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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Using boiling water is faster but can cause uneven cooking as the outside has softened where the core is still hard. A long, cold soak would do better to penetrate the interior.
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.
It breaks down the complex sugars quickly but can lead to a soft shell with hard core - then it's not possible to dial in a cooking time that leads to both being equally soft vs soaking in cold water and having a consistent firmness to cook down. Water soluble vitamins/minerals get lost if you pitch the soaking water so presumably more leeches out with hot water.
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.
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.
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!
Sounded like alternative medicine, but it was supposedly centering my stomach or adjusting the intestines to be in their optimal place, e.g. some people have organ displacement, the stomach is too low or too high, and somehow that affects digestion and health.
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?
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.
It's a specific alternative therapy, a traditional practice associated with adjusting or repositioning the stomach in folk healing. The woman who performed this on me is a physiotherapist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lactose intolerance principally derives from a failure of the human body, not the microbiome, to produce the enzyme lactase which breaks down the sugar lactose.
All humans (and all mammals) produce lactase as infants and children, but many lose that capacity in adulthood. Several populations (Northern Europeans, some North Africans, and a few elsewhere) inherit a mutation which continues lactase production in adulthood. Many parts of the world, notably east Asia and the Americas (indigenous populations) lack that mutation and adults tolerate unfermented milk products poorly.
Fermented products (cheese, yoghurt, keifer, doogh, buttermilk) tend to have most of the lactate converted in the fermentation process, and tend to be better tolerated.
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.
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.
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).
Yeah - humans have adapted to be able to use milk(s) from other sources than parents for the high sugar and fats present and required to survive in harsher climates (cold) that we're not native to.
Milks, butters, and cheeses are a high value food source for people who burn massive amounts of calories to keep their bodies warm.
Hmm, I’ve been intolerant my whole life, but I also used to drink milk daily during childhood, resulting in, for reasons I now know why, in a subpar youth ..
having discovered the lactase supplement has finally given me some peace of mind :)
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.)
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.
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.
More anecdata here. For various health reasons, about six months ago I started eating beans every day for lunch. At first it was… intense. But within a few weeks, the gas entirely disappeared. I now have no issues whatsoever.
FWIW, some beans are easier on my system than others. Kidney beans (sadly), my favorite, can be murder if you don’t cook them thoroughly enough. Lentils, on the other hand, seem to be pretty gentle. They also soak up whatever flavor they are cooked in so they are a great “starter bean” if you want to eat a more vegetarian diet.
Yeah, given the number of vegans / vegetarians I know who have gone through this I find it completely self obvious. If I went and ate meat today, I would almost certainly barf… But I wouldn’t spend ages trying to find a way to cook meat to make me not barf, I would just slowly introduce it back into my system little bits at a time until the adverse effects go away.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are digestive enzymes on the market that solve digestive gas for beans, legumes, lentils, peanuts, broccoli, etc. You take one or a few at your first bite, and problem solved. Bean-zyme is the most popular in the US apparently. Vegan and international options are NOW's Optimal Digestive System, Bulk, California Gold's Digestive Enzymes, and Bulk's Digezymes. Your mileage may vary.
> These tests blew me away. At the very least, I expected that presoaking the beans and pitching the water would reduce fartiness. After all, the sugars are water soluble, so they should leach into the soaking water and get discarded. As it turns out, not so much. I still don’t understand this result.
I don’t buy it. He’s says it doesn’t work but can’t explain why it didn’t work. Could be his method was faulty, the type of bean, the age of the bean, etc.
I rather take the experience of an entire country.
Not to dismiss the experience of Brazil, but Korea believed you would die if you had an electric fan on with no windows open. Safe to say entire countries are not infallible either.
Brazilian here. It's not a superstition, I can see my wife's belly literally inflate if the process is not done correctly. I cook beans at least once a week, I've made mistakes and there's no way to hide it. We don't get them cooked from delivery as we don't know how they were prepared, lesson also learned the hard way.
That said, the process is soaking the beans in water for, at least, 10 hours. You have to change the water four or five times during this period and toss the water at the end.
On the other hand, adding bay leaves are totally a superstition. Saw my mother-in-law trying to hide she forgot to soak the beans overnight by adding bay leaves and my wife had a bad aftermath.
Yeah, boiling water with lemon helps, but without it my wife has a lot more gases. One article that they tested, can't explain it properly and we have seen over and over working, I very much don't believe they did it right
can confirm. worked in a very small office with a guy who didn't give a damn. silent but deadly doesnt do it justice. between that, a single bathroom right across from the secretaries desk (the unfortunate lady she was), and the sound of coworkers breathing, it was unbearable to say the least
There is an old New York Times article (90s) that makes the same conclusion. The only real way to reduce the issue is to eat then more often. Personally never had big issues with beans. What's far worse for me is anything with a high inulin content. I feel physical pain from bloating when eating that.
Hmm too bad he did not try out the method I use which is soaking in water with a bit of baking soda. You got to rinse the beans well before cooking them. Would be interesting to know if it really makes a difference on the gas. It does on the skin though making them much softer.
Given the bacterial digestion context here, I wonder how consistent bean consumption affects the gut microbiome? Others have mentioned eating beans a lot is the best way to stop the gas, why is that? is it because the bacteria that digest the indigestible substance are well-hardened and numerous (I'd expect more, not less gas, but perhaps it has to do with the digestive efficiency resulting in less "bubbles" of air that make an audible sound?), or is it because those bacteria die off after being overworked, and you just pass on the indigestible substance unprocessed?
I find these discussions both entertaining and annoying. We humans unquestionably expect to be able to bend the world to our will, even when the “world” is defined by some arbitrary set of rules put forth by some faction whose intent is solely to serve their own purposes, desires, and needs, independent of a shared reality. Legumes, among other things, make you fart. Get over it.
On could say that grains are indigestible, leather rot and oil doesn’t explode… but we manage to cook, taw and distil. Why wouldn’t we also soak/germinated/ferment/peel the beans ?
It’s human nature to come up with ways to bend the world to our will. If you got over things, humans would’ve stayed at their initial habits and maybe perished with climate change.
Something quite acidic after the meal works great for me. I prefer a small glass of water with two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar. It's not tasty but it's just one quick swig, and as a bonus fermented beverages/foods are very beneficial.
I'm surprised they didn't test another northeastern U.S. folk remedy: only put a maximum of 239 beans in whatever you're cooking (otherwise ther'll be two-fahrty!). Hyuk hyuk hyuk! :-D
Yep. Rancho Gordo bean club member here — when I transitioned from “beans are okay but a lot of work to make a way I enjoy” to “I should make an effort to try a new recipe every two or four weeks”… it took about a month for my stomach to normalize the assault, but now it’s no different than anything with fiber.
Fellow Rancho Gordo bean clubber and I saw the same thing. If I really go hard, like eating them with every meal for most of a week I'll notice it building up but otherwise not really.
Yeah, I eat beans all the time and don’t have any reaction to them. Anecdata but in my experience only people who eat very little beans react to them. But I haven’t researched it.
>Here I feel the need for an aside. Many, many people will tell you that the key to reducing bean gas is to eat more beans. Eating more beans, they argue, works because it allows our digestive systems, and the microbiome in them, to acclimate to the beans. Over time, they say, the gassiness will go down. This makes no sense to me. If these oligosaccharides are food for bacteria in our gut, common sense would say that feeding that bacteria more food would, if anything, do the opposite by supporting their population growth while giving them plenty of raw material to digest. It wasn't within the scope of this project to test (and, I suspect, disprove) this theory, but count me as highly doubtful. If anything, I have to imagine that eating more beans more often just makes people more used to being gassy, and that, in turn, makes them notice it less. (Their significant others might have a very different take…)
I agree with this in principle but have to point out a few flaws in practice.
First, the immediate product of fermentation is not methane, despite what your high school biology teacher told you. It's hydrogen. In fact, bacteria do not produce methane at all! Only archaea are capable of methanogenesis. This is a rather surprising fact nobody mentioned in school:
>Organisms capable of producing methane for energy conservation have been identified only from the domain Archaea, a group phylogenetically distinct from both eukaryotes and bacteria, although many live in close association with anaerobic bacteria.
So there is some room for error here. When methanogenesis occurs, the volume of gas is reduced by 80%:
4 H2 + CO2 >> CH4 + 2 H2O (l)
But I have never seen any evidence that the amount of archaea or the extent of methanogenesis in the digestive tract varies with diet. However, it does change under certain circumstances, and more methane in enteric gas is generally correlated with less hydrogen:
>Usually patients produce either hydrogen or methane, and only rarely there are significant co-producers, as typically the methane is produced at the expense of hydrogen by microbial conversion of carbon dioxide. Various studies show that methanogens occur in about a third of all adult humans
(The second study is less optimistic than I am about methanogens reducing intestinal discomfort.)
But there is another thing that can change the amount of noticeable farting: unnoticeable farting. The digestive tract has its own nervous subsystem which reacts to stimuli and processes information. It's plausible that if you produce a lot of gas for a long time, your digestive tract learns to let it out gently. This may reduce irritation of the epithelium.
I've eaten lots of things in my life. I'm vegetarian now and I'm often eating 30+ different plants in a day. My experience is any "new" food or a big change in ratios/quantity of a food has the potential for flatulence. The worst gas I got was when I upped my protein to ridiculous quantities for the bodybuilding hobby. I eat beans all the time and they don't cause me any problems at all. But occasionally some vegetable will cause me excessive flatulence. It's part of vegetarian life really. Stick around any herbivores long enough and you'll know about their farts.
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.
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.
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.
https://youtube.com/@ChrisYoungCooks
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I smell what you did there.
Bean counters shit on everything they touch.
Nice read!
For the impatient: they found no common cooking technique that helped significantly reduce - as they call it the “fartyness” of the beans..
It's the best part of beans though. Everybody loves their own brand.
Hacker News in a nutshell
Locked and loaded, as it were ;)
this guy says he loves his farts
[flagged]
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.
Using boiling water is faster but can cause uneven cooking as the outside has softened where the core is still hard. A long, cold soak would do better to penetrate the interior.
>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.
Rhizopus oligosporus (tempeh) worlds pretty well too!
What’s koji?
The moldy rice used to ferment soybeans into soy sauce, and to make sake.
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?
Why would having the soak water boiling help? And why would it reduce flavour or texture?
It breaks down the complex sugars quickly but can lead to a soft shell with hard core - then it's not possible to dial in a cooking time that leads to both being equally soft vs soaking in cold water and having a consistent firmness to cook down. Water soluble vitamins/minerals get lost if you pitch the soaking water so presumably more leeches out with hot water.
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.
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytobezoar
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3292399/
I clicked the link out of interest but am quite happy that the article had no image.
Could be, almost like something was trapped and fermented inside.
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!
Sounded like alternative medicine, but it was supposedly centering my stomach or adjusting the intestines to be in their optimal place, e.g. some people have organ displacement, the stomach is too low or too high, and somehow that affects digestion and health.
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?
Sounds like the massage moved his intestines around
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.
It's a specific alternative therapy, a traditional practice associated with adjusting or repositioning the stomach in folk healing. The woman who performed this on me is a physiotherapist.
Are you a Batman villain by any chance?
Did the massage trigger a giant fart? I would be terrified of somebody massaging my stomach, lol
It felt uncomfortable and I needed to pass gas but managed to hold it.
Please say more; this is breaking my brain.
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.
Do you know the name of those poses by chance?
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.
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.
How does one do that? Does it change the flavor / texture?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Reminds me of the cure for lactose intolerance: You just have to keep drinking milk until your microbiomes adapts.
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.
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.
I can drink milk with no digestive distress, but within a week will have a full face of acne.
Spent many years and many thousands of $$ on skincare products trying to figure that out. I now avoid dairy and have excellent skin.
Lactose intolerance principally derives from a failure of the human body, not the microbiome, to produce the enzyme lactase which breaks down the sugar lactose.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance>
The gut biome may play some role, but it's secondary and limited, see:
<https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8666824/>
All humans (and all mammals) produce lactase as infants and children, but many lose that capacity in adulthood. Several populations (Northern Europeans, some North Africans, and a few elsewhere) inherit a mutation which continues lactase production in adulthood. Many parts of the world, notably east Asia and the Americas (indigenous populations) lack that mutation and adults tolerate unfermented milk products poorly.
Fermented products (cheese, yoghurt, keifer, doogh, buttermilk) tend to have most of the lactate converted in the fermentation process, and tend to be better tolerated.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase
That seems like a very shitty cure..
But on a more serious note, does that actually work, even if just a bit?
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).
Yeah - humans have adapted to be able to use milk(s) from other sources than parents for the high sugar and fats present and required to survive in harsher climates (cold) that we're not native to.
Milks, butters, and cheeses are a high value food source for people who burn massive amounts of calories to keep their bodies warm.
Hmm, I’ve been intolerant my whole life, but I also used to drink milk daily during childhood, resulting in, for reasons I now know why, in a subpar youth ..
having discovered the lactase supplement has finally given me some peace of mind :)
this youtuber presents herself as a case study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h90rEkbx95w she also cites references
Yes.
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.)
Or you can drink camel milk and then slowly move on to bovine milks.
I was very surprised to see that the article explicitly says it will not consider this answer!
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.
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.
More anecdata here. For various health reasons, about six months ago I started eating beans every day for lunch. At first it was… intense. But within a few weeks, the gas entirely disappeared. I now have no issues whatsoever.
FWIW, some beans are easier on my system than others. Kidney beans (sadly), my favorite, can be murder if you don’t cook them thoroughly enough. Lentils, on the other hand, seem to be pretty gentle. They also soak up whatever flavor they are cooked in so they are a great “starter bean” if you want to eat a more vegetarian diet.
Yeah, given the number of vegans / vegetarians I know who have gone through this I find it completely self obvious. If I went and ate meat today, I would almost certainly barf… But I wouldn’t spend ages trying to find a way to cook meat to make me not barf, I would just slowly introduce it back into my system little bits at a time until the adverse effects go away.
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?
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.
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
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.
YMMV and people differ. Source: vegetarian who eats a lot of beans too. Beanzyme is a lifesaver.
Yeah, people are diverse. I have this issue with lentils. I love em, but however many I eat they don’t love me back.
Do you rinse them until the water runs clear before cooking them?
>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?
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.
I don't know if you can have it all, bacteria wise.
Exactly. The gut microbiome adjusts and cultivates bacteria that feeds more efficiently or even cross feeds on gases produced by other bacteria.
Correct, signed another vegan :)
Unscientifically, it feels like your gut microbiome adjusts to it after a while!
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.
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?
Your username is incredibly relevant for a food science discussion!
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.
You're almost pickling them in citrus at that point.
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.
Do you notice any flavor profile changes?
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.
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.
Interesting, 130f appears to trigger the enzymes to break down oligosaccharides and anti-nutrients - thanks for sharing
There are digestive enzymes on the market that solve digestive gas for beans, legumes, lentils, peanuts, broccoli, etc. You take one or a few at your first bite, and problem solved. Bean-zyme is the most popular in the US apparently. Vegan and international options are NOW's Optimal Digestive System, Bulk, California Gold's Digestive Enzymes, and Bulk's Digezymes. Your mileage may vary.
This is exhaustively covered in the article
It's a Portuguese article, but a well known thing in Brazil to leave them in water https://www.nationalgeographicbrasil.com/ciencia/2024/10/voc...
To soak them in water. And then toss the water (very important). If you try to use the water from soaking you will regret it.
The article mentions they tested this, and it didn't work.
> These tests blew me away. At the very least, I expected that presoaking the beans and pitching the water would reduce fartiness. After all, the sugars are water soluble, so they should leach into the soaking water and get discarded. As it turns out, not so much. I still don’t understand this result.
I don’t buy it. He’s says it doesn’t work but can’t explain why it didn’t work. Could be his method was faulty, the type of bean, the age of the bean, etc.
I rather take the experience of an entire country.
Not to dismiss the experience of Brazil, but Korea believed you would die if you had an electric fan on with no windows open. Safe to say entire countries are not infallible either.
Brazilian here. It's not a superstition, I can see my wife's belly literally inflate if the process is not done correctly. I cook beans at least once a week, I've made mistakes and there's no way to hide it. We don't get them cooked from delivery as we don't know how they were prepared, lesson also learned the hard way.
That said, the process is soaking the beans in water for, at least, 10 hours. You have to change the water four or five times during this period and toss the water at the end.
On the other hand, adding bay leaves are totally a superstition. Saw my mother-in-law trying to hide she forgot to soak the beans overnight by adding bay leaves and my wife had a bad aftermath.
Yeah, boiling water with lemon helps, but without it my wife has a lot more gases. One article that they tested, can't explain it properly and we have seen over and over working, I very much don't believe they did it right
> I rather take the experience of an entire country.
I wouldn’t.
Mexicans think rubbing the ends of a cucumber makes it less bitter.
It’s all superstition until you put it to the test.
The article I posted mentions they tested it and it works, but not completely.
Why would you? Farting is the pinnacle of comedy.
My own as-yet-unpublished research suggests that some cultures frown upon excessive comedy in the workplace.
But what if those cultures are just objectively wrong? Farts are hilarious after all.
Early results indicate that the ears say yes, but the nose says no.
can confirm. worked in a very small office with a guy who didn't give a damn. silent but deadly doesnt do it justice. between that, a single bathroom right across from the secretaries desk (the unfortunate lady she was), and the sound of coworkers breathing, it was unbearable to say the least
If I ly excessive gas didn't cause crazy painful cramps for me.
Try Asafoetida powder (Hing root powder), just a tiny pinch with bean or lentil dishes.
Why would that work?
Asafoetida/Hing[0] is widely used in Indian cuisine and it does help, anecdotal evidence of course. How/why it works, is something I can't say.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asafoetida also talks about this
There is an old New York Times article (90s) that makes the same conclusion. The only real way to reduce the issue is to eat then more often. Personally never had big issues with beans. What's far worse for me is anything with a high inulin content. I feel physical pain from bloating when eating that.
There are always options. Beano also exists and it works.
Hmm too bad he did not try out the method I use which is soaking in water with a bit of baking soda. You got to rinse the beans well before cooking them. Would be interesting to know if it really makes a difference on the gas. It does on the skin though making them much softer.
Given the bacterial digestion context here, I wonder how consistent bean consumption affects the gut microbiome? Others have mentioned eating beans a lot is the best way to stop the gas, why is that? is it because the bacteria that digest the indigestible substance are well-hardened and numerous (I'd expect more, not less gas, but perhaps it has to do with the digestive efficiency resulting in less "bubbles" of air that make an audible sound?), or is it because those bacteria die off after being overworked, and you just pass on the indigestible substance unprocessed?
Traditionally in many cuisines cumin or caraway seeds are added to dishes such as beans or cabbage for this reason.
I find these discussions both entertaining and annoying. We humans unquestionably expect to be able to bend the world to our will, even when the “world” is defined by some arbitrary set of rules put forth by some faction whose intent is solely to serve their own purposes, desires, and needs, independent of a shared reality. Legumes, among other things, make you fart. Get over it.
On could say that grains are indigestible, leather rot and oil doesn’t explode… but we manage to cook, taw and distil. Why wouldn’t we also soak/germinated/ferment/peel the beans ?
It’s human nature to come up with ways to bend the world to our will. If you got over things, humans would’ve stayed at their initial habits and maybe perished with climate change.
I tend to find it in the spirit of "hacking".
Wonder if they should have tried some seaweed based approaches as well?
As per: https://phys.org/news/2026-04-seaweed-compound-major-methane...
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.
Something quite acidic after the meal works great for me. I prefer a small glass of water with two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar. It's not tasty but it's just one quick swig, and as a bonus fermented beverages/foods are very beneficial.
> These tests blew me away.
Made me laugh : )
I'm surprised they didn't test another northeastern U.S. folk remedy: only put a maximum of 239 beans in whatever you're cooking (otherwise ther'll be two-fahrty!). Hyuk hyuk hyuk! :-D
Yes. Black mustard, asaefotida and fenugreek.
I always found it I eat them consistently, they would make me less gassy. But only after a couple of weeks.
Yep. Rancho Gordo bean club member here — when I transitioned from “beans are okay but a lot of work to make a way I enjoy” to “I should make an effort to try a new recipe every two or four weeks”… it took about a month for my stomach to normalize the assault, but now it’s no different than anything with fiber.
Steve Sando, the founder/owner of Rancho Gordo, has been on the podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cooking-issues-with-da...) hosted by the author of this article (Dave Arnold) a few times.
Those episodes are really fun and always result in me eating more beans!
The first rule of bean club is to tell everyone about bean club.
Rancho Gordo beans are great! Yellow Eyes ftw.
Fellow Rancho Gordo bean clubber and I saw the same thing. If I really go hard, like eating them with every meal for most of a week I'll notice it building up but otherwise not really.
Yeah, I eat beans all the time and don’t have any reaction to them. Anecdata but in my experience only people who eat very little beans react to them. But I haven’t researched it.
As mentioned in the article, alpha galactosidase supplements like Beano exist.
Wow, no mention of asafoetida (hing)?
It looks like more and more websites star using html-load.com to circumvent DNS ad blocking like PiHole and Adguard Home, like this one.
>Here I feel the need for an aside. Many, many people will tell you that the key to reducing bean gas is to eat more beans. Eating more beans, they argue, works because it allows our digestive systems, and the microbiome in them, to acclimate to the beans. Over time, they say, the gassiness will go down. This makes no sense to me. If these oligosaccharides are food for bacteria in our gut, common sense would say that feeding that bacteria more food would, if anything, do the opposite by supporting their population growth while giving them plenty of raw material to digest. It wasn't within the scope of this project to test (and, I suspect, disprove) this theory, but count me as highly doubtful. If anything, I have to imagine that eating more beans more often just makes people more used to being gassy, and that, in turn, makes them notice it less. (Their significant others might have a very different take…)
I agree with this in principle but have to point out a few flaws in practice.
First, the immediate product of fermentation is not methane, despite what your high school biology teacher told you. It's hydrogen. In fact, bacteria do not produce methane at all! Only archaea are capable of methanogenesis. This is a rather surprising fact nobody mentioned in school:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanogenesis
>Organisms capable of producing methane for energy conservation have been identified only from the domain Archaea, a group phylogenetically distinct from both eukaryotes and bacteria, although many live in close association with anaerobic bacteria.
So there is some room for error here. When methanogenesis occurs, the volume of gas is reduced by 80%:
4 H2 + CO2 >> CH4 + 2 H2O (l)
But I have never seen any evidence that the amount of archaea or the extent of methanogenesis in the digestive tract varies with diet. However, it does change under certain circumstances, and more methane in enteric gas is generally correlated with less hydrogen:
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/bmfh/45/1/45_2025-044/_...
>However, methane gas production was not changed by dietary intake, suggesting that intervention with prebiotics may be necessary.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1752-7155/7/2/024...
>Usually patients produce either hydrogen or methane, and only rarely there are significant co-producers, as typically the methane is produced at the expense of hydrogen by microbial conversion of carbon dioxide. Various studies show that methanogens occur in about a third of all adult humans
(The second study is less optimistic than I am about methanogens reducing intestinal discomfort.)
But there is another thing that can change the amount of noticeable farting: unnoticeable farting. The digestive tract has its own nervous subsystem which reacts to stimuli and processes information. It's plausible that if you produce a lot of gas for a long time, your digestive tract learns to let it out gently. This may reduce irritation of the epithelium.
"The liquid in the bean can has many more farts per gram than the beans themselves do"
I've eaten lots of things in my life. I'm vegetarian now and I'm often eating 30+ different plants in a day. My experience is any "new" food or a big change in ratios/quantity of a food has the potential for flatulence. The worst gas I got was when I upped my protein to ridiculous quantities for the bodybuilding hobby. I eat beans all the time and they don't cause me any problems at all. But occasionally some vegetable will cause me excessive flatulence. It's part of vegetarian life really. Stick around any herbivores long enough and you'll know about their farts.
"No so I just eat more meat instead"
Disappointed not to see any mention of epazote.
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