Nutritional potential of edible insects: a systematic review of published data

Edible insects are a suitable source of valuable nutrients that can meet the nutritional requirements for humans. Published scientific data on their nutritional value has been on the rise in the last decade. There are, however, huge disparities in the nutrient values found in the publications hence the need to appraise the data for quality, collate the results, and give an opinion on the nutrient potential of the insects. Nutritional data were searched systematically from published research articles using Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. A total of 483 published scientific journal articles were obtained and screened for quality based on European Food Information Resource (EuroFIR) guidelines with data from 26 articles meeting the criteria by scoring above 17.5 out of 35 points. A total of 91 insect species in 135 data lines were identified in the search. The results showed a wide variety of nutrient content among different species. The highest and the lowest recorded values for macronutrients were; Carbohydrates: 94.01g/100g, 0.1g/100g; Protein: 81.11g/100g, 1.11g/100g; and Fat: 77.01g/100g, 2.11g/100g. The highest energy value was 762 Kcal/100g and the lowest was 268.3 Kcal/100g. The highest and lowest values for fatty acids were; SFA: 733.46mg/100g, 17.50mg/100g; MUFA: 165.80mg/100g, 5.67mg/100g; and PUFA: 1514.32mg/100g, 3.70mg/100g. For minerals, potassium had the highest reported value of 2515mg/100g while copper had the lowest reported value of 0.0073mg/100g. Among the vitamins, vitamin E had the highest recorded value of 0.925mg/100g while vitamin C had the lowest recorded value of 0.0046mg/100g. The highest recorded value for amino acids was 96.02mg/g of protein for leucine and the lowest reported value was 1.19mg/g of protein for methionine+cysteine. The data shows a great variation even within species and regions, attributable to diet (feeding regime), sex, geographical source, and growth stage. The quality of published data was deficient leading to a high number of papers not meeting the EuroFIR criteria, majorly attributed to the number of analytical samples used during analysis However, the data indicate that edible insects are a good source of nutrients and can be used to fight undernutrition with some insect species providing a significant contribution to the Recommended Daily Allowance. Researchers need to address themselves to data quality when conducting nutritional analysis.