Plant proteins: covering your needs without overcomplicating it

Proteins are chains of amino acids. Nine of them are called essential: the body cannot make them and has to get them from food.

A source is called complete when it supplies those nine amino acids in usable proportions. Most animal sources are. Many plant sources, on the other hand, are limited in one or two of them: cereals are low in lysine, legumes are lower in sulphur amino acids such as methionine.

Incomplete therefore does not mean poor quality. It means that one source, eaten exclusively, would leave a weak link.

Soy and its derivatives, namely tofu, tempeh, edamame and textured soy protein, supply all the essential amino acids in favourable proportions. It is the simplest base for a vegetarian diet that supports training.

Quinoa and buckwheat also provide all nine essential amino acids. Be careful not to treat them as equivalents of tofu though: their protein content per serving is far lower, and they work as starches, not as a main dish.

Chickpeas, lupin and peas offer protein concentrates that are widely available today.

The principle is simple: what one lacks, the other supplies. Cereals and legumes together cover the full essential amino acid profile.

Most traditional cuisines have done this forever, with no theory involved: rice and lentils, semolina and chickpeas, black beans and corn, wholegrain bread and hummus. These are not nutrition hacks, they are dishes.

There is no need to combine both in the same mouthful. The body maintains an amino acid pool that lets it combine what arrives across the day. Eating varied over the day is enough; forcing it meal by meal only makes life harder.

The main difficulty of a plant-based diet is not getting the right amino acids. It is reaching a sufficient total protein intake when you train, because plant sources arrive with a lot of carbohydrate or fibre attached.

In other words: you have to eat noticeably more volume for the same protein, which quickly becomes uncomfortable. Hence the value of leaning on the most concentrated sources, firm tofu, tempeh, seitan, pea or soy concentrates, rather than relying on lentils and rice alone.

Protein needs are higher for someone doing resistance training than for a sedentary person. The nutrition calculator gives an order of magnitude for your profile.

The further a diet moves away from animal products, the more some intakes deserve attention: vitamin B12 first of all, absent from plants, but also iron, whose plant form is less well absorbed, along with zinc and long-chain omega-3s.

These are things to check, not reasons to give up. A blood panel read by a healthcare professional remains the only serious way to know where you stand, and that is what I recommend before any supplementation.

The approach that requires the least thinking: put the protein source on the plate first, add the vegetables, then fill in with carbohydrates. That is the reverse of most improvised vegetarian meals, which start from the pasta.

The recipes on the site are built in that order, with vegetarian versions flagged. Preparing those bases in advance changes everything: the principle is detailed in Sunday meal prep.

For a plan built on your needs, your tastes and your schedule, that is the work of nutrition coaching.