Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Squats make the lower part of your outer thigh bigger, while leg extensions make your front thigh muscle bigger — your muscles grow in different spots depending on how you train them.
Causal
Whether you do squats or leg extensions for two months, you’ll get about equally stronger at doing leg extensions — the exercise you don’t do doesn’t hurt your progress on it.
If you're a woman new to lifting and do leg extensions twice a week for two months, your front thigh muscle (rectus femoris) will grow more all along its length than if you did squats.
If you're a woman new to lifting and do squats twice a week for two months, you'll get much stronger at squats and your outer thigh muscle near the knee will grow more than if you did leg extensions.
If you train one leg at a time, that leg gets much stronger than the other when tested alone — but if you train both legs together, both legs get stronger at the same rate, with no one leg getting ahead.
Even though people who trained one leg at a time ended up lifting heavier weights than those who trained both legs together, both groups ended up with the same muscle size and overall strength — so lifting heavier with one leg doesn’t automatically make you stronger overall.
Training one leg at a time makes it harder for both legs to work together at full power, while training both legs together makes them work better together — the way you train changes how your legs coordinate.
Whether you train one leg or both legs at once for 12 weeks, your legs get just as big and strong overall — the way you do the exercise doesn’t change how much muscle you build or how strong you become in general.
Doing leg extensions one leg at a time for 12 weeks makes each leg stronger and more active when tested alone, better than doing both legs together — even though both methods improve overall leg strength similarly.
Biscuits made with high-oleic sunflower oil or butter tasted good and had a nice texture, but the ones made with coconut and sunflower oil mix were liked the most by tasters.
Descriptive
What kind of fat you use in biscuits changes how crunchy they are, how easily they break, and how they taste.
Biscuits made with butter have more cholesterol than those made with other oils or fat mixes.
Biscuits made with a mix of coconut and sunflower oil have more saturated fat but last longer without going rancid than other versions.
Biscuits made with high-oleic sunflower oil have more of a certain healthy fat and vitamin E than those made with palm oil, which could make them nutritionally different.
This plant extract is way more powerful at fighting free radicals than most other wild berries tested in similar lab tests.
Quantitative
Plain avocado oil becomes unsafe for frying after about 10 days of heating, but with this plant extract, it can last 15 days before reaching the same safety limit.
Even though the ether extract has fewer antioxidants, the ones it has stick better to the oil because they’re more oil-friendly, which helps protect it.
Mechanistic
When you heat avocado oil slowly in air, it breaks down in about five or six clear stages, not all at once.
The alcohol-based plant extract works better than the ether-based one at protecting oil from breaking down when heated, because it has more antioxidants.
After heating for 6 days, the oil with plant extract has much less of the bad chemicals that form when oil goes bad, compared to plain oil.
Avocado oil is mostly made of healthy monounsaturated fats, with some polyunsaturated fats and a smaller amount of saturated fats, which makes it prone to going rancid when heated.
The alcohol-based plant extract is four times stronger at fighting free radicals than the ether-based one, according to lab tests.
The plant extract made with alcohol has way more natural antioxidant chemicals than the one made with ether or the oil itself.
When you heat avocado oil with this plant extract, it breaks down much slower than plain oil, so it stays safe to use for frying longer.