I just finished an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, October 23, 2008, about the possibility of an exercise pill. Apparantly, sitting around on your duff long enough actually causes the muscle fibers in your body to change from a type I muscle fiber to a type II muscle fiber.

What’s the difference? Well, type I fibers cause changes in the metabolic and contractile properties of the muscle, speeding up glucose uptake and building endurance. Type II does just the opposite. Now what if scientists could isolate the proteins that mimic the benefits enjoyed by athletes and inject them into our growing overweight and diabetic population? Could it change our obesity rates?We’ve known for a long time that exercise reduces the risk of diabetes and in fact lowers blood sugar in diabetics. It causes the skeletal muscle to change so that it can utilize glucose, the body’s energy source, more effeciently. A number of other positive changes occur including increasing insulin sensitivity in the muscle which means less chance of developing diabetes. Now scientists have been able to isolate the specific proteins that effect this change and theorize that an exercise pill is not far off.

Aside from the obvious benefit of lowering the rate of diabetes in this country, these PPAR proteins given along with AMP activated proteins in sedentary mice, actually increased mice endurance on the mouse tread mill by 44%. When the same proteins were given to aerobically active mice, their endurance increased by a whopping 77%.

So maybe an exericse pill is not that far off. Is that a good thing? Well, if it reduces the rate of diabetes and improves exercise tolerance in our population then that’s a good thing. But isn’t it likely that we’ll rely on a magic pill rather than change our behaviors that got us into this state? And finally, how will this be (ab)used by athletes?

There are enough problems with side effects to make this unlikely at this time but given that over two dozen pharmaceuticals have been working on this for over a decade, a solution may not be far away.