The World’s Healthiest Superfood

Spirulina (high protein source for Aztecs)

The Aztecs had access to the ‘world’s healthiest superfood’, Spirulina. (Written/compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

A tiny aquatic plant (each strand is less than half a millimetre long!) offering the most powerful combination of nutrients (protein, vitamins, anti-oxidants, etc.) ever known in any grain, herb or food. This edible blue-green algae (found in Lake Texcoco) produces 15 times more protein per acre than soybeans, 35 times more than corn and 70 times more than wheat! And because it grows in salty lakes, it doesn't compete with other possible food sources.

Tecuitlatl (its Náhuatl name, meaning ‘stone dung’) was sold in Tlatelolco market and eaten with maize or a sauce made of chili peppers and tomatoes. It was briefly described by Díaz de Castillo, one of the first Spaniards to enter Tenochtitlan: ‘then there were fishmongers and others who sold little loaves which they made out of a sort of slime which they gather from the great lake, which they thicken and they make loaves of it which taste like cheese’. The Florentine Codex has a tiny reference to a ‘tecuitlatl gatherer’.

(Info from 'Aztec Medicine, Health and Nutrition' by Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano, 1990, pp. 102-106)

World superfoods checklist - many are from Mexico!‘How Mexico is reclaiming spirulina’ - BBC feature “Spirulina, or ‘Aztec cheese,’ is Mexico’s pre-Hispanic superfood”

Comments (3)

Lasse

18th Feb 2017

I think it taste more like some kind of spinach. I can’t understand how someone would compare it to cheese?

tecpaocelotl

11th Jan 2010

Great article.
It’s very healthy. The only problem I have is making it look appetizing to people who aren’t use to eating things with spirulina since when you mix it with other things it makes everything green.

Fabio Lanari

20th Oct 2009

The algae looks very clean indeed.

Spirulina (high protein source for Aztecs)