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ctoa
About 50% of people just don't get gassy from beans to begin with, and 70% of those who do adapt within weeks, according to https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51819295_Perception...
My casual observation is that people's perception of bean's gas causing properties is way out of line with what they do for most people and strongly influenced by people who have unusually high intolerance, who are the minority.
A part of the article that irked me is where he talks about why he's going to ignore people who say you get used to it because he thinks the microbiome change doesn't make sense misunderstands the gas/bacteria process in the gut.
There is a big mix of FODMAP eating bacteria, both inefficient generalists that can eat FODMAP but do it poorly and create a lot of gas, but also specialist bacteria like Bifidobacterium that also eat them but are much more efficient at it and produce much less gas. With more food the specialist bacteria becomes more prevalent. There are also gas consuming bacteria, not just gas producing, which also will shift in population. The idea is not that you just grow a larger population of the existing problematic bacteria.
adrian_b
When I was young, I never got gassy, regardless of what I was eating and how much I was eating.
But at one time I was forced to take antibiotics orally for a rather long time.
After that, eating anything like beans resulted in copious amounts of gas, so it was obvious that the composition of the bacteria community in my guts had been changed.
After many years, the reactions to beans and the like have diminished, but I have never reverted to the condition from before that exposure to antibiotics.
saghm
> My casual observation is that people's perception of bean's gas causing properties is way out of line with what they do for most people and strongly influenced by people who have unusually high intolerance, who are the minority.
I would not be shocked if they're also influenced by knowing a catchy rhyme describing the purported effects on an individual who consumes them.
insaneirish
If you are unfamiliar with the author, Dave Arnold is a former instructor at the French Culinary Institute, a bar owner/operator in NYC (Booker & Dax (closed), Existing Conditions (closed), and Bar Contra (https://www.barcontra.com)), a cooking equipment designer and manufacturer (https://www.bookeranddax.com), sharer of lots of knowledge (e.g. https://cookingissues.com/primers/sous-vide/part-i-introduct...), James Beard Award winning book author (https://www.kitchenartsandletters.com/products/liquid-intell...), and a weekly podcast host (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cooking-issues-with-da...).
I highly recommend anything he works on.
Aboutplants
I just want to dap this comment about Dave Arnold. If you’re a nerd (science nerd) who likes food then Dave is your guy. His podcast is great and if you want to blow away your next Thanksgiving meal, find his stuffing recipe.
satvikpendem
I'd also recommend Chris Young on YouTube who also uses science based rather than tradition based methods of modern cooking, such as making a consomme without lots of effort as French chefs would tell you to do.
ksherlock
A trick I learned in Ireland is to carefully count out your beans and stop when you hit 239. Because 1 more would be too farty.
mittsquinter
I smell what you did there.
Der_Einzige
Bean counters shit on everything they touch.
howlin
I'm a vegan so experienced bean eater. There are a couple things I found that help, but they do come at a cost of flavor or texture:
Soak and rinse, but the soak water should be boiling when the dry beans go in.
Alkaline. Sodium Carbonate (baking soda) or calcium hydroxide (lime) work. Throw away the cooking water. This has to be done carefully, as too much of either can give the food a mineral taste and/or dissolve the beans entirely.
Fermentation also works. Lactic acid (like kimchee or pickles) helps a little. Koji (either added or grown on the beans themselves) helps a lot. Both will have a big impact on the flavor and what the beans will be good for in the end.
b00ty4breakfast
>Sodium Carbonate (baking soda)
I assume you meant Bicarbonate? Washing soda is pretty heavy duty and I've always used 1/4 tsp bicarb/lb of dry beans for dealing with old beans that won't soften the old fashioned way without any problems. You can also add the bicarb to the soaking water if making dry beans. Discard and rinse, as usual.
aziaziazi
Rhizopus oligosporus (tempeh) worlds pretty well too!
What’s koji?
badc0ffee
The moldy rice used to ferment soybeans into soy sauce, and to make sake.
PeterHolzwarth
I'm not very familiar with this topic. What is the chemical mechanism through which you feel that baking soda reduces undigestible sugars in beans?
globular-toast
Why would having the soak water boiling help? And why would it reduce flavour or texture?
dsego
Not related to beans, but I had serious issues with bloating, gas and bad smell comparable to sewage. It went on for years until I had a short massage to adjust my stomach, the lady was pushing and shifting things around. This was a few months ago. Ever since I haven't had that type of gas, and I burp now which I haven't for years. I didn't change my diet at all.
MrDresden
Not my field, but I wonder if this could have been a case of a bezoar of some kind, perhaps Phytobezoar[0], that got loosened by the massage?
After seeing reports[1] a few years back about the use of Coke as a non invasive way to clean these out, I now drink the stuff when my stomach is upset. With n=1 I can report it has a real effect on me.
ikesau
Years of digestive issues resolved by a single massage? I've never heard of an outcome like that before. Could you explain more about how it worked and what this lady's approach purported to do? Who was she? Genuinely curious!
thisislife2
Was this a normal body massage, where they also worked on your stomach or specifically a massage for the stomach promising a cure for your specific issues?
xeromal
Sounds like the massage moved his intestines around
thisislife2
I understood that. Just wanted to know if the masseuse specifically pitched the idea to OP, after hearing his complaint or whether it was just a happy co-incidence.
TurdF3rguson
Are you a Batman villain by any chance?
Fire-Dragon-DoL
Did the massage trigger a giant fart? I would be terrified of somebody massaging my stomach, lol
jamwil
Please say more; this is breaking my brain.
ButlerianJihad
There are yoga poses that can be done solo, that have the effect of massaging internal organs. This can also be helpful for the lymphatic system, in which lymph circulates passively, encouraged by movement of the relevant body parts.
aziaziazi
Do you know the name of those poses by chance?
rand846633
Nice read!
For the impatient: they found no common cooking technique that helped significantly reduce - as they call it the “fartyness” of the beans..
tmoertel
I was surprised they didn't try sprouting the beans before cooking. When a bean germinates, it converts sugars in storage forms to more usable forms. Given that the author seems to understand that gassiness is caused by being unable to digest FODMAPs, sprouting to reduce gassiness seems like an obvious hypothesis to test.
nchmy
This is the way. It also makes the nutrients more bioavailable (absorbable) AND creates new/extra vitamins and minerals. I don't understand the latter part.
Cultures around the world have been sprouting and fermenting forever, but most people have forgotten it.
azinman2
How does one do that? Does it change the flavor / texture?
cassianoleal
IME, at least with black beans, overnight is enough. You don’t need to see the actual sprouts, you just need to kickstart the process.
It doesn’t change the taste, and you can control the texture by how long you cook them. Soaking also means it takes less time to cook.
Source: Brazilian who grew up eating black beans several times a week because it’s the number 1 staple there. Usually served in a creamy bean sauce and white rice for the full range of BCAAs - not that I understood that then, it was just delicious.
nchmy
I just did it in the past few days. Soak overnight in any container you want. Drain. Rinse it a couple times a day until sprouts form. Maybe a few days. I usually wait a few more so the sprouts are a few cm/one inch long.
VladVladikoff
There are lots of sprouting tutorials on YouTube. I used mason jars, soak the seeds for an hour or two, drain and leave the seeds in the jar damp. Rinse the seeds twice a day. Eventually they start to sprout.
spike021
Many years ago at a science-y summer camp as a child, this was a "project" we did. Not for the same purpose as suggested here but just to see how sprouting happens. Cool little experiment.
blackjack_
Yes. You just eat beans a lot. After a few months it stops making you gassy until you eat a type of bean you have never eaten before and then you are back to square one.
Source: vegan who eats beans with 75+% of meals
enaaem
Reminds me of the cure for lactose intolerance: You just have to keep drinking milk until your microbiomes adapts.
esperent
An article on this did the rounds a few months ago and suddenly everyone quotes it as gospel truth.
Unfortunately, it's not. What will happen is that you'll get somewhat better at digesting lactose as your gut bacteria learn to partially compensate for your lack of ability to produce lactase enzyme.
If you're only slightly lactose intolerant that might be sufficient. But for many people it would just make a bad health issue into a slightly less bad healthy issue.
Not great when there's a clear and obvious full cure available: don't eat dairy if you can't digest it.
Or maybe lactase enzyme pills. I've tested them for an occasional slice of cheese cake and they seem to work if I get the timing right.
cik
Lactose issues are fascinating. Some peop’e are triggered by pasturized milk, others can't handle milk at all. Some people can only handle cooked milk, others cheese until limits. For some lactose works, and for others not - to the point of upsetting stomachs. There's even compelling annecdotes (to my knowledge, no research) indicating that adding a couple of drops of any citrus to milk helps some people.
For some reason this all blows my mind.
weird-eye-issue
I didn't know I was lactose intolerant for a long time and thought it was some other issue so I kept having dairy daily for well over a year. It never went away.
fhn
Your body produces lactase, an enzyme that breaks down lactose. People who are lactose intolerant are unable to produce lactase and therefore, unable to break down lactose. Gut bacteria can break down lactose and perhaps if you drink milk all the time, those bacteria proliferate but loactose intolerance is no fun. It's better to just skip milk altogether.
finger
That seems like a very shitty cure..
But on a more serious note, does that actually work, even if just a bit?
thunfischtoast
I'm nitty picking now, but for most people you can't cure lactose intolerance because it's not a disease. It's more like the default state that adult mammals have. You might be able to rebuild some tolerance, but it's much easier to just take the artificial lactase and manage intake. One could argue that, biologically speaking, lactose tolerance is the off state and just so happens because we keep consuming breast milk well into adulthood (just not our own mother's).
aw-engineer
this youtuber presents herself as a case study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h90rEkbx95w she also cites references
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polishdude20
Yes.
ssl-3
Maybe? What follows is just my own dumb anecdotes.
For a long time, I sometimes had issues. I'd keep anti-diarrhea pills in stock at home. I kept some in the car. I even had some in blister packs my wallet (they'd get smashed up over time, but they still worked in powdered form and the desperation was very real).
I didn't know why that was a problem, but I definitely knew it was a real problem and that it could erupt at any time, so I treated the symptoms when that was useful to me. Sometimes, those shitty days on the toilet were intense. They'd wreck me, physically and mentally, for far longer than I want to think about.
Eventually, after decades, I noticed a pattern: Milk. Days when I drank milk or ate ice cream were much more likely to be problematic than days when I did not.
But then, I noticed that some other milk products like cheese were usually just fine. And that made sense and fit the pattern well, because the fermentation of cheesemaking reduces lactose very significantly.
And I like milk. So, experimentally, I started buying lactose-free milk. This worked well, but it was expensive and it tastes different. That helped to further define the pattern.
I started buying cheap lactase tablets instead, in bulk. That saved a fair bit of money, tasted good, and it also worked fine. This also reinforced the observed pattern.
Somewhere along the line, I became interested in kefir, so I bought some completely non-mystical mass-produced kefir from the grocery store and drank some.
Kefir treated me fine (yay fermentation). I found that adding a bit of kefir to a glass of milk also worked: That was never problematic at all, even without lactase tablets. (And it let me stretch that delicious, to me, kefir flavor out over a larger volume -- which also saved some money.)
I found that these observations strongly suggested to me that I was lactose-intolerant.
This went on for a long time; several years. Lactase or kefir, with milk, in various amounts -- whenever I felt like it. I thought I was proactively managing my apparent lactose intolerance very effectively. And by observation, I was indeed doing so. Keeping active stock of anti-diarrhea pills always nearby was reduced to kind of a fuzzy memory.
---
And then one day, I wanted a nice big ice-cold glass of milk, so I poured myself one. I went to the cabinet in the kitchen, but the lactase bottle was empty. I went to the fridge, and the kefir was gone.
So there I am, with a big glass of milk and nothing to help me digest it.
My health-and-sanitation spidey-sense refuses to let me pour stuff back into containers, and my dread for waste refused to let me pour it down the drain.
So I drank that milk. It was every bit as delicious as I expected.
And I expected (anticipated) the worst, but nothing bad happened. Everything was fine.
One sample isn't a trend, so I had more later. That was fine, too.
Weeks went by, then months. Now years. No issues: Milk goes in, and everything comes out properly.
I can have milk without assistance whenever I want, and that's fine. The previous and clearly-evident pattern that suggested lactose intolerance has become broken.
---
So now I don't have lactase tablets in stock anymore. I still drink the least-fancy milk I can get at the grocery store whenever it suits me.
I do enjoy some kefir from time to time (I love the taste of it), but I haven't had any of that for several months now either.
And I'm still fine. I'm doing really well in that area, really.
I'll leave it to the microbiologists to explain the hows and the whys; that's not my field of study. All I know is that this aspect of my life is way, waaaaaaay better than it was.
I'm very deliberately not providing causation or theories here. This is just my story, and I'm sticking to it.
---
(Now, someone reading this probably has some questions that are shaped like "Holy hell. Decades? Why didn't you at least go to the doctor or something?"
And that has a simple, dumb-as-bricks, one-word answer: 'Murica.)
thisislife2
Or you can drink camel milk and then slowly move on to bovine milks.
mixedmath
I was very surprised to see that the article explicitly says it will not consider this answer!
tptacek
If Dave Arnold says he really doubts it, it's a pretty safe bet he's read like a dozen papers related to the prediction and is basing it on something. He's like the Bunnie Huang of cooking.
dandellion
In the article the only explanation he gives is that it doesn't make sense to him, doesn't mention any papers or anything at all. But I'm pretty certain that he's wrong and it works. The difference in gas if I've been eating beans recently vs if I haven't eaten them in a couple of months is not just "I feel like maybe I get a little bit less gassy maybe" it's going from "two dozen farts at least, guaranteed" vs "one or two, if any at all" it's a night and day difference and if there even was a paper that says the contrary rather than change my mind I'd just assume that there must be something wrong with how the study was made. Of course, I'm just a sample of one and I haven't done any study either, so I don't mean to imply that there might not be other factors or that it may not work to the same degree for everybody, only that I'm pretty sure that dismissing it is wrong because I know at least one counter example.
jack_pp
well if your solution is to eat beans with 3/4 meals and I STILL need to social distance for a few months while I acclimate then that's not really the best solution now is it?
blackjack_
Yeah, you don’t run a marathon on your first run. You ramp up the intake slowly as your body adapts, like anything. If you are unlucky, this takes a long time or never happens because you rolled a bad microbiome. But for most people, this works fine.
jack_pp
In my case or a lot of people's cases.. I eat beans to save money and if I have to save money now.. months of adaptation isn't gonna cut it
toast0
I'd guess you might get more prosocial results by ramping up slowly. Start eating beans twice a day, but start with very small portions.
shermantanktop
YMMV and people differ. Source: vegetarian who eats a lot of beans too. Beanzyme is a lifesaver.
blackjack_
Yeah, people are diverse. I have this issue with lentils. I love em, but however many I eat they don’t love me back.
krackers
>After a few months it stops making you gassy
What causes this? Gut microbiome adapting? Doesn't that imply there should be some probiotic-type supplement you can take to seed these bacteria and keep them alive even when not eating beans?
apothegm
I believe it has to do with competition with other bacteria. The gas-producing ones have to die off, too, and they thrive on non-bean diets.
meroes
I don't know if you can have it all, bacteria wise.
brewcejener
Exactly. The gut microbiome adjusts and cultivates bacteria that feeds more efficiently or even cross feeds on gases produced by other bacteria.
girvo
Correct, signed another vegan :)
Unscientifically, it feels like your gut microbiome adjusts to it after a while!
whyage
As a vegan who consumes plenty of legumes, I researched the topic and found this useful patent: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/88/c7/d6/daddb53...
I boiled it down to the following steps (pun intended): 1. Rinse the beans. 2. Soak for several hours in room-temperature water, replacing the water 2-3 times. 3. Soak for several hours in ~130°F water, replacing the water 2-3 times (I use Yogurt mode on my Instant Pot, as it lets you set a temperature and hold it for hours). 4. Cook'em as you normally would.
Cooked beans freeze well, so I usually make large batches and freeze them in Ziplock bags for later use.
Heston
There are actual real solutions to this. Just look to the older cultures that ate lots of beans.
In many parts of Africa the ultimate solution is to peal the skins off the beans. This removes all digestive issues with bean consumption but it's a lot of work.
Another solution is to uses the microbe Aspergillus by consuming Miso paste with the beans which help break down indigestible polysaccharides.
PeterHolzwarth
In regards to the first method, are you saying that the skins of beans are the majority source of undigestible sugars in beans?
<edit> actually, come to think of it, fiber is also a source of gas. Are the skins of beans the higher source of fiber?
novafacing
Your username is incredibly relevant for a food science discussion!
dryheat3
I consume legumes daily and found that using baking soda completely eliminated gaseous emissions from them. For lentils, I soak 20 g in water with 1/4 tsp baking soda for a hour. Then discard the liquid before cooking. For refried black beans I first bring 65 g of beans to simmer then add 1/4 tsp baking soda and stir briskly.
Once I implemented this protocol I found that onions and prunes were also causing gas. Seems any stone fruit gives me gas because this also happens with apricots. I haven’t found a way to fix the stone fruit. But the onions can be fixed by heating them with lime juice before consuming.
Hope that helps.
soperj
You're almost pickling them in citrus at that point.
dryheat3
Pretty much, yep. The point is to neutralize the indigestible sugars through chemical or enzymatic action. So there should be a solution to any given type of food which causes gas. Just need to find the right trigger.
Side note… Fermentation is a technique humans used for millennia, but modern technology has replaced that with methods that fail to neutralize those indigestible elements. So I also use lacto fermentation on various foods.
BikiniPrince
Do you notice any flavor profile changes?
dryheat3
They become much darker in color but I have not noticed a change in flavor. I discovered this technique from an episode of America’s Test Kitchen on PBS.
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Sometimes after I eat beans I feel like I'm dying, but they're especially good in any tortilla, so it's definitely worth it.