Of mice and (lazy) men

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/07/2020 (2073 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I have excellent news for couch potatoes who think bending over to pick the TV remote control off the floor is too physically demanding.

Prepare to become extremely excited, lazybones, because scientists have just determined blood from a mouse that exercises on a regular basis can perk up the sluggish brain of a “couch potato” mouse.

Is that exciting news, or what?

Personally, I feel the most exciting aspect of that discovery is the fact that, apparently, some mice own couches.

For the record, I am not joking around about this major mouse-related scientific breakthrough, which I hope will lead to some amazing health benefits for people such as myself who break into a sweat watching golfers putting on TV.

According to Science Magazine, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, decided (why not?) to put one of those little exercise wheels into a cage full of mice, thereby causing them to spend their nights running and running and running.

“The researchers collected blood from elderly or middle-aged mice that had an exercise wheel in their cage for six weeks and then transfused this blood into old mice without a wheel in their cage,” Science Magazine explained.

“Couch-potato mice receiving this blood eight times over three weeks did nearly as well on learning and memory tests, such as navigating through a maze, as the exercising mice. A control group of couch potatoes receiving blood from similarly old, non-exercising mice saw no boost.”

To recap, elderly, sluggish mice who spent their days doing absolutely nothing (much like Canadian senators) were transformed into smarter, hipper, fitter rodents simply by being transfused with blood from mice that were forced to take part in the rodent version of CrossFit.

My initial reaction on reading about this study was something along the lines of: “Huh?” But then it occurred to me that non-physically fit human beings like me might be able to reap some incredibly easy benefits from this discovery.

It turns out I am not the only person who was thinking along these lines.

“It’s very tantalizing,” is what Princeton University molecular biologist Coleen Murphy, who studies aging in worms, told Science Magazine. “We always want people to exercise more and not everybody is going to be able to do that. To be able to give people this in a pill form would be fantastic.”

A pill sounds pretty good to me, because the other option for getting fit without doing any exercise apparently involves catching mice that work out on a regular basis and either eating them or injecting yourself with their blood, and where would you find a hypodermic needle small enough?

Also, I can tell you from personal experience that I have never been able to catch any of the mice that invade my house on a semi-regular basis, and they are not even all that healthy to begin with. Seriously, the mice in our house tend to drop dead of heart attacks because they eat whatever happens to be lying around the house, a high-fat diet consisting largely of cheeseburgers and salty snacks.

As a crusading columnist, I spent several valuable minutes researching this topic, which is how I ended up Googling the phrase “athletic mice,” which led me to news stories about how researchers at Harvard Medical School had taken a gut microbe from elite human marathon runners, transplanted it into the colons of laboratory mice and discovered it boosted the rodents’ performance on a treadmill exertion test by 13 per cent.

Which makes you wonder where they got tiny mouse-sized treadmills, but that is not today’s scientific point. No, today’s exciting scientific point is that apparently all we human couch potatoes have to do now is to inject ourselves with blood, or possibly gut microbes, from random athletic human beings.

Intrigued by the notion of becoming a better version of myself without all the bother of going to a gym or getting off the couch, I asked my wife, She Who Must Not Be Named, her feelings about these mouse-intensive fitness discoveries.

At first, she laughed, and then, after giving it some serious consideration, she said this: “Well, it looks like you are going to have to get your hands on some of Bob’s blood!”

For the record, Bob is my best buddy and, along with being the publisher of this newspaper, is arguably the fittest human being I know. On a typical day, Bob will run a marathon, eat a nutritious high-fibre breakfast, play 18 holes of golf, go for a swim, then spend the rest of the day working, avoiding white bread and refined sugar and — I’m not sure about this last thing — watching a documentary on PBS while lifting heavy weights.

So now, if I want to get fit without exercising, all I have to do is figure out how to persuade my buddy Bob to part with a few pints of his super-healthy blood.

I don’t have a clue how to make that happen, but for the moment I’m going to try and B positive.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca