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> Therefore, if you have a sedentary life style, lentils cannot provide a too big fraction of your daily protein intake, i.e. above 40% to 50%, otherwise they would provide too many calories.

If you're going to respond with six paragraphs to every post, at least indulge us with some numbers when you make claims about food which you seldom seem to do even though you appear in every nutrition thread on the forum.

2000 calories of cooked lentils provides 156g protein which is over even the 1.6g/kg protein high-mark for a 200lb guy who still has more calories to spare. 930 calories of cooked lentils provides 72g protein which is the 0.8g/kg minimum threshold in less than half of the day's calorie budget.

A quick google search says a 200lb sedentary male needs 2150 to 2550 calories per day to maintain.




Numbers for "cooked lentils" are irrelevant, because they depend on how they are cooked.

All computations are easy and precise in terms of raw ingredients, because you know precisely which ingredients have been used as the starting point for cooking the food.

For lentils I know very well the values because I eat them frequently and if I do not control the amount of ingredients that I use for food I gain weight immediately.

For instance, the lentils that I use have 23% protein and 3120 kcal/kg.

The values that you give for a 200 lb sedentary male seem too big.

I am a male of average height and I weigh 170 lb. There was a time when I had much more than 200 lb (up to 250 lb), but then I was definitely obese and it took a great effort to come back to 170 lb.

Now, at 170 lb, if I eat more than 1900 to 2000 kcal per day I gain weight very quickly, even if I do around a half of hour of intense exercises per day. This is consistent with most studies that I have seen, where 2000 kcal per day was considered as the typical energy intake for a sedentary life.

The lentils have a better protein/kcal ratio than most non-animal alternatives. Nevertheless, you cannot eat only lentils and you cannot even use only lentils as the principal protein source, because they do not have enough methionine. To get enough methionine from lentils you need to eat e.g. 550 g/day, i.e. 1716 kcal, which does not leave enough room for the kcal provided by the rest of the food that you need.

If you replace a part of the lentils with cereals, those have a much lower protein content and after also adding the rest of the food that is required for other nutrients it becomes impossible to get a sum that is not much greater than 2000 kcal.

You can get a sum of 2000 kcal without meat or dairy and without expensive protein extracts by getting some protein from freerange chicken eggs, or, for a 100% vegan diet you can extract at home gluten from wheat flour.

For instance, for myself, an adequate daily protein intake within a vegan diet can be provided by 167 g of lentils + gluten extracted from 500 g of wheat flour (I prefer to not extract pure gluten, because that needs too much time and too much water, so I remove only about 75% of the starch, which needs less than 5 minutes of washing, and with the washed dough I make a bread that is highly enriched in protein in comparison with standard bread).

Also, regarding what you have said in your comment, it is true that I tend to reply to most nutrition threads. The reason is that I have neglected my health and I have been obese for many years. Then, after many failed attempts I have eventually succeeded to reduce my weight from 250 lb to 170 lb and then I have maintained the latter value for more than a decade and I have improved my health tremendously in comparison with my previous state. To achieve this, I had to study much of the existing nutrition literature and it took me years of experiments of cooking various kinds of food in order to find choices for an optimum compromise between how much time I waste for cooking, how much I enjoy the food and how well the food satisfies the nutritional requirements. For many things that I have found after many failed experiments I would have been very happy to find useful advice before wasting time with that.




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