In vegan diets, the types of foods eaten at each meal—such as grains, fruits, potatoes, and sugary condiments—are linked to lower protein quality, even when the total amount of protein consumed per...
Mechanism
Synthesis from 1 study
Even if you eat enough food in a day, if your meals are mostly bread, fruit, or potatoes, your body doesn't get the right kinds of building blocks it needs to make proteins. Adding beans or legumes to meals fixes this because they supply the missing pieces.
Most probable mechanism
When meals are mostly grains, fruits, potatoes, or sugary foods, they don't have enough of the key amino acids that the body needs to build proteins. Even if you eat a lot of food overall, your body still can't make all the proteins it needs because each meal is missing the right building blocks. Adding beans or legumes fixes this because they provide the missing amino acids.
Meals dominated by grains, fruits, potatoes, and sugary condiments provide insufficient quantities of indispensable amino acids, particularly lysine, methionine, and threonine, relative to human requirements.
Low availability of these indispensable amino acids in the intestinal lumen limits their absorption into the bloodstream during digestion.
Reduced systemic concentrations of indispensable amino acids constrain the rate of protein synthesis in tissues, as amino acid availability is the rate-limiting factor for ribosomal translation.
Evidence from Studies
Supporting (1)
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