ScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2008) — Trying to reap the health benefits of exercise? Forget treadmills and spin classes, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies may have found a way around the sweat and pain. They identified two signaling pathways that are activated in response to exercise and converge to dramatically increase endurance.
The team of scientists, led by Howard Hughes Medical Investigator Ronald M. Evans, Ph.D., a professor in the Salk Institute's Gene Expression Laboratory report in the July 31 advance online edition of the journal Cell that simultaneously triggering both pathways with oral drugs turned laboratory mice into long-distance runners and conferred many of exercise's other benefits.
In addition to their allure for endurance athletes, drugs that mimic the effects of exercise have therapeutic potential in treating certain muscle diseases, such as wasting and frailty, hospital patients unable to exercise, veterans and others with disabilities as well as obesity and a slew of associated metabolic disorders where exercise is known to be beneficial.(Full Story at sd)
If it can help people with rare diseases I'm all for it, but I'm just too skeptical (bitter?) to believe that the drug companies will leave it there. If this drug ever does make it to market, it will be perscriped like crazy. The real problem is that people will start thinking they can eat anything (junk) and look better by taking this pill, and everything will be OK. It just doesn't work that way, and you can't convince me otherwise.
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