Vegan Bodybuilding & Fitness

I was bored today and created this comparative chart, maybe someone will find it useful or interesting...?

Note: Amounts are in grams. Each amino acid profile is per 100g.




Updated: 12/19/07
2:1:1 ratio comparison of Branched Chain Amino Acids (L-Leucine, L-Isoleucine and L-Valine)




Updated: 06/30/08
Amino Acid Scores from NutritionData.com

All hail gemma.

That's what you do when you're bored.. Geez I need some lesson's from you:)
Thanks Troy !

That is interesting! It must have taken some time to put it together... Thanks for posting it.

-Chris

Since you can design your own protein powder at True Protein I thought it would be fun to see if I could play with the ratios and see if I could adjust the amino acid profile of a mixed protein using Gemma/Hemp/Soy. I set it up on Excel and have been tinkering with percentages of the proteins to come up with better a profile. Trouble is, I don't know what the ideal amino acid profile is for building muscle and can't find it anywhere on the net.

Zack is right, Gemma seems to be king of the hill for veggie proteins...Out of the essentials, Hemp has more Tryptophan, and Rice (which is not a True Protein product...yet!) has more Methionine. Otherwise Gemma comes out on top of the rest of the essentials.

An interesting fact I found while tinkering is that it takes 2.3 times the Gemma to surpass every amino acid in the Ion Exchanged Whey.

Fun stuff!

Wow, nice work. Thanks for doing this.

You're welcome everybody... an idle mind is the devil's playground, right? Took about an hour to throw together, if anyone else has a protein they want me to do I'll gladly add it to the spreadsheet.

Whey protein is wildly popular amongst bodybuilders, so we use it as a yardstick to judge our sources of vegan protein. Sure it works great, but is it "THE ABSOLUTE BEST POSSIBLE" combination of amino acids for building muscle???

Hmmmm....

My guess is that there probably doesn't even exist a study of this that wasn't backed by someone with some kind of financial interest in a obtaining a particular outcome.

-Chris

That is awesome to see everything laid out like that and all in one area. Great work.

Great post LongTimeVegan...

Thats why I put Whey Isolate up too... as a reference of sort. And that was my original goal in throwing these numbers on Excel, to see if I could manipulate the %s of other proteins, to get Gemma closer to Whey Isolate. Then I thought, there must be an ideal (perfect/best) ratio or profile that the human body needs or could utilize, but to no avail... None-the-less I'm pretty sure all the aminos "jump in the pool" persay and the body uses them as needed. But when it comes to money...

I'm pretty sure everyone wants the best bang for the buck... as you can see, Whey Isolate gives us the highest quantity of essential amino acids... Gemma is about 30% less when it compared to Whey Isolate essential amino profile....

....as far as total aminos, Gemma and Soy aren't that far off... only about 6% less...

so and educated guess would tell me that the greater # of essential aminos per gram of protein , the "better" the protein is... yay or nay?

What I don't know and haven't researched is what makes one protein digest faster than then the next.... any takers?

Sometimes I think too much.

I wouldn't put wheys profile on such a totem pole even if we can replicate it exactly in a vegan form. Just because it has the most essentials doesn't mean thats the amount of essentials a human requires. I think one of the reasons its such a successful product is that its so cheap and people know they can take as much as they want because its so cheap.

How do we know how many essential amino acids a human requires? I looked for this and couldn't find anything. I'm trying to think of this logically. Here is an example:
If I eat
200 grams of protein per day of Gemma Isolate
vs
200 grams of protein per day of "Protein X" (of lesser essentials)
I'm getting more essential aminos for my "pool" by consuming the Gemma than I am if I consume "Protein X". So even though I am consuming 800 calories of each, I'm getting more aminos per calorie, which would be nutritionally more dense, no?

Another analogy would be eating 200 grams of Kale vs 200 grams of Iceberg Lettuce, wouldn't we want to opt for the more nutritionally dense food choice?

These aminos are all different and we need a different amount of each one. We may only need a few miligrams or even micrograms of some while we may need many grams of another. It has nothing to do with density if its dense in something that our body can't use that much of or even worse...dense in something thats even bad for us. Just because an amino acid exhists and we can't make it doesn't even mean we need it. There are amino acids that grass doesn't even have...and probably amino acids that cows don't produce...yet its enough for them. Meaning there are amino acids that exhist that a cow doesn't need. Thats very likely the case with every animal on the planet.

So are you saying that the ratio of each amino acid to each other takes precedence over the amount of amino acids within a protein... therefore a variety of different profiles would be of the utmost importance for proper amino acid utilization by the body? This would also make sense to me too.

PS I have enjoed your responses as they usually are straight forward, no nonsense posts that tend to give me a perception that I have not looked at before... so thanks in advance