With the exception of soy, beans are an incomplete protein.

In order to get a balance of all the amino acids, you should mix beans and grains in a vegetarian diet. I don't mean necessarily to physically combine them. But beans and grains should be served together.

That sounds like something that the powerful soy loby came up with.
However, Chaman said We use Lentils,Urad(adad), Mung,
Muth,Papadi Lilalva etc. in our diet which replace the need for meat in the diet. which would be a mix, rather than just one type of bean.

Also, for the record Beans are legumes not vegitables, beans and peas in pods would be veggies, but the acctual bean itself is not considered a vegtable.

OK B_of_B. Then I guess the peanut is not really a nut either. Since it grows underground should we call it a tuber?

Tedp2 you are correct the peanut is not actually a nut it is a legume. Nuts are the seeds of trees. A peanut is a seed so is corn and wheat but those are cereal grains and not tree seeds.

Roger, I'm afraid its not that simple either unfortunately, I think that perhaps it could be said that a nut is the seed of a tree or bush (Shall we say a woody plant?)(That is edible?) that is not a legume, if you look at trees like Honey Locust you will find that the seed is acctually a bean, because it is a legume aswell, Legumes are a widespread and diverse group indeed, White Clover is even a legume.

Now onto grain (which you didn't say much about, but I am in an expounding mood, so feel free to ignore me as I prattle on), some sources reffer to legumes as grains, although the edible seed can be reffered to as a legume in all places, this I believe is a means to distinguish between forage legumes like clover, alfalfa, and vetch, and legumes harvested for there seed like peas and beans.

I feel like expounding also. Here's a link that might be helpful.

Here is a link that might be useful: nut definition

how about one more

Here is a link that might be useful: legumes definition

Tedp2-
A peanut is a goober.

And to throw etymology and semantics into an already dead-end discussion, the word 'legumes' means vegetable in the Latin languages.

Plants producing seeds in the pods belong to leguminosea family.Seeds of some of these plants are edible by human beings. Edible seeds from the green pods are commonly known as vegetables where as dry seeds after ripening are known as legumes.

Or "pulses."

Of course, if we start trying to make sense out of the legumes lexicon we'll be here two days longer than forever. And still not get a solid fix on it.

Gardenlad's comment (2nd post in this thread) about the nutrition of a bean/grain combination is terribly important. Many cultures caught on to this long before the science of biochemistry. I've always wondered how they knew.

Jim

pnbrown, while latin roots are important they are not the english language, we do not reffer to letuce as legumes, or root vegitables as legumes, like many things while they may have both origionally meant the same thing now they mean something different.

Jimster I think they figured it out when people weren't dieing quite so much.

"I think they figured it out when people weren't dieing quite so much."

And someone said, "Hey, maybe it's because we've learned to smoke tobacco!"

And someone else said, "No, you idiot. It's because we started eating grain with our beans."

Jim

Rice and beans has been popular for a LONG time with many in different places.

Vegetarian dish in Indian Subcontinent will,normaly, consist of:
Bread prepared from flour of Wheat,Millet,Juvar or Corn.Bread will be coated by butter or Ghee(Butter purified by applying heat).
Soup prepared from Lentils or Mung splits or Curry.
Rice.
One vegetable.
Pickle, Salads and Papadam.
This will provide a good balanced meal.

Yes, brendan, the point of my post was to illustrate the semantic nature of this debate.

'Legume' entered english from the old french, whence it derived from the L 'legumen' - meaning 'bean-plant'.

Now the word 'bean', on the other hand, is good old AS. So your dismissal of the etymology of 'legume' for being irrelevant as it isn't english should lead you to much prefer the word 'bean', which is as english as it gets.

The word 'pea' is perhaps more interesting, becuase it's one of those rare Latin introductions directly into old english (pre-norman conquest) AS. 'pisa' from L. 'pisum'.

So we now reach a conundrum for this discussion. Latin had a word for the pea-plant (pisum), and a seperate word for the bean-plant (legumen). We don't know if they had a word for the plant family of which peas and beans are a part. Nor do we know if AS had such a word. It seems our ancestors were less concerned with such niceties of catagorization; probably they were more concerned with growing and breeding profitable eating varieties, luckily for us.

And, of course, "legumen" would have applied only to old-world beans, Vicia faba, because the Romans didn't know about Phaseolus.

But what about cowpeas? The certainly would have known about them, and grown them in the African colonies if nowhere else.

In a world where horticulturists can't even decide whether limas and butterbeans are the same, there is no way we're gonna solve the greater puzzle of categorizing edible legumes.

Or, if you really want to talk about name confusion: Everybody from growers, to catalog writers, to botanists to food science people talks about horticultural beans. But nobody can tell us what they are.

Once we get into common terms, all bets are off. For instance, Dirt Dew tells us, above, that a peanut is a goober. Yet, the word goober comes from slaves in the American south and the Carribean to describe the African groundnut, or bambara (Voandzeia subterranea). At one time they were widely grown in the American south, but were replaced by peanuts. Goobers, or goober peas, became a slang expression for peanuts, but did not gain widespread use until the War of Northern Aggression. In parts of Georgia, today, "goober" is used to describe boiled peanuts, but not roasted ones.

My favorite, when discussing the confusion of the legumes lexicon, is making leather britches. Starting with old-style snap beans, which have zipper strings, you remove them (it's called stringing). The beans themselves were called string beans. And, to make the leather britches, you sewed the pods on strings and hung them to dry, a process also called stringing.

So----No, Mary can't come out to play. She has to string the string beans and string them.

Now, when more modern stringless varieties become more common, they were (and are) called green beans instead of string beans. Leading to such phrases as: Pass me a mess of them purple green beans.

Shellie beans are called shuck beans in many places. But in the southern mountains, a shuck bean is a bean dried in the pod. Dried beans outside the pods are often collectively known merely as soup beans.

I hope y'all been taking notes. There will be a quiz on Friday. And next time, in case anyone isn't frustrated enough, will discuss the word "runner."

I just think its useful to distinguish between vegtables and the seeds of legumes (reffered to as legumes, or beans, or peas, or sometimes nuts) the nutritional charictaristics are generally very differnt, and vegtable is an overused word today (zukes, cukes, squash, pumpkin, tomatos, and mushrooms are all called veggies regularly) the word vegtable is often used to describe what we are not getting enough of in our diets as Americans, however if we get too loose with our words pretty soon coffe will fall into that category, frenchfries are already there, I wonder if they will ever figure out how to get soda in (root beer?), Heck, sugar really is a vegtable extract, I wonder when they will start lableing it as such.

I made some lentil soup tonight. My dinner contained no grains. The soup had lots of veggies -- four different kinds. Is there anything in those veggies to complete the essential proteins, or do I need grain? We need to think about such things in a culture which is not rigid in its patterns.

Most lentil soup recipes are very similar. Sometimes they call for a bit of meat, sometimes some pasta. Pasta would have balanced the protein, but I didn't use it tonight. Bread would have been nice but it required a trip to the store. The soup was good. I can catch up on the protein tomorrow.

Jim

I'm not sure what it is that beans lack, but I have for a while been under the impression that mixing lentils and peas and beans (including garbanzo beans and cow peas) will give you all of the Essential Amino Acids that you need.

Adding crackers to lentil soupe will provide carbohydrates and fat.

Beans have starches in them, all seeds store energy in the form of fats or carbohydrates, also crackers tend to be low in fat, thats why I add pork.

Lentils contain high amount protein, perhaps highest of all pulses ( we identify legumes edible for human beings as pulses).This requires crackers or bread in diet consisting of lentil soup.I mentioned crackers because it is convenient to keep a box of crackers around to use when bread is not available.
Yes, all seeds store carbohydrates, fat etc. in varying amounts required for germination, quantity which may or may not be enough for our dietary requirements, that is why we add bread etc. to get a balanced diet.

Jim, one meal doesn't consist of a diet. Not even quite a few meals, because your body will start using its own reserves if necessary.

It's when you start cutting into those reserves that you are in trouble.

What you have to look at is the overal balance of what you eat. If you were strictly vegetarian, and ate only lentils, you'd have problems supplying the necessary proteins. That's where the beans/grains thing comes into play. But having a bean and a grain at every meal you assure the right mix for total amino-acid intake.

BofB: I looked at the article you cited, and have a couple of problems with it. The most important of which is that it doesn't even address your contention, let alone demonstrate it.

On top of that, the article is badly written, confusing, and, most of all, _lacks any citations_.

I have never heard any reliable nutritional source make the claim that mixed pulses would provide all the essential amino acids. And, despite your smugness, it is an established fact that soy is the only bean that does. Which is precisely why soy is such an important part of the vegan diet.

From your linked article, here is a chart showing which essential amino acids are missing from various foods:

Protein source/ Limiting amino acid
Wheat/ lysine
Rice /lysine
Maize /lysine and tryptophan
Pulses /methionine (or cysteine)
Beef/ phenylalanine (or tyrosine)
Egg, chicken none; the reference for absorbable protein
Milk or Whey,/ bovine methionine (or cysteine)

In terms of RDAs, methionine is one of the highest. And that's precisely what's missing from most beans. But look at the wheat, rice, and maize (corn) just above them and you see how a bean with a grain provides all that you need.

It doesn't take much to achieve balance. As Chaman points out, a couple of slices of bread, or a handful of crackers with a bowl of lentil soup will provide it.

In much of the world, meat is either absent from the diet or is used more as a flavoring agent than as a main component of the diet. Look at how those peoples eat and you'll always find a combination of beans & grains in their diets; sometimes combined, as in the ubiquitous beans & rice, and sometimes in separate dishes served at the same time, as in Chaman's lentil soup and bread.

In tems of human health, the man who said "bread is the staff of life," was wrong. What he should have said was "bread and beans are the staff of life."

The article wasn't to back up my belief, I have not found any proof from reputable sources (i.e. not second hand from friends from vegitarian antigrain nutritionists) it was simply for those who do not know what essential amino acids are, because a good number of people out there do not I'm sure.

I don't know what they are, nor do I much care. Since people have managed to have healthy diets for centuries without knowing of their existence, I suppose I can do the same.

Tonight I had rice and peas. Last night I had tofu, rice and vegetables, and lunch before that was rice, zuccini and green beans. I'd been away for a week and hadn't been able get hold of any brown rice so I was absolutely ravenous for it.......

I was reading some old threads and came across this one. It was getting ready to fall into the "gone forever" bin.

I found it to be an interesting read with comments from several folks whose thoughts and opinions I've come to respect.

Perhaps you'll enjoy it also.

Rick