How does a vegetarian get protein from food without carbohydrates?

Question

A low amount of carbohydrates is okay, but lentils, etc are excessive.

Answer 1

Carbs are not bad.  In fact, we need them to function.  Our organs rely on them.  You just need to choose good carbs like whole grains.

Answer 2

Soy.  

Answer 3

As a raw vegan all I eat are veggie, fruits, seeds and nuts. I also do green juices/smoothies which is also healing in many ways.

Answer 4

Why would you want to get protein without carbohydrates?  Do you want to starve your brain of fuel?  Do you want your kidneys to fail?

Your diet should be mostly complex carbohydrates, moderate in protein and light on heart-healthy fats.  Carbohydrates are your body's fuel of choice and, when they're burned they leave behind only water; your body can, in a pinch, burn protein for fuel, but the "ash" left behind burdens the kidneys.  Your brain has no option: it's carbohydrates or nothing.  The whole "low carb" craze is undoubtedly going to come back and bite people in the butt one of these days.

If you want to reduce the unhealthier forms of carbs in your diet, cut out things like white bread, white rice and added sugar.  But you shouldn't fear the naturally-occuring carbs in lentils.  Sheesh.

Answer 5

I understand where the questioner is coming from.  For a lot of people, carbohydrates ARE something that we need to minimize consumption of: I'm talking about the tens of millions of type 2 diabetics who don't inject insulin.

I can't eat more than 15 g of carbs (excluding fiber) in one sitting, or my blood glucose level goes unacceptably high.  This means: no potatoes, pasta, rice, cereal, corn, oatmeal, etc.  Beans and lentils only in very small amounts. For bread, just a very low-carb flaxmeal/soy/oat-fiber flatbread; for crackers, just some very high-fiber bran crackers that taste like pressed sawdust.  (The taste grows on you after a while though -- I actually like my GG Scandinavian Crispbread now!)

After a while, you get very adept at making substitutions.  Most of my vegetarian cookbooks have unnacceptably high-carb meals, so I am always switching things around.  Rice?  Use grated steamed cauliflower.  Cubed potatoes?  Use small white turnip.  Shredded potatoes?  Use shredded zucchini.  Mashed potatoes?  Use mashed cauliflower.  Spaghetti?  Use spaghetti squash, or green beans, or fried shredded cabbage.  Beans?  Use black soybeans instead (not white!).

It's definitely not a fad.  It's a permament dietary requirement for millions of people like me.  It's not even a choice, the way that vegetarianism is a choice: if I want to keep my eyesight, my kidneys, and my feet, I HAVE to strictly limit carbohydrates.

It kind of irritates me when people say that it's unhealthy to eliminate or drastically reduce carbohydrate consumption, because carbs are "essential".  It sounds exactly the same as when people say that being a vegetarian is unhealthy, and that some meat or fish is "essential". (There are "essential fatty acids" and "essential amino acids" -- fats and proteins -- but there are no essential carbohydrates.)

As for the original question: there are plenty of sources of protein that don't involve grains or beans.  Nuts, eggs, cheese, soy, meat-substitutes like Quorn and Boca products, peanut butter, etc.

(background:  I am not a vegetarian, but my husband is.  I am a T2 diabetic, but my husband is not.  In order to make meals that both of us can safely eat, I have found ways to make lots of low-carb vegetarian dishes.)

EDIT (to respond to the post after this one):

(1) The brain uses glucose.  Glucose is a carbohydrate.  This leaves many people with the mistaken impression that you must eat carbs for your brain to function properly.  But that's not the case at all: the liver can produce glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis.  The classic example is that of the Inuit, whose diet used to consist nearly entirely of fat and protein, with almost no carbohydrates, and yet their brains functioned perfectly well.

(2) Low carbohydrate diets do NOT cause kidney failure.  This fallacy comes from the fact that IF you have kidney disease already, you should not eat high level of protein, because that can hasten failure in an already-diseased kidney.  If you do not have kidney disease, then low-carb diets will not  cause it.

Low-carb diets have been around for quite a long time, even before they became the flavor-of-the-month crash diet a little while ago.  It may be a fad to some who jump from one way of eating to another, but it is a very long-term and very healthy way of eating for many others.  It is no more an "unhealthy fad" than vegetarianism is.

Answer 6

Carbohydrates are necessary nutrients.  

Where did you get the idea lentils are "excessive" carbohydrates? How can something be excessive when we don't even explain how much you are eating?

Some people came up with some fad diets some years ago where they claim "carbs" are bad for you. It's not true.

Sure, it's easy to gain weight eating more calories from starchy food than you can possibly burn off with exercise. But that doesn't automatically mean carbohydrates are bad for you. Eat a proper number of calories and eat from all the sections of the food pyramid and you'll do fine.

Answer 7

Seitan and TVP(made from soy concentrate, not defatted soy flour) are good examples.

Why are you cutting down on carbohydrates? Are you trying to starve your brain or just slow it down?

Answer 8

soy and tofu work for me.

try a tofu salad with soy sauce and sesame seeds YUM

Answer 9

Carbohydrates and protein are two different things.  To get protein, we vegetarians often eat things like eggs, dairy, nuts, beans, seeds, artificial meats, and so on.

You shouldn't really do low carbs for a long period of time....it's okay to cut back on them to the point that your metabolism needs, but you do need a healthy amount of carbs and cannot function without enough of them.

Answer 10

I get most of my protein from isolated soy protein powder, zero carbs.