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Next to the percentages in the tables are letter ratings that allow you to make up your own complementary protein combinations. The letter ratings indicate how well each type of food supplies you with a key amino acid. (Of the eight essential amino acids, only the four likely to be deficient in a diet of nonmeat protein are shown here.) Since egg protein is considered to be the most nearly perfect protein, the ratings are based on how closely the particular amino acid content of a food matches the amount of that amino acid found in egg protein.* Thus:

Using the protein tables, you can match the deficiencies in some foods (C and D ratings) with adequacies (A and ⅛ ratings) in other foods in order to achieve higher biological values than those of the same foods eaten separately. Discovering the patterns of amino acid strengths and weaknesses in the different food groups will enable you to do your own “protein matching.” To help you I provide two guides:

1. For foods having no serious amino acid deficiencies, such as seafood (Protein Table I), dairy products (Protein Table II), and meat and poultry (Protein Table IX), I have emphasized their particular strengths by putting their A + ratings in boldface. These foods need no supplementation from other foods but make excellent supplements themselves.

2. All the other protein tables have foods with serious amino acid deficiencies. The one or two most important weaknesses of each food are indicated by boxed letters. Compensation for these deficiencies can come either from the foods in category 1 above or from other foods having an opposite pattern of amino acid deficiency. Rather than concentrating on the names of amino acids, it might be easier simply to note the columns in which weaknesses tend to occur.

Please refer back to this page for a chart summarizing the complementary protein combinations. The following protein tables will give you a fuller understanding of the amino acid patterns in foods that make these combinations “work.” Following each of the nine protein tables, I also include tips for complementing that particular food’s protein.

Tips for complementing other foods with seafood

The lysine strength (A+) of seafood means that it can complement well the protein of foods low in lysine, such as grains and certain nuts and seeds.

Tips for using dairy products to complement the protein in other foods

1. Amino Acid Makeup: dairy products have excellent amino acid ratings, as you would suppose from their high NPU scores. Thus they make good supplements to any food. But dairy products have notable amino acid strengths in isoleucine, and especially in lysine. These strengths can be used to advantage in combination with cereal grains (Protein Table V), which are low in both of these same amino acids. And it doesn’t take much! Only 2 tablespoons of nonfat dried milk added to 1 cup of wheat or rye flour increases the protein quality about 45 percent. Thus, bread with cheese, cheese-rice casseroles, and cereal with milk are all good protein mixes. These same amino acid strengths allow dairy products to complement the protein of nuts and seeds (Protein Table IV): sesame, peanuts, black walnuts, etc.

2. Experimentally determined complementary protein mixes include milk products:

plus Grains, for example:

Milk + Rice

Milk + Wheat

Milk + Corn + Soy

Milk + Wheat + Peanuts

plus Nuts and seeds, for example:

Milk + Peanuts

Milk + Sesame

plus Legumes, for example:

Milk + Beans

plus Potatoes:

Milk + Potatoes

Tips for complementing the protein in legumes

1. Amino Acid Makeup: notice in Protein Table III that the major amino acid deficiencies of legumes appear in the two outside columns: tryptophan and the sulfur-containing amino acids. But among the nuts and seeds in Protein Table IV and among grains in Protein Table V, deficiencies appear most frequently in the two inside columns: isoleucine and lysine. It is now clear why legume protein, on the one hand, and the protein in grains and certain nuts and seeds, on the other hand, complement