Butod is a Sabah thing. If you've never heard of it, it's a fat white grub that lives inside rotting sago palm trunks, and yes, people eat it alive. Locals, especially from Kadazan-Dusun and other indigenous communities, have eaten it for generations. Tourists try it on a dare. The grub has a coconut-y, creamy taste raw, and goes crispy and nutty when grilled or fried. Calorie-wise, 20 calories per grilled grub sounds almost too good to be true. And honestly, be straight with you, these are ballpark estimates because there's very little lab data on butod specifically. What we know is the macros are mostly fat with a bit of protein and basically zero carbs.
In practice, nobody sits down and eats one butod. At a market stall they come skewered in batches of 5 to 10. Ten grilled grubs puts you at around 200 calories, which is still pretty reasonable. Where it gets spicier is deep-fried, where each grub picks up a bit of oil and hits 25 calories each, so ten grubs is closer to 250 calories. The serving size is really what drives the maths here, not the cooking method. If you're eating it as a novelty snack at a Sabah night market, you're probably not having more than 5 to 10 grubs total, which is 100 to 200 calories. Honestly for a snack, that's not bad lah.