Legumes: The Super Foods That Should Be Regulars on Your Plate

Preface

While I was growing up in India, legumes were a regular part of my diet. I don’t remember when one kind of legume or another was not part of a meal, beginning with breakfast. Although we were not vegetarians as a family, and ate meat, poultry, and fish a few times a week, grains, legumes, and vegetables were the dominant part of our diet. But that changed when I emigrated to the U.S. Here my plate was filled more with meat or meat products, less with grains and vegetables, and rarely with legumes. This was not a conscious choice on my part, but came about because of what was served in the places I ate, such as campus cafeterias.

At first, I did not pay much attention to the missing familiar elements, like legumes, but once I started preparing my own meals, I realized what I had been missing in my American diet and started adding them back again. Chief among them were dry beans, peas, and lentils. Over the years, I noticed that, while the typical American diet often included fresh green beans and peas, it rarely contained dry beans, peas, and lentils.

As a nurse educator with a background in public health, I often talked about the importance of a healthful diet for preventing disease and promoting health. For decades, people have known that the large amounts of saturated fat contained mainly in meat, poultry, and other animal products is unhealthy, and that the unsaturated fat contained mainly in plant-based foods, is healthy. Yet, like much of the diet in Western Europe, the standard American diet (SAD) consists of an abundance of calorie-dense, high-fat, animal-based foods, and an insufficient amount of low-fat, high-fiber, plant-based foods. This is despite the United States Department of Agriculture’s recommendation to eat five to seven servings of fruits and vegetables daily, and at least three cups of legumes a week, or half a cup of cooked legumes each day.

My initial research into why there was a lack of enthusiasm for legumes in the American diet was quite revealing. The reasons included many prevailing misconceptions and inaccuracies about legumes as a food. Recognizing that a first step in facilitating any change in behavior, including eating behavior, is to make accurate, credible information available, I expanded my research to include learning about legume-based diets in selected countries around the world. My purpose was to learn how the traditional legume-based diets impacted health and disease in those countries. This book is the result of that quest, and fulfills my desire to share my findings with a broader audience.

Although this is not a book on weight loss, the steadily rising rates of overweight and obesity in the U.S., and the chronic diseases attributable to marked overweight were also factors prompting me to write this book.

The book is divided into seven main chapters and a summary, followed by the back matter. Chapter 1 deals with a global evolutionary account of dry beans, peas, and lentils in the human diet. Chapter 2 details the value and benefits of legumes as food. Because nutrition and health literature is fraught with buzzwords, Chapter 3 is devoted to providing factual descriptions of terms that are most frequently heard. Chapter 4 is a compilation of findings from several studies on diet and the implications for health and disease in selected countries over time. Chapter 5 discusses the most commonly consumed legumes around the world. Chapter 6 outlines methods of preparing, cooking, and sprouting legumes, and Chapter 7 provides sample recipes for cooking with legumes. The Summary, References, Recommended Reading, and an Index finish out the book.

—S.M

Introduction

It is no secret that two out of three Americans are overweight and two out of five are obese, the latter term generally defined as being 30 percent or more over the ideal body weight. This is in spite of the collective obsession about being thin. As a nation, Americans have not always been fat, so why are they now succumbing to this burgeoning health problem?

A partial answer may be found in the fact that the current environment is inundated with unhealthy foods that not only lead to weight gain, but also lay the foundation for chronic diseases, such as heart disease, certain cancers, and adult-onset diabetes. Conversely, some foods that provide good nutrients in abundance to help people stay lean and healthy for the long run remain below the radar and don’t get the attention they deserve. Legumes undoubtedly belong to the latter category, and for a variety of reasons they have been undervalued, underconsumed, and even maligned as a food.

In this book, the word legume is used to refer to dry beans, peas, and lentils, although technically the term can refer to podded vegetables in general. Botanically, legumes are seeds of plants belonging to the family Leguminosae, which is one of the three largest families of flowering plants. Legumes have been cultivated and consumed for thousands of years in many parts of the world, and are considered super foods. What makes them super foods? Although, to date, there does not seem to be an agreed-upon or universally accepted definition of what super foods are, those foods generally referred to as super foods, such as almonds, avocados, bananas, blueberries, legumes, oats, pomegranates, pumpkins, walnuts, and wild-caught salmon, share some attributes. They are rich in vitamins and minerals, contain generous amounts of soluble and insoluble fiber (both associated with significant health benefits), have little or no saturated fat, and are generally low in calories. Naturally, any food that has these qualities belongs in a class above foods that lack one or more of these health-promoting and disease-preventing attributes.

Legumes as a group not only possess all the nutritional qualities mentioned above, but are also high in protein. They are deficient in a sufficient quantity of one essential amino acid to make them a complete protein, but the missing amino acid can be obtained from a complementary food, such as a grain, and the combination makes them a complete protein. Legumes as a source of protein are particularly important in plant-based diets. The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommend three cups of legumes per week, or half a cup of cooked legumes on a daily basis. This recommendation is based on empirical data drawn from studies that have shown that eating at least 100 grams of legumes per week is associated with many health benefits.

In a twenty-five-year study that examined food-intake patterns and risk of death from coronary heart disease, researchers followed more than 16,000 middle-aged men in the U.S., Finland, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and the former Yugoslavia.

The typical food patterns found were:

•  Higher consumption of dairy products in Northern Europe;

•  Higher consumption of meat in the U.S.;

•  Higher consumption of vegetables, legumes, fish, and wine in Southern Europe; and

•  Higher consumption of cereals, soy products, and fish in Japan.

When researchers examined the data in relation to the risk of death from heart disease, they found that legumes were associated with an 82-percent reduction in risk of death from coronary heart disease.

There is another beneficial attribute of legumes, although not derived from eating them, namely their ability to absorb nitrogen from the air and convert it into nitrates in the soil, a process referred to as nitrogen-fixation, which serves as a natural fertilizer. Legume plants accomplish this useful function with the aid of the rhizobium bacteria they harbor within their plant-root nodules. Legume crops build nitrogen levels in the soil as they grow, and benefits from the en hanced soil are achieved through crop rotations (inter-cropping) with non-nitrogen-fixing cereal grains. Since antiquity, the historical crop rotation of beans and maize (corn) in native cultures has capitalized on this characteristic property of legumes to produce higher yields of corn.

Why aren’t legumes figuring as prominently in the American diet as they are in other regions of the world? The obvious explanation for the difference lies in the dietary patterns of the respective regions. Legumes like chickpeas appear in varied forms in the Mediterranean diet. A variety of dry beans constitute an important part of the South American diet. A wide variety of dry beans and lentils are a part of the daily diet across all regions of India. In other regions of Asia, people have found multiple creative ways to consume the much-touted soybean. The high content and quality of protein in soybean nearly matches animal protein. Although United States is one of the top producers of soybean, the legume is primarily consumed as an ingredient of many processed foods here.

A second reason for the scant consumption of legumes by Americans is the inconvenience associated with their preparation and cooking. Dry beans, except for lentils, need to be soaked in water for several hours before cooking and thus require advance planning prior to meal preparation. While many canned legumes come pre-cooked, they frequently contain significant amounts of salt and other additives. For convenience, raw legumes cannot compete with the timesaving processed and prepackaged foods that can go directly from the refrigerator or freezer to the oven or stovetop, a much-appreciated benefit in today’s busy households.

A third reason for the lack of enthusiasm for legumes, especially among Americans, has to do with long-held stereotypes and attitudes toward legumes. They are often considered a poor man’s food that does not lend itself to culinary creativity. Expressions that denigrate beans, such as he doesn’t know beans about, used to indicate that someone is not well informed on a subject. And the expressions don’t amount to a hill of beans when referring to worthless things, or nicknaming one of the oldest cities in the Northeastern United States Beantown don’t help either.

Then, too, there’s the fact that dry peas, beans, and lentils don’t come in attractive packages with glossy, colorful pictures on the packages. In short, to many Americans, raw legumes don’t appear to be foods that could be turned into interesting or tasty dishes.

Perhaps the most important overall reason for an inadequate consumption of legumes in the United States is the insufficient attention given them as nutritious, healthful, lean-protein, and high-fiber foods by American nutritional and dietary groups. Despite being recommended in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released annually by the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, and Agriculture, legumes have not caught on as a nutritious and healthful food with the general public. Given their good taste, health-promoting and disease-preventing attributes, ready availability, and low cost, legumes need to be embraced as the super foods they are, deserving of a more frequent presence on the American plate.

The following chapters delve into the many nutritional and health benefits of legumes to help readers think of them not just as occasional or exotic foods, but as nutritious, healthful, and tasty components of a well-balanced diet.

Legume Consumption—A Historical Perspective

Leguminous plants were among the first crops grown by human beings. The term legume is derived from the Latin word legumen, which means to gather in its verb form legere. Beans were among the first and most important foods to be gathered, and humans gathered wild legumes long before they domesticated them. Tens of thousands of years ago, for example, fava beans and chickpeas were food for hunter-gatherers in Central Asia and the Himalayan foothills. They were gradually cultivated in much of Asia, the Middle East, and Egypt, and became staples in many diets. The Phoenicians are believed to have carried the chickpea to the Western end of Europe, where it became entrenched in the diet of Iberians and continues to occupy an important place in their diet to this day. The lentil, the pea, and the broad bean can all be traced to present-day Afghanistan, Northwestern India, Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan, and Western China. The American common bean and the lima bean are both said to have originated in the regions of Southern Mexico and Central America. The historical documents and reports kept by the Spanish explorers reveal that varieties of the common bean were grown by Native Americans as far South as Chile and Argentina, and as far North as the valleys of the St. Lawrence and upper Missouri rivers. The common bean further developed into other varieties, such as the black bean, great Northern bean, kidney bean, navy bean, pinto bean, and white bean.

The history of legumes goes back to the Neolithic era, when humans transitioned from being hunter-gatherers to producing food through their own work. Early civilizations in Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East cultivated beans and consumed them as a staple. They paired them with a grain staple because they recognized that doing so improved the nutritional quality of both, and that the combination contained sufficient protein to sustain them. Examples of such combinations include soy and rice in China, rice and lentils in India, beans and corn in Mexico, and wheat and fava beans, chickpeas, and lentils in the Middle East. Meat and dairy were less available in these regions and so constituted a much smaller percentage of the diet. In his book Beans Through History and Around the World, Ken Albala asserts, … without beans, the great cultures of the ancient world might never have arisen.¹ In those cultures