Scientists are hard at work brewing up the next superfood: Cockroach milk.<\/p>\n
The nutritious bug juice is packed with protein and calories, making it a potential perfect weapon against world hunger \u2014 and just the right addition to your next latte, researchers said.<\/p>\n
A recent scientific review<\/a> published in the journal \u201cInsects\u201d explores how the latest advances in cockroach milk and other insect-derived ingredients can be used for \u201cfunctional beverages\u201d such as protein shakes, tea, liquor and beer and be sold in mainstream markets.<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear what the milk tastes like \u2014 or whether anyone has ever tried it. <\/p>\n Some roaches produce \u201cmilk\u201d that could be used for human consumption, scientists say. Los Angeles Times via Getty Images<\/p>\n Cultura Collective<\/p>\n But it is produced by the Pacific beetle cockroach to feed its unborn babies and loaded with special crystalized proteins and has triple the calories of bovine milk, according to Dr. Ramaswamy Subramanian of Purdue University, who co-authored a groundbreaking cockroach-milk study in 2016.<\/p>\n Subramanian and his colleagues \u2014 Leonard Chavas from the medical imaging company DECTRIS and Nathan Coussens of the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research \u2014 studied how the milk, or \u201cmilk analogue,\u201d to be precise, could be harvested in mass to supplement global food supplies.<\/p>\n And why not bring it to neighborhood coffee shops in the meantime?<\/p>\n \u201c[T]his work shows that insect-based beverages are likely to move beyond niche markets\u201d with the proper marketing, wrote to the study\u2019s authors, who also explored how ingredients from worms, crickets, and other creepy-crawlies can go mainstream, too.<\/p>\n (From right) Ramaswamy Subramanian, Nathan Coussens and Leonard Chavas show some humor over their remarkable research. Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research\/Facebook<\/p>\n But harvesting cockroach milk is harder than it sounds.<\/p>\n The Pacific beetle cockroach is the only known cockroach that has live births.<\/p>\n For their research, Subramanian and his colleagues cut embryos out of 54-day pregnant Pacific roaches, sliced the embryos open and allowed their protein crystals \u2014 i.e., the \u201cmilk\u201d \u2014 to spill out.<\/p>\n The scientists are now studying the molecular structure of the roach baby food in hopes of replicating it.<\/p>\n Here are some commercially available alcoholic beverages made from or with insects. NCBI<\/p>\n Subramanian co-authored another cockroach milk study<\/a> in 2023, and this year he and his colleagues won the Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry \u2014 an award given for scientific achievements that \u201cmake people laugh and then think,\u201d Purdue said in an announcement.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m delighted to receive an Ig Nobel Prize because it recognizes something I\u2019ve always believed about science: The most unexpected questions can lead to fascinating discoveries,\u201d Subramanian said, in an acceptance statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists are hard at work brewing up the next superfood: Cockroach milk. The nutritious bug juice is packed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":900836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[97,269,15850,194],"class_list":["post-900835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-health","tag-nutrition","tag-scientists","tag-us-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=900835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/900836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}