believe that for usual conditions of healthy living it is not
necessary to consume complementary proteins at the same time
and that separation of the proteins among meals over the course of a day would still permit the nutritional benefits of complementation. There are also physiological data to support this contention.
Because lysine is most likely to be the limiting amino acid in
a diet based predominantly on cereal grains (30), it is of interest and relevance that in the skeletal musculature there is a sizeable
pool in the intracellular space of free amino acids, particularly of
lysine. The size of this pool responds to changes, both acute and
chronic, in the amount of lysine ingested (43). Based on the data of Bergstrom et al (44), we calculate that after a protein-rich meal (providing 50 g bovine serum albumin) 60% of the adult daily
requirement for lysine may be deposited in this intracellular pool
within 3 h. Hence, a protein with a relatively low lysine content (maize) could be ingested some hours later than a complementary, higher lysine-containing protein (eg, soy protein) and the
free-lysine pool in the muscle would buffer the low lysine content
of the amino acid mixture derived from the digestion of maize.
Overall, the nutritional quality of the combined meals would be high. We conclude that it is not necessary to balance the amino acid profile at each meal, especially under conditions where intakes of total protein substantially exceed minimum physiological re
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