The off-grid survivalist dude in invidious video ID “YOXkcz8j3Gc” says milk & potatoes are “nutritionally complete”, which if I understand correctly means that pairing covers the 9 essential amino acids. That’s cool.. but not vegan.
A pescetarian in my family was hospitalized for malnutrition. Not sure what he did wrong or what he was short on, but he doesn’t strike me as someone who would be overly negligent. IMO, as a non-vegan outsider looking in, a vegan diet is easy to screw up & requires some research to stay safe. You can’t just live on rabbit food. So I wonder if the title-linked article has the answers. In short, it claims these pairings are nutritionally complete:
- rice & beans
- tofu & veg (questionable¹?)
- chickpeas & wheat
- peanut butter & whole wheat toast²
- pinto beans³ & corn
- whole wheat pasta & peas
- lentils & rice ←I’m bummed it’s not lentils & couscous, which I often use in lentil salad
- oatmeal & pumpkin seeds
Note that all links referenced in this post are Cloudflare-free and openly accessible to all. Also no big cookie popups or similar garbage.
footnotes (with questions!):
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I find tofu & vegetables suspicious. There are countless vegetables, so this is quite vague. How can we expect any given veg to have whatever tofu is missing? This makes me somewhat skeptical of the whole article.
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Why toast? Why not bread?
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Or skip the pinto beans and just make sure your corn is infected with a purple fungus containing lysine, assuming #lysine is the reason pinto beans are paired with corn.
Basically every single whole food has all 9 essential aminos, the incomplete protein thing is a half truth. It is true some foods have an imbalanced amino profile but it's a complete fabrication that no plant foods are good enough. Many pulses, nuts, seeds, and vegetables will get you the recommended amount of aminos if you exclusively ate that singular food. For some examples pinto beans, peanuts, sunflower seeds, spinach. Even many grains like buckwheat and quinoa will get you there, just not wheat, the most commonly eaten one.
But I also find the term "nutritionally complete" to be a misnomer for something that simply has all the required aminos in the right quantities. Your body needs more than amino actions to function, there are many more known essential nutrients as well as nutrients that aren't essential but healthful, so it's best to eat a variety of things, and potatoes with dairy definitely does not satisfy the bill. Looping back to spinach though, it's an example of a food that might be as close to nutritionally complete as possible, perhaps Popeye was on to something.