What is a plate of jollof without the peppered chicken on the side? Is a plate of rice and stew even complete without a piece of meat, or at least a boiled egg?

Growing up, I learned to cultivate a healthy reverence for the piece of meat on my plate. I remember vividly my mother’s stern warnings against touching my meat before I finished my food. In time, I came to see the meat (whether beef, chicken, or fish) as a reward for ‘clearing’ my plate of rice or bowl of soup.

My childhood experience was a reflection of our society’s attitude towards meat. We tend to regard a plate of food as incomplete if it does not have a piece of meat in it. To a Nigerian, a meatless meal is a sign of hard times (or of a child undergoing punishment).

But more than that, meat is seen as an essential source of ‘complete’ protein. It is widely believed that if you go without meat, you run the risk of protein deficiency because plant proteins are ‘incomplete’. So understandably, when presented with a plant-based diet as an alternative to the conventional diet, many people become anxious about how they will meet their protein needs.

Meat is indeed a high quality source of protein, because it contains adequate quantities of all of the 9 essential amino acids that our bodies must get from food (the other 11 are produced by the body). But most people are not aware that plants also contain these essential amino acids in adequate quantities. And it’s not just beans – grains, tubers, nuts and seeds are good sources of these amino acids as well. Even starchy foods such as bread, pasta, yam, maize, and millet contain essential amino acids.

Source: Vegetarian Guide

The reason plant sources of protein are regarded as inferior or incomplete is that single plant foods typically will contain all of the essential amino acids but only some of them will be present in adequate quantities. But this interpretation is based on the mistaken assumption that you need to get all the essential amino acids in every meal. In reality, this is not necessary. Your body allows you the leeway to meet the requirement over the course of a day or two.

Fortunately, it’s not difficult to meet the body’s amino acid needs with plant proteins. Nature has set things up so that even without eating any meat at all, by eating a variety of plant foods you can easily get adequate quantities of all 9 the essential amino acids.

Let’s take a closer look at two of the most common components of the average Nigerian diet. Rice is an adequate source of all essential amino acids except lysine (yes, white rice contains protein too!), and beans (black-eyed peas) happens to be rich in several amino acids, including lysine. So a meal of rice and beans would provide all the amino acids that you’d get from eating a piece of chicken. But the really amazing thing is you don’t even have to combine them in the same meal. If you were to have akara for breakfast and jollof rice for dinner, by the end of the day you would still have met your requirements.

But hold on, this doesn’t mean that must you now go and memorise the amino acid content of all the foods in your pantry. Variety is the important thing – there is no need to carefully choose specific foods to get the perfect combination of amino acids. As long as you’re not eating a monotonous diet (shout out to those of us who eat jollof rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner), you’ll get what you need.

The big takeaway from all this is that going without meat will not lead to protein deficiency if one eats a varied diet of grains, nuts, legumes, fruits and vegetables. However, it is not always possible to maintain sufficient variety, which is why the flexibility of a plant-based diet is advantageous. While the plant-based diet is primarily comprised of plant foods, the occasional (once a week or less) piece of meat or boiled egg will serve to fill any gaps that a lack of variety might leave open.

If you’d like more info about the adequacy of plant sources of protein, Dr. Michael Greger has a great video on the topic here as well as additional resources here. Michael Bluejay does a thorough breakdown of the ‘complete protein’ myth here.

 

The post Will a plant-based diet leave you protein deficient? appeared first on Eat Right Naija.

At the same time, I was becoming increasingly aware of the proliferation of Nigerian healthy lifestyle businesses popping up on Instagram. On the one hand, I had friends lamenting how difficult it was to find dairy milk alternatives in Nigeria, and on the other hand, I had come across Instagram accounts of several businesses offering locally made tigernut milk in Lagos and Abuja.

The Wholesome List is a searchable directory that aims to connect these businesses to their customers. Users can search for items they need and get a list of vendors offering that item, whether in their vicinity or online. Whether you’re looking for a healthy lunch in Lekki, soya milk in Abuja, or cold pressed juice in Ikeja, you can find it on the List.

To view the List, click the link on the menu bar. Listings are organised by category. You can either view all listings in a category by clicking any of the links on the page, or do a quick search for a keyword such as ‘salad’. This will bring up a list of all listings associated with that keyword.

You can also do an advanced search by clicking the link to the right, under the ‘Find Listings’ button. The advanced search form allows you to limit your search by location, filter by category, and so on. In the example below, I’m looking for grocery stores in Lagos that sell mushrooms.

As shown above, the List is super simple to use, and the best part is that anyone can submit a listing, for free!

How to add a listing to The Wholesome List

Let’s say I want to list a business called Healthy Munchies that sells salads, bulgur wheat jollof, smoothies, cold pressed juice and tigernut milk. The business operates as an online meal delivery service, from Lagos. Here’s how I would go about submitting a listing for Healthy Munchies.

First go to the ‘Submit a listing’ page or click the button at the bottom of the Wholesome List page to open the listing form.

Start with business category. You can select multiple. Here, I’ve selected ‘Healthy food spots’ and the sub-heading ‘Meal delivery services’, as well as ‘Food and beverage’, because Healthy Munchies sells prepared meals as well as nut milks and juices.

Next, enter the business name, format, a brief description of what they do, a website, and the address or location. Some fields, such as Business Name, are marked with an asterisk and are compulsory. Other fields may be left blank if you do not have the information required.

Next, provide contact information and a set of ‘business tags’ or keywords to associate with the listing, separating each one with a comma. These are the words that a user would search to find this listing; they may be products or services offered by the business.

Finally, upload the company logo, ensuring that the size of the image is within the specifications outlined to the right.

When you are done, click ‘Complete Listing’ and the listing will be submitted to the site admin for review, after which it will be posted.

Thanks for reading!

x

Itua

What do you think of the Wholesome List? Would you find it useful? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Watered down by the Green Revolution

During the green revolution which took place from the 1930s to 1960s, there was a big push to use advanced technologies to increase agricultural production. One of these technologies was the development of ‘improved’ crop varieties through genetic manipulation, and it’s primary victim was wheat. Because of severe genetic manipulation to induce characteristics such as high yield and high gluten content, the strain of modern wheat we cultivate today (dwarf wheat) may grow faster, but is far less nutritious than nature intended. Compared to ancient varieties like einkorn and spelt, it is lower in micronutrients like zinc, magnesium, iron, copper, and selenium.

Stripped of nutritional value

Modern wheat has also been bastardised by over-processing. Generally we consume wheat in the form of refined flour – that brilliant white powder that is used in everything from pasta to pastry. White flour is amazing in its ability to keep for long periods of time; but it is precisely that shelf stability that makes it so dangerous to our health. If you were to simply grind up whole wheat berries, the oil released from the wheat germ in the process would make the flour go rancid in a matter of days. Obviously this makes it useless for industrial purposes, so wheat flour is refined to remove such ‘impurities’. As a result, the parts of the wheat plant that contain the little nutritional value left in modern wheat are stripped away in the process of refinement. The wheat germ, bran (fibre) and wheat germ oil are all removed until what you have is an unnatural substance. As if that weren’t enough, some manufacturers also bleach the flour, a process that creates a by-product called alloxan, a diabetes-inducing chemical.

Don’t be fooled by ‘Wholewheat’ and ‘Enriched’

Despite its name, ‘wholewheat’ flour is not much better. It goes through the same process of refinement, but after the white flour is produced some bran is mixed in to give it a fibrous texture. Although it contains more fibre than white flour, there’s really nothing whole about it. Enriched flours are simply refined flour with some of the vitamins that were lost in the refinement process added back later. What does this mean for your health? Unlike whole foods like beans, potatoes and brown rice which are rich in fibre and other nutrients, refined flour foods contain carbs and not much else. So when they are broken down in the body they have little to offer but glucose. They have little fibre to regulate absorption and let us know when we’ve had enough to eat, so you eat too much of them. They are low in micronutrients so you need to eat them in larger quantities in order to obtain sufficient vitamins and minerals. These are some of the reasons that consumption of such foods results in weight gain.

The solution: go gluten free?

Does this mean you need to avoid wheat completely and go gluten free? No, strict avoidance is not necessary at all, unless you have celiac disease. As mentioned earlier, wheat is a highly nutritious food when consumed in its natural state. What you can and should do is avoid heavy consumption of foods containing refined wheat flour. You have a few options:

1. Make your own bread, pasta, etc with wholegrain flour: This option is the most desirable, but it is also an expensive and time consuming exercise that involves sourcing organic wheat berries, grinding them into flour and doing the baking at home – unfortunately not realistic for most people.

2. Switch to whole grain products: Although these are not so easy to find in Nigeria, they are the best option for wheat products and I buy them whenever I can. Look for ‘100% whole grain’ on the packaging, as seen on the Weetabix cereal box.

3. Reduce consumption of refined flour foods: The best way to eat less bread, semo, noodles, pasta and so on is to replace them with something better each time you have to make a choice. This is what I do most of the time. For example, if you usually have white bread for breakfast, have oatmeal instead. And instead of 2 packs of Indomie, try having just one with lots of vegetables to bulk it up. Whatever option works best for your lifestyle, remember that everyday actions really add up over time; eventually you’ll realise you’ve cut down your flour consumption by half. Your body will thank you for it! You can read more about what’s wrong with modern wheat here and here.  Image sources: Pixabay, Geog100, Women Fitness, Alibaba

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