The importance of this subject is underestimated and applies as well quite independently of whether humans eat the insects directly or not. Consider the cuban tree frog for example, which has long since initiated its campaign in Florida to host and spread throughout the food chain the rat lungworm nematode. Rat lungworm (angiostrongylus) holds its own in the burgeoning presence of hideous and hostile parasites. It is highly infectious to many species and no picky eater, as it favors the entire body of the host, the brain and all. Burmese pythons are another up and coming host in Florida, and while they might prefer a provincial life in the everglades, many other species will meander north and onward. There are other nasties from nematodes to cestodes and more, gaining new ground. Baylisascaris procyonis is another terrible nematode found almost anywhere in the US, mostly in racoons, but in other species (humans included) with more varying and less frequency and it's often incurable. A study showed that, if I remember correctly, 40 out of 250 wildlife rehabilitation personnel had been exposed, but symptoms varied by exposure load. Both rat lungworm and baylis ascaris are resistant to environmental elements that normally break things down, with baylis even surviving UV light, formaldehyde and extreme cold. Rat lungworm can be deposited on surfaces (eg vegetables), and snails are common vectors. Lungworm is very difficult to remove by washing while baylis is so adhesive that wildlife control authorities advise disposing of rather than washing shovels or tools exposed to racoon latrines. The list goes merrily along with other nasties, but it would require time to refresh my memory and accurately describe more.
Larger animals can be inspected individually to find pathogens or diseases.
Insects are so small that it's practically impossible to inspect each individual organism. You can do sampling of the batch, but the odds of missing bad ones are still high.
Same with the fruits and vegetables, some are easy to inspect, others are almost impossible, or impossible to clean. There are kosher (insect-free) versions of lettuce and some berries which are much more expensive than non-kosher ones.
Lastly, disgust is a part of the human immune system. Religious dietary laws and cultural taboos are probably partly developed from disgust, and partly from trial-and-error.
I’ve wondered about this for a few years so this is extremely gratifying to read. I’ll have to go in deeper later to really understand the implications of each parasite, but my main takeaway is that my intuition here was way off. I expected insects to pose far fewer risks from parasites to humans.
I wouldn’t have taken a chance based on that assumption, and cooking bugs seems like it would eliminate most of these pathogens, but still. I figured it would be safer.
I’d need to read a lot more to draw some kind of comparison between insects and animal agriculture (both seem to carry plenty of baggage), but it’s great to see research like this so it’s possible to begin doing so.
>my intuition here was way off. I expected insects to pose far fewer risks from parasites to humans.
Weird, my intuition was the exact opposite. The thought of eating bugs triggers a disgust reaction, similar to the thought of eating crap. Humans developed those reactions over hundreds of generations for a reason.
> cooking bugs seems like it would eliminate most of these pathogens
I prefer everything I eat to be properly cooked. I even usually avoid raw vegetables. I can't imagine eating a raw bug on purpose unless it was for a lot of money and I could chase it with a shot of hard liquor afterward.
If insects were such a valuable and risk free source of nutrition wouldn't we see a lot more human cultures eating them?
They've been around forever, but somehow we share a mostly common disgust for eating bugs. Is it farfetched to assume that perhaps that disgust allowed us to survive.
They're not a practical food source. They're hard to farm, they taste bad, they're subject to predators, etc. There are lots of cultures that eat a few insects but I've never seen a single one that gets >33% of their daily protein from insects. The human gut produces chitinase but I don't know how it would react to tens of grams of chitin per day.
That's simply not true. The UN FAO estimates that 2B people worldwide consume terrestrial insects regularly in their diets. Add in aquatic insects like shrimp or lobster and that number increases drastically.
A lot of animals do eat insects however, so it is not that they are dangerous a priori. Our evolutionary ancestors, small mammals/primates, most likely did eat insects. We somehow evolved them out of our diet. Strange actually, since they are quite abundant.
It's not surprising... I mean look at them. There is an evolutionary reason why insects look disgusting to us. Same reason why feces look disgusting - We're not supposed to eat that.
"Parasitic developmental forms were detected in 244 (81.33%) out of 300 (100%) examined insect farms. In 206 (68.67%) of the cases, the identified parasites were pathogenic for insects only; in 106 (35.33%) cases, parasites were potentially parasitic for animals; and in 91 (30.33%) cases, parasites were potentially pathogenic for humans. " Sounds horrific. How does this compare to other food sources?
As an owner of a reptile this study has another angle for me. The insects tested are all classic reptile food and aside from some creatures being illegal to import or breed the production and selling of edible insects for animals seems pretty unregulated. Every producer claims their bugs are all parasite free so seeing ~80% actually do have parasites is alarming.
Yeah, I always said that for me, a south American for which the Churrascos/Assados (barbecue) is part of my cultural identity, I prefer to become a vegan than eat insects. Pass the lentils, shall you?
Possibly like any other food source, then? Boils down to how they're grown, handled, prepared.
Arguably, the wet markets in Wuhan wouldn't have been such a disease nightmare if the cages of live animals weren't kept one atop the other, dripping feces and other fluids between species and breaking the inter-species barrier.
Big fan of Black Soldier Fly farming and there are efforts with grasshoppers. Not sure the featured article (TFA) issue extends beyond the few people working in production (increasingly automated [1]) because the output is a dry meal flour.
This, Seaweeds, and directed precise fermentation are a big part of the 10B+ people solution.
Don’t eat the bugs. You have an innate disgust reaction to bugs and to the idea of eating them. It evolved over millions of years. Heed nature’s warning. They only eat bugs in places where it was historically necessary due to extreme famine. These activists trying to get you to eat bugs don’t have your best interests at heart. Eat meat. It is one of the great liberties man enjoys.
I don't think disgust is "innate". A typical English person finds squid disgusting, but is happy to eat various kinds of cheese, including ones like Stilton with mould on them. Someone in Japan, on the other hand ...
Also, everyone has heard at least one story of a young child eating an earthworm they found in the garden. It seems to be only after seeing the reaction of older children and adults that they learn to find that disgusting.
What's with the sudden uptick in people talking about eating bugs and eating meat (and liberties, billionaires, elites?)?
Those two things aren't the only two options, and no one is forcing anyone to do anything, which makes me think this is some attempt by the meat industry to paint all the people who are telling you to eat less meat (like your doctor) as authoritarian lunatics out to undermine civilization.
>Conducted parasitological examination suggests that edible insects may be the most important parasite vector for domestic insectivorous animals
Bummer. I was aquainted with some folks in insect farming who tried to get novel food regulations moving years ago that for whatever reason gave up and fell back to insect based flours/protein powders and animal feed. Some of them had pretty interesting proposals integrating insect farming with recycling urban bio waste that then gets turned into animal feed which looked good on paper but I always wondered if that was recipe for disease. That said, crickets taste pretty good fried, but for some reason I don't like the idea of the meat I eat being fed on crickets.
I was thinking of raising insects for my cat to hunt in the apartment, and had the idea that maybe an indoor farm could become parasite-free after a generation or two of treatment with ivermectin.
I searched the article (didn't read) for the words "ivermectin" and "treatment". Nothing specific, but it did have this to say:
> The high prevalence of selected developmental forms of parasites in the evaluated insect farms could be attributed to low hygiene standards and the absence of preventive treatments.
I kind of assumed that bugs raised for reptiles, etc. would be treated, but maybe not.
They probably contain toxins that can't be cooked away either. Ask yourself why humans refrained from eating them unless near starvation and death for the recorded history of humanity.
I'm going to say you probably haven't traveled much to be drawing such conclusions. Eating bugs is a big tourist shtick in Mexico for example. And you can go to markets with heaps of them on display.
The last hunter gatherers in Africa have lived that way for as far as we can tell for thousands of years. Part of their diet is raw bee larvae. There's a photo of a man eating it accompanying this news story about a study in Science.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/24/5456315...
> Ask yourself why humans refrained from eating them
Plenty of humans don't eat plenty of meats and sea animals either. Traditions don't necessarily contain good wisdom.
I think seeing a bug feast on feces and then having it sneak up on your food stashes might trigger an obvious reaction (similar to pigs and the reason why some don't eat them)
They didn't. Many insects are even literally kosher. It's just that farming them didn't make much sense until recently.
Plants and mushrooms, having far more different biology from us than insects, are probably a worse concern when it comes to toxins that can't be cooked away. And yet humans managed to cultivate food with plenty of those, like cassava.
Over the years I've seen several female friends try to stay vegan. One managed a decade before she couldn't put up with the anemia any more. The others quit sooner, because of weight loss, malnutrition, and other issues.
It seems humans were evolved to scavenge animals as well as eating plants. It's not just protein, it's iron and fats, and a few other things.
The obvious answer is because they are tasty and people are used to it and it is ingrained in the very culture (cooking, traditional holiday meals etc) of pretty much every country I know of. Those are some of the strongest forces working in unison. Seems very unlikely hamankind will ever move off animal based diets.
1. Number of people eating bug(driven by mimesis pushed through a media narative and thus typically viral(aka Exponential by default).
2. Number of variety of bugs being eaten(regionality and entrepreneurialism((often referred to as Cambrian explosions in perfectly competitive markets)) .
3. Number of geographies bugs for consumption being grown in((any including Antarctica and space with a new profit motive...look at the impact of disease due to invasive species)).
4. Number of production methods and processes.
5. New combinations of genetics of peoples and insects/infectious organisms being consumed. Think Montezuma's revenge or lactose intolerance in certain regions of the world except possibly contagious and deadly
Multiply all that by orders of magnitude faster gestation cycle and thus the chance for mutation, aside from technology developed to support existing food chain, Number of mutations per lifecycle, increasing the chances of deadly DNA combination by 12x, so order of magnitude.
Average lifespan of...
A. Bacteria: 12 hours
B. Insect: 12 months
C. Mammal: 12 years (shortest being the primary disease harbinger, the rat).
[+] [-] eth0up|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nivertech|3 years ago|reply
Insects are so small that it's practically impossible to inspect each individual organism. You can do sampling of the batch, but the odds of missing bad ones are still high.
Same with the fruits and vegetables, some are easy to inspect, others are almost impossible, or impossible to clean. There are kosher (insect-free) versions of lettuce and some berries which are much more expensive than non-kosher ones.
Lastly, disgust is a part of the human immune system. Religious dietary laws and cultural taboos are probably partly developed from disgust, and partly from trial-and-error.
[+] [-] steve_adams_86|3 years ago|reply
I wouldn’t have taken a chance based on that assumption, and cooking bugs seems like it would eliminate most of these pathogens, but still. I figured it would be safer.
I’d need to read a lot more to draw some kind of comparison between insects and animal agriculture (both seem to carry plenty of baggage), but it’s great to see research like this so it’s possible to begin doing so.
[+] [-] weberer|3 years ago|reply
Weird, my intuition was the exact opposite. The thought of eating bugs triggers a disgust reaction, similar to the thought of eating crap. Humans developed those reactions over hundreds of generations for a reason.
[+] [-] Traubenfuchs|3 years ago|reply
Salads can literally kill you via the listeria they bring.
[+] [-] slfnflctd|3 years ago|reply
I prefer everything I eat to be properly cooked. I even usually avoid raw vegetables. I can't imagine eating a raw bug on purpose unless it was for a lot of money and I could chase it with a shot of hard liquor afterward.
[+] [-] ramblerman|3 years ago|reply
They've been around forever, but somehow we share a mostly common disgust for eating bugs. Is it farfetched to assume that perhaps that disgust allowed us to survive.
[+] [-] scythe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trinachi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blablablerg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jongjong|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaburn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pb060|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neodypsis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neodypsis|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[+] [-] kseistrup|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sumo89|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iLemming|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elzbardico|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] instagraham|3 years ago|reply
Arguably, the wet markets in Wuhan wouldn't have been such a disease nightmare if the cages of live animals weren't kept one atop the other, dripping feces and other fluids between species and breaking the inter-species barrier.
[+] [-] jimmySixDOF|3 years ago|reply
This, Seaweeds, and directed precise fermentation are a big part of the 10B+ people solution.
[1] https://www.rebelnews.com/worlds_largest_cricket_farm_finish...
[+] [-] Trouble_007|3 years ago|reply
Food Contamination - harmful Chemicals and Microorganisms in food : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_contamination
Foodborne Illness / Food Poisoning : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodborne_illness
[+] [-] justthinkhn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bloak|3 years ago|reply
Also, everyone has heard at least one story of a young child eating an earthworm they found in the garden. It seems to be only after seeing the reaction of older children and adults that they learn to find that disgusting.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
Those two things aren't the only two options, and no one is forcing anyone to do anything, which makes me think this is some attempt by the meat industry to paint all the people who are telling you to eat less meat (like your doctor) as authoritarian lunatics out to undermine civilization.
[+] [-] smcl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dirtyid|3 years ago|reply
Bummer. I was aquainted with some folks in insect farming who tried to get novel food regulations moving years ago that for whatever reason gave up and fell back to insect based flours/protein powders and animal feed. Some of them had pretty interesting proposals integrating insect farming with recycling urban bio waste that then gets turned into animal feed which looked good on paper but I always wondered if that was recipe for disease. That said, crickets taste pretty good fried, but for some reason I don't like the idea of the meat I eat being fed on crickets.
[+] [-] cloudkilla|3 years ago|reply
I searched the article (didn't read) for the words "ivermectin" and "treatment". Nothing specific, but it did have this to say:
> The high prevalence of selected developmental forms of parasites in the evaluated insect farms could be attributed to low hygiene standards and the absence of preventive treatments.
I kind of assumed that bugs raised for reptiles, etc. would be treated, but maybe not.
What do you think?
[+] [-] dukeofdoom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asveikau|3 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy_in_humans
I'm going to say you probably haven't traveled much to be drawing such conclusions. Eating bugs is a big tourist shtick in Mexico for example. And you can go to markets with heaps of them on display.
[+] [-] stevenwoo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wonderbore|3 years ago|reply
Plenty of humans don't eat plenty of meats and sea animals either. Traditions don't necessarily contain good wisdom.
I think seeing a bug feast on feces and then having it sneak up on your food stashes might trigger an obvious reaction (similar to pigs and the reason why some don't eat them)
[+] [-] vintermann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matsemann|3 years ago|reply
This is very wrong. Did you forget to ask outside your gated community?
We've not eaten half the things we regularly eat for most of recorded history either. That's not an argument.
[+] [-] codekansas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x20cowboy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuatoru|3 years ago|reply
It seems humans were evolved to scavenge animals as well as eating plants. It's not just protein, it's iron and fats, and a few other things.
[+] [-] wsc981|3 years ago|reply
I for one will not stop eating animals, even though WEF (and by extent politicians and mass media) will push people to eat bugs.
[+] [-] throwaway0x7E6|3 years ago|reply
you might as well preach abstinence, like the previous iterations of church ladies did.
[+] [-] kriro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NL807|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wonderbore|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] fzfaa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helpfulmandrill|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaburn|3 years ago|reply
Multiply all that by orders of magnitude faster gestation cycle and thus the chance for mutation, aside from technology developed to support existing food chain, Number of mutations per lifecycle, increasing the chances of deadly DNA combination by 12x, so order of magnitude.
Average lifespan of... A. Bacteria: 12 hours B. Insect: 12 months C. Mammal: 12 years (shortest being the primary disease harbinger, the rat).