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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.
I'm wondering why that genetic pathway isn't active for all mice, but suspect it's because they don't live as long during a famine. I also wonder why mice evolved to be able to run for 160 minutes straight, considering they tend to move in bursts, and hide.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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.
Yes, your reading comprehension shows you'd be a perfect fit for slashdot editing. Or maybe you got tired and couldn't finish reading the summary. I hear there's a pill for that.
Next study would be how to activate genes for reading endurance. Some people just can't go the distance.
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.
If natural selection could have found a way of dramatically increasing our stamina and/or strength without reducing our lifespan or causing other issues that reduce our breeding ability
You don't even have to look for really nasty side effects. Most likely the steady state energy consumption of the body goes up when fitness is enhanced. Given a limited food supply, there's an optimum point on the fitness/energy curve. I assume the natural mice are already close to that optimum. When the environment changes, the optimum may shift, and the metabolism can quickly adapt, because the pathways are already there.
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.
I know this is a joke, but having been there, done that, and having the arthritic knees (currently asymptomatic) to prove it, I'd like to attest that it's not really that hard to dig yourself out of that hole.
Scientific research has shown that exercise, like everything else, has diminishing returns. At any given point, most of the health benefits of adding more exercise to your routine come in the next twenty minutes per week you add. The bad news is that it takes incredible dedication to be super-healthy; but the good news, if you aren't exercising at all, is that it's quite easy to be a lot healthier than you are now.
As for running 50 m, that's not health, it's fitness which are two different things. If I read the summary right, the pill in question gives some of the health benefits of exercise without exercise but not the fitness benefits.
Fitness is an adaptation of your body to the stress it "expects", so the trick isn't doing huge volumes of exercise, it's getting the intensity right. So if you want to adapt your body to running 50m, run at the pace you want to set for 50m, and drop back to walking until you've recovered and do it again. It doesn't matter if you can only run for 10m before you give up, you're telling your body it has to adapt to that level of effort. Again you don't have to put huge amounts of time and suffering into it, but there is some suffering.
The key isn't volume; it's consistency. You don't have to run 10km a day; 2km every other day is just as good unless you're training for a 10k race.
Anyhow, a lot of the attraction of a pill is that you wouldn't have to spend countless hours at the gym to get healthy, but the fact is you don't need that even without a magic pill. There are reasons to go to the gym but health isn't one of them. Anyhow, if you deduct the amount of time some people at the gym spend on their smartphones, they might as well stay home.
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