On the topic of beans and essential amino acids.

For a good part of this spring and now on into summer, I have been taking a hard look at beans. Not so much because I like them (I do), but more due to the fact that they are considered nearly a complete food and a good substitute for eating meat. By saying complete food, I mean that beans have most all of what are known as ‘essential amino acids’. These are the protein building units (there are twenty in all) that we all need to be healthy and strong. Given food, our bodies can synthesize twelve of the twenty with the last eight needing to be obtained from some outside source. These sources are most readily found in meat, fish, poultry, milk, cheese, and eggs. The eight amino acids, by the way, are phenylalanine, valine, threonine, tryptophan, isoleucine, methionine, leucine, and lysine. Of these three are considered ‘limiting amino acids’ mainly because they hard to find in vegetables. These are methionine, tryptophan and lysine. (Only one legume, Soybean, has all eight essential amino acids). But who wants t eat it J

So, if for whatever reason, you want to abstain from ingesting animal products, you have to look to combinations of veggies that together will provide your body with what it needs. One such combo would be beans and rice! (Beans are only missing tryptophan and or methionine while rice lacks lysine). So, if you had to subsist on just two readily available foods that can be stored for long periods of time, are easy to grow and contribute a lot to your health, then the bean and rice combination is hard to beat. Just a half cup of each will provide about 200 calories, no sodium or cholesterol, plenty of good carbohydrates and loads of dietary fiber to help insure colon health.