Do you want to change your diet to one without animals or without products derived from them such as milk or eggs, or do you simply want to reduce your meat consumption but are worried about not ingesting enough proteins or that they are not complete ? Don’t panic because you won’t be short of protein even if you decide not to eat meat or fish.
But let’s go in parts. Proteins make up our muscles, organs and tissues but they are also part of the immune system, of many enzymes and are even related to neurotransmitters.
They are made up of chains of amino acids . There are 20 amino acids, of which eight are called “essential”, because our body is not capable of manufacturing them and we must ingest them through the diet. Well, complete proteins will be those that contain the eight essential amino acids in sufficient quantity . On the contrary, the incomplete ones will be those that do not have all the essential amino acids.
Complete proteins are mainly found in foods of animal origin such as meat, eggs, fish, milk … and in some of vegetable origin such as soy and all its derivatives (tofu, tempeh, textured soy, soy drink, miso …), in chickpeas, some types of beans, quinoa, hemp seeds, amaranth and pistachios.
Does this mean that if you do not take complete plant proteins, your diet will be deficient? No way. All foods have essential amino acids, but it may happen that they are missing one or more or have a small amount of them. And nothing happens!
The reason why you should not worry is that if we combine foods that lack different amino acids, they will complement each other, giving rise to the long-awaited complete proteins . And best of all, you don’t have to combine them in the same dish, but you can do it throughout the day and it will work just as well. The combination of foods we are referring to is legumes and cereals, and as we have mentioned, having oatmeal porridge (cereal) for breakfast and having a plate of lentils (legume) for lunch result in complete proteins. That easy.
One more note, not only do you have to take into account the amount of protein that each food has for, for example, 100 g but per serving. Nuts have between 18 and 27 g per 100 g but a serving of nuts is equivalent to 25g, so we would only get 5-7 g of protein. With foods derived from soybeans, the opposite would occur and that is that the ration would be larger and we would meet our protein requirements sooner.
