Cricket Juice Healthier Than Orange Juice? Many Insects Loaded with Antioxidants | Hacker News Reader

Cricket Juice Healthier Than Orange Juice? Many Insects Loaded with Antioxidants

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25 pointssunnyP33 comments

I recently read the book "Oxygen, The molecule that made the world" by Nick Lane. Roughly the first half talks about the geologic aspects of oxygen in world history. The second half talks about biological processes relating to oxygen.

One thing he gets across is that dietary anti-oxidant intake is often ineffective, and in some cases can be harmful. Also, vitamin C isn't just an antioxidant -- it it involved in a number of different reactions and having too much can be as bad as too little. In fact it can be a pro-oxidant.

My almost certainly incorrect chronology of events, cobbled together from pop science headlines I've read:

1) Free radicals are bad because they cause oxydation (oxydization?) and this is bad for our cells? 2) Thus, anti-oxidants are good, because they prevent this process 3) People recommended more dietary anti-oxidants 4) It turns out that ingesting anti-oxidants doesn't actually produce the antioxidants necessary to combat free radicals, the same way eating dietary fat doesn't create human fat. Dietary sources of anti-oxidants largely are not absorbed and are useless. 5) Instead, we should look for foods that stimulate production of anti-oxidants in... the liver? the spleen? Wherever those are made in your body? But no one knows which foods are good for that?

I recall reading in 'The Vital Question' (also by Nick Lane) that free radicals (produced when a cell is unable to meet energy production demands) signals the replication of mitochondria. Antioxidants suppress this signal which leads to cell death. Interestingly an increase in free radicals themselves beyond a certain threshold also result in programmed cell death

Also should add - some molecules like Nitric Oxide act as both an antioxdiant and free radical.

The vitamin sellers often use the browning of a cut apple as an easy-to-explain example of the effects of oxidation.

Orange juice is essentially just sugar. Crickets are high-protein and low-carb. This makes sense intuitively...though I think "cricket juice" may need some rebranding.

Apparently, milk companies lobbied to have almond and other forms of alternative milk rebranded as "nut juice."

Kind of makes sense.

It isn’t milk. It is good that big grocery isn’t allowed to mislead people so easily, but I’m less convinced than I was before I typed out my comment.

It isn't dairy, that is correct. Note however, that using the term 'milk' to plant liquids has hundreds of years of history in the English language.

Thanks, I wasn’t aware.

Happy I was a bit careful with that comment.

Yeah it's only been recently since the nut and soy milk have started eating into the profits of dairy farmers that they've started being all up in arms. Look for vegan cheeses and vegi burgers to be the next targets. The also went after mayonnaise substitutes as well. It's just a move to use the legal system to student stifle free market competition.

Well, there are a lot of products that are deliberately deceptive and apparently not being regulated sufficiently, so I'm not so quick to say "free market uber alles".

For instance, I noticed recently that a drink that said it contained "natural flavoring" had sucralose in it. I guess sweet isn't legally a flavor maybe, but from the perspective of a consumer, it's hard to tell if this sort of thing is caused by finding clever loopholes or just by ignoring rules completely.

You can't fall back on "just read the label" when you're given a mixture of contradictory, inaccurate, or ambiguous information that is training you to ignore the label.

We used to drink "bug juice" at summer camp.

Juice isn't actually healthy due to it's high sugar content.

Do insects count in vegetarian diets? They are an excellent source of protein.

I tried some "cricket flour" brownies (which like most edibles taste like brownies). Their sales pitch was the yummy taste of brownies, twice the protein content of eggs. Presumably targeting the muscle building folks.

Conceptually it shouldn't be a big deal, but it is. Bugs as food being perhaps the biggest marketing challenge you can come up with.

At first i wanted to say of course insects count against being vegetarian. But then I thought about it...vegetarians don't want to eat living things, but technically plants are alive too.

Is mass farming vegetables as inhumane as mass-farming cows, pigs, chickens etc? probably not.

But mass farming insects may not be anymore inhumane than the life wild insects are already accustomed to (living in tight, dark spaces).

From a sustainability standpoint, there's no question that getting your protein from insects is better for the environment than cows/pigs/chickens.

But some people are vegetarian just because they're generally grossed out by eating bloody flesh...so just from that angle i'd say insects are not vegetarian.

Relevant from one day ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432600

There are 'non-sentient' animals like mollusks. I'd hazard insects are, generally, dumb enough that cruelty is further removed. We kill house insects all the time, for no reason other than they bother us.

We kill house insects all the time, for no reason other than they bother us.

The fear of some technologists, is that someday, super-optimizing sentient AIs will treat us the same way.

Long ago I read something that questioned why we get so angry (or whatever emotion) that we kill insects like that so easily. Why end its life? I don't remember where I read it, but decades later I still think of that whenever I either kill a bug or think of killing one. I'm not claiming to be a saint or anything, and I'll still go on a rampage with a fly-swatter.

Last night I was sitting outside reading, and something touched my skin in the wrong way I guess, and I instinctively looked around and reached down and smashed it, like in a split second. It was a millimeter long green baby grasshopper-looking thing. I was alone, but I apologized (to nobody) for killing it.

Many vegetarians don't eat animals because they feel pain not because they are alive, were that the case they would eat animals that died of old age. Plants have no mechanism to feel pain and some plants specifically spread through consumption, though there are some plants that vegans won't eat because insects play a necessary part in their creation i.e. almonds if memory serves correct, they don't eat honey for the same reason. Vegans generally want no animal or insect, sometimes even bacteria involved in the creation of there food and there's numerous n different forms of veganism that in not knowledgeable enough to describe. There's debate about some sea life for vegetarians, however recent information highly suggest insects feel pain and most vegetarians probably wouldn't include intentional insect consumption as valid vegetarianism (there's no real avoiding unintentionally consuming some). It's not grossness thing. Most people who are vegetarian started as meat eaters and chose for a time or for life they were no longer comfortable with the equation of enjoyment of eating meat versus the harm to other creatures they were causing. Everyone needs to figure out their own line of comfort and that changes over a lifetime.

Your arguments about sustainability while not incorrect don't actually factor into the debate about whether or not insects are agreeable to a vegetarian diet and lifestyle. They are more of a concern about animal welfare which doesn't require a vegetarian diet. There are numerous animal advocates and farmers who advocate for animal welfare without practicing a diet other than omnivorous.

"Many vegetarians don't eat animals because they feel pain not because they are alive, were that the case they would eat animals that died of old age."

I don't understand what you are saying. You seem to be saying that many vegetarians don't eat animals that died naturally...for what reason?

Being a vegetarian means eating plants and plant-based foods and dairy. Many vegetarians eat eggs but many others don't. In India, folks that don't eat eggs (but do eat dairy, go figure) call themselves "pure" vegetarians, and the folks that eat eggs are often called "eggiterians". But, in general, pure-vegetarians and eggiterians are considered to be vegetarians.

Thats pretty much it. Additions or subtractions from the above diet results in a different label (vegans, pescatarians, omnivores, buggyterians? etc.).

I'm pretty sure bugs are covered under omnivores and carnivores which is plainly what pescatarians are as well. You've given a really good definition, though I admit, I've never heard of eggitarians, sounds like a delightfully British term. I've always heard egg only called ovo-vegetarian, milk only as lacto-vegetarian and missed vegetarians as lacto-ovo vegetarian. Pescatarians just want to feel better about themselves by saying that they only eat one type of meat, which to me isn't really an argument against calling them omnivores if it makes them feel better I don't really see the harm though. For an extreme example you wouldn't say a thief isn't a criminal if they only committed thievery. It's covered by the original term it's busy a more specific form of that term, it's just odd to me.

No ingredient is healthy or unhealthy. Diet can be that or not. Having more vitamins, or other stuff means nothing. Body thrives on variability not on some optimality based on nutrient amounts.

Can there not exist some concoction of every possible nutrient the body needs in ideal proportions to where you would never need to consume anything else?

Soylent certainly thinks so.

You would still have to regulate amount. Even if such a concoction existed, too much or too little would still be unhealthy.

That assumes your bodies need is static, but unless you are living in a place without seasons, consistently exercising the exact same amount, and not aging, that is not going to be true.

I always thought there was an evolutionarily produced tendency to not want to eat the same thing all the time, because if you rely on one food type from one source, no matter how good it is, you risk something going wrong with it that you don't sense.

So I would think that even if you came up with the scientifically "perfect" food, it wouldn't take long before most people felt ill at the sight.

Plain water is probably healthier than orange-flavored sugar juice.

I'm interested in a future where farming insects for the protein and such is normal. I'm sure 90% of people don't even know that 'whey' protein is from milk. Give cricket powder a better name and then sell it cheap, if it's nutritious then it should catch on.

There's been a single recent study that came out with the claim that any drink with high sugar can increase your overall cancer risk and sugar may impact tumor growth. Unlike the study is repeated though it's just a single study that could be an aberration.

Rebranding like hamburger and pork but only not chicken and water creature like fish, clams, etc. It's weird, but it would probably work.

"sugar may impact tumor growth"

Well, everything needs sugar. Cancer cells are full of water too, aren't they?

Drink cricket juice if you're thirsty! It has Water Molecules(tm)

Eat the shrimp AND the shell (bugs)!

Every time I read about something disgusting that is touted because it has 'antioxidants' I ask myself, can't we synthesize antioxidants in the laboratory? I'll take mine from a Pyrex beaker, thanks.

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