RSSAn exercise pill? Don't count on it
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The pleasantly plump may have been given new hope and a new way to shed unwanted pounds without even exercising: Just pop a pill.
Is it too good to be true? For now, it appears to work on mice, but the jury is out on whether couch potatoes will see their dream come true.
The Los Angeles Times reported recently that in experiments on mice that did no exercise, a chemical compound known as AICAR allowed them to run 44 percent farther on a treadmill than those that did not receive the drug. We're still trying to figure out that contradiction: Proof of the value of a pill replacing exercise is substantiated by running the little critters on a treadmill.
That sounds like a whole lot of exercise to us.
The drug reportedly changes the physical composition of muscle, essentially transforming the tissue from sugar-burning fast-twitch fibers to fat-burning slow-twitch ones -- the same change that occurs in distance runners and cyclists through training.
The researchers said the drug's fat-burning ability could also help reduce weight, ward off diabetes and prevent heart disease -- the benefits of daily exercise without even working up a sweat.
Oh, that it were so.
"The mouse doctors and cell biologists are of course quite enthusiastic about these things, but the human doctors are a little more reticent," Dr. Benjamin Levine, a cardiologist who leads the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, told the Times.
And the kicker: In sedentary mice, the drug had no effect on endurance. Only when the drug was combined with exercise did it give the mice an advantage.
Of course, more research is needed as to how any application to humans might play out. Or, if it will even happen.
We all know what that means. Off the couch and into an exercise regimen. There is no free pass in the medicine cabinet, at least not quite yet.
* Members of the Yakima Herald-Republic editorial board are Michael Shepard, Sarah Jenkins, Bill Lee and Karen Troianello.
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