A couch potato’s dream – a magic pill that could mimic the benefits of exercising without ever having to leave the couch could soon be a reality.
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While pharmaceutical developers hope to target overweight and obese people with an exercise pill as well as tap into the athletic market, the expectations of the benefits have thus far been extremely exaggerated by the marketing efforts of the companies that are developing the pills.
Researchers from the University of Sydney have created the world’s first “blueprint” for how exercise causing a 1,000 molecular changes in the body, NDTV reports. “This review focuses on the concept of “exercise pills” and how they mimic the effects produced by physical exercise including oxidative fibre-type transformation, mitochondrial biogenesis, increased fat oxidation, angiogenesis and improvement of exercise capacity”.
Exercise pills are an achievable goal, with drugs being developed to mimic the effects of physical activity, but they will be no substitute for the real thing – at least not in the immediate future.
He explained that exercise is crucial for lessening the risks of certain diseases and cancers but for a few people it was not a practical option.
“Clearly people derive many other rewarding experiences from exercise – such as increased cognitive function, bone strength and improved cardiovascular function”, said Laher.
In this latest study, the researchers analyzed human skeletal muscle biopsies from four untrained, healthy males following 10 minutes of high intensity exercise. The majority of the changes found in the study had not been previously associated with exercise. “The signaling molecules activated by physical exercise are logically considered to be potent pharmacological targets for such exercise pills”.
The major benefit of an exercise pill is that the pill produces a similar reaction in muscle tissue that exercise does. “It plays an essential role in controlling energy metabolism and insulin sensitivity”, said co-author Dr Nolan Hoffman from the Charles Perkins Centre and Faculty of Science.
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While scientists suspected that exercise causes a complicated series of changes to human muscle, this is the first time exactly what happens has been mapped.
