Special Appearance by the "Harvard Fart Squad"

January 5, 2023 9:39 AM

Can You Stop Beans From Making You Fart? We Put 17 Methods to the Test
posted by Cash4Lead (38 comments total)

I note that they do not appear to have tested if and how the plating of beans affects bean fartiness. If only they had consulted Metafilter first.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 9:56 AM on January 5, 2023 [8 favorites]

pass
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:01 AM on January 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

The phrase "farts per gram" makes me happy
posted by Zumbador at 10:02 AM on January 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

so now we are just actively looking for ways to suck the joy out of life?

i will not be silenced
posted by elkevelvet at 10:02 AM on January 5, 2023 [16 favorites]

I was surprised to see that they did not cook the beans with kombu, only soak.
posted by timdiggerm at 10:04 AM on January 5, 2023

no farts? what fun is that?
posted by supermedusa at 10:08 AM on January 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

That's one of those things I always wondered about. They are always telling us how important our gut biome is to our health, and one sign that gut bacteria is being well fed with prebiotics like beans, is that it is emitting gas. So isn't farting a sign of a healthy biome? Is this one of those 'being healthy vs not being a social outcast' things?
posted by eye of newt at 10:19 AM on January 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

i will not be silenced

siri what fart-related slogan encapsulates grounds for divorce
posted by lalochezia at 10:19 AM on January 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Doom toots as he pleases!
posted by Going To Maine at 10:22 AM on January 5, 2023 [12 favorites]

I am going to recycle a 'joke' I already made on this here website.

They should have had a number control too. They should have compared cooking 239 beans vs. 240! And see if that extra bean made a difference.
posted by indianbadger1 at 10:25 AM on January 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Please tell me they're going to to submit this study to some peer-reviewed food science journal. It's been done before.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:25 AM on January 5, 2023

From the article:

Gram per gram, rinsed beans are over twenty percent less farty than unrinsed, and the liquid you throw away is thirty percent fartier than the beans are themselves. The liquid in the bean can has many more farts per gram than the beans themselves do, but pitching this liquid comes at a high cost: flavor. Compared to beans with their cooking liquid, rinsed beans are tasteless.

posted by spamandkimchi at 10:41 AM on January 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Bean plating? Been tooting!

Metafilter: more farts per gram than the beans themselves do
posted by lalochezia at 10:57 AM on January 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

so if I ever come into money my Peter Thiel moment will be the dark money funding of Fart-Fortified Beans

"they will hear me coming and they will know exactly what hit them"
posted by elkevelvet at 11:03 AM on January 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Anasazi or Bolita beans offer much lower oligosaccharide content and they taste better.
posted by Brian B. at 11:05 AM on January 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

The liquid in the bean can has many more farts per gram than the beans themselves do

This part raised three questions:

1. What is the fart potential of aquafaba?
2. Can it be reduced using the Beano method they describe?
3. Does doing so affect the taste or utility of aquafaba as an egg white substitute?
posted by jedicus at 11:05 AM on January 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

Most importantly, is there in fact a positive correlation between the more you toot and the better you feel?
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:24 AM on January 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

My understanding was that by eating beans regularly your gut biome adapts and you become less farty naturally. Was I misled?
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 11:35 AM on January 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oops: it’s in the first few paragraphs of the article that the author is unconvinced it’s true. Either way, I’m still gonna eat’em.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 11:37 AM on January 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I appreciated the detailed discussion of Beano. I dimly remembered Beano used to sell a product that was a food additive, a liquid you put in your pot of beans. But the combination of it not working if heated and not working very well on whole beans sounds like a real problem, I wonder if that's why the product was discontinued.

I think Ben Franklin was on to a better idea

Certain it is also that we have the Power of changing by slight Means the Smell of another Discharge, that of our Water. A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreable Odour; and a Pill of Turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets. And why should it be thought more impossible in Nature, to find Means of making a Perfume of our Wind than of our Water?

What Comfort can the Vortices of Descartes give to a Man who has Whirlwinds in his Bowels!
posted by Nelson at 11:54 AM on January 5, 2023 [8 favorites]

I was expecting this study to just be about if beans make you farty at all but evidently that's a real thing. I've heard the beans-farts jokes song and alleged connection my whole life, but have quietly disbelieved it or just wrote it off as jokes, or that beans are almost always served with fart foods like cheese. Seems like the science is saying beans make you farty but idk, anecdotally, personally, as a bean-eater never organically connect beans and farting. My apologies to all of the people over the years I thought were no-good fart-liars or devious agents of the Musical Fruit Conspiracy. To be honest I still don't believe it but I have to acknowledge I'm wrong anyway and that reality disagrees with my perception of it.
posted by GoblinHoney at 12:00 PM on January 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

2. Can it be reduced using the Beano method they describe?

Based on their testing of the can liquids, I'd say signs point to yes. But the key word here might be reduce, rather than eliminate.

3. Does doing so affect the taste or utility of aquafaba as an egg white substitute?

It is sugars like these that form the gels (that's the mouth feel part) and foams (that's the fun fizzy stuff, of course) that replicate the egg-like behaviours, so possibly. It depends on how much of the polysugars are removed and what their roles are in the stable gel and foam formation are.

Would need some testing. The problem with science is that there's always another study...
posted by bonehead at 12:11 PM on January 5, 2023

I trust that everyone reading this thread is saying "Harvard Fart Squad" with their worst Boston accent.
posted by Cash4Lead at 12:47 PM on January 5, 2023 [24 favorites]

My understanding was that by eating beans regularly your gut biome adapts and you become less farty naturally. Was I misled?
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 11:35 AM on January 5 [1 favorite −] Favorite added! [!]


Oops: it’s in the first few paragraphs of the article that the author is unconvinced it’s true. Either way, I’m still gonna eat’em.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 11:37 AM on January 5 [1 favorite −] Favorite added! [!]

IMO that is a huge problem with their research design. And it would have been easy to describe and discover. Begin the study by having everyone eat 200 grams of beans every day for three months. I'm pretty sure the results would be clear either way. Then you could test all the other methods, if they were even relevant.

In my experience, populations that eat a lot of beans, like Italians, Spanish, Central Americans, Middle Eastern people, Indians (we're getting close to at least half the world's population or more) are not at all more farty than white western people who don't.
posted by mumimor at 1:07 PM on January 5, 2023

None of the traditional methods discussed included epazote. I don't know if it works, and I think farting is fun (I'm on record here as having hilariously loud but odorless farts so maybe that's why?) but I would like a study on the actual effectiveness, if any, of epazote. I.did a libmed search and left deeply unsatisfied.
My family definitely (generic) Beano's before especially farty meals.
posted by atomicstone at 1:30 PM on January 5, 2023

a Pill of Turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets

the things you learn
posted by trig at 2:18 PM on January 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

This page says that lectins, proteins that bind to carbohydrates, also cause a lot of bloating and gas, and lectins are especially abundant in beans.

it also says that soaking and cooking neutralize the effects of lectins, but then goes on to discuss examples of lectins causing problems that would seem to be very rare if soaking and cooking were as efficient as it earlier implied.
posted by jamjam at 2:50 PM on January 5, 2023

→ 1. What is the fart potential of aquafaba?

In an uncontrolled test (sample size = 1), an aquafaba meringue was consumed by a large middle-aged Scottish person. Within minutes, some bloating was noted, and after half an hour, abdominal distension was evident along with mild discomfort. Some relief was found by the test subject in just over an hour, but not by the test subject's partner. Keywords describing the nature of the flatus reported by the subject's partner included "alarming", "seismic" and "extremely acrid".
posted by scruss at 3:10 PM on January 5, 2023 [18 favorites]

I'm having a hard time comparing the 10 methods with the 17 results... as in - they don't have good charting. Honestly this is frustrating.

Some notes for my culinary days were:
- 24-hour soak, dispose of water.
- Cook beans in seasoning (no salt) and cold water. Bring to a boil, boil 4 minutes, drain and blanch in cold water. (this is kind of their blanch, but more refined)
- Cook beans for reals in final seasoning (still no salt).
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:25 PM on January 5, 2023

What Comfort can the Vortices of Descartes give

If "the Vortices of Descartes" isn't already a username, it damn well should be!
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:34 PM on January 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm on record here as having hilariously loud but odorless farts

Your hearing's fine, now you need to work at clearing up your sinuses.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:36 PM on January 5, 2023 [11 favorites]

They fail to provide the information why Pythagoras was afraid of beans! Pythagoras did not want his soul to escape his body through his butt.

Which I respect!
posted by bigendian at 5:55 PM on January 5, 2023 [10 favorites]

First, Mastodon ends toots -- and now this?
posted by MrJM at 8:35 PM on January 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

The liquid in the bean can has many more farts per gram than the beans themselves do, but pitching this liquid comes at a high cost: flavor. Compared to beans with their cooking liquid, rinsed beans are tasteless.

Okay, but....that's if you don't do anything to season the beans, and what cook does that?

Okay okay yeah sure your soaked and rinsed black-eyed peas don't taste as strongly as your not-soaked black-eyed peas, but aren't you also going to be throwing a ham hock and some salt and some bacon and some onion in there too, and isn't THAT going to flavor things? Or - your soaked Jacob's Cattle beans lose some flavor in the soaking, but after you cook them up and then dump them into a Dutch oven with ketchup and molasses and mustard and tomato sauce and brown sugar and you bake them in all of that for four hours, how would you even TELL?

...I have been a member of the Rancho Gordo Bean club for a year and change now, and as such I get a LOT of beans. I soak many of them before eating them, and while I may be missing out on some of the original bean's flavor, I'm not experiencing intestinal distress, and I'm still perfectly happy with all these bean dishes seasoned with paprika and smoked ham hock and sausage and tomato and you name it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:39 PM on January 5, 2023

the things you learn

You know this publication is part of a long prank that ended in Ben Franklin saying to Erasmus Darwin "Verily, it shall smell greatly of Violets, approach thee my Rump posthaste."
posted by away for regrooving at 10:29 PM on January 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

→ beans are almost always served with fart foods like cheese

Cheese is Not a “Fart Food”, exclaims indignant middle-aged Northern European mutant who can process lactose.
posted by scruss at 5:29 AM on January 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Eagerly awaiting a rebuttal from the Yale Fart Squad.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 7:07 AM on January 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I love beans. They taste great
I enjoy farting. It feels great.

Draw your own conclusions.
posted by Dr. Wu at 12:01 AM on January 7, 2023