Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel, Bam here, you can go ahead and stop the world and let me get off. Scuttle Butt from the super food sector has it that cockroach milk could become a new niche in the non dairy milk craze.
Americans do love their dairy free alternative milks. Non dairy milk sales grew six over the past five years, skyrocketing to an estimated two billion in seventeen so I, almond and coconut are the current top favorites, but other plant based milks include pecan, cash you, macadamia, hazelnut, kinwa, flax out, rice, and hemp are also on the rise, and a new market research report predicts that global plant based milk sales will exceed thirty four billion dollars by four But I
said cockroach milk. The chatter about cockroach milk first started in that's when a study published in the Journal of the International Union of Crystallography reported that the milk like substance found in the mid gut of the Pacific beetle cockroach is one of the most nutritious substances on Earth. The Diplottera punctata, which is the only cockroach known to give birth to live young instead of laying eggs like regular roaches, produces protein crystals that are what scientists call
a complete food, containing proteins, fats, and sugars. Just one of these crystals has more than three times the amount of energy in an equivalent amount of buffalo milk, which in turn has more energy than plain old cow's milk.
Bottom line, it's packed with calories and nutrients. Because milking cockroaches is not a viable option, an international team of researchers headed by scientists from the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India have figured out a way to sequence the genes that produce the milk protein crystals. They hope to eventually employ yeast as an efficient way to produce these milk yielding protein crystals in large quantities.
The study suggests that because it's such a dense, time released protein source, cockroach milk could help alleviate food and security around the world. The light philosopher and self help guru Dr Wayne Dyer once queried this food for thought, Can you see the beauty in a cockroach? Well? Can you. Today's episode was written by Carrie Tato and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other scuttle butt topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com