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Towards an Exercise Pill
aztektum among many other readers sent us news that medical researchers have developed two drugs that can build muscle tone in mice without exercise. While such an advance may inspire dreams of a "couch potato pill," the article mostly talks about other medical uses, should the drugs prove safe and effective in humans. The doctor in charge of the research is working with sports authorities to develop a test to detect the drugs in athletes. "Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that they had found two drugs that did wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice's endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment. A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect. 'It's a little bit like a free lunch without the calories,' said Dr. Ronald M. Evans, leader of the Salk group."
If this drug works as advertised & has no dangerous side effects, why wouldn't *everyone* including athletes take it? I realize that this would be an unfair advantage in the present, but I'm talking about after 20+ years of testing.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Nice idea, but I'm not going to hold my breath. My chosen sport is cycling, and I like to ride long distances, the faster the better. If, on top of the training I do, this pill improves my endurance and other attributes similarly to what it did in mice, and it does that with no life-threatening side effects, then I might consider it. However every "miracle drug" that has ever come along has always come up with some long-term side-effects that shorten life spans or even kill you outright. I'll stick to my workouts and training rides for now, thank you very much.
Although I run 5K at least 4-5 times per week and try to do at least a couple of hours of weight lifting per week, I still think that self righteous "eat less, exercise more" preachers are a bunch of jerks.
Every food or weight related story on Slashdot brings these jerks out of the woodwork. They build up their self esteem by criticizing others. Like an anorexic or a bulimic, they have nothing important to be proud of so they build their self esteem on their weight and feel superior to people who are heavier than they are.
Without resorting to a puritan religious justification, how can you argue that a task "should" be difficult? If it's easier for me to be fit than it is for you, does that make you "better" than me?
If a pill can make it easier for you to lose weight and has no adverse effects why shouldn't you use it? Only a religious jerk demands that people should suffer more than necessary.
If one person enjoys rich creamy deserts and another person enjoys basketball how can you attribute "moral" superiority to one or the other. They're both doing things they enjoy. There's absolutely no moral implication that one of those things tends to increase weight and the other tends to decrease weight.
Well, you have to realize that everything in your body is chemistry. No more, no less. All the feedback loops in your body, including "oi, we're doing lots of contracting here, we need more muscle fibers!" or "oi, we're suffocating here, let's have some more blood vessels!" are based on chemical signals. Some chemicals are produced, whether solely as a dedicated hormone/signal, or as a by-product of the cell's normal functions (e.g., CO2.) Some protein binds to them, and does something else. A lot of them regulate the expression of some genes to produce more or less of some other protein, or trigger cell division.
So, yes, if you just force a bunch of cells to divide, you'll get what you wrote.
On the other hand, if you fake the signal which says, basically, "oi, we're doing lots of contracting here, we need more muscle fibers!", you'll get just that. The body doesn't and can't distinguish between the real thing and a faked substance which binds with the same proteins. (Which is why tobacco, marijuana, etc, work, for example. They too bind to some proteins which were meant for something else, but the body can't differentiate between its own canabinoid signals and the THC from hemp.)
Mind you, it doesn't need to be perfect. If the other signals aren't perturbed, the body will still use its other feedback loops for stuff like building blood vessels there or for how many mitochondria it needs there. So you may have some thick muscles, but without the thick veins of real body builders, since they only have to feed those muscles in an unused state. Which isn't a problem, since, well, they do get as much oxygen there as they actually need. You might get faster tired than a real athlete, as a result, though.
But anyway, to cut this rant short and actually answer your question: yes. It would very much help with that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
muscle atrophy is only one problem. another other is loss of bone density. there's nothing in the article which points to a fix for that yet.
But the iPhone will leave you as soon as it sees a buff gay with a six pack...
There are quite a few people who cannot exorcise. Elderly people with joint problems. People in casts with broken bones. people recovering from operations. There are a lot of people who the Mem Get of your ass and do something just isn't practical.
Muscles don't matter very much if you don't have the neurological conditioning to make use of them.
It would be like having a 1000W amplifier with incorrectly set gain or an uncontrolled input voltage.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
so I'd love to take a pill to jump-start me into a condition where I could do 30 pushups and feel fine instead of 10-15 pushups and have my arms feel like rubber. I always end up quitting because I feel like I can't exercise "good enough"