Imagine a typical morning: You groggily wake up, brush your teeth, eat breakfast, take your exercise pill:
Wait, what?
It may not be so far-fetched, as Salk Institute research published this week in Cell Metabolism found that such a drug increased athletic endurance by 70 percent in mice.
The drug activates a genetic pathway that usually occurs from running, enabling the mice to experience similar outcomes like increased stamina and fat loss, reports Fox News. The best part? It didn’t require any movement.
This research builds on earlier work, in which researchers discovered sedentary genetically-engineered mice that had a permanently-activated gene (known as PPAR delta, or PPARD) grew into long-distance runners. They were impervious to weight gain and were more responsive to insulin, which regulates your blood sugar and lets your body absorb carbohydrates for energy use. A chemical compound, GW1516, offered the same PPARD activation, though it didn’t alter endurance.
The new study gave the sedentary mice the GW1516 dose for 8 weeks as opposed to four weeks. While the control group mice could only run 160 minutes before exhaustion took hold, the drug gave mice a 70 percent leg up at 270 minutes. And the mice were still insulin-responsive and weight gain-resistant.
“This study suggests that burning fat is less a driver of endurance than a compensatory mechanism to conserve glucose,” Michael Downes, a senior scientist at Salk and study author said in a statement. “PPARD is suppressing all the points that are involved in sugar metabolism in the muscle so glucose can be redirected to the brain, thereby preserving brain function.”
Pharmaceutical companies have shown interest in the drug for use in human clinical trials. Researchers see a possible prescription drug use for those with obesity or type 2 diabetes to burn more fat in addition to helping patients’ fitness before or after any surgery they may undergo.
Still, such a pill wouldn’t be immune to skepticism.
“Personally, I am not certain that such a pill would be possible,” Ali Tavassoli, a Southampton University professor of chemical biology told The Guardian. “There’s a big difference between showing in an organism that you can mimic exercise over the short-term and demonstrating the long-term effects of doing this.”
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One Day, A Pill Might Offer You the Same Benefits As Exercise originally appeared on usnews.com
