Pop an exercise pill — but what about the feelgood rush?
Last week I had the misfortune of striking up a conversation with a scowling middleaged woman at the local Dis-Chem. It had nothing to do with hiring whites, as I had initially feared, but everything to do with her aches and pains.
We crossed paths while I was looking at a wrist strap. She wondered aloud — in my direction — which knee guard would be best for the “awful shooting pain” in her knee when she runs, which her sister’s receptionist said was probably caused by her excessive foot pronation.
To cut a long story short, which I wish I could have done then, she proceeded to discuss her daily cocktail of unproven herbal remedies for every malady imaginable and then said: “If only they could invent one pill for all my problems.”
People like pills. If you think the internet of things and artificial intelligence has radically changed our world, wait until cosmetic gene therapy and cellular altering medication goes mainstream. And it will — either legally or on the black market. There is a captive market.
Scientists from MIT and Harvard Medical School have published a study that identified how exercise and high-fat diets modify cells, genes and cellular pathways. The next step, after discovering that exercise is not just about “calories burnt” but that it triggers a host of important cellular changes in the muscle and bones, is the endeavour to develop a drug that mimics these changes. Or, in layman’s terms, exercise in a pill.
But it turns out that on the other side of the world, scientists in Japan have already identified a compound that does just that — a drug that induces the effects of exercise without, you know, exercise. Manna from heaven.
Tomoki Nakashima recently published the findings of his research undertaken at Tokyo Medical and Dental University. The research team identified a new compound called Locamidazole, or LAMZ. Some lucky mice got a test run and the results were unambiguous.
The rodents who got the drug, and who did almost the same amount of activity as the control group, had wider muscle fibres, and they were stronger as well as fitter. They got the benefits of exercise without exercising.
LAMZ increases the number of mitochondria in muscle and bone cells by stimulating the expression of a gene for the PGC-1 alpha, which is a protein that maintains muscle and bone cells and helps make more mitochondria. The drug hasn’t been tested on humans.
Both groups of scientists argue that some people just can’t exercise safely, and that the practical application would be a medical intervention for those who can’t move on their own. Tell that to the hoards of competitive sports people wanting to win at all costs and suburbanites wanting to buy the body without paying the dues.
This isn’t cynical, it’s just human nature. Researchers at University College London published findings a few years ago that found we are hard-wired to be lazy. The lead author in this study, Nobuhiro Hagura, wrote: “We found that not only does ‘cost to act’ influence people’s behaviour, but it even changes what we think we see.”
And this, dear reader, is why there is hype about “exercise in a pill”. However, it defeats the point of exercise. Yes, you want stronger muscles and bones, and you want to be fit, but do you really want it without the endorphin rush that rewards you after an intense workout or difficult run?
Do you want the results at the expense of fresh air, team sports or the feeling of cool water against your skin? Do you want the body without the satisfaction that accompanies achievement?
Who are we kidding, of course you do. Most of us do, but as we get deeper into our fourth industrial revolution where there’s an app for this and a pill for that, maybe some old-school grind will slap some sense into us.
The pill would give you some of the sideeffects of exercise but not the exercise itself and despite being hard-wired to be lazy, we’re designed to move.