Don't Go Swimming For at Least 30 Minutes After Eating

Don't go swimming for at least 30 minutes after eating or you could get stomach cramps and drown! That is something that I used to hear all the time as a kid.  We didn't have the Internet in the 70's and 80's.  If we did, we could have googled it and learned as I just did from this article that that little piece of advice was a myth and that they can't find one documented death caused by swimming after eating. Just think of all the extra time we could have enjoyed swimming as kids in the summer if we had known better.

Well, for the past week I have found documented evidence that the "myth" that says that we shouldn't swim for 30 minutes after we eat may not be a myth after-all.  In fact I have documented proof of an experiment done using lab rats (okay, maybe they aren't lab rats) in the photo below.  This settled science has not been peer-reviewed, but the picture below is hard to refute.

This rat needed a life preserver

We showed you back in this post from June how we ferment rice to be used for chicken feed.  Each morning and night we soak rice in buckets of water.  Rats from the barn smell the fermenting grain, jump into the buckets of water to eat and then drown.  Over the past few days, I have extracted a total of four drowned rats from the rice bucket once I drain the water out.

Each morning, I toss the water-logged and very dead rats out in the barnyard to the omnivorous chickens who make a quick meal of the drowned rats marinated overnight in fermented rice 'wine'. Tasty!  Why, the fermenting rice bucket has turned into a veritable buffet line of grains and meats for the chickens! Remember kids, swimming and eating don't mix!  (For rats, at least.)