Exercise may be fun (for some people), and it may be good for your health, but if you just want to lose weight and get in shape, exercise isn’t necessarily required.

Medical researchers are producing pills that build muscles and stamina, and they’ve discovered so-called brown fat that makes us slimmer. Soon we’ll pop a few pills, plop in front of the TV, and turn into slender athletes. The Future has finally arrived!

In mid-2008, researchers told us about The Exercise Pill, a drug called AICAR developed by Schering-Plough. It’s still being tested, but the results in mice are astounding.   

Taking the drug for four weeks, mice improved their running endurance by 44%, with zero exercise. When the mice were tested on treadmills, they ran nearly 1.5 times as long as, and faster than, mice that didn’t get a dose. A second group of rodents got a companion drug, GW1516, and showed a 70% performance improvement.

“It’s a little bit like a free lunch without the calories,” said Dr. Ronald Evans, whose research was published in the medical journal Cell. This wasn’t fly-by-night research. It was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the U.S. National Institutes of Health. 

Now we have news of a second major medical breakthrough – discovery of “good fat” (brown fat) in adults. 

Three new studies show that most adults have large deposits of brown fat — calorie-burning cells that scientists thought disappeared after infancy. “This is a tissue whose sole physiological purpose is to expend energy,” said Francesco S. Celi, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. “That makes it an ideal target” for drugs designed to rev up its bad-fat-destroying abilities. (Since those drugs are still in development, for now the best way to activate brown fat is to stay cold, on the verge of shivering, for prolonged periods.)

So… brown fat can make you skinny and the exercise pill will make you strong. Is this a great world, or what?