According to an article in NewsDaily.com, researchers have discovered the miracle pill everyone is looking for. Exercise in a Pill. No more running, no more lifting weights, no more yoga needed. Two compounds have been found to mimic the effects of exercise…
The drugs reproduce many of the biological benefits of exercise, helping cells burn fat better and boosting endurance, said Ronald Evans, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California.
One of the pills may some day help people enhance their exercise or training, while the other might be more suited for couch potatoes who need to kick-start themselves, Evans and colleagues reported on Thursday in the journal Cell.
“This is a drug that is like pharmacological exercise,” Evans says. “After four weeks of receiving the drug, the mice were behaving as if they’d been exercised.” ~NewsDaily.com
This sounds great and all, but how does that warning go? What sounds too good to be true usually is….
It sounds as if these drugs are already available on an ‘experimental basis’ but none of the testing has been finished to determine the safety of these products. Although this drug may be useful to people who have legitimate health problems preventing them from being physically able to exercise properly, I see this leading to many problems in the general population.
When will people realize that once you mess with something in your body, other things get screwed up too? Why not just do some things the old fashioned way and get the results you want without unintended (harmful) side effects…
August 2, 2008 at 1:44 am
Wow – I agree!
What’s next, “Sex in a pill”?
August 2, 2008 at 8:30 am
Well, some people might have problems with doing things old-fashioned ways, too – think steroids.
August 2, 2008 at 8:31 am
Think problems about male/females body image and the general idea of being a thin celebrity.
August 2, 2008 at 8:44 am
While I admit that idea of an exercise pill sounds over the top, there’s another side to this whole thing:
While plenty of people are overweight/obese, there’s plenty of those who are bombarded with ads and give in to the idea that you should kill/destroy yourself to get thin and be like your favorite celebrity and whatnot.
People who say that overweight/obese people are a problem often forget that we live in a culture where we’re basically taught to hate ourselves and there’s little that seems to be done about that.
August 5, 2008 at 1:18 pm
While I agree with you that we are bombarded with messages and images of thin people being the only people that count, I don’t know what CAN be done about it or what SHOULD be done. Society, as a whole, propagates this cant with their consumerism and obsession with celebrities. The only way to change this cycle is to change ourselves. And although I see nothing wrong with highlighting the importance of healthy diets and exercise in media outlets, the fascination with short-cuts and quick fixes at the expense of your health baffles me. In this same vein, the fact that the news article I read tells consumers that the pills are currently available if you look hard enough even though research is still being done and no one knows the safety of these pills bewilders me.
August 5, 2008 at 4:53 pm
[...] exercise that were not tested after use of the “exercise pill” that I talked about in my previous post. This list [...]
August 14, 2008 at 8:49 am
Nice post.
You make a good point that because this pill is still so new, a complete list of possible side effects remians lacking.
Do you know what, if any, the side effects of Alli (the FDA-approved weight management pill) are? I suppose we may expect to see similar side effects depending on whether this new pill functions in a similar or different manner to Alli
August 20, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Hey Karen,
As far as I can tell Alli works by making you “expel” excess fat by blocking enzymes from breaking down the fat…I don’t think it’s the same mechanism. The Alli website calls their side effects “treatment effects” and basically include rather large, watery bowel movements…