve damage.
That evidence does not transfer to the wellness use. In people with normal B12 status there is no controlled evidence that injecting more improves energy, mood or anything else; the vitamin is water-soluble and the surplus leaves in the urine. Paltrow's "one of my biggest wellness tools" is her experience, reported as such. It is also, by a wide margin, the lowest-risk item on her list.
Once the famous name comes off the vial
Take the name off the vial and Paltrow's regimen sorts into three piles. An approved vitamin injection with no evidence of benefit in the non-deficient. A coenzyme with exciting biology, whose oral precursors raise blood NAD+ with modest or null functional results, and whose intravenous and subcutaneous forms have no controlled efficacy data at all. And a single word, peptides, pointing at a shelf of compounds unapproved throughout the West, barred from US compounding in 2023, and now the subject of advisory votes that cannot become law before 2027.
The practical risks follow from that status, not from the celebrity. Anything injectable on that shelf is either compounded, with quality resting on the compounder, or sold as research-use-only powder, with quality resting on nobody; the arsenic and lead in grey-market copper peptide vials this year is what that looks like in practice. Stacking several such vials stacks unmeasured pharmacokinetics on top of one another.
None of this is a criticism of Paltrow for describing what she does. She was asked, she answered, and she was more candid than most in framing peptides as something she was hearing a lot about rather than a treatment she could name. The lesson for the reader who typed her name into a search bar is that the most famous NAD+ user in the world could not tell you which peptide to take, because, as of September 2026, the evidence cannot either.