Can Plant-Based Diets Sustain Protein Nutrition?

With respect to human health wellbeing, as well as to planetary health wellbeing, the consumption of plant-based diets has superior benefits over animal-based diets.

Plant-based diets provide for a variety of different source for protein that includes cereals (e.g. wheat, rice, millet, maize, barley, and sorghum), legumes (e.g. pea, soybean, bean, fava bean, lupin, chickpea, and cowpea), pseudocereals (e.g. buckwheat, quinoa, and amaranth), nuts, almonds, and seeds (e.g. flaxseed, chia, pumpkin, sesame, and sunflower).

However, one of the potential downsides to plant-based diets is the lack of amino acid diversity in certain plant-based protein sources. Most proteins of plant origin are deficient in essential amino acids and are, therefore, nutritionally incomplete. For example, cereals generally contain less than optimal amounts of lysine and are low in tryptophan and threonine. However, pseudocereals such as quinoa and amaranth do contain sufficient amounts of lysine. Legumes are deficient in sulfur-containing amino acids like cysteine and methionine.

As I have written before, one of the major benefits of plant-based diets, compared to animal-based diets, is not the type of protein but the total amount of protein consumed:

PLANT VERSUS ANIMAL PROTEIN: IS IT COMPOSITION OR TOTAL PROTEIN THAT MAKES THE DIFFERENCE

Some of the major benefits to plant-based diets are that these diets are rich in fiber, polyunsaturated fatty acids, oligosaccharides, and carbohydrates. The consumption of these types of foods have been directly correlated with a reduction in cardiovascular diseases, low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-c), obesity, and type 2 diabetes.

Proteins derived from plant sources have been reported to exhibit antitumor, antioxidant, hypoglycemic, ACE (angiotensin converting enzyme) inhibitory, antimicrobial, and hypolipidemic effects. In addition, several small peptides derived from plant protein digestion in the gut have been shown to exert antioxidant, antifungal, antitumoral, and ACE inhibition

activity.

A recent report in the journal, Frontiers in Nutrition, reviews and details the major plant-based protein sources and their compositions of amino acids, and whether plant-based diets are efficient for the purposes of sustaining protein nutrition and aiding in the prevention of various pathologies.

Sustaining Protein Nutrition Through Plant-Based Foods

There are clear health benefits associated with the consumption of plant-based diets and these benefits are not exclusively due to the protein composition.