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'Exercise-In-A-Pill' Boosts Athletic Endurance By 70 Percent, Study Finds (sciencedaily.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Daily: Salk Institute scientists, building on earlier work that identified a gene pathway triggered by running, have discovered how to fully activate that pathway in sedentary mice with a chemical compound, mimicking the beneficial effects of exercise, including increased fat burning and stamina. The study, which appears in Cell Metabolism on May 2, 2017, not only deepens our understanding of aerobic endurance, but also offers people with heart conditions, pulmonary disease, type 2 diabetes or other health limitations the hope of achieving those benefits pharmacologically. Previous work by the Evans lab into a gene called PPAR delta (PPARD) offered intriguing clues: mice genetically engineered to have permanently activated PPARD became long-distance runners who were resistant to weight gain and highly responsive to insulin -- all qualities associated with physical fitness. The team found that a chemical compound called GW1516 (GW) similarly activated PPARD, replicating the weight control and insulin responsiveness in normal mice that had been seen in the engineered ones. However, GW did not affect endurance (how long the mice could run) unless coupled with daily exercise, which defeated the purpose of using it to replace exercise. In the current study, the Salk team gave normal mice a higher dose of GW, for a longer period of time (8 weeks instead of 4). Both the mice that received the compound and mice that did not were typically sedentary, but all were subjected to treadmill tests to see how long they could run until exhausted. Mice in the control group could run about 160 minutes before exhaustion. Mice on the drug, however, could run about 270 minutes -- about 70 percent longer. For both groups, exhaustion set in when blood sugar (glucose) dropped to around 70 mg/dl, suggesting that low glucose levels (hypoglycemia) are responsible for fatigue.
Let me wikipedia that for you... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW501516
"GW501516 (also known as GW-501,516, GW1516, GSK-516 and on the black market as Endurobol[1]) is a PPAR receptor agonist that was invented in a collaboration between Ligand Pharmaceuticals and GlaxoSmithKline in the 1990s, was entered into clinical development as a drug candidate for metabolic diseases and cardiovascular diseases, and was abandoned in 2007 because animal testing showed that the drug caused cancer to develop rapidly in several organs.
In 2007 research was published showing that high doses of GW501516 given to mice dramatically improved their physical performance; the work was widely discussed in popular media, and led to a black market for the drug candidate and to its abuse by athletes as a doping agent. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) developed a test for GW501516 and other related chemicals and added them to the prohibited list in 2009; it has issued additional warnings to athletes that GW501516 is not safe"
It shouldn't be a surprise that doping improves performance and is bad for you...
So, I now can run longer and die sooner?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
GW501516 (also known as GW-501,516, GW1516, GSK-516 and on the black market as Endurobol[1]) is a PPARÎ receptor agonist that was invented in a collaboration between Ligand Pharmaceuticals and GlaxoSmithKline in the 1990s, was entered into clinical development as a drug candidate for metabolic diseases and cardiovascular diseases, and was abandoned in 2007 because animal testing showed that the drug caused cancer to develop rapidly in several organs.
In 2007 research was published showing that high doses of GW501516 given to mice dramatically improved their physical performance; the work was widely discussed in popular media, and led to a black market for the drug candidate and to its abuse by athletes as a doping agent. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) developed a test for GW501516 and other related chemicals and added them to the prohibited list in 2009; it has issued additional warnings to athletes that GW501516 is not safe.
22K per day? Yeah, sure. You and the other elephants in the enclosure, right? The most the human gut can absorb per day is roughly 6K to 8K which is why a lot of people who do extreme expeditions still lose weight despite eating high calorie food almost non stop.
For the majority of our time on earth we have been subject to limited food supplies. People in first world countries are now at a point where they are able to regularly eat more than their bodies naturally burn, usually unintentionally. If we could teach our bodies this, we would be able to make better use of the available energy. Now, whether this drug is a safe way to do that is an entirely different issue.