Here's something you may have heard before, perhaps out of this very mouth: "Nearly every
culture on Earth has something like rice and beans — some popular dish that combines
a cereal grain with a legume.
And the reason everybody combines these two foods is that together they make a complete
protein — all the particular amino acids a human body needs to survive and thrive."
What I just said was probably like nails on a chalkboard to certain people out there — people
who are particularly invested in debunking what they call the "protein combining myth."
Is it a myth?
Personally, I've come to the conclusion that "myth" is a little too strong a word to use.
For example, I think what I just said about rice and beans is essentially correct, or
it could be correct.
Grains and legumes are certainly an excellent nutritional pairing, in addition to being
tasty AF, and I think it's reasonable to hypothesize that peoples of the world who kept these two
foods in their diets, well, they would've been able to keep more of their people healthy
relative to their overall agricultural productivity, and thus they were able to thrive and spread
their cultures and their dishes all around the world, which is why almost everybody has
some version of rice and beans.
But what I'm about to say now is the clear consensus view of the dietary scientific community:
You probably don't need to worry about any of this.
By "this," I mean worrying about combining specific foods in specific meals to get all
your amino acids — you probably don't need to worry about that.
And by "you," I mean people materially prosperous enough to spend at least some of their time
watching food videos on the internet.
In practice, it would be very hard to eat enough calories to live and yet not get all
of the amino acids that you need to be healthy, even if you never ate a single food that chefs
would call a "protein."
When people refer to a piece of meat or a block of tofu like this as being a protein,
they're not saying that it's solid protein.
It's not.
They're just saying that protein is the dominant dietary component in here.
There's also carbs and fats in here, just like there are fats and carbs in meat.
But in terms of the nutrition content, protein is the main event — so, for a shorthand,
we call it a protein.
Similarly, these are all foods that I might label as carbs, because they're mostly carbs
in terms of their nutrition content, but all of them also contain fats and proteins.
Every single food here is seeds.
Grains are seeds, beans are seeds, potatoes aren't technically seeds, but it's a botanical
energy store that can grow into a new potato plant, so for these purposes, I'm calling
it a seed.
A seed contains all of the raw material that a little baby plant would need to get started
in its life, and that's going to include carbs and fats and proteins.
Proteins are chains of amino acids that are linked together and do a specific job in a
living thing.
Plants, just like animals, need amino acids to make proteins to do all kinds of their
basic life functions, so yes, seeds have protein.
And all of these common seed-based foods has within it all of the amino acids that scientists
broadly consider essential to good human health, and I don't mean in combination with each
other.
These potatoes, by themselves, they have all of the essential aminos inside them.
This rice has all the essential aminos in it.
Don't take my word for this — google it, or look in the scientific sources that I've
linked in the description.
When people talk about a food as being an incomplete protein, that doesn't necessarily
mean that it totally lacks one or more of the essential amino acids.
Much more commonly, what it just means is that the food is kind of relatively poor in
one of the amino acids.
It has it, it just doesn't have a lot of it.
Grains, for example, are relatively poor sources of the essential amino acid lysine.
If you don't eat enough lysine, you get really tired and moody, and eventually some much
worse stuff starts happening.
But if you eat a lot of bread, you could still get all of the lysine and other essential
aminos you need just from the wheat in here, because wheat has lysine — it just has maybe
half as much lysine as it has histidine or tryptophan, or any of the other essential
aminos in here.
Eat enough bread and you will get enough amino acids – they're all in there.
Of course, there are many other essential nutrients beyond just amino acids, so yeah,
if you eat a ton of bread, you might get all the protein you need, but you'll still eventually
start to get problems like scurvy, because there's no vitamin C in here.
It is good for everyone to eat a variety of foods, and when you buy them, consider scanning
your grocery receipt with the sponsor of this video, Fetch Rewards.
This free app here doesn't just work with grocery or restaurant receipts — it works
with any retail receipts.
If it takes more than one photo on your phone to get the whole receipt, that's fine — the
app stitches them together for you.
Hit this button to upload your scan, and immediately you get reward points back.
For electronic receipts, it's even easier.
Hit that button and the app can scan your email inbox for any eligible receipts — meal
delivery, Amazon, whatever.
The app scans those receipts and gives you reward points back instantly.
The points are basically gift cards that you can redeem at a million different stores and
restaurants, online and in-store.
I'm in a fortunate enough position where I can just donate my points to one of these
charities, but I've used points at the bookstore, drugstore, Nintendo eShop, you name it.
Hit my link in the description to download the app, and for a limited time, you can get
3,000 points when you use my code RAGUSEA and you scan your first receipt.
3,000 points — link and code in the description.
Thank you, Fetch Rewards.
Anyway, yeah, the protein combining controversy.
Why is it so controversial?
Why do people get so worked up about such a seemingly benign and academic topic?
Well, I think it's mostly about animals.
Meat, or most meat, is going to have all of the amino acids you need — in a pretty concentrated
form, too.
Advocates of vegetarian or vegan diets have a particular interest in combating what they
call the protein combining myth because it gives the impression that meatless diets are
hard, or that non-animal foods are inherently inferior, which I don't think they are, and
I'm a guy who eats meat sometimes.
This is Frances Moore Lappé.
Her 1971 book, "Diet for a Small Planet," has got to be one of the most influential
books in the history of meatless eating, which she advocates chiefly for environmental reasons.
In the original 1971 edition of the book, Lappé referred to these vegetarian protein
combinations as being nutritionally complementary, and she was not wrong.
Every scientific source I can find on this topic agrees that rice, for example, is relatively
low in the essential amino acid lysine, because rice is a grain.
Beans, on the other hand, have plenty of lysine, but are relatively low on methionine.
Rice has plenty of methionine, so if you eat both beans and rice, you are more likely to
get all your essential aminos without even needing any meat — and this fact is a fact.
This is true.
And yet Lappé herself considers that part of her book to be a mistake.
It's a mistake that she corrected 10 years later in the 1981 edition of her book.
"In combating the myth that meat is the only way to get high-quality protein, I reinforced
another myth.
I gave the impression that in order to get enough protein without meat, considerable
care was needed in choosing foods.
Actually, it is much easier than I thought."
And I think it's fair to say that that is the consensus view among scientists today,
at least as it pertains to the typical person watching a video like this.
This is a position paper from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics on vegetarian diets.
"Research indicates that an assortment of plant foods eaten over the course of the day
can provide all essential amino acids and ensure adequate nitrogen retention and use
in healthy adults, thus complementary proteins do not need to be consumed at the same meal."
You don't have to have rice and beans.
You can have beans and then, much later, have rice.
Our bodies store amino acids in the intracellular fluid, and in our tissues that our body is
constantly breaking down and rebuilding again based upon whatever it needs at any given
moment.
The old gym bro adage that the body has no way of storing protein is another one of these
things that is kind of true, but also kind of not true, and we should talk about that
another day.
And besides, even if you only ate rice, you could still get enough lysine and all the
other aminos by simply eating a lot of rice.
Plain white rice might even be a better source of lysine than other foods, because when you
brown foods, you get the Maillard reaction, which destroys amino acids.
Plain rice isn't browned, and the lysine in rice might be particularly bioavailable, or
able to be used by your body.
This paper is linked in the description, along with many other sources.
So yeah, there are all the reasons why people think that protein combining is a myth.
I think "myth" is a little too strong a word to use, because yeah, a food like yams really
is relatively low in a couple different essential amino acids, and that could be relevant to
people on highly restricted diets, like people starving in a refugee camp somewhere, or me
going on a diet.
I put on a bunch of weight over Christmas, as always, and now I am trying to lower my
body fat while maintaining or even gaining some skeletal muscle.
To do that, I need to restrict calories in general, but fats and carbs in particular.
If in the unlikely event that white rice was my only protein source, yeah, I might not
get all of my essential amino acids if I simultaneously cut my total carbs way back — cut them so
far back that I just didn't get enough rice in my body to get all of that lysine.
According to some very rough math that I did, I'd have to eat about 700 grams of rice to
get the minimum daily recommended lysine for a normal adult, let alone an adult who is
trying to grow his muscles, which requires extra amino acids, extra protein beyond the
minimums.
And if I'm trying to drop body fat, I might not want to eat all the carbs necessary to
get that protein exclusively from grains.
So yeah, even though scientists generally regard the old notion of protein combining
as a myth, they still study this stuff all the time as it pertains to athletes and dieters
and old people and sick people.
There's a zillion studies showing that specific amino acid balances in the diet could be beneficial
for certain specific purposes.
But if you're a pretty normal person and you're eating a pretty normal amount of food, yeah,
you probably don't need to worry about protein completeness at all, whether you eat meat
or not.
I want to emphasize more than usual right now that I am not a scientist.
I'm just a guy who eats and reads a lot.
But I'm pretty sure that nothing I just said was scientifically controversial.
Sources are in the description, as always.
Keep your vinegar leg on the right.
That's what that graphic means, by the way.