Well, because they were able to get funding. You know that.
The rats were nesting. Same reason a bird will pick up random prices of crap.
There. Study complete. Where’s my check?
I don’t believe any such experiment ever took place in earnest. That’s even simpler - the thing is a figment of the imagination of the same kind of dribbling stupid that claims food X is ‘one molecule away from’ poison Y
If there’s any grain of truth at all to this (which I doubt to begin with), it might, might, be that rats fed a combination of cereal and a little bit of cardboard were healthier than the ones just eating cereal. They still wouldn’t get any nutrition from it, but they’d at least get some fiber.
Or, more likely, it’s just completely fabricated from start to finish.
I suspect this is the case.
As a kid, I was told the same story right along side other gems of nutritional science such as how ducks would starve if I fed them white bread*. Apparently, they’d fill up on the bread and not eat anything nutritious; eventually, they’d die of starvation while surrounded by food. Squirrels, geese and pigeons were also being starved by over-consumption of white bread.
In regards to the cereal story: the truth is that even sugary cereals are some of the healthiest things kids eat all day long. The addition of fiber is relatively recent, but cereals have been fortified with all kinds of things for decades.
- Just for the record: I had no white bread or sugary cereals. When I was a kid, we made our own granola and multigrain bread.
It’s true that white bread is not a very good food for ducks and when they eat a lot of it all the time, they can suffer digestive poroblems and dietary deficiencies, but keith of those things are the same as actually starving.
Gah. Blerdy autocorrect. Keith=neither
Who knows, maybe cardboard was more nutritious back then. 
I should perhaps stress that I am not validating the existence of the rat test.
I am confirming that the story definitely dates back about three decades, and was discussed then in the better newspapers, as a genuine test result. I certainly understood at the time that these were genuine reports from the context of discussion.
Adding vitamins and minerals to processed cereal (as a normal practice) appears to me to date from around that time. Certainly, that does not prove that the alleged test occurred. However, it indicates that concerns had arisen about the lack of nutrients in some cereals, and the alleged test (or something similar to it) may have heightened those concerns.
From Wikipedia:
Part of the problem here is that the term ‘nutrition’ means different.things to different people. To some, it’s talking about the food energy.value of something. - by which measure, cereals have alelways been nutritious.
but to others it’s talking about a proper balance of all dietary requirements, in which case cereals will never (on their own) qualify.
I can confirm that I have also heard the story (and, to my shame, repeated it) in more or less the form that Michael of Lucan tells it and, (although memory on the point is hazy) probably first heard it in or around the '70s, as he says. I never really thought that much about it before, but now I apply my SDMB honed critical faculties to the story I realize that it does sound much more like urban legend than fact.
It is a real study. This is the link to a PDF that quotes the study with cornflakes:
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!!!
Do you have a link to the actual study? Because I don’t think it is a real study.
Do you have a cite for the journal article that the “real study” was published in? (Hint: a cookbook is not a scholarly source.)
The PDF says that the study is described in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. That book is available at Amazon. If you search for it there, and then use Look Inside! at pages 468-9, you’ll see this mention of the study (I’ve left out the middle portion where the study is described), “In 1960, researchers at Ann Arbor University performed an interesting experiment on laboratory rats. . . . The startling conclusion of this study is that there is more nourishment in the box that cold breakfast cereals come in than in the cereals themselves. Loren Zanier, designer of the experiment, actually proposed the protocol as a joke. But the results are far from funny. They were never published and similar studies have not been repeated. If consumers knew the truth about breakfast cereals, vast fortunes would be jeopardized. SWF”
I doubt the results for several reasons. First, the cookbook mentions Ann Arbor University. Probably she meant the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, but if so, that’s really sloppy. Second, she says that the study results were never published.
Plus, even if it was valid, it’s 51 years old. Box *and *cereal technology have come a long way since then.
Is that the same Loren Zanier as the one who sells what he calls “Ideally Structured Water”?
Never published??? Probably because the results were so horrifying!
I had heard the same thing in the 70s. I am quite certain that it was told to me by the same person who told me where to pick up that Corvette for $400 dollars. You know the one: the owner of it killed himself in it, and he was out in the desert…
hh
Zanier by name…
Not to mention cruel (not that that has stopped lots of other experiments, mind you).
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…
I once saw a mouse steal a Rolo* and drag it back to its home in the wall, behind a whole wall of shelving. You could hear the clonks and bonks as this tiny mouse maneuvered the giant (to him) Rolo all the way back there
We found the glob of caramel a few days later with all the chocolate eaten off. Conclusion? Mice are chocoholics but don’t like caramel.
*for those in foreign lands that may not carry it, it’s a sort of cylindrical bit of caramel coated in chocolate. They come individually wrapped in foil, stacked into tubes.
I can definitely see rats doing very poorly on sugary cereals though I haven’t read any studies. I can’t possibly imagine them doing better on cardboard, however. Unless it was magically infused special cardboard with vitamins and nutrients in it.*
*what is the differene between a vitamin and a nutrient? I guess I’ve always considered vitamins a subset of “nutrients” but wonders what makes them a class of their own…