admin December 28th, 2008

So, what do you need to know about Rice Protein?

Rice protein powder is a great tasting vegetable protein, and is thus obviously suitable for those who are after a vegan option in their protein powders. It is also a protein powder free of the common food allergen properties that are sometimes associated with the other types of protein powders.

However, the protein in rice is generally considered incomplete as it has lower levels of certain essential amino acids. So one should be careful when buying rice protein powder, as if all essential amino acids are not present in sufficient quantities the rice protein cannot be used for growth or maintenance of tissues.

Digestibility and Amino Acids

Digestibility & Amino Acids should always be a factor when it comes to making your decision on what Protein Powder is right for you. And when it comes to examining Digestibility and Amino Acids, there’s a good yardstick to use… it’s called the PDCAAS, or Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score. What’s that? Well, the definition of the PDCAAS, given to us from Wikipedia again is:

a method of evaluating the protein quality based on the amino acid requirements of humans. The PDCAAS rating is a fairly recent evaluation method (it was adopted by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations/World Health Organization (FAO/WHO) in 1993 as “the preferred ‘best’” method to determine protein quality.

So, now we know what it is, how does Rice Protein stack up? Rice on its own scores only a 0.47. Since a perfect protein score is 1.0, you can see that rice protein falls short. However, when rice is used in a combination with other ingredients the score raises significantly. In fact that’s true of many proteins and protein powder supplements. Few of them contain one ingredient only.

In terms of food, combining rice with milk raises the PDCAAS to 0.92, close to perfect. With peas or beans it jumps up to a complete protein; 1.0.

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