Good news for people who would love to be fit but aren’t able to work out! Scientists have moved one step closer to developing a medication that can give you the fat-burning benefits of exercise in a pill.
Exercise in the pill: not just for lazy people
Scientists are working in several different areas, all of which are discovering ways to mimic how the body reacts to exercise, replicating those actions through pharmaceutical means.
Some assume that people who are overweight are just too lazy to work out and have no self-control when it comes to overeating.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Many people have legitimate reasons they are unable to exercise to a beneficial degree, whether it’s because they have paralysis, an injury, an disease, are recovering from surgery, or live with a number of other limitations.
If science could develop a way to give these people the fat-burning benefits of exercise through medication, it could go a long way to improving and maintaining health.
After all, exercise truly is one of the best “medicines” for your body. The benefits of exercise are many: slowing down aging, improving blood pressure, heart rate, mental well-being, cognitive sharpness, bone density, muscle tone, body fat, body weight, and more.
Scientists test several new “exercise pill” drugs
Before developing new medications that could serve as “exercise in a pill,” scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) looked at the human genetic code to understand how they might make some cells in the human body go into reverse, LADBible reports. Scientists hope to use such knowledge to “develop drugs that mimic the impact of exercise across multiple tissues,” Dr. Kellis, an expert in computational biology, told The Sun.
Specifically, they looked at mesenchymal stem cells, which morph into fat-storing machines. If scientists could flip that switch off, it would prevent the body from storing fat, according to an MIT research paper published in the journal Cell.
In another recent study by Tokyo Medical and Dental University, published in the journal Bone Research, scientists developed a new drug, known as locamidazole, that mimics the changes in muscle and bone that occur as a result of exercise, IFL Science reported.
In yet another study published earlier this year in the journal Nature, researchers pinpointed a molecule in the blood produced during exercise. Researchers then gave mice this molecule, finding it lessened their food intake and improved their metabolic profile.
