Canned beans

[mccoy]

Hi all, 

I'm wondering if you guys are regular users of canned beans. Since I started attending these forums I made quite a few changes to my diet and one of'em is eating regularly legumes, after the overwhelming evidence of their beneficial properties.

 

Digestibility issues have been worked out by now. Problems deriving from lenghty preparation remain, even if they can be cooked on weekends. It takes some additional work though and fridge room, plus you must eat all week the same batch.

 

So my routine now is to eat canned beans. The simplest version: beans, water and salt. They are usualy very well cooked, better than I could do myslef, they come in many varieties, organic and not organic, they come from domestic crops, they are incredibly quick to prepare and sometimes unbelievably unexpensive. they come in small containers (10 ounces drainedweight) so are usually eaten soon after opening and not kept in the fridge.

 

Once in a while I'll cook some ancestral legumes which are sold in health food stores at very high prices. But mainly I'm eating canned beans now.

 

I'm curious to know if you guys do the same and can find any major drawbacks to canned beans. Dr. Michael Greger is a fan of canned beans and he convinced me at the end.

[Saul]

I'm a regular user of canned beans -- especially chickpeas. My wife uses canned black beans often.

 

I suspect that raw chickpeas (unlike raw black beans) require very little cooking to become the familiar chickpea that you find in a can --

the article about chickpeas in Wikipedia seems to imply this -- but it's unclear. If that's true, then I'd like to try consuming raw chickpeas.

 

-- Saul

[mccoy]

Hi Saul, it's great to know I'm in good company, I never came across fresh chickpeas that I can remember.

 

In Italy when it's season we cook this kind of freshly picked bean, which requires about 30 minutes from the start of water boiling.

 

[Michael R]

I absolutely do not want to come off as screaming that canned beans are unhealthy. However, you should consider:

 

-Canned (vs. home-boiled) beans do have a higher glycemic index, presumably because of a mixture of initial pressure-cooker style boiling and then the long soak inside the can all breaking down the fiber and food matrix structure.

 

-Nearly all brands of canned beans will contain etiher BPA or similar potentially xenoestrogenic compouds. (Eden is the only brand I know to which this clearly doesn't apply, tho' I've not looked into the matter recently.

[mccoy]

Thanks Michael for underlining some cons of canned beans, clearly it could not have been the perfect food, all pros and no cons.

 

I can imagine the higher-GI issue can be mitigated to an extent by choosing the firmer, less soft brands. Maybe.

 

If the BPA content is related to the epoxy liners, then, besides buying BPA-free cans, we may buy beans in glass containers or in tetrapak containers (most of the ones I buy have these characteristics).

 

You are also reminding me that mineral water in plastic bottles (which I drink) may contain plenty BPA, but it is too convenient, I'll have to avoid adding more sources to this.

[Sibiriak]

Google turned this up:

 

http://www.ewg.

BPA in Canned Food

 

EWG analyzed 252 canned food brands, mostly between January and August 2014, to find out which of them packed their food into cans coated with BPA-laden epoxy. Here’s what we discovered.

 

78 brands used cans with BPA-based epoxy lining for all their products.                                                                                  

31 brands used BPA-free cans for all their canned products

[see site for lists]

http://www.ewg.org/research/bpa-canned-food#.Wb3PL9Fx3b0

 

 

I've been eating a good deal of canned beans as well as beans in glass jars (often mixed with vegetables in  Russian "homestyle" fashion).

[Michael R]

If the BPA content is related to the epoxy liners, then, besides buying BPA-free cans, we may buy beans in glass containers or in tetrapak containers (most of the ones I buy have these characteristics).

I had meant to head this one off at the pass ... the problem with "BPA-free cans" is that many of them are made with alternative chemicals on which we really know essentially nothing, as opposed to BPA which is for better and for worse the Devil we know.

 

There's significant BPA and other xenoestrogens in TetraPak-type containers (eg, PMID  19274472 — and that was water (q.v)).

 

You are also reminding me that mineral water in plastic bottles (which I drink) may contain plenty BPA, but it is too convenient, I'll have to avoid adding more sources to this.

Most often, plastic water bottles are PET plastic (American recycle code #1), which are not made with BPA. However, they do contain other xenoestrogens. Intrinsically, packaged water is less concerning than most foods in the same container, because it isn't normally put into the container at high temperatures and contains no fat (xenoestrogens are all lipophilic). However, it clearly does still manage to absorb such chemicals (see the just-cited study).

[mccoy]

All the above reminds me about the phytoestrogens of soy and broadbeans for example (like genistein and daidzein); they may be used to counteract some of the negative effects of estrogen-like compounds since they seem to lock the androgen receptors. At least as far as prostate cancer prevention that sounds like a feasible strategy, I don't know about the other problems.

 

Glass jars tend obviously to be more costly and subtract the benefit of substantial inexpensiveness to pre-cooked beans. Yesterday I dined after reading the above and chose a glass jar from my stock, LOL. 

[mikeccolella]

As for bottled water I simply use a filtering device. Easily pays for itself and saves the environment from all that wasted production, shipping C02. As for the chickpeas I find a soak and a cook not very time consuminf especially because I use a very large pot and do three lbs. at a time which I then scoop into conveinant glass pyrex containers easily available and freeze them. But MR has me wondering about the freezing effect on glycemic load, usually a negative, but at least no bpa issue and the frozen ones ARE VIRTUALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM THE ONES EATEN WITHOUT FREEZING.

[drewab]

While this doesn't necessarily pertain to canned beans, I came across this clip recently by Dr. Essylstyn. It seems he must be quite fond of them!

 

https://youtu.be/HfNvq74hS_o?t=35m30s