FEMALE crickets should stick to an Atkins-style protein-heavy diet, while males are better off carb-loading. There is a chance that men and women might benefit from sex-specific diets too.
Alexei Maklakov at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues measured lifespan and success in reproduction in hundreds of black field crickets. They found that the insects lived longest on a diet of eight parts carbohydrate to one part protein – up to 55 days for females and up to 70 for males.
The same high-carb, low-protein diet gave males greatest potential for reproductive success, as judged by…
