Bench-Pressing 500 mg

What weighs close to 50 pounds, is full of pills and contains enough scientific facts to make your eyes bleed? It is the Physicians’ Desk Reference, of course, a publication so dedicated to the skinny on pills, capsules, elixirs and ointments that the publishers have to issue a new edition every year just to keep abreast of a pharmaceutical industry gone mad.

Within the 3,000 pages of this medical marvel are descriptions of a gazillion different pills -- so many pills that every man, woman and child in the nation could have a handful and nobody’s would be the same. We are a pill-popping nation, and at last comes an account of a new pill that all of us except a tiny little minority of fitness nuts have been waiting for since Lydia Pinkam’s Compound (Pink Pills for Pale Ladies) was introduced in the 1800s.

Background: At Gold’s Gym in Dallas, over on the Nautilus machines, is a group of mice all decked out in Adidas sweat gear and New Balance cross-training shoes. They are exercising up a storm, and it is evident by their six-pack abs, awesome gluts and developed delts that the strenuous workout is paying off. Over in the spa area is another group of mice, wearing cut-offs and T-shirts with University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center emblazoned across their impressive pecs. Their activity is limited to lying in hammocks, sipping Gatorade and ogling the current swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. What strikes the onlookers as odd is that the second group of rodents is just as fit as the sweat-intensive first group, if not more so; and not one of them is lifting a paw. No crunches, no stair-steps, no bench pressing -- nothing. These recumbent rodents are the result of experiments being conducted by one Dr. R. Sanders Williams, dean of the Duke University School of Medicine and his colleagues.

In collaboration with his team, Dr. Williams, whose parents have never publicly explained why they named him Sanders, has come up with an idea for yet another pill. The journal Science claims it will knock the socks off all those Baby Boomers who are beginning to notice spare tires, saggy underarms and the terrible effects of gravity on their middle-aged spreads. If Williams et al. are right, you can forget those zillion and one offerings in the PDR, this pill is the only one you’ll ever want.

All right already, you ask, what kind of a pill is it? It’s a pill that pumps up muscles WITHOUT exercise. It’s a pill that will let people get the health benefits of regular exercise even if they never stir their stumps. Impossible, you scoff? Well, suppose we let the mice explain it.

Spa mouse: Until recently, our primary mouse activity was frightening women into jumping atop chairs and screaming, "A mouse! A mouse!" Occasionally some hyper gal would go after us with a broom. It was the only exercise we ever got. Me and some of the guys were chosen one day to have our genes altered so that they produced a surplus of CaMK, or calmodulin-dependent protein kinase.

Gym mouse: If there’s a point to this, would you get to it!

Spa mouse: The point is, when this protein is activated, it triggers the physical changes that muscle cells undergo after intense exercise. That means, Rambo, that with high levels of CaMK in us, we develop the same healthy muscle cells sitting around watching the clouds form as you guys do busting your buns on the weight machines.

Gym mouse: It also means that pharmaceutical companies have yet to figure out how to make this so-called exercise pill and have it retail for less than 5 bucks a pop. Back to the treadmill!

Nevertheless, Dr. Williams is optimistic. He says the main target of the research is to promote the health of people with heart disease or other conditions that keep them from doing enough exercise. Right on, echoes Dr. Keshav Singh of John Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Since levels of mitochondrial proteins decrease with normal aging, this study may also help develop therapies to increase the physical endurance in the aged."

If so, Doctors, you’d better get the hell out of the way as the hordes of smelly, sweating gymrats rush to buy that pill so they won’t have to sustain that "no pain, no gain" bull any longer.