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LET’S face it, nutritional data isn’t the most fascinating, so it can be really helpful when food writers delve through the dry tables of stats to translate them into easy-to-understand messages. One of the most popular formats are eye-catching memes based on simple two food comparisons. These appear on my social media timelines at least half a dozen times a week. Are they accurate?

“Do you really need meat to get protein?” asks one image that recently crossed my social media feed. It shows two forks, one holding a piece of lean steak and the other an equal-sized piece of broccoli.

In accompanying text, beef was listed as containing a meagre 6.4 grams of protein per 100 calories, compared with broccoli’s whopping 11.1 grams.

Food data tables usually measure nutrient levels per serving or per 100 grams, not per calorie. This matters because broccoli is far lower in calories than steak. By using this metric, the meme is actually comparing the nutritional content of more than three servings of broccoli (285 grams) with less than a third of the typical serving of steak (55 grams). Not exactly the fork-by-fork comparison it suggests.

According to the , even per 100 calories, steak has more than twice the protein of broccoli, containing more than 15 grams of protein versus just less than 7 grams.

So does the stat in the meme stand up? It is hard to tell on social media alone as it references an online article that is no longer functioning. However, there may be a simple explanation. While the image shows a steak vs broccoli comparison, the text refers to beef in general. Different cuts of beef have different fat-to-protein ratios and therefore different protein values. Also, as fat has about twice the calories of protein, picking fattier cuts distorts the “per 100 calorie” metric to give you even lower protein values. Bottom line? The meme is at best misleading, at worst based on questionable stats.

Now let’s look at another meme that tells a very different story. This one compares the nutritional content of apples and liver. According to the graphic, liver is higher in a range of nutrients from protein to selected vitamins and minerals like iron, so is by far the healthier choice.

“Humans aren’t pandas. We don’t survive by just eating one type of food, but a diverse range of them”

But who is eating apples thinking they are a rich source of protein? I mean, frankly, it isn’t a like-for-like comparison. It is comparing apples with, well, liver. That is before we even consider the stats. I had thought this may be because the image in the meme is of pork liver, yet the meme links to poultry data as a source. When I compared the figures in the meme with tables for beef, pork, chicken, lamb, goose and duck liver, I couldn’t find any exact matches. Curious.

Why compare apples and liver anyway? It may be because when it comes to animal foods, liver is a particularly rich source of vitamins and minerals, including things like vitamin C, which isn’t found in more commonly eaten cuts of meat.

Comparing this with apples, which aren’t the most nutritionally dense of plant foods, is a neat way of supporting a pro-meat stance. However, if you were to pick a more commonly eaten cut like steak and compare it with a more nutrient dense plant like kale, then the opposite is true: kale comes out on top in the majority of nutrients.

All this number crunching skirts around the most important issue here. Humans aren’t pandas. We don’t survive by just eating one type of food, but a diverse range of them. Because of this simple fact, there is scientifically really no such thing as healthy or unhealthy foods, just healthy or unhealthy diets. The idea of a balanced diet may be a bit old school for 2020, but unlike social media memes it is based on scientific reality.