Dr. Steven Novella

Because they had chitinase.

They had an enzyme that digested chitin.

And so without the selective pressure to maintain the enzyme, mutations basically deactivated it.

So we have lost the ability to digest chitin.

Right.

Now, there's lots of non-chitin parts of insects that you can still get nutrition from, but we can't fully make use of it like our ancestors in more equatorial regions did, right?

So those are kind of the two big things.

And part of the reason for this was because there's a lot of interest in modern insect farming.

And so it's interesting that there are parts of insects that we can't really digest very well and we wouldn't get a lot of nutrition out of.

So if you're making cricket flour or whatever, you don't want a lot of chitin in there, right?

You want the non-chitin.

So you genetically alter a cricket to have no chitin.

Or just, I don't know.

It's going to die anyways.

Can't you just strip off the chitin part?

It would all just be worms.

Or just crack open the chitin and scoop out all the gooey stuff.

I've reached Jay's limit for entomophagy.

Yeah.

Jay, insects used to get in their bread, too.