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.
Tofu does has a fairly complete amino acid profile, which is why it combines well with many vegetable proteins. It’s only a little short on methionine.
Seeds, nuts, spinach, sweet potato, corn, asparagus, broccoli, chard… And more are all pretty decent sources of methionine.
You may find this article my friend wrote interesting -https://green.michaelaltfield.net/2014/10/20/complete-protein-ratios/
I think many people like to toast the bread but you don’t have to.
I don’t think any two foods alone will give you a good nutrition. Eat different foods (cook fresh when you can), look for protein here and there and you’re probably good. Except vitamin B12, take supplements for that!
Indeed I would expect diversity to matter. I’m a novice here but it seems this whole concept of “nutritional completeness” is actually incomplete in the big scheme of things and more about keeping you alive & avoiding hospitals. That’s a good thing) but I’m assuming it’s not the best end-game because the concept seems to overlook all vitamins & probably other factors as well.
