this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
366 points (95.1% liked)
Good News Everyone
1857 readers
390 users here now
A place to post good news and prevent doom scrolling!
Rules for now:
- posts must link from a reliable news source
- no reposts
- paywalled articles must be made available
- avoid politics & schadenfreude
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
By the way, all plant foods have all amino acids. They just have them in proportions to one another that don't quite match the proportions that we need. But this is only relevant, if you eat the minimum amount of protein necessary to sustain your body tissues.
In a Western diet, we typically eat significantly more protein than that. As such, if e.g. black beans only provide 50% of an amino acid compared to the other amino acids and compared to what we need, you can totally eat 200% black beans to make up for it.
Or, what's more likely the case, you're not gonna eat just black beans, but rather mix and match them with lots of other protein sources, which will have different amino acid distributions. Even wheat and rice contain protein. Well, and then you're gonna eat significantly more of that mixture than you actually need, so you don't need be particularly cautious at mixing+matching either.
Not the most scientific source, but has some decent illustrations: https://vegfaqs.com/essential-amino-acid-profiles-beans/
The human body require 20 amino acids of which 9 our bodies cannot produce. A "complete amino complex" contains all 9 of those unproducible acids. Most plants do not contain all of them. Black beans lack methionine; so simply eating more black beans will not suffice.
No, that's what I'm saying. Black beans 'lack' methionine in that they have less milligram methionine per gram protein than other protein sources, but they don't have none.
This table in the source that I linked is to be read as "you should eat 4.59 cups of black beans per day to cover the methionine RDA (if you weigh 70kg and all you eat is black beans)":
Here's another diagram showing that black beans do contain methionine, which got published in a scientific paper:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Amino-acid-composition-of-quinoa-black-bean-and-lentil-proteins-g-100-g-of-protein_fig1_351804462