Exercise pill?

The big story in the news at the moment is the announcement of a pill that can give you the benefits of exercise without the work. There's even an article about it on MSNBC. What do you all think about it? Personally, I don't think you could really replace exercise with a pill. There are other things that exercise does for the body than just reducing fat and increasing endurance.

I am going to quit working out - take 4 times the recomended dose and start
competing in local bodybuilding shows!! I think it will be just like everything else
and in a few months you wont hear anything about it. "IF IT SOUNDS TO GOOD
TO BE TRUE ...." Or it will be like the other meds they advertise on TV now -
with the side effects being somthing like " uncontrolled bowles, passing out,
and possibility of sudden death..." LOL

Oh god, I have to read about this more. It sounds pretty stupid to begin with IMO.

i JUST saw this myself... .i could only read so much of it....

did you actually read how it works?

its turns some of your fast twitch muscle fibers that burn sugar for fuel and changes them to slow twitch fibers (think endurance runners) that burn fat.

but what if the patient still overeats? I dont think it changes the physics. You overfuel your body and dont use it all, you have an excess.

would it then change body composition, or shape of muscle??

what happens if you use it and work out?? double benifit??

it only produces the cardio benefits, not that of weight lifting. Still promising, could replace dnp :greedy: .

How exactly does it do that? I didn't see any real information on that part. I am not sure how it can give you the cardio benefit if the muscles didn't actually move.

saudades said:

How exactly does it do that? I didn't see any real information on that part. I am not sure how it can give you the cardio benefit if the muscles didn't actually move.

Click to expand...

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/medicine/la-sci-couchpill1-2008aug01,0,4249687.story

A little follow up:


http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2008/08/couch-potato-wo.html

Sigh!:nope:





Couch-potato workout pill? Not so fast

5:14 PM, August 4, 2008
It sounded so good just three days ago. "You're getting the benefits of exercise without having to do any work," said David Mangelsdorf, a pharmacologist at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who was not connected with the research. That's what he told the Los Angeles Times in an Aug. 1 story about a chemical compound, known as AICAR, which allowed sedentary mice to run farther on a treadmill than their placebo-taking couch-mice peers. And when the mice were dissected, the ones who took AICAR had 29% more high-efficiency muscle fibers than those on a placebo.

As you can well imagine, rodents worldwide were popping out the good, high-fat cheese to celebrate. So were humans, even without proof the drug will ever have any benefit for their species.

So now here comes a killjoy, Frank Booth, a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher who has studied inactivity in humans for 40 years. It seems that changing the physical composition of muscle -- transforming the tissue from sugar-burning fast-twitch fibers to fat-burning slow-twitch ones -- as the chemical compound did for the mice, doesn't even get close to providing all the benefits of exercise.

Booth, in a news release from the university, lists 26 benefits of exercise not touched by the compound AICAR: