Even if you’ve never betrayed the confidence of a confidante or informed the police of a crime, you, my friend, are still a rat.

This is not to say you possess a pointy snout and a long tail. Or forage about to build a home and scavenge through trash for meals.

But when your 30,000 or so genes are compared to those of the Rattus argentiventer, Rattus norvegicus, or (my favorite name) Rattus rattus, guess what? There’s a 95-percent match.

While maybe that’s not the most comforting thought in the world, there’s certainly an upside to it. What biomedical research learns by using any species of rats or mice (which are just as close genetically to humans) can be applied to you.

And what’s been learned by researchers working with mice at the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and published in the May 2022 issue of Science is that if you start eating 30 percent less (and at the right times), you could live up to 35 percent longer.

Now the question is why would you want to? Not live longer, but eat 30 percent less and be hungry all the time.

Researchers in the United Kingdom and Austria worked together - not using rats or mice but real people - to determine being hungry means being hangry. Being hangry is the now-popular term for being short-tempered and irritable because you need to eat, and that’s not a good thing.

In the study published in the July 2022 issue of PLOS ONE, 64 mostly female Central Europeans whose average age was 30, sent five reports every day for 21 days to the researchers using a smartphone app.

While these reports covered other areas in order to be scientifically comprehensive, what’s important for you to know is that the Visual Analogue Scale was used to assess the subjects’ feelings of both hunger and irritability. So five times a day the 64 gave two scores using a range where 0 meant not hungry or irritable at all and 100 meant very hungry or irritable.

In short, these scores showed a correlation between hunger and irritability that the researchers call “substantial . . . even after taking into account demographic factors such as age and sex, body mass index, dietary behavior, and individual personality traits.” And while the participants were from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, an additional questionnaire they answered at the conclusion of the three-week study would make you think they came from California, Indiana, and Rhode Island.

Like most in the U.S., their main motivations to eat came from liking the meal offered and being hungry. Fifty-eight percent revealed they usually ate breakfast, 78 percent ate lunch, 84 percent ate dinner, and 48 percent snacked in between.

The only statistic that leads you to think this was not a cross section of Americans: 53 percent ate a healthy diet very often or always.

So where’s all this headed? Back to advice I first issued more than 30 years ago.

A recommendation to eat throughout the day in a way that was called grazing back then. It’s still the best way to eat if you exercise every day - especially if some of your workouts are intense or lengthy.

While this concept of eating smaller snacks and meals every two or three hours has fallen a bit out of favor in light of the current popularity of intermittent-fasting diets, the PLOS ONE study suggests that intermittent-fasting diets adversely affect your state of mind.

Now once again, I’ll write what I write with such frequency that devoted readers know it by heart. Even though there are more similarities than differences in most dietary comparisons of people, no two metabolize food in exactly the same manner.

So it’s possible that you could go 16 hours every day without food - the typical time frame suggested in the middle-of-the-road intermittent-fasting diets - lose weight, and still maintain a positive mental outlook.

Or you could be more like the 64 in the PLOS ONE study and find that anger and irritability increase with hunger.

But whether you graze or fast, eat liberally or diet, there are certain generalities about eating that all will find to some degree as being true. Most of these deal with how the macronutrients - proteins, fats, and both types of carbohydrates, simple and complex - affect one another.

So in whatever way you eat, whenever your feeding is primarily simple carbs, like refined grains and added sugars, your blood sugar level will soon spike and then crash. In about 90 minutes or so, you’ll feel as hungry as if you hadn’t eaten at all.

But if you eat mainly complex carbs in conjunction with a fair amount of protein and a bit of healthy fat, you can avoid the sort of spike in blood sugar that causes insulin to remove so much of it that you feel hungry again that quickly.

Such a meal or snack can keep the hunger pangs at bay for three or four hours.