What the scientists are saying…

Workouts make “insides” fitter If you start a fitness programme, don’t use your weighing scales to monitor your progress, says the Daily Mail. Exercise regimes often don’t lead to significant weight loss – but that doesn’t mean they’re not working. A new meta-analysis, conducted by a team at Liverpool John Moores University, and Radboud University in the Netherlands, has found that between two and six months of endurance training results in an average weight loss of only 1% – partly because when people start to exercise they gain muscle, which is a relatively heavy tissue. However, the study data reveals that levels of “visceral fat” – the fat that accumulates deep in the abdomen, and surrounds internal organs – falls significantly, by an average of 6%. Visceral fat is considered more dangerous than the fat that lies just under the skin, and high levels of it are associated with a range of health problems, including heart disease and type 2 diabetes. “These results clearly demonstrate that the powerful effect of exercise training on your body composition cannot be detected by your weighing scale,” said Professor Dick Thijssen, the co-author of the study, published in the journal Obesity Reviews.

End to shampoo dregs? Could the frustrating struggle to extract those final dregs of shampoo soon be over? Scientists at The Ohio State University say they have developed a nanoparticle coating for plastic bottles that allows viscous liquids to glide out easily. Sauces such as ketchup are fairly easy to get out, because they’re mostly water, and water molecules – having relatively high surface tension – tend to stick to each other more than to plastic. But surfactants – the compounds that make soap “soapy” – have far lower surface tension, which means that once they hit plastic, they stick to it. The solution, says the team, is to coat the bottles’ insides with microscopic Y-shaped structures that hold the soap above tiny air pockets, so it never comes into contact with the plastic. “It’s what you’d call a first-world problem, right? ‘I can’t get all the shampoo to come out of the bottle,’” said Bharat Bhushan, the lead scientist on the project. In fact, the issue is more serious than it might seem, he went on: in order to be recycled, bottles must be rinsed totally clean, but when it comes to hard-to-shift detergents, many consumers don’t bother.

Statins scaremongering Misleading scare stories about statins have caused thousands of people to stop taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs, putting them at increased risk of heart attacks and strokes, scientists have claimed. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine examined statin usage during a six-month period from 2013-14 – when a debate was raging about the drug’s safety, prompted by the findings of a controversial study published in The British Medical Journal (The BMJ). This study concluded that statins could cause a range of side effects including muscle pain and increased risk of type 2 diabetes. Although its findings were widely disputed, the new research shows there was an 11% rise in the number of patients abandoning statins in the next few months – equating to 200,000 people. Experts estimate that this temporary spike in the abandonment rate will lead to at least 2,200 more heart attacks and strokes over the next decade – almost a quarter of which are likely to prove fatal. Professor Liam Smeeth, who led the new research, criticised The BMJ for publishing the study, saying subsequent reporting may have led to a “minority view” about side effects being given “disproportionate weight”. However, The BMJ’S editor-inchief, Dr Fiona Godlee, defended the journal’s decision, on the grounds that there should be a “public debate about the benefits and harms of treatment”.

Bread, not butter, the problem Butter has been given the all-clear by a US study – which warns that the more serious threat to health is the bread it is so often spread on. Researchers analysed data on more than 636,000 people, and found that those who ate more butter had no increased risk of heart disease or strokes, and were slightly less likely to get diabetes. They believe the nutrients in butter, such as calcium and vitamin D, compensate for its saturated fat content. By contrast, starchy foods such as white bread and potatoes “have been linked to higher risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease”.