Can you stop beans from making you gassy?(seriouseats.com) |
Can you stop beans from making you gassy?(seriouseats.com) |
Those episodes are really fun and always result in me eating more beans!
Rancho Gordo beans are great! Yellow Eyes ftw.
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.
I highly recommend anything he works on.
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.
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.
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.
For the impatient: they found no common cooking technique that helped significantly reduce - as they call it the “fartyness” of the beans..
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.
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.
What’s koji?
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.
Cultures around the world have been sprouting and fermenting forever, but most people have forgotten it.
I always assumed that was the point of the overnight soak, although I often do the 'quick soak' method that most bean bags describe where you bring them to a boil and then turn the heat off and let them soak for an hour before draining and cooking.
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.
Source: vegan who eats beans with 75+% of meals
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.
<edit> actually, come to think of it, fiber is also a source of gas. Are the skins of beans the higher source of fiber?
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.
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.
I always do that, but I wonder if the companies that can them do that.
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 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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asafoetida also talks about this
As per: https://phys.org/news/2026-04-seaweed-compound-major-methane...
Made me laugh : )
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.
<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.
But on a more serious note, does that actually work, even if just a bit?
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?
Unscientifically, it feels like your gut microbiome adjusts to it after a while!
For some reason this all blows my mind.
Spent many years and many thousands of $$ on skincare products trying to figure that out. I now avoid dairy and have excellent skin.
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.
Milks, butters, and cheeses are a high value food source for people who burn massive amounts of calories to keep their bodies warm.
having discovered the lactase supplement has finally given me some peace of mind :)
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.)
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.
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.