I live in Sheffield where I work as an engineer on cool stuff to improve the world. Most of my time has been on a pandemic preparedness project, but looking to launch some super exciting animal welfare things.
I recently restarted High Impact Engineers. Check out and engage with the new forum (pretty please)!
I run EA Sheffield. Come along to our next social if you’re in the area!
I organised EA North 2025 and might make it an annual thing. It was very cost-effective.
I have a PhD in computer science and an undergrad degree in physics.
Yes, this table does not include data on this. I don’t have columns for values related to that. It’s a lot of work to track these numbers down and for many foods they are just not available.
When people online talk about the “bioavailability” of protein sources, they seem to mean one (or both) of two things:
One is the digestibility. So how much of the amino acids end up absorbed your body. That number is ~90%+ for most soy products (that I have found numbers for) as well as vital wheat gluten.
The other thing that people talk about is the amino acid profile. As one would expect, an animal muscle has the amino acids that one needs to build animal muscle, in about the right relative amounts.
Soy also has all essential amino acids, the profile is just a bit different. But none is particularly low or missing.
Vital wheat gluten is low in lysine. So I wouldn’t recommend relying only on seitan for protein. But if there is a bit of soy or some beans in your diet, I wouldn’t worry about it. (It’s also easy and cheap to supplement but that’s probably usually not necessary.)
Protein quality scores like PDCAAS and DIAAS try to account for both. That’s why, on its own, vital wheat gluten ends up with a poor score. But soy products tend to still score highly.
Basically, I am not worried about it and have personally been building muscle without problem on a vegan diet with lots of soy and some seitan. But you are right that accounting for this would probably change the table ordering a little.