Superfoods whose nutritional potential or nutritional value makes them very interesting from the point of view of health due to their high concentration of antioxidants, healthy fats or vitamins.
Forget about the kale or the turmeric, the new superfood could be the cockroaches. Specifically, his milk, according to a recent study.
Scoop milk
Although most cockroaches do not actually produce milk, it has been shown that Diploptera punctate, which is the only known cockroach that gives birth to live young, pumps a type of 'milk' that contains protein crystals to feed its offspring
The fact that an insect produces milk is fascinating, but what most interested the researchers is that one of these protein crystals contains more than three times the amount of energy found in an equivalent amount of buffalo milk (which also it is higher in calories than cow's milk).
Milking cockroaches does not seem a very feasible option, so an international team led by researchers from the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India decided to sequence the genes responsible for the production of these milk protein crystals to see if they could somehow replicate them in the laboratory. The results are being very promising and may soon become a food with many proteins to feed populations where there are deficits.