Food Data Insights

🥓🫘 You might be surprised to learn what pork and beans have in common. You already know that they are both protein-rich, but…

They are both very high in ✨Vitamin B1, aka Thiamine✨!

In a day, if you eat about 160 g (fresh raw weight) of pork or 160 g (dry weight) of beans or lentils, you have enough vitamin B1 for the day.

Is it a good idea to eat them together?

Well, they are often served together, as their flavors nicely complement each other. In France, for example, we have “petit salé aux lentilles”, which basically consists of lentils, pork, and salt.

So, a meal with generous amounts of pork and legumes will likely provide way more than enough, actually too much, thiamine.

What happens to the excess thiamine in your body? Apparently, no problem. Thiamine is a water-soluble vitamin and your body can easily get rid of the excess (through urine).

What happens on days you don’t eat foods high in vitamin B1? To my current understanding, your body won’t have much in store and it won’t be optimal.

So, this gets me to think… if you regularly eat pork and legumes, but not every day, maybe it’s a good idea to eat those on separate days, to spread out your thiamine intake and optimize its use? 🦘

You may not eat pork, you may not eat legumes, but this would apply to other foods as well… Pork and legumes are not the only foods high in thiamine; they just caught my attention in my data analysis work:

Among the top foods high in thiamine, I made a representative selection of whole foods (skipping processed foods with added vitamins etc).

The official recommended daily allowance is 1.1 mg for women and 1.2 mg for men. For calculations, I took 1.2 mg so that everyone’s covered.

Based on those 1.2 mg, I created a bar chart that shows the amount of each food we would need to eat in a day.

This is a simplification, because every day, we eat several different foods and we need many different nutrients. But it gives you an idea of which foods are most interesting in terms of vitamin B1.

Here’s the interactive chart: