The first version of my protein calculator is now done! Choose any protein source and it tells you all about it in gory detail AND recommends a good complimentary food! Please give it a try and let me know any suggestions or bugs you find in the protein calculator.
Interesting Vegetarian Protein Combinations
“Beans and rice” is what you always hear people say makes a “complete protein”, well my software begs to differ. My calculator claims that the best complimentary food for virtually all beans is sesame because it has so much methionine per calorie. The best complimentary food for black beans, defatted soy meal, and chickpeas are all listed as lowfat sesame flour. Its odd because I have never seen these combinations listed before, anyone know why?
It also appears that cauliflower is a big favorite of my protein calculator as a complimentary food because it has a *lot* of lysine per calorie. Cauliflower is listed as the best complimentary food for many grains and nuts like brown rice, quinoa and dry roasted peanuts. Again, I have never heard of these food combinations, who can tell me why?
The best complimentary food for lowfat yougurt my protein calculator says is spinach to make up for the tryptophan deficiency in the yogurt. Again, thats a combo I havent heard of.
Nutritionists, doctors, vegans and vegetarians what do you say to this? If you disagree with my protein calculator, why? I do acknowledge that the food pairing in this first version is not 100% optimal because I only look at the one single essential amino acid that is in shortest supply and then find a complimentary food that is high in that essential amino acid. Obviously, that is not perfect, it would be much better to look at *all* essential amino acids that are in relative short supply in the target food and then search the database for the food that can supply the missing essential amino acid quantities with a minimum of calories. For example, if you look at the protein quality of soy protein concentrate, you see that compared to chicken breast, its lacking most in methionine but also lacking in lysine. Since my software currently only looks at the shortage of methionine it chooses low fat sesame flour as the best complimentary food which fixes the methionine but still leaves a 12% deficit in the lysine. In my next revision, I will improve the algorithm significantly by looking at the lagging three essential amino acids rather than just looking at one.
on a related note ….
- Top 100 sources of tryptophan
- Top 100 sources of threonine
- Top 100 sources of isoleucine
- Top 100 sources of leucine
- Top 100 sources of lysine
- Top 100 sources of methionine
- Top 100 sources of cystine
- Top 100 sources of phenylalanine
- Top 100 sources of tyrosine
- Top 100 sources of valine
- Top 100 sources of histidine