In fact, billions of people worldwide are considered physically inactive.

But what if I told you science could change that with a pill.

Meat couch, potato mouse and Lance Armstrong mouse.

Both are being fed the same Western diet, which is mostly high fat and high sugar, tastes kind of like cookie dough and they're both raised under the exact same conditions.

They live in the same setup and are both extremely limited in how much exercise they are allowed.

And yet scientists have recently found a way to keep Lance Armstrong mouse lean and fit with a perfectly healthy shiny coat without exercise or the need to move a muscle.

A simple daily dose of a drug has effectively given Lance Armstrong mouse the benefits of exercise this is real and happening at the Salk Institute in SAn Diego.

The drug is called G W 501516 or just 516 for short.

And when given to healthy mice that are allowed to exercise, it increased their endurance by 75%.

After only four weeks shrank their body fat, reduced insulin resistance and shifted muscle composition ratio to slow twitch fibers.

And it's not the only drug like this.

But before we can fully understand the mechanisms and whether you should or would even want to take these drugs, we first have to understand exercise a little more.

The benefits of exercise have been known for centuries with the first evidence of organized exercise for health occurring in china in 2500 Bc.

Between then and now, different cultures have had differing beliefs about physical movement, but it wasn't until the 19 forties and fifties that scientists in the west really became obsessed with the benefits of exercise.

And it all started because of the famous red Decker busses in London England.

No joke.

In fact, they provided the first ever quit Quantitative systematic medical study of exercise.

You see.

In the 1940s, medical professionals began realizing that rates of heart attack were way up and suspected it may be due to modern in activity.

Turns out these double decker busses were the perfect environment to test their hypothesis.

On the one hand, you have the driver who sits around 90% of the time and on the other you have the conductor who goes up and down the stairs all day to the tune of around 750 stairs.

After analyzing these two groups, scientists found that the drivers were twice as likely to drop dead of a sudden heart attack or yet congestive heart disease than the conductor's.

Now, even though it's been shown thousands of times that exercise benefits humans in so many ways it's even known to help prevent 25 diseases exactly how it does, what it does or what biological pathways or chemicals come into play is almost completely unknown to scientists like we know it's good for us but we haven't been able to pin down exactly what's happening inside inside the human body.

That makes it good.

In fact, a recent study biopsied people before and after 10 minutes of hard cycling and found thousands of changes of which only 10% were currently understood.

Even the National Institutes of Health is running a five year study to try and document every major molecule changed by exercise in 3000 people.

So what do we know that we could implement into pill form?

Well, exercise is known to increase antioxidant production in your body.

When our body breaks oxygen, it can form reactive oxygen species or R.

O.

S.

S.

That can cause damage to our cells.

But when we exercise, our body is able to increase the production and activity of antioxidant enzymes such as glutathione and aniseed oil system.

To protect against the stress roos puts on ourselves.

So that would be useful in a pill.

Cata cola means are also one of the most well studied benefits of exercise.

When you exercise, you release dopamine adrenaline and nor adrenaline, adrenaline initially increases blood pressure and heart rate when you exercise.

But after you exercise your blood pressure and heart rate have a new lower baseline.

This is why athletes tend to have lower heart rates than the average person.

Dopamine when produced through exercise, reduces pain perception and reduces the release of the stress hormone cortisol.

Another important known changes.

Epigenetic modifications which could be one of the most important factors in an exercise pill.

Epigenetic is how your D.

N.

A.

Is expressed.

In other words your D.

N.

A.

Is the language that tells your body how to function, how you read.

The language is epa genetics and studies in mice have even shown that epigenetic inheritance can occur when parental exercise benefits are passed on to their child.

Scientists in Germany used a mouse model where mice were given either a high fat diet or a normal diet and were allowed to exercise while others were made to be sedentary.

And they found that the Children of mice that exercised had improved glucose metabolism regardless of their diet compared to mice parents that were set terry, this is the path that many modern exercise and appeal drugs are taking.

How can they turn on or off genes that lead to a beneficial outcome.

The drug 516 from earlier targets the gene PPR delta.

It binds to the receptor and boost the signal to break down and burn fat and because mice are now burning fat instead of carbs, they're able to run longer before feeling the physical sensation of exhaustion which results from using their glucose stores.

If the Lance armstrong mouse was allowed to run it would be able to go 1.5 hours longer than the couch potato mouse.

If it could run as well ironically, even though scientists understand this is the mechanism of 516, they don't understand which molecule is naturally responsible for this process during exercise.

Another drug called compound 14 being developed at the University of Southampton, effectively trick cells into thinking they are running out of energy, which triggers them to burn more fuel.

A major discovery this year found that one of the most significant change after exercise was the production of an amino acid called blackfeet.

Blackfeet is made from lactate, the thing responsible for the burning sensation in your muscles.

When you work out when lack fee was given to mice with diet induced obesity, it decreased their food intake by 50% without affecting their movement or energy expenditure, ultimately burning fat and reducing weight.

Now these are just a few of the many compounds and molecules being tested and explored to induce the benefits of exercise without the need to actually move.

Though it may be increasingly obvious to you that it's extremely unlikely that any one drug will end up creating all these benefits.

Now, some of you might be yelling why not just exercise And I hear you, but despite the fact that simply telling somebody to exercise more or explaining the benefits of exercise doesn't actually increase activity and the fact that a lot of people don't have the time or resources to afford a gym membership or equipment, there are a lot of other use cases for these kind of drugs.

For example, people who are recovering from surgeries or the elderly who lose muscle mass at a rate of around 8% each decade after 45 and are often unable to exercise as much could take these pills.

I'm not calling 45 year old elderly by the way, I'll be there soon enough.

I'm just saying that's when a lot of muscle loss begins.

Or even astronauts who lose a huge amount of muscle and bone density while in space and require physical therapy on their return.

They could take an exercise pill for a short period of time, but but there's a catch.

There's always a catch, isn't there?

It turns out that the drug 516, for instance, when given to mice in large doses causes them to develop cancer way faster than other mice.

Not given the drug any antioxidant production, we talked about could have negative effects to increasing the risk of heart disease, stroke and lung cancer, increased cata cola.

Mean production can increase blood pressure, causing palpitations, anxiety and chest pain, and a lot of these other drugs being studied in research also have their tradeoffs at least for now.

While scientists continue to try and modify and adapt them in ways that could be less harmful at the end of the day.

If you're interested in the benefits of exercise, you're probably best off just exercising, but that doesn't mean it's not an incredibly useful field of medicine that may have a huge impact on human quality of life in the future.

Where one day we might have a pill or many, many pills that we can take to confer the benefits of exercise with as little risk as possible until then keep lifting.

Yeah, No, but honestly, just moving your body is an amazing thing.

Even if it's just walking, the benefits are awesome.

I'm curious what you think if you would ever actually take a pill that could give you the benefits of exercise without actually having to move.

Thanks for watching.

Make sure you like the video subscribe and we'll see you next time for some more science piece.