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.
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.
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.
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).
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 :)
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
Rhizopus oligosporus (tempeh) worlds pretty well too!
What’s koji?
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.
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.
That seems like a very shitty cure..
But on a more serious note, does that actually work, even if just a bit?
this youtuber presents herself as a case study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h90rEkbx95w she also cites references
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).
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 :)
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.
Yes.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
Exactly. The gut microbiome adjusts and cultivates bacteria that feeds more efficiently or even cross feeds on gases produced by other bacteria.
YMMV and people differ. Source: vegetarian who eats a lot of beans too. Beanzyme is a lifesaver.
Correct, signed another vegan :)
Unscientifically, it feels like your gut microbiome adjusts to it after a while!
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 ?
I tend to find it in the spirit of "hacking".
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.
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
> These tests blew me away.
Made me laugh : )
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.
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.
>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.
As mentioned in the article, alpha galactosidase supplements like Beano exist.
Yes. Black mustard, asaefotida and fenugreek.
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.
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.
Disappointed not to see any mention of epazote.