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Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

They dance around this in the article, but there is a current obsession with taking in massive amounts of protein for “health reasons”, and there’s just little reason to do so. Even a vegan diet - even a particularly poorly designed one, will get you pretty far without any needed supplementation. The idea of combining foods, like beans and rice, turned out to be a myth.

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>The idea of combining foods, like beans and rice, turned out to be a myth.

No it's basic high school biology...

https://ic.steadyhealth.com/what-is-complete-protein-and-why...

>Proteins are vital for making enzymes, hormones, and other body chemicals. They are needed for muscles, hair, skin and all of the internal organs. Proteins are the only food source of nitrogen, essential to all life on earth.

>Being built from amino acids, different proteins contain specific amino acids in specific order and amount. Proteins from meat are different than those from milk, for example. There are twenty two different amino acids, and nine of them are called the essential amino acids. Essential amino acids are somewhat specific, because they cannot be made by the body and they can be provided only through the diet.

>A complete protein is a protein that contains all of the essential amino acids, in an adequate proportion. Not all of the proteins containing all essential amino acids may be called “the complete proteins”. Correct proportion, sufficient to support the biological functions of the body, is what makes one protein complete.

You've fallen for the myth!

The issue isn't that protein isn't needed - it is of course; it's that you need to combine certain foods together in the same meal to get a complete protein. Check the sources you've listed in the link. The first doesn't mention it, the second says:

> It was once thought that vegetarians and vegans needed to combine plant foods at each meal to ensure they consumed complete proteins (for example, baked beans on toast). Recent research has found this is not the case.

The third is a flickr image so that's irrelevant.

It's not a myth. Your post just confirms this. The reason why beans and rice are combined is because they form complementary proteins. The combination of the two are a complete protein taken together. This was my response to the parent comment. The parent implied the need to combine either rice or beans with another protein is a myth. Beans and rice are both incomplete proteins. The combination of beans and rice is not a myth. People combine beans and rice because each of them have some of the amino acids you need, both of them together have all of them.

What the parent is saying is that you don't need to "combine" these in the conventional sense. You can eat the beans one day and the rice a few days later, and your body will absorb the complementary set of amino acids.

I think you are missing the point of these high protein diet fads. It's structured to replace conventional highly processed carb diets with something appealing/tasty and ultimately filling. It's a ween off the bad habit diets prevalent in much our modern culture. And allows you to do so at traditional restaurants, you can maintain your social groups and rituals. On the other hand going vegan is not easy to do, its hard to take an average American single persons home cooking knowledge to the point where they can cook filling (and tasty) plant based meals. (Unless you have some ethnic food knowledge that your family gave you.

Its the low bar of picking up a rotisserie chicken vs cooking from home that drives the "obsession". In the end its much better than starting off with a bowl of cereal, getting a fast casual lunch at chipotle, and eating steak and white potatoes for dinner.

Interestingly, certain areas will have more access to good tasting vegan meals. In those areas, there is enough economic demand for these foods that the groceries, the cafes, the restaurants all give people easy onramps into integrating plant based foods into their diets.

No, poorly designed vegan diets result in malnutrition. I've seen it happen several times -- a few where tofu was the principal food, and a couple where the diet was basically chips and soda.

Yes, I believe you need a varied diet, vegan or not. In a vegan diet, you also need B12 supplements because it's absent* in a vegan diet and it is an essential nutriment. Lacking B12 is bad.

*except B12-enriched food if you happen to have it, but you still need to make sure your B12 intake is okay.

That is separate from the outdated "you need to combine proteins in one meal" myth.

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