Exercise Holy Grail Is Close At Hand:
Weight-loss via exercise is a concern for many of us at one time or another.
And the shocking thing is that it’s surprisingly difficult.
You may also find that fat is unexpectedly-hard to burn off with exercise alone,
-That you really need nutrition on your side too.
Millions of people have gone still further and turned to supplements to see if the process could become even one small bit easier.
Well, SCIENCE! has come to the rescue, and research doctors are creating the next wave of exercise-in-a-bottle that make workouts almost obsolete…
Early Weight-Loss Tech Comes Back, The Return Of GW516:
So a long time ago, companies that are now known as GlaxoSmithKline came up with a strange compound to induce weight-loss for diabetics, called 516.
But after extended-trials, they found that the margin-for-error with it was near-zero.
At lower doses, it didn’t help much, and at higher-doses it caused pervasive incidences of the most serious health problem out there. (cancer)
And it was set aside.
Salk To The Rescue, Again:
Fast-forward to today. Ronald Evans and his team over at The Salk Institute and Mitobridge are giving the old monster a new try.
-But with a new twist.
You see, they found the same complications with 516 as the previous researchers. -So they just made a new version that’s slightly less powerful.
And the results are nothing short of surprising.
Marathon Man No Longer Hits The Wall:
So one of the problems with marathonning that’s very similar to losing-weight is Sugar.
Your brain runs on it, and it hates all other forms of energy, regardless of what Keto-dieters would have you believe.
And when long-distance-runners deplete every last ounce of sugar they have in their bodies,
Their brains go nuts!
And that’s what they call “Hitting The Wall”. -Think of it as a (sometimes literal) crash-course in Keto dieting.
The Weight-Loss Magic Of Gene-Switching:
-Because when you run out of sugar, what does your body use as fuel?
That’s right! -Fat!
And guess what the new version of 516 does? -When it changes the expression of ~1,000 genes (including a very special one called PPAR-d), by the way…
It gets your muscles to burn fat!
-BOOM!
For example keto-diets are popular because most people don’t have too much Weight, they have too much Fat; and that’s what they burn.
And sure-enough, when Salk researchers checked the Actual Muscles of the test animals,
They found Genetic Changes in the actual fibers, biasing them to burn fat instead of sugar.
-Even though somehow, it made none of the other changes that muscle is known to in response to exercise.
The Awesome Double-Whammy Of Unexpected Discovery:
Just like when the Freakonomics guys tell you they found something unexpected in the data, Evan’s research-team at Salk did also.
-And you are going to freaking LOVE IT!
Remember how we said earlier that you cannot out-exercise bad nutrition?
That may have been a little premature.
Because not-only does the new version of 516 get your muscles to start burning fat instead of sugar,
-At the genetic-level.
*That means it also saves sugar,
And if we go back to our example of marathon-runners, what do you think that might suggest?
It takes a little leap of faith to connect the dots, but guess:
It Increases Stamina, too!
-DOUBLE BOOM!
Even More Weight-Loss Potential From Exercise Stamina:
So NOT ONLY could the test-animals lose a Very Significant amount of body-fat, just by flipping a chemical-switch,
But they could easily exercise SEVENTY PERCENT LONGER than the standard non-supplemented ones!!!!
Just think of what YOU could do if you could exercise 70% longer than you normally-do,
And burn almost-exclusively fat while you did!
-If you even wanted to exercise in the first place!
Because, as we said at the beginning, you don’t need to exercise for this pill to work.
-It will work slower if you don’t, though. Because it SWITCHES your metabolism. It does not Accelerate it.
So, you still win, either way you look at it.
But if you do choose to exercise, you just might be able to blast that fat away in ways never before imagined.
PS: 516 also improves people’s cholesterol profile, too. -TRIPLE BOOM!
And Now All The Qualifications
Even-though some of the most intelligent & crafty people in the world are working on reducing the risks from their Version 3.0 of 516, they are still there.
The dosage amount or type that most people would have to use it at still raise some pretty scary thoughts for potential life-threatening amounts of The Big C if anything at-all goes wrong.
-Which is why 516 has been deemed unsafe by just about every single regulatory-body out there, despite competitive athletes’ insane drive to win at any or -All- costs.
And for obese people, the amount of 516 v.3 that they’d have to take still looks scary. -Even if it were just for 1-2 years and then stop, to get them back to some normal kind of weight.
Also, to keep other exercise-incapable or impaired people healthy despite dietary-mistakes and oversights, the timeline of their dosage would probably be indefinite.
-Like a Decade or more. Again, that raises big concerns; especially if they try to get this help in the time of people’s lives when most of the health problems they’re ever going to have all start cropping-up.
The FDA’s Definitions Are Not Helping, Either:
Add onto that, the fact that although obesity, diabetes, and “Metabolic Syndrome” that is caused by them, are all at epidemic-proportions, so much so that diabetes therapies are one of Big Pharma’s most profitable channels,
The FDA still does not consider “Metabolic Syndrome” a disease.
And under their rules if you can’t call something a disease, you cannot get a new medication approved unless it does directly and specifically treat that officially-recognized condition.
So: It appears that Evans and his new company are trying a side-door approach.
They’re finding diseases that have common-symptoms.
Right now that’s looking like Duchenne Muscular-Dystrophy.
So if Evans can make his new version of 516 with his new company Mitobridge, get it tested and approved through all FDA trial-stages, especially if it can help people fight something terrible like MD,
Perhaps, it can THEN be used for other purposes based on its action and the wisdom of physicians.
And THEN you have your “Exercise In A Bottle”.
When, Not If:
There is really no reason to fear or worry at this point.
516 and its variants are all early shots at the target.
And this entire category of meds will be part of a “When, Not If.”-scenario.
There is too much obesity, and other similar problems out there for Big Pharma + researchers not to make it a reality.
Right now, short of some painful sampling techniques, and full-body tricorders, there is categorically no way for science to fully understand everything that’s happening to your body when you exercise.
-Because, as the Salk Team have shown, endurance exercise alone changes the expression of a minimum of 1,000 genes.
The Future Is Bright:
So the real data will be nothing short of astounding, and probably take a small server-farm to decode on-the-fly.
(strangely enough, the NIH is set to do more-or-less exactly this!)
And it’s a guarantee that 516 and even the next few versions of this gene-therapy will do nothing close to what’s actually-happening in your body,
There is a REALLY good chance that:
1) SCIENCE! will get close-enough and hopefully safe-enough, and
2) They’ll just stick to it long enough to get something that works, because the benefits will be too great to ignore.
So be careful! In 30 years, people will be such weight-loss experts there will be no fat-people left in the entire first world, and everyone will just be too goddamn sexy to even exercise!
Check out the rest of the details at the Links:
Photo Credits: “Free Runners”, by Einar Hansen
Links:
• Source: Salk
• More Coverage: NewYorker
• Source Study: Cell.Met-PPARδ Promotes Running Endurance by Preserving Glucose
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