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Beans, Belly-aches, and Worse

In the following chapters, we’ll look at some ordinary foods that can make us miserable. The availability of such foods is not a failure on the part of food-health agencies. Properly handled, these foods can contribute to our diet’s interest and variety. Improperly handled, on the other hand, and we can get into a lot of trouble. In an ideal Disneyland world of butterflies and gentle deer, plants would happily offer surplus leaves and seeds to any passing animal. In the real world, plants with nutritionally valuable seeds usually make protective chemicals in order to protect their offspring. Legumes such as beans and peas can yield protein-rich seeds even in infertile ground. Their seeds are so nutritious that every one would be eaten by pests, were they not protected by natural chemicals. Legumes can produce some truly exotic seed-protection chemicals. To protect ourselves against these toxins we rely on methods like plant breeding, detoxification, leaching, and cooking.

Common Beans

The makings of an instant stomach ache are available without prescription in your local supermarket, where you can purchase dried beans from the versatile plants known as Phaseolus vulgaris. There are hundreds of varieties of dried beans and almost all of them contain stomach-churning chemicals.

The protective chemicals called ‘lectins’ are made from different combinations of proteins and sugars. Some lectins cause red blood cells to clump, while others attack the intestine lining. Lectins of one sort or another are made by all kinds of plants, but the common bean makes one of the most powerful. Bean lectin does terrible things to the animal gut, destroying villi (the little projections on the inside of the small intestine). This damage stops animals from absorbing nutrients from the food they eat — not just nutrients from the bean but from anything else eaten. The mammalian pancreas, which makes important digestive enzymes, may become too large because of overwork.

Lectins are powerful chemicals, naturally occurring in dry beans at injury-causing levels. To nutritionists, lectins are one of the best known natural toxins. Lectins are relatively easy to eliminate, yet many people still get into trouble with bean dishes.

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