Pasta is the default high-protein carb. Remove it and you'd expect the collection to shrink. It didn't. The gluten-free filter pulled 110 pasta dishes from the high-protein parent collection, and what replaced them changed the shape of every plate.
Curries tripled, from six to seventeen. Tacos surged from one to seven. Smoothies went from zero to nine. And 127 of these 202 meals have no grain base at all: protein, vegetables, and nothing else between them.
The carbs that survived the filter brought something the pasta never had. Coconut milk, the backbone of those seventeen curries, increased lutein absorption from spinach by 42% in a head-to-head of fourteen plant milks. Sweet potato cooked with oil delivers 10 to 20 times more beta-carotene than the same sweet potato without fat. Potatoes, naturally gluten-free, scored 323% on the Satiety Index, the highest of all 38 foods tested.
The median meal here hits 32g protein and 11g fiber in 20 minutes. Fifty-eight percent deliver 10g or more fiber per serving, a threshold where viscous fiber showed reproducible body-weight effects across 62 trials and 3,877 participants. The gluten-free constraint didn't hollow out the plate. It rebuilt the infrastructure around ingredients whose mechanisms have been measured.