An Overview of Importance and Nutritional Evaluation of Food Protein Quality

Protein is the buzz word commonly being used to market a food product or to emphasize the importance of a particular food.However, the quality of each protein is different in terms of its bioavailability or chemical score based on the presence or absence of essential amino acids.Generally, plant-based proteins lack one or more essential amino acids and need to be complemented by consuming variety of other plant proteins while animal proteins are considered as complete protein due to their high bioavailability and presence of all essential amino acids.Different methods are employed to evaluate the quality of food protein viz., digestibility coefficient, biological value, true and apparent protein digestibility, net protein utilization, protein efficiency ratio, and amino acid scores.The present paper highlights these methods as have been commonly employed to assess the importance of food items in terms of its protein quality.