The New Complete Book of Food
Storing This Food
Store beans in air- and moistureproof containers in a cool, dark cabinet where they are pro-
tected from heat, light, and insects.Preparing This Food
Wash dried beans and pick them over carefully, discarding damaged or withered beans and
any that float. (Only withered beans are light enough to float in water.)
Cover the beans with water, bring them to a boil, and then set them aside to soak.
When you are ready to use the beans, discard the water in which beans have been soaked.
Some of the indigestible sugars in the beans that cause intestinal gas when you eat the beans
will leach out into the water, making the beans less “gassy.”What Happens When You Cook This Food
When beans are cooked in liquid, their cells absorb water, swell, and eventually rupture,
releasing the pectins and gums and nutrients inside. In addition, cooking destroys antinutri-
ents in beans, making them more nutritious and safe to eat.How Other Kinds of Processing Affect This Food
Canning. The heat of canning destroys some of the B vitamins in the beans. Vitamin B is
water-soluble. You can recover all the lost B vitamins simply by using the liquid in the can, but
the liquid also contains the indigestible sugars that cause intestinal gas when you eat beans.
Preprocessing. Preprocessed dried beans have already been soaked. They take less time to
cook but are lower in B vitamins.Medical Uses and/or Benefits
Lower risk of some birth defects. As many as two of every 1,000 babies born in the United
States each year may have cleft palate or a neural tube (spinal cord) defect due to their moth-
ers’ not having gotten adequate amounts of folate during pregnancy. The current RDA for
folate is 180 mcg for a woman and 200 mcg for a man, but the FDA now recommends 400 mcg
for a woman who is or may become pregnant. Taking a folate supplement before becoming
pregnant and continuing through the first two months of pregnancy reduces the risk of cleft
palate; taking folate through the entire pregnancy reduces the risk of neural tube defects.
Lower risk of heart attack. In the spring of 1998, an analysis of data from the records for
more than 80,000 women enrolled in the long-running Nurses Health Study at Harvard
School of Public Health/Brigham and Woman’s Hospital in Boston demonstrated that a diet