It starts with an Instagram Reel: an influencer talking about the most powerful weight loss peptides. Two taps, and the feed is filled with peptide-fueled weight loss journeys. Then the descent into the rabbit hole begins: YouTube lecturers, AI simplified scientific papers, Reddit thread obsessions, private chat groups. It ends with a shipment of a powdered weight loss drug from China, which is unapproved and still in testing.Hundreds of people across India depend on these imports, partly to beat the prices of prescription drugs like Monjaro, which can cost as much as Rs 16,000 a month. Semaglutide (brand name Ozempic) has become cheaper, but even this is unlikely to impact the market for “Chinese peptides”. People’s desperate search for ways to delay the weight loss process further promotes this. Even the most powerful GLP-1 only works up to a point, as the gut eventually adapts to the drug. By stopping these, weight starts increasing gradually.