Vegans should honestly just take a B12 pill. B12 is naturally produced by bacteria, but most good natural sources amount to using an animal gut as a fermenter. Pills just cut out the middleman and use an industrial fermenter rather than one that moos.
You could eat dirt or drink unclean water instead, but the pills are cheap, easy and natural.
Protein combining is an old myth. You don’t need to eat a complete protein at each meal. It’s fine if they average out to be complete over the course of a day or two, which is quite easy. If you have a sandwich for lunch and lentil soup over cauliflower rice for dinner you’ve eaten a complete protein.
9 of them are “essential” because your body can’t make them from other amino acids.
Protein is complete when it has enough of all of the essential amino acids. It’s incomplete when it’s missing at least one of them.
Rice, for example, doesn’t quite have enough lysine in it. If you live on only rice, you’ll eventually run into a lysine deficiency. Chickpeas, though, have plenty of lysine but not enough methionine.
Rice and chickpeas individually are incomplete. A bowl of chickpeas and rice is complete, though.
The problem with this, like I said, is that if you have cucumber sushi for lunch and falafel dipped in hummus for dinner it’ll average out to be complete. Almost no one has to actually care about this, it’s really just an interesting factoid.
I remember now that you say it, that the body cannot create all proteins we need. Makes sense to call it “complete” when your diet includes all the amino acids that you need.
Vegans should honestly just take a B12 pill. B12 is naturally produced by bacteria, but most good natural sources amount to using an animal gut as a fermenter. Pills just cut out the middleman and use an industrial fermenter rather than one that moos.
You could eat dirt or drink unclean water instead, but the pills are cheap, easy and natural.
Protein combining is an old myth. You don’t need to eat a complete protein at each meal. It’s fine if they average out to be complete over the course of a day or two, which is quite easy. If you have a sandwich for lunch and lentil soup over cauliflower rice for dinner you’ve eaten a complete protein.
What does complete protein mean? It’s the first time I hear about it.
Protein is made up of amino acids.
9 of them are “essential” because your body can’t make them from other amino acids.
Protein is complete when it has enough of all of the essential amino acids. It’s incomplete when it’s missing at least one of them.
Rice, for example, doesn’t quite have enough lysine in it. If you live on only rice, you’ll eventually run into a lysine deficiency. Chickpeas, though, have plenty of lysine but not enough methionine.
Rice and chickpeas individually are incomplete. A bowl of chickpeas and rice is complete, though.
The problem with this, like I said, is that if you have cucumber sushi for lunch and falafel dipped in hummus for dinner it’ll average out to be complete. Almost no one has to actually care about this, it’s really just an interesting factoid.
I remember now that you say it, that the body cannot create all proteins we need. Makes sense to call it “complete” when your diet includes all the amino acids that you need.
Thanks for explaining.