No Pill for Exercise
August 7, 2008
Don’t encourage kids to chase every “free lunch” that comes along. Still, it happens all the time. In fact, people even turn things into free-lunch fantasies. Here’s an example.
In a recent online article at Cell, Ronald M. Evans and his colleagues reported that they gave mice specific chemical compounds that gave the mice more endurance on a treadmill. In the very first line of the summary, the authors write:
The benefits of endurance exercise on general health make it desirable to identify orally active agents that would mimic or potentiate the effects of exercise to treat metabolic diseases.
Yes, it would be great to find something like this to treat metabolic diseases. Drugs might even be formulated that provide “exercise” for people who can’t move because of a spinal injury, and such therapies might make their entire body work better. So the scientists aimed this research at useful goals.
But that’s not how this story got “sold” to the general public. Instead, people wrote about “exercise in a pill” or “coach potatoes turned into athletes with a pill” or some other free-lunch thinking. Is that how we want kids to think? If kids do think that way—that they can get exercise just by taking a pill—then they will think that way about other things too. They’ll want a pill that makes them learn algebra. They’ll think that life comes with easy solutions to everything.
Even if obesity takes over the world, even if someone wants to be the best athlete of all time, there should never be “exercise in a pill” for someone who is completely capable of exercising on their own. Instead, we should teach kids to value the effort applied to achieving something. We should teach them to envision what they want and then dig deep. We should teach them to dig in and fight for what they want. No one can get that from a pill.
But, we can only teach kids this lesson by showing them. As role models, adults must do their best to work for what they want. No lottery is likely to solve any financial problems, but a little financial work might. No waist line gets more trim with some gadget, but exercise will do the trick. No amount of just wishing will make a person learn something new, but digging in and doing the work will. Think of all of the good things that we could do—if we just stop looking for a free lunch.
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