Nutritional Composition of Bombyx mori Pupae: A Systematic Review

As insects have started to enter the eating habits of Western countries, an increasing amount of literature regarding the mulberry silkworm (Bombyx mori) prospective application as food has been published. Despite this growing interest, there is currently no systematic review of silkworm nutritional composition available. In this paper, we performed a systematic review of the recent available literature on the nutrient composition of mulberry silkworm pupae. After screening the titles and abstracts of 14,008 studies retrieved from three scientific databases, data about nutrients was extracted from 29 selected papers, together with their related variables. This systematic review provides an overview of the variety of data reported in the literature and highlights that many elements contribute to hindering a sound comparison of the different nutritional values reported for silkworm pupae. The observed variability of the composition data reported could be due to differences in diet, strains, pretreatments, and origin of the silkworm analyzed. However, all these variables were not always available and should be reported in future studies to simplify the data comparison.