Sea cucumber has always been regarded as a tonic with high protein and high nutrition. But how high is the protein content of sea cucumbers is often a mess. Many sea cucumber products claim to have a protein content of 55%. I have seen a sea cucumber product advertise that its protein content is as high as 90.82%. The protein content of dried sea cucumber in the China Food Ingredients List 2002 is 50.2%. However, this refers to dried sea cucumber with a moisture content of only 19%. The fresh sea cucumber has a protein content of only 16.5% because its moisture content is as high as 77.1%. This value is comparable to common fish or shrimp. When eating, dried sea cucumbers need water (water soaking, soaking, etc.), the water content is greatly increased (93.5%), and its protein content is only 6%! It is only equivalent to half of the egg protein content. What kind of high protein is this?

　　The most important thing is that the nutritional value of sea cucumber protein is low, not high-quality protein. The sea cucumber protein is mainly collagen, which is seriously deficient in tryptophan. Tryptophan is one of the essential amino acids required by the human body. Each 1g of sea cucumber (water soaked, calculated according to the food composition table code 12-9-003) contains only 5.2mg tryptophan. Its amino acid score (AAS) is only 0.52. Not only lower than high-quality protein such as minced meat (0.73), tofu (0.70), but also lower than non-high-quality protein such as rice (0.58) and potatoes (0.64).

　　All in all, the protein content in sea cucumber is not very high, and the nutritional value is also low. The beautiful words such as "high protein" and "high nutrition" are all arrogant words that are meaningless and inexplicable.