Omega 3 fatty insect oils?

By 12. January 2016Blog, Nutrition

Now there’s an idea. We have blogged about the unsustainable use of omega 3 fatty acids and about possible alternatives: direct from seaweed or genetically modified oil seed rape. But what if there was another natural source?

A PhD student from Wageningen University in the Netherlands who was working with milk fats decided one day to have a look at the fatty acids contained in the oil extracted from insects. This oil was actually a by-product of harvesting the insect protein and was normally thrown away.

She looked at the fatty acids from meal worms, beetle larvae, crickets, cockroaches, grasshoppers and soldier flies and found that there were omega 3 fatty acids that could be extracted. The results are published in a paper in the journal Food Research International.

Another notch on the belt for insects becoming a food source of the future, now if we could just get past that yuck factor….

Click here to read more.