# Do rats eating cereal box cardboard live longer than rats eating cereal? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 20, 2011, 12:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556 "2011-05-20T12:08:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2011, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/41 "2011-12-15T22:40:41Z")
What’s weird to me is that this is a fairly simple experiment. A high school student could reproduce it. So if there was anything to it, some could and should have by now. ---
**Author:** ![OpalCat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/8edcca/32.png) [@OpalCat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OpalCat)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2011, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/42 "2011-12-15T22:56:59Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > What’s weird to me is that this is a fairly simple experiment. A high school student could reproduce it. So if there was anything to it, some could and should have by now. Ethical constraints? Either imposed or personal to the person performing the experiment…? ---
**Author:** ![Ferret\_Herder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e47774/32.png) [@Ferret\_Herder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferret_Herder)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2011, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/43 "2011-12-15T23:13:48Z")
> [@OpalCat](#): > > Ethical constraints? Either imposed or personal to the person performing the experiment…? Perhaps at the high school level, but someone beyond that ought to have managed to give it a try. And as I posted above, “Mythbusters” did it and one of the cardboard-limited rodents was so starved that it resorted to cannibalism. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2011, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/44 "2011-12-15T23:40:21Z")
I thought about the experiment some more. I think some (perhaps all) universities have a bioethics committee that approves all animal experimentation to see if the pain and/or death caused to the animals is justified by the nature of the experiment. If there are such committees, I can’t imagine that such an experiment could be justified. So that may be a reason that this experiment hasn’t been reproduced. ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2011, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/45 "2011-12-15T23:54:53Z")
The source cited by **emmablue** said: > [@](#): > > Before death the cornflake rats developed schizophrenic behavior, threw fits, bit each other and finally went into convulsions. Autopsy revealed dysfunction of the pancreas, liver and kidneys and degeneration of the nerves in the spine – all signs of “insulin shock.” To test that, you don’t need cardboard-fed rats as a control group: you just need to feed one group of rats on cornflakes, and another on ordinary rat pellets. And frankly I don’t think it’s plausible. There must be millions of wild rats that have eaten breakfast cereals that they found in kitchen cupboards and pantries. If eating those cereals causes such extreme results, why haven’t they been observed in the wild? ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2011, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/46 "2011-12-16T00:00:05Z")
Presumably rats in the wild aren’t subsisting only on cereal from the cupboard, but are supplementing with multivitamins from the medicine cabinet. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2011, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/47 "2011-12-16T03:20:12Z")
> [@OpalCat](#): > > But don’t some animals survive on things like bark and tree leaves? So wouldn’t that be nutritionally in the same at least ballpark as cardboard? (I seriously don’t know the answer, which is why I’m asking). It would seem if that’s the case then some animals might survive (though not thrive, surely) on cardboard. I don’t think rats are one of those, however… Ruminants (cows, etc), termites, and some other animals have symbiotic microbes in their digestive tracts that digest cellulose and provide the nutrients to the animal host. Rats, however, are not one of them. To a termite, cardboard would be like crepes suzettes. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2011, 9:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/48 "2011-12-16T09:15:18Z")
> [@emmablue](#): > > It is a real study. This is the link to a PDF that quotes the study with cornflakes: > > [Bauman College: Culinary Chef School & Holistic Nutrition | Online Certificate Programs](http://www.baumancollege.org/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=5704.0;attach=2778) > I can’t believe people eat cereal for breakfast and think it’s healthy! You are hungry 30 minutes later!!! I can’t believe you’d take that nonsense seriously. Toxic protein fragments! Oh noes! ---
**Author:** ![raskolnik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e47c2d/32.png) [@raskolnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/raskolnik)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2011, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/49 "2011-12-16T14:09:29Z")
Isn’t the whole point of the rat that it lives long enough to reproduce on almost ANY diet? Longevity is only valuable to animals with long long gestation periods, and which also raise their young for years. Thus a bad diet may kill a man in his 50’s. But he could be a grandparent by then. A rat which is 3 years old has bred how many times? ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2011, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/50 "2011-12-16T16:58:04Z")
Perhaps, but ‘any diet’ still has to be one that’s composed of digestible food. Cardboard is not a digestible food for rats. ---
**Author:** ![fiddlesticks](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiddlesticks/32/18129_2.png) [@fiddlesticks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fiddlesticks)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2011, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/51 "2011-12-16T17:00:14Z")
> [@emmablue](#): > > I can’t believe people eat cereal for breakfast and think it’s healthy! You are hungry 30 minutes later!!! That’s why cereal is “part of this nutritious breakfast” … not the entirety of this nutritious breakfast. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [December 17, 2011, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556/52 "2011-12-17T21:24:50Z")
> [@emmablue](#): > > I can’t believe people eat cereal for breakfast and think it’s healthy! You are hungry 30 minutes later!!! Well, if hunger’s all your worried about, I guess eating the box might help you stay not hungry longer… Don’t know whether that’ll be because you’re throwing up later, though. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-rats-eating-cereal-box-cardboard-live-longer-than-rats-eating-cereal/582556.md?page=2)