Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
by Marion Nestle
Nov
27
2019
Food options for Thanksgiving? Omega 3-enriched farmed grasshoppers!
I was interested to see this announcement from the University of Eastern Finland about new research suggesting a way to improve the nutritional quality of fats from….edible grasshoppers!
Until I read this account, I did not know that
- Long-horned grasshoppers are widely consumed as snacks in parts of Africa.
- More than 2,000 insect species are known to be eaten by humans.
- Raising edible insects requires less space and water and has lower greenhouse emissions than meat production.
- In some places, overexploitation of insect resources is a problem.
- Feeding omega-3 fatty acids to grasshoppers to finish off their growth (as is done with farmed salmon) improves their essential fatty acid levels.
This research was done for a doctoral dissertation and published in the Journal of Economic Entomology. It must have been a lot of fun to do.
Yum?
