A cricket-protein shake three times a week: older adults' blood pressure dipped, but adding exercise classes didn't beat either one alone

Insects keep turning up in conversations about the protein we'll eat in future, mostly on the grounds of cost and land use. A team at Kasetsart University in Thailand has been testing a more personal question: does a protein made from house crickets do anything for the bodies of older people? Their latest paper, published online in the Annals of Geriatric Medicine and Research on 30 September 2026, looks at blood pressure, artery stiffness and heart rhythm.

Between August 2021 and July 2022 they recruited adults from community health centres in Nakhon Pathom province whose blood pressure was raised (a systolic reading of 120 to 139 mmHg, or a diastolic of 80 to 89) or was under control with medicine. Forty-four finished the study, 39 of them women, with an average age of about 65. They were split four ways for 12 weeks. One group drank a placebo made mostly of maltodextrin, a cheap starch, matched for calories. One took 30 g of enzyme-treated ('hydrolysed') house cricket protein three times a week without exercising. One did supervised hour-long sessions three times a week, brisk aerobic work followed by elastic-band and body-weight strength exercises, and drank the placebo afterwards. The last group trained and took the cricket protein straight after each session.

Systolic pressure fell by 5.1 mmHg with training alone, 3.5 mmHg with the protein alone and 7.2 mmHg with both, while the placebo group's barely moved. Resting heart rate followed a similar pattern; in the combined group it went from 67 to 62 beats a minute. By the end, the combined group's mean arterial pressure (a weighted average of the two readings) was 8.7 mmHg lower than the placebo group's. But the comparison that matters most for anyone wondering whether to buy cricket powder came out flat: the combined group did no better than training alone or protein alone. A measure of artery stiffness, pulse wave velocity, fell in all three active groups, but not by a different amount from the placebo group. Nobody had side effects, and liver and kidney blood tests didn't change.

The authors are unusually frank about the limits. This is a secondary analysis of a trial built to study muscle, not blood pressure; their earlier paper reported gains in strength and lower inflammation. It wasn't sized for these outcomes, it tested many measures without correcting for multiple comparisons, and it was registered only after it had finished. There was no comparison with whey, soy or any other protein, so nothing here shows that crickets beat any other protein, and the drop in the protein-only group could partly be people regressing towards their usual readings. Lab studies have found peptides in cricket protein that block ACE, the same enzyme some blood pressure drugs target, but the trial measured none of that. What it does show is that a supervised exercise routine of an hour, three times a week, lowered blood pressure in older adults as it has in many earlier trials, and that cricket protein was well tolerated alongside it.