vegetable protein

03 Apr 2013

Disclaimer: this is not a rah rah meat post. I love meat. I also love vegetables.

So, I normally don’t bite on stupid facebook memes, but this one is so egregiously stupid I had to comment – especially because nutrition is a pet topic/peeve of mine. So this image is floating around facebook:

So, you don’t have to be a nutritional expert to get the impression these numbers are … amiss. Cucumbers? 24% protein? So, I can’t pretend to know where they got these numbers, but the numbers for beef, chicken and egg are accurate, as a calculation of % protein by weight. So I fixed the image using that as a calculation for the vegetables:

These are a little off in some regards – I used small gram amounts, so some figures yielded 0g when really there’s some fractional amount. Also, to be fair, using percentages by weight doesn’t really mean anything. What you should really look at is percentage by kilocalorie content. So here’s the real version fixed:

Spinach is awesome. This is why I eat bales of it. I think my favorites on this list are cucumbers, which have hardly any protein at all. That, and parsley. Listing parsley on a protein content infographic is hilarious. I would love to watch someone eat enough parsley to get their RDA of protein.