Fruits with "decent" amount of protein?

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Created on 03, September, 2018

A health-focused magazine article lists six fruits that contain "relatively high amounts" of protein.

"Relative" is the key word here, because most fruit has very little, if any, protein, so ANY amount is relatively high. But that doesn't make the amount significant or worth rejecting other fruits because of it, especially when fruit is our go-to source for certain vitamins, minerals, fiber, etc.. not protein.

Of the six fruits listed, 5 are dried (including the one that is incorrectly shown as a fresh apricot in the photo, despite the data being for dried). Standard serving sizes for dried fruits (something the author apparently is not familiar with) are not equivalent to the fresh version. A serving of dried fruit contains more of the fruit than the fresh version, so naturally the protein (and everything else except water) will be higher.

The fruit shown as having the highest protein content, guava, actually contains a fair amount of seeds, which cannot easily be separated from the fruit, so we end up eating them, and the data for the seeds is included in that protein data as well. But most of those seeds (where the protein is found) will pass through your digestive system (meaning, you won't get much if any protein out of them). Showing the protein in guava as being the best for a fruit is misleading. Guava is a vitamin C delivery system. Eat them for that reason... not because you might get an extra one gram of protein in your meal containing 50+ grams of protein.

While we're at it... the protein data given for each fruit was rounded to the impossibly precise 100th (.01 grams) decimal place for 5 of the 6 fruits. This is an amateur move, as data in the USDA database is an average of many samples, meaning there can be a significant range. Everything should be rounded to the nearest gram when making generalizations about nutrient content.