Q: Does protein from sources like brown rice and almond butter build muscle?

A: Absolutely, all protein in your diet counts! However there are a few things you should keep in mind when it comes to protein from non-animal sources...

First off, it is not easy to get a lot of protein from non-animal sources. Recall that a typical athlete or a person looking to lose fat or build muscle would do well to aim to get at least 20% and preferably 30% of their calories in the form of protein. That's quite a lot of protein! For example, if you eat a 2500-calorie daily diet (which is fairly average), 20-30% of those calories in terms of protein would mean 130-180 grams of protein daily! There's just no way to get that much protein from things like brown rice or almonds without eating A TON of those foods, much more than 2500 calories worth.

On the flip side, if you take a vegetable like spinach that has very high protein content (50% of spinach is protein!) the problem becomes that it becomes impossible to eat enough of it to get a significant amount of protein. A cup of spinach contains only 8 calories and 1 gram of protein -- to get a significant amount of protein from spinach you'd have to become Popeye!

So if you are a vegan or eat very few animal products, then you would do well to incorporate a lot of beans, lentils, and soy products in your diet. They combine both high protein content (up to 50%) and relatively high calorie density that it's quite reasonable to get 100 grams of protein or more daily from these legume sources.

Besides the difficulty in finding non-animal source foods that are both rich in calories and in protein (other than legumes), there's also a matter of getting complete source of protein. Protein is just a generic name for different amino acids and different protein sources contain different proportions of the different amino acids. Animal protein sources, including eggs, dairy, and whey protein powder, have what is called a complete amino acid profile -- meaning they contain enough of each amino acid to provide maximum benefit. However plant protein sources typically contain incomplete protein (soy comes the closest to being complete), so if you get all of your protein from a single plant source you will likely get subpar protein profile. So it's important to combine different plant protein sources (such as beans with rice, for example) to make sure you get a complete set of amino acids.

So to summarize, yes, all protein sources count, including plant protein. But you have to plan your diet carefully and incorporate lots of beans, lentils, and soy to make sure you get sufficient amount of protein if you don't eat any animal-source products. You also should incorporate different plant protein sources to make sure you get a complete amino acid profile. One last tip, is that if you are vegetarian, but can eat eggs and dairy both of them contain a lot of high-quality animal protein -- and you can always supplement with whey protein powder.