I’ve always thought that the best place to get protein from is meat: steak, lamb, chicken, eggs, fish. And I’ve always wondered where vegans get their protein from and especially vegan athletes.
I found this article on the net which shows how much protein there is per 100g of food stuffs. Here’s a screenshot from the article:
Credit for screenshots:
It’s very clear from the above that plant protein as a category has a lot less protein per 100g than meat and dairy does as a category.
How much protein does a person need? From articles I found, a sedentary man needs around 54g per day and a runner might need around 75g. A weights guy might need 120g a day. From the table above, you might get all you need to get for running from 200g of steak (smaller than a normal steak of around 285g).
To compare that with protein from plant sources, you would need to eat around 800g of chickpeas or a kilo of tofu to come somewhere close. That’s a lot of beans and tofu.
But maybe it isn’t that hard to do on a vegan diet. A normal can of baked beans is 415g in total and half a can (one portion) has around 10g of protein in it. A carton of 300g of tofu (one portion) has nearly 20g in it. 100g of hummus from chickpeas would be close to 20g as well. So it’s definitely possible to get protein from plant-based sources. Phew!
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