Hey Y’all I love to cook with lentil pasta and black bean pasta. However it wasn’t until I got pregnant recently and re-consumed some basic nutrition information that I realized none of my recipes with this pasta make it a complete protein.
I usually buy the Barilla or Aldi’s brands of the pasta but they’re virtually all the same, even the off-brand boxes. Most just have one ingredient and its red lentil flour or black bean flour or even chickpea flour.
With how much potential protein is in these portion sizes I think it’s a waste to not try to complete them in a meal. Can anyone suggest a good recipe or how they incorporate the lentil pasta into their meal prep?
PS: I have found one brand that does red lentil flour and rice flour which I’m hoping complete the protein on its own.
The “complete protein” directive has been shown to be a myth. You don’t need to eat all essential amino acids in the same meal. If throughout the day you’re getting your protein from a variety of sources, you’ll be fine.
If you still want to meal prep with “complete protein” in mind, quinoa and soybeans (including tofu) have all essential amino acids.
In short, though, eating a variety of plant-based foods (beans and legumes, grains, vegetables)will give you all the nutrients you need (B12 is an exception; plant-based eaters usually need to supplement and plant-based eaters with narrow diets need to think about other deficiencies; also see my caveat in the next sentence). If you eat dairy and/or meat, and you’re eating a varied diet, you also don’t need to be concerned about nutrients, unless you have an underlying condition that is keeping your body from absorbing nutrients properly. And then you’re going to need a medical team to help you with that.
Oh wow I appreciate the advice. I wasn’t sure if it mattered if I had eaten the other amino acids earlier in the day or not.
I’m neither a scientist nor a dietician, so if it’s important to you, you should definitely seek out some expert advice. But in very basic terms, as I understand it, you eat food. That food goes through the digestive process, which breaks that food down into its constituent parts. The very clever organs (like the liver) then send those parts off to the part of the body that needs that bit, and then it then gets utilized (assuming your body is functioning properly, of course).
Put another way, your body isn’t analyzing your meal and saying, “hmmmm… we’re missing an amino acid, time to reject the whole shipment.” It’s doing its best with what it’s got. So when thinking about proteins, over the course of a day (and maybe even longer), your body is busy sending whatever amino acids you give it to wherever it needs to go, regardless of when it receives those amino acids. (That being said, I also think the body can handle only so much protein at any given time … so it’s all very complex.)