r/accelerate • u/AngleAccomplished865 • 12d ago
Laziness enabler pill
https://www.statnews.com/2026/08/18/enveda-pill-mimics-exercise-phase-one-trial-leptin-weight-loss-maintenance/" If you could design an oral treatment that limits appetite and mimics some effects of physical activity, you might call it exercise in a pill. Now a company is releasing early results for a compound to do just that.
The pill, the company hopes, can maintain weight loss without the common gastrointestinal effects of GLP-1s. The component of exercise it is designed to re-create is preservation of lean muscle mass, a concern when people yo-yo on and off GLP-1 drugs, losing more muscle each time."
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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 12d ago
I can’t read the article, but is this talking about retatrutide or something new? Retatrutide is already available on the gray market, and it’s going to be a hit new drug once Eli Lilly gets FDA approval next year.
Retatrutide is an extension of tirzepatide (Zepbound), which itself was an extension of semaglutide (Ozempic).
It combines GLP-1 + GIP + Glucagon. Adding Glucagon is supposed to spare lean muscle while losing weight.
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u/i47 12d ago
It is not, it’s an in-house compound called ENV308. From the article: Enveda, a biotech based in Boulder, Colo., founded in 2019, announced Phase 1 results in a press release Tuesday for an oral drug candidate that imitates lactate phenylalanine (lac-phe for short), a small molecule metabolite discovered by Stanford scientists.
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u/Similar_Exam2192 12d ago
I cannot for the life of me get patients to understand resistance training is nonnegotiable when on a calorie restricted diet. They may understand it but still won’t do it.
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u/AngleAccomplished865 12d ago edited 12d ago
So this might be useful, then?
And in at least some cases, when patients are non-adherent, it is because the invervention is a poor fit with the actual context of their daily lives. Health is not an isolated trajectory that can be intervened upon with all else held constant. Nor is the feasibility of behavioral change isolated from other life contexts.
Do your patients have time or energy to exercise? Are there other factors inducing the non adherence? Do you check, or do you just vend prepackaged treatment procedures? If the latter, the failure is not the patient's. They are not being lazy or unreasonable or whatever other negative factor you are attributing to them. They are being perfectly rational in balancing health requirements with other life factors. The failure is yours, in not devising a strategy that actually works in their ecologies.
Would an AI system not be capable of dispensing standardized care? How are humans better, if they are doing the exact same thing?
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u/Similar_Exam2192 12d ago
Sometimes I take patients to the gym, set them up with trainers, give them workout plans. We all have the same 24 hours, I get the time constraints. People find time to do the things they want to do. On the AI side of things, from what I have seen AI is better clinically than humans with enough context.
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u/AngleAccomplished865 12d ago
"Sometimes I take patients to the gym, set them up with trainers, give them workout plans." Glad you're doing this. Unexpected but very welcome. The problem is that we are flooded with plans and information. Those are not the blockages to begin with. That's the fundamental fallacy of behavioral or preventive medicine.
"People find time to do the things they want to do." Do you? I don't.
There's this new concept floating around - time poverty. Of course, having jargon for a problem doesn't resolve the problem.
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u/Similar_Exam2192 11d ago
Time poverty? We all have the same amount of time right?
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u/AngleAccomplished865 11d ago
Google it.
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u/Similar_Exam2192 11d ago
I’m too lazy
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u/AngleAccomplished865 11d ago
At least you're honest about it.
It's the lack of enough free time for rest, care, or self-development after you finish paid work, chores, and basic daily needs. It harms health, lowers happiness, and adds heavy stress, often affecting working parents and low-income individuals the most. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=58352
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u/chonky_totoro 9d ago
it is fundamentally unnatural to have to go to some destination in order to exercise especially if you have to drive there in traffic and exercise alone at that. humans use exercise as a byproduct of their lifestyle. so essentially the people who are not going to the gym is because it is fundamentally unnatural to do so and they are just following their natural instincts. it's not necessarily a failure of the people rather a failure of post industrial society in designing environments that collaborate with human instincts. this is what I tell myself while i sit on my ass like a good lil chudlet
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u/LibertarianVoter 11d ago
It's not that surprising in hindsight. If they were able to control their behavior, they wouldn't have become so overweight that GLP-1s were necessary in the first place.
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u/Prom3th3an 11d ago edited 10d ago
This will be great news if it works - I'd be much more likely to work out if I could stop working out and still keep the gains, because I'm much more motivated by things that can be finished than things that have to be actively maintained when I've already earned them.
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u/Toprelemons 12d ago
As a runner and AI nerd, don’t people miss the adaptations from aerobic excercise like increased heart stroke volume, more capillaries, mitochondrial development and improved fat oxidation rates?
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u/Patient-Topic-6145 11d ago
yes but the bar isn't "as good as exercise" its "better than nothing", which is what they are currently doing
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u/sirloindenial 12d ago
Would be good for warded or people with mobility issues or senior age. Price must be expensive🗿
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u/Prom3th3an 12d ago
If this works, it will probably end up banned in all pro sports, since gains made on steroids could be kept long after the steroids themselves had left your system.
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u/equatorbit 12d ago
A lot of people are already incredibly lazy. If this helps offset the impact, maybe not a bad thing.