Exercise in a Pill?

August 29, 2008

Before we get into a new drug’s seemingly miraculous ability to provide the same benefits as strenuous exertion, here’s why it is so potentially important. When I saw this headline in Google news, I had to do a double-take to make sure that it wasn’t from The Onion, the satirical Web site whose faux-journalistic parodies occasionally are plagiarized by reporters in other countries and run as actual news. But no, this story is from Reuters, and apparently it’s dead serious:   

ALL U.S. ADULTS COULD BE OVERWEIGHT IN 40 YEARS   

Ouch. The study in question, published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Obesity, uses data gathered over the past four decades to project the expansion of American waistlines into the future. And it’s not a pretty picture. By 2030, if present trends continue, 86.3 percent of American adults will be overweight, with a body mass index of 25 or greater, and 51.1 percent will be obese, with BMIs above 30. If the pattern persists through 2048, all American adults will be carrying a significant excess of pounds, something scientists would not have believed to be possible.

"Genetically and physiologically, it should be impossible" for all U.S. adults to become overweight, said Dr. Lan Liang of the federal government's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, one of the researchers on the study.

However, she told Reuters Health, the data suggest that if the trends of the past 30 years persist, "that is the direction we're going."

I’m avoiding the temptation to make a gratuitous Jabba the Hutt joke here, because the trend described by this study is a potential health catastrophe of staggering proportions. Indeed, the researchers predict that the cost of treating health problems associated with excess weight could double each decade, so that by 2030 we could be spending nearly a trillion dollars a year, or nearly a fifth of total U.S. healthcare expenditures, to cope with what essentially is a preventable condition.

So what’s an increasingly corpulent nation to do? Giving up cheese fries and venti lattes will help, but cutting caloric intake drastically only works up to a point, because our bodies kick into starvation-fighting mode and become super-efficient at preserving those stores of fat, often at the expense of consuming muscle. A less-drastic balanced diet, combined with plenty of exercise, is the conventional wisdom. The problem with that solution: A lot of people don’t particularly care for getting all breathless and sweaty.

But what if you could get the benefits of exercise simply from taking a pill?