When it comes to supplementing protein, people often first think of eating meat and drinking milk. In fact, as long as the mix is reasonable, you can also get high-quality protein from staple foods.

Proteins are made up of a class of components called amino acids. There are many members of the amino acid family, eight of which are particularly important to the human body. They have a special name called "essential amino acids". The human body needs a special proportion of the eight essential amino acids, but the content of these eight members varies greatly from food to food. For example, in milk and eggs, the proportion of eight members is almost exactly consistent with the needs of the human body, just as the various boards of the wooden barrel are the same length, do not need any cutting modification, and the protein nutritional value is high.

However, many plant proteins (such as grain proteins) often have insufficient content of 1 to 2 of the 8 members, which is equivalent to a barrel with a particularly short edge; At this time, in order not to waste the barrel, the body has to saw off several other long edges to match the most scarce essential amino acids, so that a lot of protein is wasted. The eight amino acids in vegetable protein barrels vary in length, but if two carefully selected barrels are stacked together, the long side of one barrel is right on the short side of the other barrel, the portion of the stacked barrels will be greatly reduced, in other words, the nutritional value of the protein is increased - most typically with beans. In daily life, a series of cereal foods such as rice, white flour and corn are considered to be proteins with low nutritional value due to the lack of lysine, an essential amino acid. However, the close relatives of cereals, legumes (red beans, yellow beans, kidney beans, etc.), contain large amounts of lysine. When we eat cereals and beans together, the amino acids of cereal short board are just supplemented by the excess amino acids of beans, which were originally more and less nutrients to be discarded, due to the principle of wooden barrel splicing, perfectly complementary together, forming a protein combination with high nutritional value, and even comparable to meat protein. Therefore, for vegetarian people or people who need to control protein intake, cereals and beans must be eaten together, and must be placed in a meal, so that the protein value of cereals and beans is instantly increased.

Compared to meat, the combination has some disadvantages. For example, although there is a certain amount of iron in rice beans, the absorption rate is only about 5% to 40% according to the food and individual situation; Meat is not only rich in iron, the absorption rate is as high as more than 80%, and basically unaffected by external factors. Therefore, even if millet and beans as a pair of golden combination, is the ideal dietary mode of vegetarian people, but for ordinary people, there is no need to completely give up meat not to eat, not only complementary millet and beans, other types of food are also complementary nutrition, the key to achieve rich ingredients, balanced collocation.