Something You Should Know - Eat Almost Anything & Still Be Healthy & The Amazing World of Rats- SYSK Choice

Episode Date: July 25, 2026

Why do mosquitoes seem to feast on some people while barely bothering others? It turns out your attractiveness to mosquitoes has much less to do with "sweet blood" than with your body chemistry, the carbon dioxide you exhale, and even your skin microbes. Understanding what really attracts mosquitoes can help you avoid becoming their favorite summertime meal. https://hartfordhealthcare.org/about-us/news-press/news-detail?articleId=42234&publicid=395# Most people think eating healthier means giving up the foods they love and following a restrictive diet. Unfortunately, that's one reason so many diets fail. According to nutrition expert Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, you don't need to obsess over what you can't eat. Instead, the key is making sure your body gets the nutrients it needs while working with the foods you already enjoy. Dr. Ballantyne is founder of Nutrivore.com and author of Nutrivore: The Radical New Science for Getting the Nutrients You Need from the Food You Eat (https://amzn.to/4cREoPN). She explains how a simple shift in thinking can make healthy eating both easier and more sustainable. Few animals are as disliked as rats. They've been blamed for spreading disease, destroying property, and invading our homes for centuries. Yet rats are among the most adaptable and intelligent mammals on Earth. They've followed humans around the globe, thriving almost everywhere we live, and their remarkable survival skills reveal an animal that's far more sophisticated than its terrible reputation suggests. Joe Shute is an award-winning journalist and author of Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat (https://amzn.to/3WiYzPl). He shares the fascinating history of rats, why they have become such successful survivors, and why you may see these much-maligned rodents in a very different light after hearing his story. Most meetings are held around a conference table because... well, that's just how meetings are done. But research suggests the way people are physically arranged during a meeting can have a surprising impact on how they think, contribute, and work together. There is one simple change that can dramatically alter the dynamics of almost any meeting. https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/how-to-make-your-team-more-collaborative.html PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less.  QUINCE: Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Today on something you should know, why mosquitoes like to bite some people more than others. Then the science of eating healthy. And it's not as hard as people think. Any food can fit into a healthy diet. Even studies that look at ultra-processed foods show there's no health harm from 20% or fewer of our daily calories coming from ultra-processed foods. So even the junkiest of junk food, there can be room for that. Also, how sitting in a circle may be the best way to conduct a meeting. And rats.

You may not like them. I don't like them. But rats absolutely go everywhere humans go. That's the rule. There is one very interesting exception to that rule in North America, in Alberta. And since the 1940s, the provincial government there have essentially been waging war on rats. All this today on something you should. should know.

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Or treat yourself to your Dreamburger lineup with our original Quarter Pounder with cheese or Quarter Pounder BLT. at participate in McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Product availability varies by restaurant. Something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hey there, welcome to Something You Should Know.

In the summertime, I'm sure you've noticed. Everybody's noticed this, how mosquitoes seem to be attracted to some people, more than others. Why is that? Well, there could be a couple of reasons. First of all, mosquitoes land on people with type O blood nearly twice as often as they do in type A blood, according to a study. Type O blood seems to be mosquito's preferred blood type.

Also, this is kind of interesting, about 85% of people give off a chemical signal through their skin that indicates their blood type. If you're one of them, mosquitoes find you particularly appealing, no matter what blood type you are, because you're basically sending out an invitation that you have blood. Mosquitoes are drawn to heat, so the higher your body temperature, the more attractive you are to them. Chemicals found in sweat, like lactic acid, uric acid, and ammonia seem to get their attention. Researchers aren't really sure why, but at least one study suggests,

that drinking beer, even just a single 12-ounce bottle, can make you more attractive to mosquitoes. And mosquitoes's sense of sight is nowhere near as good as their sense of smell, but they do use vision to find humans, and they see dark objects more easily than light objects. So if you're dressed in dark clothes, you're an easier target. And that is something you should know. Let's talk about food, because in the next 20 minutes, you're going to hear a lot of things you probably haven't heard before about how nutrition works,

and you're going to get some very easy ways to tweak what you eat to make it much healthier and more beneficial. And this is information backed by real science. My guest is Dr. Sarah Ballantine. She is the founder of Nutravor, and she is author of the best-selling book, Nutravor, the Radical New Science for Getting the Nutrients You Need from the Food You Eat. Hi, Sarah, welcome. Oh, thank you so much for having me. So first, let's talk about the problem.

What is the issue that you're seeing as it relates to what people eat, what they don't eat, how they eat, and what that's doing to us? So we're in an interesting cultural moment where the diets that are gaining popularity are becoming more and more restrictive. So people are learning how to cut out more and more foods from their diets. At the same time as our food supply is becoming more and more refined, three quarters of the food in the grocery store are ultra-processed. Those foods have fewer nutrients, but they're also tastier. They require less time and energy to prepare. And they're also cheaper.

And so why do you suppose this is a problem more now than in the past? I feel like there's a lot of mixed messages coming from diet culture and the wellness community right now. A lot of fear-based marketing that is muddying the waters. So people are more confused than they ever ever have been about what a healthy diet really looks like. But that messaging goes back to the 70s, I think. So it's not just that the message now is really murky and confusing. I think we've now have several generations that have been taught more incorrect information about what a healthy diet looks like than correct information about what a healthy diet looks like, what the best, you know, fat. and cooking oils are.

Fewer people know how to cook than ever before. So I think, yes, I think a lot of people are aware that more vegetables is a good thing, but a lot of people are afraid of vegetables as well. So we kind of have, we have multiple prongs of this problem that are all contributing to the same outcome. And so your solution, I mean, how do you change that? Because it seems like people have been trying to get people to pay attention to this for a long time. and people don't, which is why we have the obesity problem we have and the health concerns you addressed earlier.

It seems like a lot of people are screaming from the mountaintop and nobody's listening. So my goal is to make the barrier to entry to healthy eating as low as possible. So that requires busting a lot of myths about food quality that make it feel like, well, if I can't afford all these expensive foods, it's like why even bother, but also show people really that every slightly better choice counts. So for example, in the scientific literature where they do dose responses looking at, let's say,

vegetables and all cause mortality, which is a general indicator of health and longevity. It's a really great tool to measure whether or not something is good or bad for us overall. And we look at somebody who eats zero vegetables per day versus somebody who eats one serving of vegetables per day. and you see this really like steep dose response curve from zero to one. It's a huge difference. It's maybe a 10, 15% reduction in all cause mortality, just going from zero to one servings of vegetables per day. Of serving being raw about the same volume as your fist, so about one cup,

that is the same difference as going from one to five servings of vegetables per day. So you about double the benefit going from one to five as you go from going from zero to one. And so that shows that you don't need to be perfect in order to benefit from putting some effort into adding more vegetables. And those vegetables can be frozen. They can be canned. They don't need to be fresh or organic or from the local farm. And also having the conversation about it's okay to make it taste good. It's okay to add seasonings. It's okay to add these vegetables to, a recipe that you already like or to hide them from yourself or to make a cultural dish that really embraces bold flavors in order to make you like those green beans or whatever they are.

And then I think the next little step is a little bit easier. Once you can sort of get your foot in the door, you've made that one little change of maybe it's getting a side salad through the drive-thru or grabbing a piece of fruit as a snack instead of something from the vending machine. or maybe it's getting water as a refill instead of another cup of soda, those tiny little changes add up to make a big difference in long-term health outcomes. Help me understand something because I happen to be somebody who likes vegetables. I don't like them all, but I like several of them, plenty of them. And I hear people say they don't like vegetables.

And I have a hard time with that. I mean, how can you not like all vegetables? So maybe there's something to that, is there? So there are some genetics that for some people make certain vegetables taste a lot more bitter. So especially vegetables of the cruciferous vegetable family. So think broccoli, kale, cauliflower, brussels, turnips, radishes. So there are some people for whom those vegetables are extraordinarily bitter. And there are some people who can't detect the bitter taste at all.

And then there's a bunch of us like I'm in the middle. So I can detect that it's bitter, but it's not crazy bitter. And so people who are, they're called bitter supertasters, they actually have a much higher likelihood of not liking vegetables at all and gravitating towards sweet treats. And that's a group of people for whom learning cooking strategies to decrease that bitterness to balance it with some acid, like some lemon juice or some vinegar to balance it, maybe even with some sweetness, adding a little bit of maple cereal. up to your Brussels sprouts, those strategies become much more important for those people. But even for those people, we actually develop food preference through associative learning. So when we eat that vegetable as a kid around a family dinner table with our favorite other foods, we're much more likely to develop preferences for those vegetables. When we're not exposed to them as kids, it's much more challenging to develop those food preferences. It's not impossible. We can still recreate those positive environments for ourselves and create positive associative learning to develop a liking for vegetables. Food familiarity is a major

contributor to our taste preferences. So just trying it again and again and again can make a huge difference. But I think that, you know, there is again some sort of generational effect here where if we're not eating a lot of vegetables as kids, we're less likely to be familiar with them as adults. we're less likely to know what to do with them, to know how to prepare them. They can seem a lot more intimidating. So what are some easy ways to start to incorporate this philosophy that you're talking about? If you're not a vegetable eater, if you're not really into nutrition but realize maybe you need to do a better job. Yeah, so I think frozen vegetables are very underrated.

They are already trimmed, washed, chopped, maybe mixed, right? you can get so many different vegetable medleys. They might be pre-seasoned. They might have a really yummy sauce on them. They're going to have instructions on the package on how to cook them. So there's less guesswork. You don't have to figure out what to do. And they're less likely to go to waste because they're not going to rot in the back of your fridge.

And sometimes the frozen version of a fruit or vegetable can actually be a little bit more nutrient dense than fresh just because they're frozen so quickly after harvest. So you don't get nutrient degradation through storage. it's a very tiny effect. It's not actually meaningful from a nutritional sciences perspective. So whatever you like and have access to and can afford, that's the best option to get. But I think that frozen vegetables are a great starting point just because you don't have to learn how to chop up a bell pepper. That's tricky, learning the best way to slice a bell pepper and get the seeds out. That takes a little bit of practice and skill.

You don't need to worry about that with the frozen vegetables. It's all done for you. And if you don't like frozen, the texture is a little bit different, right, than from fresh. There's lots of options now in grocery stores in the produce section where you can get pre-washed, pre-chopped, pre-mixed a bunch of different kinds of vegetables. Sometimes there's a seasoning or sauce packet right in that bag for a stir fry or something like that. You can get the fajita vegetables to add to your meat and taco seasoning mix. I think that the pre-mixed, most of the work has done for you, vegetables from an energy standpoint, and the frozen ones are usually cheaper than fresh, so that also can really

help from a budget standpoint. I think those are really, really useful tools for figuring out how to fit vegetables into our diets and a great way to try a lot of different things all at once and then figure out from there what your preferences are. We're discussing some very interesting and important information about diet and nutrition and my guest is Dr. Sarah Ballantyne. She's author of the best-selling book Nutravor, The Radical New Science for Getting the Nutrients You Need from the Food You Eat.

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The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus. Starring Emmy Rossum, Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu Original Series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus. So, Sarah, I imagine it's not just the food that you ate as a kid and now that's the diet that you take into adulthood and that dictates a lot of what you eat as an adult. But also there's got to be other factors that affect what you eat because even people who eat healthy

will also succumb to lousy food when the moment strikes. So when we are stressed and we're not getting enough sleep, we tend to, that increases our appetite, we tend to crave high energy density foods, which tend to be packaged foods and not fresh fruits and vegetables. And we tend to have less mental space for anything that's a break outside of our routine. right? When we are barely hanging on, we really rely on the predictability of routine, and that even includes the types of foods that we are buying and preparing and eating. We really rely on that routine to just survive because it's not just about living far away from a grocery store,

although it's also that. It's not just about the less amount of time to prepare food if you're working two or three jobs, although it was also that, but it's also just the bandwidth for something new. So I think there's some big, like, systemic change that needs to happen to make fresh and whole foods more accessible, but also accessible in terms of budget and time and energy and flavor for people. Being able to address the lifestyle factors can really help in terms of the psychology of trying something new. Well, it does seem, you know, people look at this idea of like changing their diet or eating a healthy diet as kind of daunting.

It's like a big process, a big change that they'd really rather not. And again, I think one of the most important things that I can do as a health educator is show how much of a difference to long-term health outcomes can be, made from a small change because I think we get overwhelmed with the long, like, laundry to do list of, well, I have to go to the gym and I have to do my mindfulness meditation practice and I have to eat all of these different foods or avoid all of these other different foods. If I can maybe focus the attention on let's work on getting 15 more minutes of sleep. Like, sure, would two more hours be great? Yes, but let's start with just 15 more minutes of sleep. Let's start with a 10-minute walk

around the block, let's start with one more serving of vegetables. I think that we shift the conversation from something that feels impossible that we may lament the impossibility of it in the future. We shift that conversation to something where it is that first step is doable and we can make that small little bit of change and then we can iterate on that. And then hopefully we can get to a point where healthy diet and lifestyle doesn't seem so over. overwhelming or out of reach and change the end-of-life conversation from instead of I wish I had to, I'm glad I did. Well, I remember hearing something a long time ago that stuck with me, and I know you talk about this too, is to try to make your diet, because this is an easy thing to do, try to make it colorful rather than beige, because so much of what we eat is beige. And if you just put more color on your plate, that's not a bad goal.

There was a study done a few years ago that showed that 42% of health outcomes were improved by color-associated pigments in plant foods, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains, which means that green or red or blue and purple, orange and yellow, different colors of fruits and vegetables are improving different health conditions. And all of the biggies, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, they were all improved by multiple pigments, which is an argument for what, I mean, I'm not the one who invented this terminology, what many people call eat the rainbow, which basically refers to eating fruits and vegetables and other plant foods that fall into five different color families. So they're divided into red, orange and yellow, green, blue and purple, and white and brown. And the reason why they're divided that way is because the compounds that give those fruits and vegetables,

their distinctive color, they are nutritive. They are important antioxidants. A lot of them are anti-inflammatory. Different ones have different, like, additional benefits to our health. So the same thing that gives a carrot, it's distinctive orange color or spinach, it's distinctive green, or radicchio, it's beautiful violet color. The same compounds that are giving those fruits and vegetables, their distinctive colors, are beneficial

nutrients for us. And we get the best coverage for health outcomes. If we want to get all of those 42 health outcomes to be improved and our risk to be turned down for all of those, we want to be trying to get as many different colors as we can, in our foods. And they show this big study that was done a few years ago basically made an argument for eating the rainbow, hitting all of those five different color families, being beneficial on top of just eating enough fruits and vegetables. So ideally we would eat. Studies are a bit mixed. So there's some studies that make a really compelling argument for three

servings of vegetables per day. There's others that make a really compelling argument for five servings of vegetables per day. I don't think this is settled science yet, and I think there's room for interpretation on exactly how many servings of vegetables is like the best to eat for long-term health outcomes. But however many we're aiming for, wherever we're at, maybe we're just at that trying to go from zero to one, mixing up the colors will be beneficial on top of working on getting the servings up. So you said at the beginning here, and I've always found this interesting, that so much of the talk about what we eat is what we're not supposed to eat or what we don't eat or what we shouldn't eat. It's about rather than talk about what we should eat.

And it seems like the conversation is flipped. Like, why not just focus on what you should be eating and stop worrying about what you should be not eating? Because it's like the elephant in the room. If you focus on what you're supposed to not be eating, now you're thinking about French fries and, you know, bubble gum or whatever. Exactly. And psychology studies actually back this up, that when we adopt a restrictive approach to dieting, meaning there's this list of foods that we're going to reduce or eliminate or obsessively measure,

that increases food, fixation and obsession, cravings, emotional eating patterns. It can drive disordered eating, and it increases the likelihood of developing an eating disorder. restrictive diets are how most fad diets are or even weight loss diets. That's how most of them are structured. Most of them are about the thing that you cut out. And psychology studies show over and over again that they are not diets that people can stick to, that they increase the likelihood of weight regain cycles, which is the technical term for yo-yo dieting, and that they increase the likelihood of developing eating disorders. And it's not what we don't eat that has anything to do with what the quality of our diet is

or whether or not that diet is going to support health. It's what we actually do eat. Are the foods we eating actually supplying the nutrients or bodies need? That is what actually determines whether or not a diet is healthy. So I like to focus the conversation not on restriction because any food can fit into a healthy diet. Even studies that look at ultra-processed foods show there's no health harm from 20% or fewer of our daily calories coming from ultra-processed foods. So even the emptiest of calorie, what we would call the like the junkiest of junk food, there can be room for that in a healthy overall

eating pattern and a healthy diet. Real briefly, because we're almost out of time, tell the, tell the story about the M&M study, because I think that says a lot. There was a study done a few years ago in kids where they gave them a bowl of red and yellow M&Ms. And they told one group of kids, eat as many of these M&Ms as you want. And they told the other group of kids, eat as many of these M&Ms as you want, but you're not allowed to eat the red ones. They repeated the study in the afternoon.

And this time, they got the same bowl of red and yellow M&Ms. And both groups of kids were told, eat however many you want. The group of kids who in the morning were not allowed to eat the red ones in the afternoon, ate proportionally more red M&Ms because they had an increased desire for them. And the kids who had food restrictions at home, for example, weren't allowed candy at home, they ate the most M&Ms and the most calories of all of the kids in the whole study. It's a delightful study because all of us want to volunteer for a study where we get to eat M&Ms. but it also is a really great illustration of just how much adopting a sort of restrictive

mindset that food is bad. I'm not allowed to have that food. How much that actually drives our behaviors around food. Well, I have a real interest in food and nutrition anyway, and I also get to talk to a lot of people who work in that field. And still, in the last 20 minutes, I've learned quite a bit of new things, and I appreciate you spending the time with us. Dr. Sarah Ballantine has been my guest. The name of her book is Nutravor, the radical new science for getting the nutrients you need from the food you eat. There's a link to her book at Amazon and the show notes. Sarah, thanks. This was great.

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Personally, I hate rats. They freak me out. Bugs, spiders, no problem. Lizards, that's fine. Most things don't freak me out, but rats, no thanks. Still, rats are everywhere. Where there are people, there are rats, lots of them. And you hear stories about them growing to, like, the size of a small dog.

I mean, it's just, it's freaking me out just talking about it. Still, you've got to give them credit for their adaptability, their cleverness, and their strong will to survive. And since there is a good chance that there is a rat very close to you right now, you might be interested in knowing that there's a lot to know about rats that many people find fascinating. Here to discuss it is Joe Shoot. He is a journalist who writes about the natural world. He writes for the Daily Telegraph, and he is author of a book called Stowaway, the disreputable exploits of the rat.

Hey Joe, welcome. Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me on. So what is a rat? What makes a rat a rat? Well, it's a species of rodent, is the kind of family. The rats that your audience will be familiar with are the brown rat and the black rats. Both of them originate from the eastern corner of the world.

Black rats from India and brown rats from northern China. And from there, they've spread successfully and conquered everywhere in the world, every continent apart from Antarctica, you'll find them on. And they followed humans. You know, they followed humans wherever we've gone, rats have gone. What's the difference between a rat and a mouse? Size is the big one.

Rats are considered both brown rats and black rats. Brown rats are the biggest of all, but they're considerably bigger than mice. in the UK there's the record for the largest brown rat court is over about half a I think it was a foot long talking off the top of my head from nose to tail both kind of exist on on sort of scraps that humans create either kind of around our houses or in the crops that we grow but rats are much more sort of ferocious in terms of being predators as well. Rats will happily eat a frog or a baby bird, which is something that mice wouldn't do. Mice are kind of nibblers, rats are norahs. And it's the size and the kind of hunting

ability of rats, which has made them such a kind of demonised animal as well, because they can, particularly among things like sea birds, they can have a catastrophic impact on populations, because they can eat chicks. And so people don't generally like rats. A house without rats is deemed better than a house with rats. Why do people hate them so? Is it a well-deserved hate? They're a creature that we tell so many kind of stories about.

This was another thing that piqued my interest in rats. I write in the book that a rat is a verb as well as a noun, and we talk about ratting someone out. in a way that we don't use other animals names like that. When I started to look at some of these kind of stories, the sort of cultural imprint of rats, you begin to see that a lot of it is kind of human-made, and a lot of it is real sort of myth-making.

There's the common refrain that you hear all over the world in the US as well, that you know you're never more than six foot away from a rat in New York or a maid city. And when I kind of looked into that, that's just sort of total urban myth. and rubbish. This kind of reputation, part of it is kind of fair and part of it is just something that's imposed on them by people. For example, rats are seen as real kind of harbingers of disease. And I grew up in history lessons at school being told that black rats were responsible for the black deaths, which spread across Europe in the Middle Ages and wiped out more than half

of the entire population of Europe. But in recent years, researchers have been re-appraising some of that evidence and looking into mortality data of plagues and found that actually it was human-born fleas that were far more responsible for the black death and because of the speed at which the disease spread through it. And there was one even intriguing study which was very well researched by a rigorous group of academics

and they mapped climate data to plague outbreaks and came to the hypothesis that actually it was gerbils rather than rats that could have been responsible for spreading being the source of the black death because there was a particularly type of weather pattern that led to a massive explosion in wild gerbil populations that year. So they've been unfairly blamed but equally they are kind of the perfect carry of many diseases. There was a rat that was caught by researchers at Columbia University in New York a few years ago. They caught subway rats and thought they'd investigate it to see what diseases it carried.

And it was a quite frightening amount over at least a couple of dozen diseases, some very nasty ones, and some most ominously of all, which weren't previously known to exist. The fact that if you see a rat, it's going to spread it to you is total myth-making. You know, squirrels are carriers of plague and actually responsible for more plague infections in the US than rats. Yeah. People don't think of squirrels in the same light. But don't rats attack? I remember seeing news stories years ago in New York of babies being, you know, nibbled on by rats. Rats do bite people and particularly children can be particularly vulnerable to rat bites. I visited a series of villages in Tanzania, seeing how people in kind of rural areas

are coexisting with rats and interviewed a series of villages who were being bitten by rats on an almost nightly basis. And there were quite nightmarish interviews to listen to, actually. And it was the reason why children are vulnerable is they will often go to bed with kind of sort of food on their hands and on their faces, and that would attract rats in, and rats would kind of sniff that and lick and then occasionally bite as well. It's something when housing in kind of western cities was of a much poorer quality than we see today. It's something that would occasionally happen as well. When you look at other animals that people are much more

comfortable with, for example, dogs or cats. And when you compare, hospital data on those, which I have done in the UK. And the number of dogs and cat bites is in the millions. And the number of rat bites is on, you could count them on a few people's hands. So they do bite, but much less than other animals. Is there anywhere in the world, you said other than Antarctica, but basically where people go, rats go, and where people are rats are? Yes, there is one very interesting exception to that rule in North America in Alberta, which if you look at a map of rat distribution around the world, the red indicates rats and it is absolutely painted red. But there is this one tiny white corner, which is the province of Alberta. And since the 1940s, the provincial government there have essentially been waging war on rats. and because of the unique geography of Alberta, there's only one real border where rats can get into,

which is an 800-mile stretch of border with the neighbouring province of Saskatchewan. And the authorities there in the 40s took the view that it would be cheaper to protect Alberta and agriculture to have a series of government rat patrols that patrol the border and they're armed with poison and guns. and they will wipe out any rat that they see on site.

And it was so interesting when it launched this thing. It was launched with a real sort of propaganda campaign. And I visited the provincial archives there where they have the original rat posters that were put out. And they were real kind of the kind of nightmareish idea of the rat was really sort of emphasising anyone who saw a rat was was encouraged to kill it on site and report it as well. And these rat patrols are still going today. I joined one of them. And we drove around in a pickup truck with rat patrol stamped on the side and investigating the farms of Alberta for any signs of rat activity.

They do it a few times a year. But everywhere else, exactly as you say, where humans go, rats go. And when rats go, is it like they follow or are they hiding in boxes and crates and cargo ships or are they actually running behind humans going, hey, let's follow those guys? Stowaway is the name of my book and Stowaway is what rats do. Even today in the modern era, rats exist on studies have shown on two-thirds of all maritime shipping. Back in the day when the global trades started, you know, and rats would exist on boats

that were stuffed full of provisions and rats would, you know, you couldn't imagine a better habitat for us. Oh, yeah, sure. So they would secrete themselves in food stores. And sometimes when ships have been sort of marooned at sea, the rats would become food source themselves for sailors that were running out of provisions and they would turn on these invading rats that had set up camp on the ships. There are many incredible things about the physiology of rats.

One of the ones is that they're able to compress their skeletons to fit into the tiniest of holes that are less than an inch wide. And you can get a massive muscular rat can squeeze itself through. Are rats nocturnal? Or are they just really good at hiding? Rats are nocturnal. They do come out in the day. And they are very adaptable. I mean, the great is why they are such a successful speech.

species. Scientists say that some rodent species can gnaw and some rodent species can chew. Rats can do both. So they can chew with their back molars and they gnaw with their two sort of sharp front teeth, which a lot of people will associate with rats. And that adaptability extends to when they come out as well. So they are traditionally nocturnal animals. But if there's a food source that's better, suited to them during the day, then rats will go and feed on it during the day. I've learned the hard way that rats are nocturnal, because as part of the process of writing this book, my wife

and I got two pet rats that I wanted to sort of study, and the noise that they make when the lights go out at night and they start clattering around their cage is definitely something to behold. Are rats, how do rats get along with each other? Are they social creatures? Do they mate for life? Do they live in families? Talk about that. for a species that lives so close to us and for such a sort of ubiquitous species, it's incredible how little is known about rats in the wild. In a laboratory setting, we know more about rats than any other animal, and they've actually, rats have sacrificed more in the pursuit of human health

than any other species in terms of the experiments that we've carried out on them to advance human health. But in the wild, because they're an unfashionable species, because there are species that a lot of people instinctively turn away from, there aren't actually that many comparatively anyway, rat studies around. But there is one fascinating study which is a group of scientists in Paris who've been doing for the past few years. And it also has a fantastic name of Project Armageddon. And what they've been doing is doing a genetic mapping of the rats. rat population of Paris. And they found out an incredible thing that was a real sort of advance among rodentologists. And previously it had been assumed that in the wild rat populations

were just one big population that was all sort of intermingled and intermixed. And actually, when they started testing the genetics of the rats around Paris, they found that they were existing in distinct clusters. So the rats in one corner of Paris would be genetic. genetically distinct to rats living in another corner of Paris. Now, what this means in sort of layman's terms is that it's much more like kind of families of rats and much more in a sort of criminal sort of syndicate way. I see them as like individual kind of gangs and they control their patches. And if rats will come into those patches, they will fight to the death to protect them

against sort of rats marauding in. So actually, what you have are far more complex social networks between rats that are originally understood. My sense is that they multiply like crazy. Do we have a sense of like how many babies can a mama have? There was one recent study in a favela in Salvador in Brazil, so a kind of slum setting, which was a real breeding ground for rats. And scientists monitored rat breeding there over a number of years.

and the average female could produce up to 70 pups in a single year. Rats can fall pregnant immediately after giving birth, and they have the capacity at least to produce huge amounts of litters. But in reality, they adapt to their surroundings. So even though in this Brazilian favela, 70 pups would be born, the survival rate was a fraction of that. because they have big litters because lots of the pups die essentially. There was a US psychologist called John B. Calhoun who did some experiments about rat populations

in the 1950s and 1960s. And he created, he built huge pens in laboratories to see how many, if rats were giving unlimited food, what would happen to the rat populations? Would it just keep expanding, expanding, expanding, expand? And he actually found that he did it firstly in a woodland setting and found that the rat population hit a ceiling at which it kind of balanced itself out. So the rats would not allow the population to get over a certain extent that then resources would become limited. And then he did it in a laboratory setting where again rats were given all the food they wanted. But this time he limited the space.

He called it a rat city, John B. Calhoun. And what happened there is the limit of space combined with the, the prodigious breeding drove the rats kind of wild. And they ended up sort of the rat society, that fragile society that I mentioned earlier, broke down entirely. You had rats killing each other. Male rats were kind of formed together in gangs and kind of sort of march around, kind of killing any rat they came across. So when you have those rats that you see on the news and you referred to one of them earlier that, that, you know, is a foot long and weighs, you know, 40 pounds, how does a rat get so big when my guess is rats are supposed to be a lot smaller. Is it that a particular breed or are they

just having a diet problem or what? I would argue it's not them with the diet problem. It's us with the diet problem. And where rats get to enormous sizes is in cities where human food and particularly caloric, poor quality is dumped in dumpsters and rats are allowed. to gorge on them and grow to a massive size as a result. What do rats eat normally? Like when you get a pet rat, what do they tell you to feed it? My pet rats eat rabbit food and they are total vegetarians and love dry bananas is their great weakness. But rats are omnivores. Rats will eat absolutely anything that's available to them. There's been one incredible study that's found rats and they're very powerful.

swimmers, rats, diving down in rivers to retrieve freshwater mussels that exist on the bottom of rivers. You know, you hear those things on advertisements about like to get rid of rats, like these things that make a high-pitched noise. Is there any evidence that any of those things work? I mean, how do you get rid of them? Rats do hear extraordinarily, extraordinarily high frequencies. One of the, one of the The loveliest rat studies that I've read is about a group of scientists in Germany who were assessing whether rats would play for food or also just for affection and human contact as well. And these researchers would tickle rats. They play hide and seek with them.

And when they caught the rats, they tickle them as a reward. And they use these high-frequency detectors to monitor what the rats were doing. And they found out that the rats were giggling when they were tickled. And they were kind of shrieking with delight, but it's the sound that's inaudible to the human ear. In terms of how to get rid of them, it's very difficult. But I've spoken to a lot of rat catchers about this. They say there's a real push now against chemicals and rodenticides,

which for a lot of the past century was the go-to measure that your average exterminator would do. You'd call them in and they'd put lots of toxic blue pellets around, the idea being that the rat would eat those pellets and die and that would deal with your problem. Actually, that is now being found to not just have catastrophic impacts on wider ecosystems because rats are a food source as well as being omnivores themselves. They're a food source for a huge range of species that some might really surprise you. For example, herons, those stately wading birds of riverbanks and ponds will think nothing more

of gulping down a live rat in their beaks and swallowing them. And if you don't believe me, you can watch many videos on YouTube. Just don't do it before you've had your lunch. If you just poison rats, then more rats will come and replace them. The general consensus is that you need to change the landscape in which the rats are getting in. So you need to patch up holes. You need to put sort of things like steel,

you need to stuff into burrows where rats might be getting in. If there's a food source, like you have rats around a bird feeder or you keep chickens in your garden as I do, then you need to make sure that you change the food source or remove it altogether. When you do that, rats will disappear very quickly. But if you just kill them without making any wider changes, then they'll just come more of them and more of them and more of them. Well, for somebody who doesn't like rats, I now know more about.

about rats than I ever thought I would. And you're right, I mean, you kind of have to hand it to them. They're a pretty hearty species and interesting in a lot of ways. Joe Shoot has been my guest, and the name of his book is Stoweaway, The Disreputable Exploids of the Rat. There's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Joe. Appreciate you coming on.

Thanks, Mike. It's been a real pleasure and great to be on. Remember in kindergarten used to sit in a circle? Well, a study suggests that that can be quite effective for grown-ups, too. Researchers put this seating arrangement to the test and found that people who sit in a circle get a lot more accomplished. That's because individuals tend to think and act more selfishly when they're seated in straight lines or at a rectangular table. Circling the chairs triggers this subtle environmental cue to participants

because it exposes everyone's facial expressions and body language and sense of connection to everybody else. Participants meeting in a circle reported feeling more collaborative and had a much more productive meeting than people who sit in a boardroom-style meeting. And that is something you should know. Like every other podcaster, I want to grow this show, grow the audience, and can really use your help. If you would share this podcast with someone you know, that would help us a lot. I'm Mike Hurruthers.

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