Wheatgrass, cinnamon, broccoli rabe and goji beans are a few of the latest foods that were being hailed as superfoods. However, by far the weirdest and perhaps the most nauseating of these foods has to be 'cockroach milk'.
Wait, cockroach milk?
No, most cockroaches don't produce milk, but a species of roaches called the Pacific beetle cockroach (Diploptera punctate), is known to give birth to live young ones. The cockroach reportedly pumps out a type of 'milk' from their brood sack to feed its babies.
According to an international team of scientists, this fluid is four times as nutritious as cow's milk and can be used to feed the human population in the future, reported Science Alert.
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What about nutrients?
This milk, which contains protein crystals, is not only healthy but extremely 'pretty'! Scientists sliced opened an embryonic roach under a microscope and observed that these crystals spill out like highly concentrated glitter dust. And guess what? One of these protein crystals can give you three times more energy than an equivalent amount of buffalo's milk, which in turn has higher calories than cow's milk.
The research is published in the journal for the journal International Union of Crystallography (IUCRJ).
"It's a complete food," Subramanian Ramaswamy, a biochemist at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in Bangalore, India, according to The Washington Post.
So can we milk them?
However, milking these cockroaches is not quite possible. So researchers from the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India and their colleagues have decided to sequence the genes responsible for producing this super food and replicating them in the lab, reported Science Alert.
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