Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit: Minimizing Bean Eaters' Plague

It's no secret that I love beans. I write about them all the time. Just take a look around this Bean Lover's site.

Lots of people love beans, but bean eaters suffer from a certain well-known social problem. Not to be too delicate or euphemistic about it, bean eaters almost invariably suffer from gassiness. Flatulence. Farts. Air biscuits. Fluffs. (Or whatever creative euphemism you've come up with.) There, I've said it. From here on, I'll try to be a little more delicate.

I'm here today to help. First, we'll briefly consider the cause of the problem, then we'll discuss what you can do about it.

The Cause

We get gas from beans for a simple reason: Beans contain complex sugars called oligosaccharides. We do not have the necessary enzymes in our digestive tracts to digest them, so the stomach passes them along to the large intestine. There, they break down and form gasses. Uh oh; gas equals discomfort (to use the official medical term for PAIN). And there's the problem of getting rid of the gasses--they have to go somewhere, you know. To compound the problem, when released (as you all know), the gasses do not have a pleasant odor. Other foods such as cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower contain oligosaccharides in smaller amounts and can cause similar problems.

How To Prevent the Problem

I have done extensive research on this matter. I've visited dozens of Web sites that address the matter and read about it in more than a dozen books about beans. I've even read the official word from the National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse. I have checked this out.

I discovered that everyone agrees on the cause, but the advice on preventing gas is all over the map. The bean industry groups, for example, would never tell us to quit eating beans. They advise us to eat more beans so our systems can adjust to them. Oh, also drink more fluids when we eat beans.

Soak, boil, and rinse the beans. To use dry beans, you must soak them so they reabsorb water and soften to edibility. Then you boil them for a while to continue the softening process.

Most of my sources indicate that the water used for soaking and boiling leaches out most of the oligosaccharides. Discard this water and most of your problem goes down the drain. Two sources claim that boiling the beans first, followed by a long soak and a thorough rinse completely eliminates the problem. Some sources advise that adding an eighth of a teaspoon of baking soda to the boiling water decreases the intensity of the problem. They also suggest draining and rinsing canned beans.