It seems like my days... sometimes weeks.... run in themes. Today's theme was "rats". I know... weird. I finished unpacking and organizing the boxes/food for my pantry and yesterday when I was scrubbing everything down and putting contact paper on the shelves I noticed a black box on the floor beneath the bottom shelf. Nothing about this house surprises me anymore (there's a reason it was cheap), but ... I was surprised. It was kind of heavy and I pulled it out and immediately ran to wash my hands. It was an electronic RAT trap. Not a mouse trap.... a rat trap! Are you kidding me?!
This resulted in several more scrubbings of the floor and further inspection of the trap to make sure it was empty.... it was. Thank goodness. Still, I did not sleep so well last night wondering if there could be rat meandering around my house. I am seriously considering getting an outside cat. So... that was my first rat experience. Then today when my husband and I were headed into D&B to get a pickup load of topsoil for our yard he's telling me about the John Tesh radio show and how they did this research with rats and junk food. True story. Here's what they did.
They took these two groups of rats and fed them a healthy diet of fruits, veggies, etc. and the rats were healthy and fit and then they took one group and started feeding them junk food... like real Twinkies and cookies, etc. Before doing this, they hooked up the whole shock treatment thing (Pavlov's theory) where the rats knew if they went near a certain thing... it'd shock them. So, they wouldn't go near it. But.... after a while they put the junk food by the thing that shocked them and they still ate it, even though it meant getting shocked (and they gave them back the healthy food options. Furthermore... they wouldn't eat the healthy food anymore. When the took the junk food away and just offered healthy food, the rats refused to eat it. They would rather starve.
Their "addiction" to junk food was also studied through their brain. While the rats were on junk food, their brain looked just like someone who was on cocaine or heroin. It also created dopamin in excess as occurs with addiction. And they had to keep eating "more" junk food to stimulate the dopamin effect and make them have the same high. You can also find a similar article about this experiement on sciencenews.com or http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48605/title/Junk_food_turns_rats_into_addicts
It really makes you think about the chemicals, preservatives, and the naturally addictive substances (sugar) that can be found in American food. It's no wonder people have such a hard time giving up junk food and staying or even starting a diet. Still, if we can learn to fill our cravings with healthy alternatives and to eat all things in moderation... we won't become part of this rat race madness!
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