Whew, this article is almost 7 years old! I wonder how these medications are coming along nowadays. I for one would love to be able to exercise without actually taking the time or attention to do...
Whew, this article is almost 7 years old! I wonder how these medications are coming along nowadays.
I for one would love to be able to exercise without actually taking the time or attention to do so. I don't mind the fatigue or soreness, just having to use my free time towards it. There are things I'd much rather do with my limited free hours.
I wonder how well this would help those with overweight/obesity issues that stem from mental health/medication effects. Also, one would likely need a prescription for this pill, to avoid...
I wonder how well this would help those with overweight/obesity issues that stem from mental health/medication effects.
Also, one would likely need a prescription for this pill, to avoid anorexic/body dysmorphia patients from exacerbating their issues.
My bigger worry is that a pill like this could be prescribed to people whose doctors assume their only problem is Being Fat when there's actually some other underlying medical issue. I've put on...
My bigger worry is that a pill like this could be prescribed to people whose doctors assume their only problem is Being Fat when there's actually some other underlying medical issue. I've put on weight and struggled to exercise for years, but it was because of undiagnosed hypothyroidism -- and this isn't an uncommon scenario with this disease. Would masking this one symptom through use of this medication make it harder for doctors to identify underlying chronic conditions like this?
Kind of unrelated but this was my reasoning for getting a walking treadmill to use while working. It’s been a big success for me so far, according to my Apple Watch stats I’ve doubled my average...
I for one would love to be able to exercise without actually taking the time or attention to do so. I don't mind the fatigue or soreness, just having to use my free time towards it. There are things I'd much rather do with my limited free hours.
Kind of unrelated but this was my reasoning for getting a walking treadmill to use while working. It’s been a big success for me so far, according to my Apple Watch stats I’ve doubled my average daily number of steps vs last year and haven’t committed any extra time to exercise.
I don't need a med to exercise more, I need to not be perpetually overwhelmed at work and home and to be allowed to find movement that I enjoy (long walks, lifting weights) without a weird...
I don't need a med to exercise more, I need to not be perpetually overwhelmed at work and home and to be allowed to find movement that I enjoy (long walks, lifting weights) without a weird obsession by others or myself with the shape of my body in the process. I'd also deeply like, once again, for medications not to be considered the "cure" to looking like me. It's exhausting. There is the possibility of positives from a drug like this, but I don't trust society's outlook on anything that can be framed as a diet drug.
With this pill we will be able to remove the unhealthy obsession of modern civilization with health through exercise and save some time. This will be fantastic for corporations as they can save...
With this pill we will be able to remove the unhealthy obsession of modern civilization with health through exercise and save some time. This will be fantastic for corporations as they can save money on not implementing gyms in offices and increase work hours because now people won't have a desire to exercise after they come home from work.
I think the next target for efficiency increases should be sleep! If we develop a pill against sleep, work hours can be increased up to 24h per day! The next target should be artifical wombs so that women are not taken out of the workforce anymore due to pregnancy and birth. Next up we should implement systems to remove the emotions from folks from a small age onwards, because only an emotionally dead- I mean inactive, heh, slipped up in my corp-speak there, worker is a happy worker. But that has time, because until then AI can take over the creative work from humans so that we can increase the size of our workforce and eliminate arts programs from university and to keep workers entertained while we wait for the pill against the need to be entertained to be safe and healthy.
I'm struggling to understand but also curious as to why you went for the capitalist dystopia angle. As someone with chronic issues that keeps me from exercising for the most part, and aware that...
I'm struggling to understand but also curious as to why you went for the capitalist dystopia angle. As someone with chronic issues that keeps me from exercising for the most part, and aware that this is worsening my health and bringing death closer, I would very much love if something like this was able to be developed safely. There are many people struggling with keeping a healthy body due to a lot of circumstances, many of them invisible to most people, and our struggle goes unnoticed, or it's even mocked because of some myths about willpower.
It's extremely demoralizing to see your body decay and rot, doing your best to keep the breath of death away, but realizing it's ultimately a losing battle. Much more so than the usual "Oh, woe to us humans for we are mortal," way. This is why focusing on a hyperbolic worst-case-scenario angle in a mocking way bothers me. It makes me feel as if it's overlooking the struggle of people like me, and the benefits we would get from something like this, and playing into the negative stereotypes about health by presenting only exercise as a viable way. There are many of us who can't exercise, with varying degrees of disability and such.
So, I do recognize that it could be abused, and it will be to some extent, but there are colossal health benefits for a myriad of people, and the amount of slow, soulcrushing despair it would erase. I know you probably didn't expect such an emotionally loaded reply, but it's the best way I could convey what developments and discourses like this mean to me. It's basically life-and-death. However, I recognize that we could communicate and discuss the topic at hand without antagonizing each other in an unhealthy way. So, if you want to, I would listen to what prompted you to have this reaction.
Firstly before I continue, I would like to apologise for prompting such a negative reaction within yourself. It was not my intent. I picked that angle because it is the first thing that popped...
Firstly before I continue, I would like to apologise for prompting such a negative reaction within yourself. It was not my intent.
I picked that angle because it is the first thing that popped into my head and because it is the angle that I think will apply to the majority of the population. Of course the majority is not and will never be everyone. It's impossible to address everyone in a discussion, unless you want every reply to number at least 10,000 words.
I think this could be a good drug for cases such as yours. And if it is discovered to be safe and released, then I would support folks like you in getting it. Prevention is the most efficient way to keep your health; brushing your teeth is easier than replacing them, etc. I think the ability for it to be abused would be a lot lower if it was a prescription drug for example.
Thank you for your comment. I appreciate your intent and openness. I see the merit of regulation, but I don't think that necessarily includes making it a prescription-only drug. It could be...
Exemplary
Thank you for your comment. I appreciate your intent and openness.
I see the merit of regulation, but I don't think that necessarily includes making it a prescription-only drug. It could be soft-regulated as well. It could be similar to how cardiologists don't prescribe medicine for high LDL levels at first, and instead recommend exercise and diet changes. However, how the regulation and guidelines would be structured should be data-driven, which is speculative at this point. So I don't have a definite opinion about it.
I'm not inclined to agree, however, about the generalizability of your statement for humanity. According to WHO data, in 2022, 43% of the adult population of the world was overweight and 16% were obese. That's more than 2.5 billion adult-age people, and the percentages have been increasing throughout the years.
Both obesity and being overweight are health risks, and I think this drug could benefit these people. The current practices and policies are sorely wanting, and potential breakthroughs could help in solving these health issues. But I want to make it clear that I don't think drugs like this should be the main way of combating these issues. Regulating food industry, putting restrictions on ads (like it's done for tobacco and such), changing health policies to prioritize longevity and wellbeing, constructing walkable cities, and doing other things like nudging to promote healthier diets and lifestyles should be there as well. In other words, it should be a holistic approach.
This is not to say I believe in a linear progress narrative, or that the current system is the way. I don't think these, and in some worker right areas there are stagnations and probably even partial reversals. But my point is, despite the current landscape we live in, capital is not the be-all and end-all force it's often thought to be. So I doubt that it will totally absorb these developments to the detriment of the vast majority. I actually suspect attributing to it that totality is to the detriment of worker rights, because it paints a linear decline narrative where one is powerless to effect change.
If the drug is prescription only or not ultimately depends on the side effects and dosing and such, which is hard to determine when we speak idealistically like that. Safe to say I'm with you...
If the drug is prescription only or not ultimately depends on the side effects and dosing and such, which is hard to determine when we speak idealistically like that. Safe to say I'm with you there. As long as apothecaries aren't openly advertising the easy pill to skip the gym I'd be fine.
Forgive me for keeping my replies short, but the amount of notifications in this thread is overwhelming me. I don't think the pill should be our first line of defense, but I don't think it should not not exist either.
I have made numerous attempts at having an exercise schedule. I don't believe endorphins ever kicked in. I would very much welcome a pill that allowed me to be healthy without exercising. It is...
I have made numerous attempts at having an exercise schedule. I don't believe endorphins ever kicked in. I would very much welcome a pill that allowed me to be healthy without exercising. It is regrettable that capitalism will convert every improvement into a new form of exploitation, but exercising doesn't come naturally to everyone and we can no longer pretend that shouting "just to the gym!" is effective for them. That stance is similar to that of telling overweight people to just eat less or someone addicted to cigarettes to just stop smoking. I fully appreciate the value just exercising has to some, I just don't think everyone's like that. Some people absolutely do need all the help they can get, and are not in a position to reject anything that will bring an improvement to them.
Exercise exists in other forms rather than going to the gym, which in itself is a capitalist commodity (I mean the prices per month are pretty damn high). There are clubs for every sort of sport...
Exercise exists in other forms rather than going to the gym, which in itself is a capitalist commodity (I mean the prices per month are pretty damn high). There are clubs for every sort of sport out there, and especially with team sports I find that the community aspect of it helps massively, as I am also someone who does not like exercise.
Also, a lot of at home exercise regiments ramp up incredibly quickly, which also killed my desire to keep them going for a long time. I have restarted one where I exercise less than 10 minutes each day, alternating upper and lower body. 3 sets of 4 pull-ups and then 3x10 leg raises.
I have also always tried to sneak in exercise by moving between points A and B (be that work/home or store/home) on foot or by bike, which is a luxury I understand is not possible everywhere, but also just getting out, popping in a podcast and walking around for an hour helps immensely.
A stand-up desk at home can also help at least a little. I get it, the endorphins also never kicked in for me, which has been an issue in my childhood because my mother tried to get me hooked on a lot of different sports. She was an athlete at university and it was immensely distressing to her that her son loved to just sit at the computer all day.
The exercise itself does not have to be the source of the endorphins, but the result can be. Checking myself in the mirror immediately after doing 10 push-ups, there is a noticeable change. Sure, it disappears after a bit, but it's a promise of more. The result of just walking for an hour is also noticeable on the psyche. It is positive.
Exercise itself is sort of a capitalist invention. Exercise used to be walking to the store, spending time outside, or just generally going out and participating in society. We spend so much time...
Exercise itself is sort of a capitalist invention. Exercise used to be walking to the store, spending time outside, or just generally going out and participating in society.
We spend so much time working that we end up having to cram a day's worth of exercise into a single hour. It's no wonder it's not fun for everyone when you have to crank the intensity up to make exercising more efficient.
Designing communities that are safe and convenient to walk in, designing comfortable public outdoor spaces, and providing more opportunities for in person social groups would largely eliminate the need for dedicated exercise routines unless you have specific performance or aesthetic goals in mind.
10,000 steps a day is a number that is thrown around a lot. I know that number was just randomly chosen by a pedometer company and doctors have actually said that even less activity is needed, but it's a nice number to work with for my example. 10,000 steps is about 5 miles of walking for me. That is about 1.5 to 2 hours of walking. That seems like a lot if it's something you have to add on to everything you normally do, but imagine if you could walk to work. Replace your 30 minute drive with a 30 minute walk each way, and half that requirement is done. Maybe after work, you meet up with some friends at a public square and get some food or a drink instead of just talking on the phone or discord like you normally do. You walk 20 minutes to a local business and walk home after. Thats another 40 minutes of walking done.
Nobody who is able bodied should need an exercise pill. We could just make walking a viable and comfortable option for getting around and we would all be much healthier without even trying.
That’s more apples to oranges. More walking is better than a pure sedentary lifestyle, but it’s no replacement for strength training. In fact it’s mostly orthogonal. You will gain a lot of...
That’s more apples to oranges. More walking is better than a pure sedentary lifestyle, but it’s no replacement for strength training. In fact it’s mostly orthogonal. You will gain a lot of benefit, walking or not, from resistance strength training.
We don’t run around and stab elk anymore, or smash nuts with rocks for hours on end. Probably for the best. But everyone should work out regardless.
Strength training is very important, but it's very hard to go from your couch to the squat rack with no steps in between. Walking and being mobile helps build up confidence and make the transition...
Strength training is very important, but it's very hard to go from your couch to the squat rack with no steps in between. Walking and being mobile helps build up confidence and make the transition to strength training much less jarring for people.
Lifting weights isn't even the only way to build strength. Only circus strong men were lifting weights to gain muscle prior to the last 100 years. Even beyond someone's job, I think there were more physical activities in people's lives in the past.
My point was more addressing "if we had walkable cities people wouldn't have to take a muscle pill". Sure, people use to use muscles more, but unlike walking, that's probably a good thing that we...
My point was more addressing "if we had walkable cities people wouldn't have to take a muscle pill". Sure, people use to use muscles more, but unlike walking, that's probably a good thing that we don't need to anymore.
Strength training in a gym with researched, safe, predictable movements in a controlled space is infinitely safer than on the job. Blue collar workers often have chronic pain issues for a reason. No one is perfectly careful. Meanwhile, not a lot of people get injured from walking. It's mostly cardio anyhow.
Even if we had a walking utopia, people should still train their muscles in a preferably safe way. If there were a pill that would allow you to either go to the gym less, or avoid it entirely, while still having developed muscle groups across your body, then I see no reason why the walkers should not also take it.
Strength training doesn't necessarily involve weights. It's any exercise where you're expending effort to push against something or pull something, where the goal is not to tax your cardiovascular...
Strength training doesn't necessarily involve weights. It's any exercise where you're expending effort to push against something or pull something, where the goal is not to tax your cardiovascular and respiratory systems, but your individual muscle groups.
That can be pushups, air squats, using a resistance band so on and so forth.
You're right, weightlifting is a relatively recent invention, it just so happens to be one of the most convenient and affordable ways we've found to accurately and easily train muscles.
You can have a perfectly effective strength training routine with only calisthenics, or resistance band training, or gymnastics though. Hell, you could pick up rocks and dig ditches in your backyard for half an hour every few days and it would work great.
Only if you think about exercise in the gym sense, which is one of the most boring ways to exercise. Sports have been around for as long as humanity, and even gyms have been around in ancient...
Only if you think about exercise in the gym sense, which is one of the most boring ways to exercise. Sports have been around for as long as humanity, and even gyms have been around in ancient Greece. It's where the word comes from I believe.
Despite all the best intentions, a portion of the population will never exercise or diet. To them, medication can literally save lives. I don't believe it is reasonable to hold an unjustified...
Despite all the best intentions, a portion of the population will never exercise or diet. To them, medication can literally save lives. I don't believe it is reasonable to hold an unjustified attachment to "natural" forms of improvement as if they're necessarily superior by virtue of being natural or organic. Maybe the best word for that is "non-invasive".
That may be to the detriment of those who might greatly benefit from medication.
I think we go about this backwards. Why they will never exercise? Is the lack of will something that is born with them, or the fact that we need to work for more than 8 hours per day and go home...
Despite all the best intentions, a portion of the population will never exercise or diet.
I think we go about this backwards.
Why they will never exercise? Is the lack of will something that is born with them, or the fact that we need to work for more than 8 hours per day and go home exhausted and beaten up and still have to workout on top of that?
The pill solution is a band aid for a deeper problem.
Instead of fighting for less exploitation, working hours, more free time, more leisure, more working rights, we welcome a pill that will let us be more exploited.
It is not a matter of having a pessimistic point of view, it is a fact that will happen. The same way that automation and computers didn't lessened our working ours. It just made a lot of people get fired.
This medication is not here to help. It is here to be abused.
That's a strong statement considering how much you can change about yourself today. I'm not saying it should be an invidiual effort, but a social one. When it comes to diet, a top-down solution...
Despite all the best intentions, a portion of the population will never exercise or diet.
That's a strong statement considering how much you can change about yourself today. I'm not saying it should be an invidiual effort, but a social one.
When it comes to diet, a top-down solution could even be preffered. Tax the everloving shit out of high-glucose and highly processed foods. Implement programs to lower the prices of healthy food. Make tap water completely free, it is a human right after all. Lower the overall working time of the population so that humans have time to take care of themselves and families again. Make cities walkable. Normalise letting your kids walk to school instead of a caravan of parent's cars arriving at school everyday to drop children off so they can sit all day in school. Make lunch at school free, organic, and healthy. Increase the time of exercise at the expense of other school classes (kids are spending more time at school than ever before and that time should be reduced in general). Move away from the teaching from the teacher-in-front model and consider having them take place outside so that standing and moving instead of sitting is normalised.
A lot of these solutions will have to focus on kids because it is in these times that your lifelong habits are formed. And if the parents are too tired, too depressed or too overworked (these should all also be addressed) then society has to pick up the slack in a similar fashion as when schools should (ideally) equalise the background of kids who come from academic and working class backgrounds.
Let me say that I find that I would find the existence of this drug beneficial. There are folks who, for a variety of reasons, literally cannot exercise. But exercise is not only good because it stops you from being obese, it is also good in itself. Improving your stamina lowers your blood pressure as the heart grows in size and pumps slower. It tires you out so you sleep better. Et cetera.
That does sound like a very complicated perfect solution that would take long enough to implement that people would probably benefit from quicker alternatives in the meantime, in a way that a...
That does sound like a very complicated perfect solution that would take long enough to implement that people would probably benefit from quicker alternatives in the meantime, in a way that a larger portion of the population is sufficiently attended.
I don't really understand the impulse to be so anti-medication, to the detriment of concrete outcomes.
I would love it if we could affect all the intricate social ways that make people begin smoking, but we can't. Not in every case. So I'm glad there are medications to help them quit smoking. And those medications shouldn't impede anyone from studying the deeply complicated factors that govern our behaviors.
I am repeating myself, but this really sounds like allowing the perfect to prevent the good.
I question the idea of a drug as a quick simple alternative. It takes on average a decade to get a drug from concept to approved to sell, and the process is extremely expensive, my professor in...
I question the idea of a drug as a quick simple alternative. It takes on average a decade to get a drug from concept to approved to sell, and the process is extremely expensive, my professor in patent law told me that it's about a milliard EUR, and that was in like 2018. That's a long time to start implementing at least some of these changes. I don't expect all of them to be implemented, and while we like to think of society as always progressing, sometimes it it goes dangerously close to regressing.
Again, if this drug gets approved and works then by all means, folks should get a prescription for it. I posted a comment which in its tone is a mix of art an opinion and it surprises me that folks had such negative reactions to it. One cannot address every view in a comment, because the world is infinitely complex and as such addressing everything would take an infinite amount of words and thus time.
Perhaps I am letting the perfect be the enemy of good, but my solution is really just a lot of smaller solutions that can be implemented irrespectively of each other. It's complex, but not impossible.
I know that Mexico for example already has implemented a sugar tax on soft drinks and the discussion has come up in a number of different countries. I think that most, if not all of my suggestions...
I know that Mexico for example already has implemented a sugar tax on soft drinks and the discussion has come up in a number of different countries.
I think that most, if not all of my suggestions can be done in a decade. Why would they not be?
I think you underestimate the political will needed for some of your changes, but I also think the easiest to implement are the ones that ideally should happen latest in the process. Heavily...
I think you underestimate the political will needed for some of your changes, but I also think the easiest to implement are the ones that ideally should happen latest in the process. Heavily taxing processed foods, for instance, would negatively impact people in food deserts, and those people are typically already not doing great for money. But getting rid of food deserts and ensuring everyone can afford to buy fresh, healthy food is much more difficult than adding a tax on certain foods.
A sugar tax should be accompanied by law requiring grocers to stock local (if possible) and healthy foods which should be subsidized with said tax. I think it should be one of the first things to...
A sugar tax should be accompanied by law requiring grocers to stock local (if possible) and healthy foods which should be subsidized with said tax. I think it should be one of the first things to be done because it is so much simpler to accomplish.
I would encourage you to look more into food deserts and how pervasive they are. I don't think they're the type of issue that can be easily solved by requiring grocers to stock sufficient healthy...
I would encourage you to look more into food deserts and how pervasive they are. I don't think they're the type of issue that can be easily solved by requiring grocers to stock sufficient healthy food. One of the principle issues with living in a food desert is that often there isn't a proper grocery store near enough to you in the first place. While changing the types of food grocers stock can be an element in some such situations, there are numerous other factors that are a lot harder to solve. And that's not even touching on other practical barriers, such as people not having time to cook for themselves because of how much they need to work.
In the current world, I think only limited taxes on classes of food that are truly luxuries, like sugar taxes on soft drinks, can be justified without first investing a lot more money and effort into more fundamental reforms. I think taxes on broader classes of processed foods are too likely to harm the people struggling hardest to survive if implemented without first addressing the other barriers that keep them from "eating healthy".
I agree with all of these and if you run for office I will vote for you. I particularly think that people drastically underrate the damage that prepared food products does to a person’s health...
I agree with all of these and if you run for office I will vote for you.
I particularly think that people drastically underrate the damage that prepared food products does to a person’s health over time. When you buy a box of prepped food you are outsourcing your nutritional choices. In order to be competitive they need to be ultra-palatable and that means that it’s going to be high in calories, low in fiber, and just generally bad for your health. And this is all before getting into the problems with ultraprocessed foods!
We already know that societal changes are needed because there is extensive research showing that people live longer in areas where society has normalized healthy habits. Just do a quick search for “blue zones” for more info. There’s a pretty good documentary about them on Netflix that came out not too long ago.
So I'm definitely not an expert on this or anything, but I did do a quick search of "blue zones" and under Wikipedia there's a part that says the concept has been challenged by a lack of...
So I'm definitely not an expert on this or anything, but I did do a quick search of "blue zones" and under Wikipedia there's a part that says the concept has been challenged by a lack of scientific evidence.
That’s an unfortunate example of bad writing on Wikipedia. They cite a blog entry from one person who was trying to criticize “the blue zone diet”, which isn’t really a thing. Healthy habits goes...
That’s an unfortunate example of bad writing on Wikipedia. They cite a blog entry from one person who was trying to criticize “the blue zone diet”, which isn’t really a thing. Healthy habits goes beyond just diet, after all.
They will never exercise or diet because the world is not set up for them to do so. Most people's primary form of transportation is a car. The easiest and cheapest meals are calorie dense, high...
They will never exercise or diet because the world is not set up for them to do so. Most people's primary form of transportation is a car. The easiest and cheapest meals are calorie dense, high carbohydrate and fat, and very processed. Most people's jobs require them to sit in a single seat all day. Most popular entertainment consists of sitting down and looking at a screen.
We've set our society up this way. It doesn't have to be this way though.
Obesity related health problems are a brand new problem in the human species. They literally didn't exist 80 years ago. People didn't suddenly become lazier and more averse to eating well. The societal fabric just changed. There's no reason it can't change again.
I think medication like this has a chance to improve the lives and health of people that cannot exercise whatsoever. Knowing the way western culture works though, if they're ever approved they'll just be used to compensate for the deeply unhealthy lifestyle of our culture, and while or might be an improvement worth tolerating the side effects for, it won't be a true replacement for actually exercising.
I'm not really sure how the commentary makes sense. For one, it's not like having gyms around is some kind of "natural" process that is being interrupted. Gyms themselves are a hack. Our bodies...
I'm not really sure how the commentary makes sense. For one, it's not like having gyms around is some kind of "natural" process that is being interrupted. Gyms themselves are a hack.
Our bodies are adapted to develop and atrophy only the muscles we need, to survive in a resource scarce world. We're far from that world now, and gyms are a hack to get around it, a place where you can do carefully researched exercise to maximally stimulate your muscles with the least amount of time.
When the "capitalistic dystopia" angle is that companies won't have to install gyms in offices... I mean, c'mon lol.
The way muscles develop is ill-suited to the developed world - most people eat more than enough calories and macronutrients, muscle atrophy is a pointless process. We already do a lot of optimizing - gyms are an optimization. The natural way is people should go out for a week and go hunt some deer or something.
The process itself is natural, no matter how you achieve it. Your body doesn't know if you're running four miles to tire out a gazelle in the open savannah or doing it while watching the news on a...
The process itself is natural, no matter how you achieve it. Your body doesn't know if you're running four miles to tire out a gazelle in the open savannah or doing it while watching the news on a treadmill.
The issue with using a drug to shortcut that process is that it will replicate some of the benefits of exercise, it can't replicate all of them. There are mechanical effects of exercise that strengthen bones, improve heart and lung function, and numerous other benefits besides just increasing your metabolic rate.
Having a drug like the one proposed would be an improvement on just doing nothing, but it wouldn't replace all the benefits of exercise.
A pill against the need to be entertained is actually terrifying. What do we do then? Just die? Turn into the borg? Turn into SG-1 spider bio replicators?
A pill against the need to be entertained is actually terrifying. What do we do then? Just die? Turn into the borg? Turn into SG-1 spider bio replicators?
There was a (I think fairly mediocre) movie about that made in the early 2000s, where most of humanity has been on a pill regiment that suppresses your emotions completely and the main character...
There was a (I think fairly mediocre) movie about that made in the early 2000s, where most of humanity has been on a pill regiment that suppresses your emotions completely and the main character is part of a police force which hunts the last few who resist until of course he doesn't take his pills once and begins appreciating the emotions.
Honestly it worries me. But then again, worrying about the next generation as you get older is a core experience of being human.
It's called Equilibrium! @DON_MAC found it in his comment: https://tildes.net/~health/1f2c/a_pill_to_make_exercise_obsolete_2017#comment-cbqn edit: oh sorry I replied from my notif page I didn't...
It's cool, that's probably the one. I swear there is another recent one that was really bad, but it might have involved brain wipes or something. Either way, pretty common sci fi trope. Just a bit...
It's cool, that's probably the one. I swear there is another recent one that was really bad, but it might have involved brain wipes or something. Either way, pretty common sci fi trope. Just a bit more scary when you slightly extend the idea of "this pill will make you skinny" to "this pill will kill your need for entertainment".
Personally I’ve got a pretty good exercise routine. I get well above the 150 minutes per week recommendation and feel fit. But I think if technology like this is viable then it’s a massive net...
Personally I’ve got a pretty good exercise routine. I get well above the 150 minutes per week recommendation and feel fit. But I think if technology like this is viable then it’s a massive net positive to the world’s health. And I could see it getting added to elderly people’s pill regimen, potentially significantly improving their health and life spans.
As a person with fibromyalgia this would be awesome for me too. it's hard to get around so I can't walk as much as I'd like to, and god I love to eat...
As a person with fibromyalgia this would be awesome for me too. it's hard to get around so I can't walk as much as I'd like to, and god I love to eat...
I think this is where it could have biggest impact. People with chronic conditions that limit their ability to get out and run, walk, or stay in a gym, no matter how much willpower they have. Hope...
I think this is where it could have biggest impact. People with chronic conditions that limit their ability to get out and run, walk, or stay in a gym, no matter how much willpower they have.
Really interesting idea, an exercise pill. But what tickled me most was this:
Really interesting idea, an exercise pill. But what tickled me most was this:
Mice love to run, Evans told me, and when he puts an exercise wheel in their cage they typically log several miles a night. These nocturnal drills are not simply a way of dealing with the stress of laboratory life, as scientists from Leiden University, in the Netherlands, demonstrated in a charming experiment conducted a few years ago. They left a small cagelike structure containing a training wheel in a quiet corner of an urban park, under the surveillance of a motion-activated night-vision camera. The resulting footage showed that the wheel was in near-constant use by wild mice. Despite the fact that their daily activities—foraging for food, searching for mates, avoiding predators—provided a more than adequate workout, the mice voluntarily chose to run, spending up to eighteen minutes at a time on the wheel, and returning for repeat sessions. (Several frogs and slugs also made use of the amenity, possibly by accident.)
I can see the public health argument, but similar to considerations regarding the realisation of AGI (or even AI deployed to replace many functions that we enjoy and fulfil us, e.g. art), I start...
I can see the public health argument, but similar to considerations regarding the realisation of AGI (or even AI deployed to replace many functions that we enjoy and fulfil us, e.g. art), I start to wonder - what is the point of being alive?
I think a lot of this is to do with people's view on exercise. Personally, I like to get outside and walk, hike, and climb both for exercise and the experience. For others, they just grind out...
I think a lot of this is to do with people's view on exercise. Personally, I like to get outside and walk, hike, and climb both for exercise and the experience. For others, they just grind out time on a treadmill without much enjoyment, and I could see alternatives being attractive to them.
It also sounds like it doesn't necessarily provide the benefits of exercise on its own, but improves the efficiency of exercise. Maybe I missed it in the article, but the pill they discuss is modifying your metabolism to burn fat, preserve glucose, and helps with slimming down and endurance. Which is great, but doesn't develop muscle mass or endurance without actual exercise, or cardio endurance, etc. I think much of the benefit of exercise is the muscle strength, as it stabilizes your joints, supports your core and back, etc.
I exercise rigorously mainly for the mental health benefit, the endorphins calm my anxiety, plus it creates a routine and ritual that gets me out of the house. I think the benefits to exercise go...
I exercise rigorously mainly for the mental health benefit, the endorphins calm my anxiety, plus it creates a routine and ritual that gets me out of the house. I think the benefits to exercise go way beyond physical health, and a pill could never replicate them.
If you didn't had a need to exercise for physical health, and did so exclusively for mental health purposes, you might be inclined to think of an exercise routine that is entirely focused on the...
If you didn't had a need to exercise for physical health, and did so exclusively for mental health purposes, you might be inclined to think of an exercise routine that is entirely focused on the things that improve your mental health the most regardless of physical benefits.
Just to give you an obvious example, I know people who get a lot of pleasure from dancing and very little from lifting weights. So they might dedicate more of their time to dancing and skip weight lifting.
I mean I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Unless there's a reason they need to lift weights, i.e. training for a competition, if they enjoy dancing they should just do that.
I mean I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Unless there's a reason they need to lift weights, i.e. training for a competition, if they enjoy dancing they should just do that.
Whew, this article is almost 7 years old! I wonder how these medications are coming along nowadays.
I for one would love to be able to exercise without actually taking the time or attention to do so. I don't mind the fatigue or soreness, just having to use my free time towards it. There are things I'd much rather do with my limited free hours.
I wonder how well this would help those with overweight/obesity issues that stem from mental health/medication effects.
Also, one would likely need a prescription for this pill, to avoid anorexic/body dysmorphia patients from exacerbating their issues.
My bigger worry is that a pill like this could be prescribed to people whose doctors assume their only problem is Being Fat when there's actually some other underlying medical issue. I've put on weight and struggled to exercise for years, but it was because of undiagnosed hypothyroidism -- and this isn't an uncommon scenario with this disease. Would masking this one symptom through use of this medication make it harder for doctors to identify underlying chronic conditions like this?
Kind of unrelated but this was my reasoning for getting a walking treadmill to use while working. It’s been a big success for me so far, according to my Apple Watch stats I’ve doubled my average daily number of steps vs last year and haven’t committed any extra time to exercise.
Wasn't Linus that had his computer on a treadmill?
That’s Wolfram you’re likely thinking of.
Nope. Linus has it too.
Don't know if he still uses it. I remember reading about this years ago.
I don't need a med to exercise more, I need to not be perpetually overwhelmed at work and home and to be allowed to find movement that I enjoy (long walks, lifting weights) without a weird obsession by others or myself with the shape of my body in the process. I'd also deeply like, once again, for medications not to be considered the "cure" to looking like me. It's exhausting. There is the possibility of positives from a drug like this, but I don't trust society's outlook on anything that can be framed as a diet drug.
Love your body, but not too much, not like that.
With this pill we will be able to remove the unhealthy obsession of modern civilization with health through exercise and save some time. This will be fantastic for corporations as they can save money on not implementing gyms in offices and increase work hours because now people won't have a desire to exercise after they come home from work.
I think the next target for efficiency increases should be sleep! If we develop a pill against sleep, work hours can be increased up to 24h per day! The next target should be artifical wombs so that women are not taken out of the workforce anymore due to pregnancy and birth. Next up we should implement systems to remove the emotions from folks from a small age onwards, because only an emotionally dead- I mean inactive, heh, slipped up in my corp-speak there, worker is a happy worker. But that has time, because until then AI can take over the creative work from humans so that we can increase the size of our workforce and eliminate arts programs from university and to keep workers entertained while we wait for the pill against the need to be entertained to be safe and healthy.
The preceding text is sarcasm.
I'm struggling to understand but also curious as to why you went for the capitalist dystopia angle. As someone with chronic issues that keeps me from exercising for the most part, and aware that this is worsening my health and bringing death closer, I would very much love if something like this was able to be developed safely. There are many people struggling with keeping a healthy body due to a lot of circumstances, many of them invisible to most people, and our struggle goes unnoticed, or it's even mocked because of some myths about willpower.
It's extremely demoralizing to see your body decay and rot, doing your best to keep the breath of death away, but realizing it's ultimately a losing battle. Much more so than the usual "Oh, woe to us humans for we are mortal," way. This is why focusing on a hyperbolic worst-case-scenario angle in a mocking way bothers me. It makes me feel as if it's overlooking the struggle of people like me, and the benefits we would get from something like this, and playing into the negative stereotypes about health by presenting only exercise as a viable way. There are many of us who can't exercise, with varying degrees of disability and such.
So, I do recognize that it could be abused, and it will be to some extent, but there are colossal health benefits for a myriad of people, and the amount of slow, soulcrushing despair it would erase. I know you probably didn't expect such an emotionally loaded reply, but it's the best way I could convey what developments and discourses like this mean to me. It's basically life-and-death. However, I recognize that we could communicate and discuss the topic at hand without antagonizing each other in an unhealthy way. So, if you want to, I would listen to what prompted you to have this reaction.
Firstly before I continue, I would like to apologise for prompting such a negative reaction within yourself. It was not my intent.
I picked that angle because it is the first thing that popped into my head and because it is the angle that I think will apply to the majority of the population. Of course the majority is not and will never be everyone. It's impossible to address everyone in a discussion, unless you want every reply to number at least 10,000 words.
I think this could be a good drug for cases such as yours. And if it is discovered to be safe and released, then I would support folks like you in getting it. Prevention is the most efficient way to keep your health; brushing your teeth is easier than replacing them, etc. I think the ability for it to be abused would be a lot lower if it was a prescription drug for example.
Thank you for your comment. I appreciate your intent and openness.
I see the merit of regulation, but I don't think that necessarily includes making it a prescription-only drug. It could be soft-regulated as well. It could be similar to how cardiologists don't prescribe medicine for high LDL levels at first, and instead recommend exercise and diet changes. However, how the regulation and guidelines would be structured should be data-driven, which is speculative at this point. So I don't have a definite opinion about it.
I'm not inclined to agree, however, about the generalizability of your statement for humanity. According to WHO data, in 2022, 43% of the adult population of the world was overweight and 16% were obese. That's more than 2.5 billion adult-age people, and the percentages have been increasing throughout the years.
Both obesity and being overweight are health risks, and I think this drug could benefit these people. The current practices and policies are sorely wanting, and potential breakthroughs could help in solving these health issues. But I want to make it clear that I don't think drugs like this should be the main way of combating these issues. Regulating food industry, putting restrictions on ads (like it's done for tobacco and such), changing health policies to prioritize longevity and wellbeing, constructing walkable cities, and doing other things like nudging to promote healthier diets and lifestyles should be there as well. In other words, it should be a holistic approach.
About the plausability of this, I'm sure there will be problems, but history is rarely linear. Marx and other socialists in his time had predicted that working standards of the working class would worsen extremely with time, but that did not come to pass. For example, workers were able to get fewer working hours, 2-day weekend (which was not the case before), and child labor has been decreased a lot.
This is not to say I believe in a linear progress narrative, or that the current system is the way. I don't think these, and in some worker right areas there are stagnations and probably even partial reversals. But my point is, despite the current landscape we live in, capital is not the be-all and end-all force it's often thought to be. So I doubt that it will totally absorb these developments to the detriment of the vast majority. I actually suspect attributing to it that totality is to the detriment of worker rights, because it paints a linear decline narrative where one is powerless to effect change.
If the drug is prescription only or not ultimately depends on the side effects and dosing and such, which is hard to determine when we speak idealistically like that. Safe to say I'm with you there. As long as apothecaries aren't openly advertising the easy pill to skip the gym I'd be fine.
I've made a comment elsewhere in this thread detailing how I'd solve this and I think we are in more agreement and we might have originally thought: https://tildes.net/~health/1f2c/a_pill_to_make_exercise_obsolete_2017#comment-cbqs
Forgive me for keeping my replies short, but the amount of notifications in this thread is overwhelming me. I don't think the pill should be our first line of defense, but I don't think it should not not exist either.
No problem at all, I definitely get being overwhelmed, and yeah we seem to care a great deal about a lot of common things. Hope you have a great day.
I have made numerous attempts at having an exercise schedule. I don't believe endorphins ever kicked in. I would very much welcome a pill that allowed me to be healthy without exercising. It is regrettable that capitalism will convert every improvement into a new form of exploitation, but exercising doesn't come naturally to everyone and we can no longer pretend that shouting "just to the gym!" is effective for them. That stance is similar to that of telling overweight people to just eat less or someone addicted to cigarettes to just stop smoking. I fully appreciate the value just exercising has to some, I just don't think everyone's like that. Some people absolutely do need all the help they can get, and are not in a position to reject anything that will bring an improvement to them.
Exercise exists in other forms rather than going to the gym, which in itself is a capitalist commodity (I mean the prices per month are pretty damn high). There are clubs for every sort of sport out there, and especially with team sports I find that the community aspect of it helps massively, as I am also someone who does not like exercise.
Also, a lot of at home exercise regiments ramp up incredibly quickly, which also killed my desire to keep them going for a long time. I have restarted one where I exercise less than 10 minutes each day, alternating upper and lower body. 3 sets of 4 pull-ups and then 3x10 leg raises.
I have also always tried to sneak in exercise by moving between points A and B (be that work/home or store/home) on foot or by bike, which is a luxury I understand is not possible everywhere, but also just getting out, popping in a podcast and walking around for an hour helps immensely.
A stand-up desk at home can also help at least a little. I get it, the endorphins also never kicked in for me, which has been an issue in my childhood because my mother tried to get me hooked on a lot of different sports. She was an athlete at university and it was immensely distressing to her that her son loved to just sit at the computer all day.
The exercise itself does not have to be the source of the endorphins, but the result can be. Checking myself in the mirror immediately after doing 10 push-ups, there is a noticeable change. Sure, it disappears after a bit, but it's a promise of more. The result of just walking for an hour is also noticeable on the psyche. It is positive.
Exercise itself is sort of a capitalist invention. Exercise used to be walking to the store, spending time outside, or just generally going out and participating in society.
We spend so much time working that we end up having to cram a day's worth of exercise into a single hour. It's no wonder it's not fun for everyone when you have to crank the intensity up to make exercising more efficient.
Designing communities that are safe and convenient to walk in, designing comfortable public outdoor spaces, and providing more opportunities for in person social groups would largely eliminate the need for dedicated exercise routines unless you have specific performance or aesthetic goals in mind.
10,000 steps a day is a number that is thrown around a lot. I know that number was just randomly chosen by a pedometer company and doctors have actually said that even less activity is needed, but it's a nice number to work with for my example. 10,000 steps is about 5 miles of walking for me. That is about 1.5 to 2 hours of walking. That seems like a lot if it's something you have to add on to everything you normally do, but imagine if you could walk to work. Replace your 30 minute drive with a 30 minute walk each way, and half that requirement is done. Maybe after work, you meet up with some friends at a public square and get some food or a drink instead of just talking on the phone or discord like you normally do. You walk 20 minutes to a local business and walk home after. Thats another 40 minutes of walking done.
Nobody who is able bodied should need an exercise pill. We could just make walking a viable and comfortable option for getting around and we would all be much healthier without even trying.
That’s more apples to oranges. More walking is better than a pure sedentary lifestyle, but it’s no replacement for strength training. In fact it’s mostly orthogonal. You will gain a lot of benefit, walking or not, from resistance strength training.
We don’t run around and stab elk anymore, or smash nuts with rocks for hours on end. Probably for the best. But everyone should work out regardless.
Strength training is very important, but it's very hard to go from your couch to the squat rack with no steps in between. Walking and being mobile helps build up confidence and make the transition to strength training much less jarring for people.
Lifting weights isn't even the only way to build strength. Only circus strong men were lifting weights to gain muscle prior to the last 100 years. Even beyond someone's job, I think there were more physical activities in people's lives in the past.
My point was more addressing "if we had walkable cities people wouldn't have to take a muscle pill". Sure, people use to use muscles more, but unlike walking, that's probably a good thing that we don't need to anymore.
Strength training in a gym with researched, safe, predictable movements in a controlled space is infinitely safer than on the job. Blue collar workers often have chronic pain issues for a reason. No one is perfectly careful. Meanwhile, not a lot of people get injured from walking. It's mostly cardio anyhow.
Even if we had a walking utopia, people should still train their muscles in a preferably safe way. If there were a pill that would allow you to either go to the gym less, or avoid it entirely, while still having developed muscle groups across your body, then I see no reason why the walkers should not also take it.
Strength training doesn't necessarily involve weights. It's any exercise where you're expending effort to push against something or pull something, where the goal is not to tax your cardiovascular and respiratory systems, but your individual muscle groups.
That can be pushups, air squats, using a resistance band so on and so forth.
You're right, weightlifting is a relatively recent invention, it just so happens to be one of the most convenient and affordable ways we've found to accurately and easily train muscles.
You can have a perfectly effective strength training routine with only calisthenics, or resistance band training, or gymnastics though. Hell, you could pick up rocks and dig ditches in your backyard for half an hour every few days and it would work great.
Only if you think about exercise in the gym sense, which is one of the most boring ways to exercise. Sports have been around for as long as humanity, and even gyms have been around in ancient Greece. It's where the word comes from I believe.
Work would have also been a source of exercise, but many of us have desk jobs these days where you are not doing much physical labor.
Despite all the best intentions, a portion of the population will never exercise or diet. To them, medication can literally save lives. I don't believe it is reasonable to hold an unjustified attachment to "natural" forms of improvement as if they're necessarily superior by virtue of being natural or organic. Maybe the best word for that is "non-invasive".
That may be to the detriment of those who might greatly benefit from medication.
That might cause the perfect to prevent the good.
I think we go about this backwards.
Why they will never exercise? Is the lack of will something that is born with them, or the fact that we need to work for more than 8 hours per day and go home exhausted and beaten up and still have to workout on top of that?
The pill solution is a band aid for a deeper problem.
Instead of fighting for less exploitation, working hours, more free time, more leisure, more working rights, we welcome a pill that will let us be more exploited.
It is not a matter of having a pessimistic point of view, it is a fact that will happen. The same way that automation and computers didn't lessened our working ours. It just made a lot of people get fired.
This medication is not here to help. It is here to be abused.
That's a strong statement considering how much you can change about yourself today. I'm not saying it should be an invidiual effort, but a social one.
When it comes to diet, a top-down solution could even be preffered. Tax the everloving shit out of high-glucose and highly processed foods. Implement programs to lower the prices of healthy food. Make tap water completely free, it is a human right after all. Lower the overall working time of the population so that humans have time to take care of themselves and families again. Make cities walkable. Normalise letting your kids walk to school instead of a caravan of parent's cars arriving at school everyday to drop children off so they can sit all day in school. Make lunch at school free, organic, and healthy. Increase the time of exercise at the expense of other school classes (kids are spending more time at school than ever before and that time should be reduced in general). Move away from the teaching from the teacher-in-front model and consider having them take place outside so that standing and moving instead of sitting is normalised.
A lot of these solutions will have to focus on kids because it is in these times that your lifelong habits are formed. And if the parents are too tired, too depressed or too overworked (these should all also be addressed) then society has to pick up the slack in a similar fashion as when schools should (ideally) equalise the background of kids who come from academic and working class backgrounds.
Let me say that I find that I would find the existence of this drug beneficial. There are folks who, for a variety of reasons, literally cannot exercise. But exercise is not only good because it stops you from being obese, it is also good in itself. Improving your stamina lowers your blood pressure as the heart grows in size and pumps slower. It tires you out so you sleep better. Et cetera.
That does sound like a very complicated perfect solution that would take long enough to implement that people would probably benefit from quicker alternatives in the meantime, in a way that a larger portion of the population is sufficiently attended.
I don't really understand the impulse to be so anti-medication, to the detriment of concrete outcomes.
I would love it if we could affect all the intricate social ways that make people begin smoking, but we can't. Not in every case. So I'm glad there are medications to help them quit smoking. And those medications shouldn't impede anyone from studying the deeply complicated factors that govern our behaviors.
I am repeating myself, but this really sounds like allowing the perfect to prevent the good.
I question the idea of a drug as a quick simple alternative. It takes on average a decade to get a drug from concept to approved to sell, and the process is extremely expensive, my professor in patent law told me that it's about a milliard EUR, and that was in like 2018. That's a long time to start implementing at least some of these changes. I don't expect all of them to be implemented, and while we like to think of society as always progressing, sometimes it it goes dangerously close to regressing.
Again, if this drug gets approved and works then by all means, folks should get a prescription for it. I posted a comment which in its tone is a mix of art an opinion and it surprises me that folks had such negative reactions to it. One cannot address every view in a comment, because the world is infinitely complex and as such addressing everything would take an infinite amount of words and thus time.
Perhaps I am letting the perfect be the enemy of good, but my solution is really just a lot of smaller solutions that can be implemented irrespectively of each other. It's complex, but not impossible.
Don't you think your proposal of profound societal change would take much longer than 10 or even 20 years?
I know that Mexico for example already has implemented a sugar tax on soft drinks and the discussion has come up in a number of different countries.
I think that most, if not all of my suggestions can be done in a decade. Why would they not be?
I think you underestimate the political will needed for some of your changes, but I also think the easiest to implement are the ones that ideally should happen latest in the process. Heavily taxing processed foods, for instance, would negatively impact people in food deserts, and those people are typically already not doing great for money. But getting rid of food deserts and ensuring everyone can afford to buy fresh, healthy food is much more difficult than adding a tax on certain foods.
A sugar tax should be accompanied by law requiring grocers to stock local (if possible) and healthy foods which should be subsidized with said tax. I think it should be one of the first things to be done because it is so much simpler to accomplish.
I would encourage you to look more into food deserts and how pervasive they are. I don't think they're the type of issue that can be easily solved by requiring grocers to stock sufficient healthy food. One of the principle issues with living in a food desert is that often there isn't a proper grocery store near enough to you in the first place. While changing the types of food grocers stock can be an element in some such situations, there are numerous other factors that are a lot harder to solve. And that's not even touching on other practical barriers, such as people not having time to cook for themselves because of how much they need to work.
In the current world, I think only limited taxes on classes of food that are truly luxuries, like sugar taxes on soft drinks, can be justified without first investing a lot more money and effort into more fundamental reforms. I think taxes on broader classes of processed foods are too likely to harm the people struggling hardest to survive if implemented without first addressing the other barriers that keep them from "eating healthy".
I agree with all of these and if you run for office I will vote for you.
I particularly think that people drastically underrate the damage that prepared food products does to a person’s health over time. When you buy a box of prepped food you are outsourcing your nutritional choices. In order to be competitive they need to be ultra-palatable and that means that it’s going to be high in calories, low in fiber, and just generally bad for your health. And this is all before getting into the problems with ultraprocessed foods!
We already know that societal changes are needed because there is extensive research showing that people live longer in areas where society has normalized healthy habits. Just do a quick search for “blue zones” for more info. There’s a pretty good documentary about them on Netflix that came out not too long ago.
So I'm definitely not an expert on this or anything, but I did do a quick search of "blue zones" and under Wikipedia there's a part that says the concept has been challenged by a lack of scientific evidence.
That’s an unfortunate example of bad writing on Wikipedia. They cite a blog entry from one person who was trying to criticize “the blue zone diet”, which isn’t really a thing. Healthy habits goes beyond just diet, after all.
They will never exercise or diet because the world is not set up for them to do so. Most people's primary form of transportation is a car. The easiest and cheapest meals are calorie dense, high carbohydrate and fat, and very processed. Most people's jobs require them to sit in a single seat all day. Most popular entertainment consists of sitting down and looking at a screen.
We've set our society up this way. It doesn't have to be this way though.
Obesity related health problems are a brand new problem in the human species. They literally didn't exist 80 years ago. People didn't suddenly become lazier and more averse to eating well. The societal fabric just changed. There's no reason it can't change again.
I think medication like this has a chance to improve the lives and health of people that cannot exercise whatsoever. Knowing the way western culture works though, if they're ever approved they'll just be used to compensate for the deeply unhealthy lifestyle of our culture, and while or might be an improvement worth tolerating the side effects for, it won't be a true replacement for actually exercising.
I'm not really sure how the commentary makes sense. For one, it's not like having gyms around is some kind of "natural" process that is being interrupted. Gyms themselves are a hack.
Our bodies are adapted to develop and atrophy only the muscles we need, to survive in a resource scarce world. We're far from that world now, and gyms are a hack to get around it, a place where you can do carefully researched exercise to maximally stimulate your muscles with the least amount of time.
When the "capitalistic dystopia" angle is that companies won't have to install gyms in offices... I mean, c'mon lol.
The way muscles develop is ill-suited to the developed world - most people eat more than enough calories and macronutrients, muscle atrophy is a pointless process. We already do a lot of optimizing - gyms are an optimization. The natural way is people should go out for a week and go hunt some deer or something.
The process itself is natural, no matter how you achieve it. Your body doesn't know if you're running four miles to tire out a gazelle in the open savannah or doing it while watching the news on a treadmill.
The issue with using a drug to shortcut that process is that it will replicate some of the benefits of exercise, it can't replicate all of them. There are mechanical effects of exercise that strengthen bones, improve heart and lung function, and numerous other benefits besides just increasing your metabolic rate.
Having a drug like the one proposed would be an improvement on just doing nothing, but it wouldn't replace all the benefits of exercise.
A pill against the need to be entertained is actually terrifying. What do we do then? Just die? Turn into the borg? Turn into SG-1 spider bio replicators?
There was a (I think fairly mediocre) movie about that made in the early 2000s, where most of humanity has been on a pill regiment that suppresses your emotions completely and the main character is part of a police force which hunts the last few who resist until of course he doesn't take his pills once and begins appreciating the emotions.
Honestly it worries me. But then again, worrying about the next generation as you get older is a core experience of being human.
Equilibrium is the movie you're thinking of! (unless there's another one with the same plot)
I think there was another one without the gun-fu, but maybe I am wrong....I do remember that being a part of Equilibrium.
Thank you, that's the one! It even has better reviews than I remembered. :]
You couldn't be referring to Equilibrium because there's nothing mediocre about it.
I vaguely remember that movie myself. No idea what it was though.
It's called Equilibrium! @DON_MAC found it in his comment: https://tildes.net/~health/1f2c/a_pill_to_make_exercise_obsolete_2017#comment-cbqn
edit: oh sorry I replied from my notif page I didn't see your other reply.
It's cool, that's probably the one. I swear there is another recent one that was really bad, but it might have involved brain wipes or something. Either way, pretty common sci fi trope. Just a bit more scary when you slightly extend the idea of "this pill will make you skinny" to "this pill will kill your need for entertainment".
Personally I’ve got a pretty good exercise routine. I get well above the 150 minutes per week recommendation and feel fit. But I think if technology like this is viable then it’s a massive net positive to the world’s health. And I could see it getting added to elderly people’s pill regimen, potentially significantly improving their health and life spans.
As a person with fibromyalgia this would be awesome for me too. it's hard to get around so I can't walk as much as I'd like to, and god I love to eat...
I think this is where it could have biggest impact. People with chronic conditions that limit their ability to get out and run, walk, or stay in a gym, no matter how much willpower they have.
Hope your condition is going okay :)
This is my too. I'm looking forward to having something like this in my life.
Really interesting idea, an exercise pill. But what tickled me most was this:
I can see the public health argument, but similar to considerations regarding the realisation of AGI (or even AI deployed to replace many functions that we enjoy and fulfil us, e.g. art), I start to wonder - what is the point of being alive?
I think a lot of this is to do with people's view on exercise. Personally, I like to get outside and walk, hike, and climb both for exercise and the experience. For others, they just grind out time on a treadmill without much enjoyment, and I could see alternatives being attractive to them.
It also sounds like it doesn't necessarily provide the benefits of exercise on its own, but improves the efficiency of exercise. Maybe I missed it in the article, but the pill they discuss is modifying your metabolism to burn fat, preserve glucose, and helps with slimming down and endurance. Which is great, but doesn't develop muscle mass or endurance without actual exercise, or cardio endurance, etc. I think much of the benefit of exercise is the muscle strength, as it stabilizes your joints, supports your core and back, etc.
I exercise rigorously mainly for the mental health benefit, the endorphins calm my anxiety, plus it creates a routine and ritual that gets me out of the house. I think the benefits to exercise go way beyond physical health, and a pill could never replicate them.
If you didn't had a need to exercise for physical health, and did so exclusively for mental health purposes, you might be inclined to think of an exercise routine that is entirely focused on the things that improve your mental health the most regardless of physical benefits.
Just to give you an obvious example, I know people who get a lot of pleasure from dancing and very little from lifting weights. So they might dedicate more of their time to dancing and skip weight lifting.
I mean I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Unless there's a reason they need to lift weights, i.e. training for a competition, if they enjoy dancing they should just do that.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/sJkh7