Exercise… In A Pill?

Exercise is, of course, vitally important for many aspects of health. So, can it be replaced by a pill?

And the answer is: in part, at least!

Here’s how…

Trick the muscles; trick the brain

First, what this won’t do:

• Give all the cardiovascular benefits of exercise
• Give all the strength (muscular or skeletal) benefits of exercise

You may be thinking: isn’t that everything then?

And no it isn’t, because the word “all” was doing a fair bit of heavy-lifting (so to speak) in those bullet points.

For example, there are a lot of physiological benefits, such as to muscle metabolism and knock-on effects in brain health (not just due to improved circulation, but also due to assorted chemicals being released too).

Researchers (Dr. Bernard Jasmin et al.) noted that in cases of depression, exercise can be similarly effective to first-line treatments such as medication and psychotherapy, but adherence is often lower and drop-out rates are higher than with antidepressants despite their side effects.

It’s not laziness, either; symptoms such as low energy, lack of motivation, and anhedonia—along with socio-economic pressures, co-morbidities, inexperience, time constraints, older age, stroke history, and functional limitations—can prevent people from starting or maintaining exercise.

You can learn more about this here, by the way: Laziness Is A Scooby-Doo Villain ← which means: to tackle it requires doing a Scooby-Doo unmasking. You know, when the mystery-solving gang has the “ghost” or “monster” tied to a chair, and they pull the mask off, to reveal that there was no ghost etc, and in fact it was a real estate scammer or somesuch. So it is with “laziness” too; there’s always something else underneath (e.g. the debilitating factors we mentioned in the previous paragraph)

Social psychologist Dr. Devon Price wrote about this (not with that metaphor though) in his book: Laziness Does Not Exist – by Dr. Devon Price

So the trick that Dr. Jasmin et al. went for is making use of muscle as a signalling organ that communicates with the brain.

This is because of the muscle–brain axis: skeletal muscle makes up approximately 40–50% of adult body mass and releases cehmicals collectively known as a myosecretome during contraction, which can reduce inflammation and increase neurotrophic factors that support brain health.

Sounds like a job for exercise mimetics!

What exercise mimetics are: exercise mimetics—which can be called “exercise pills”—are natural or synthetic compounds that activate key endurance-related signalling pathways in skeletal muscle, shifting fibres towards slower, more oxidative properties without physical training.

For example, compounds such as AICAR, GW501516, metformin, resveratrol, NAD+ boosters, and urolithin A, all of which may alter muscle metabolism and the composition of molecules released into the bloodstream. We wrote about several of these, by the way, in: Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight

Which can help a lot in this case too, as you can see in the paper itself: Exercise mimetics as unexplored therapeutics for treating depression

Want to learn more?

If you like this, then you’ll love the already-available…

Mediterranean Diet… In A Pill?

Take care!