Can you stop beans from making you gassy? (opens in new tab)

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.

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 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.

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.

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..

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

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 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.

Why would you? Farting is the pinnacle of comedy.

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.

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...

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?

Try Asafoetida powder (Hing root powder), just a tiny pinch with bean or lentil dishes.

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.

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.

"No so I just eat more meat instead"

> These tests blew me away.

Made me laugh : )

I always found it I eat them consistently, they would make me less gassy. But only after a couple of weeks.

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.

Yes. Black mustard, asaefotida and fenugreek.

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.

As mentioned in the article, alpha galactosidase supplements like Beano exist.

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.

Disappointed not to see any mention of epazote.