So what's the problem then? After all it has recently been shown that swimming through syrup is just as easy as swimming through water.

Cussler and Gettelfinger took more than 300 kilograms of guar gum, an edible thickening agent found in salad dressings, ice cream and shampoo, and dumped it into a 25-metre swimming pool, creating a gloopy liquid twice as thick as water. "It looked like snot," says Cussler.

How's that for a pick-up line? "Hey Baby, want to swim through my pool of snot?"

The pair then asked 16 volunteers, a mix of both competitive and recreational swimmers, to swim in a regular pool and in the guar syrup. Whatever strokes they used, the swimmers' times differed by no more than 4%, with neither water nor syrup producing consistently faster times, the researchers report in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Journal.

I seems that although there is more drag on the body as it passes through a thicker liquid there is also more thrust from pushing against the liquid and the two cancel out for a human sized object.

Now we know. Isn't science grand?

(Hat tip to Dopple-G)