Day Sixteen

Legumes: 

Source: Whole9 Legume Manifesto (note this is only a excerpt, I highly recommend that you read the entire article for lots of useful information).  

Legumes are a botanical family of plants that include dozens of varieties of beans, lentils, garbanzos, peas, and peanuts. Yes, that also includes soybeans, which the multinational agriculture conglomerates have figured out how to grow in (unnatural, unsustainable) monocultures by the megaton – and market them in a pretty effective way to the American public. (An aside: the coffee , cocoa, and vanilla “beans” are not, botanically speaking, legumes, and thus are excluded from this particular discussion.)  Legumes are often used as “cover crops” because of their ability to “fix” nitrogen in the soil, improving fertility of the soil for subsequent crops. Historically, they were primarily used as an agricultural tool, not as food. Hmmm.

The Legume Downside

So legumes aren’t as awesome as the marketing might make you think.  Is that really a good enough reason to ditch them altogether?  Worse than simply being an inferior source of dietary protein and an unnecessary duplication of the dietary fiber supplied by the micronutrient-dense vegetables and fruit we recommend, legumes do have some major downsides – enough that we think you should keep them off your plate.

First, while legumes do contain some protein, they also contain significant amounts of carbohydrate – often several times that of the amount of useable protein. We are certainly not carb-o-phobic, but the amount of carbohydrate you’d take in using legumes as a primary protein source would mean that you were (a) not getting enough (bioavailable) protein in an attempt to limit your carbohydrate intake to a healthy amount, or (b) taking in unhealthfully high amounts of carbohydrate to get as much protein as you need.  (Or, potentially, both.)  And though the carbs found in beans are low glycemic index, your body still has to secrete significant amounts of insulin to manage the relatively large amounts of blood sugar – and with insulin, like many things in your body, a little is good, but lots is… not.

Second, legumes as a general botanical category are toxic if consumed raw. Literally… toxic. The problem is that usual preparation methods of prolonged soaking and rinsing, cooking, sprouting, or fermenting only partially neutralizes those toxic substances, generally referred to as lectins. (There are other harmful substances in legumes, but we’ll stick with lectins for now.)  Lectins are plant proteins that are very resistant to digestion in the stomach and small intestine.  They arrive (and hang out) in the small intestine largely intact, and do some pretty dirty work there.  Lectins such as phytohaemagglutinin create damage to the wall of the small intestine (which increases gut permeability) and causes an imbalance of gut bacteria. P.S. Increased gut permeability is never a good thing.

If your gut integrity is compromised, that means that the immune tissue located in your gut is exposed to large amounts of potentially inflammatory substances, including those lectins. Regular exposure to lectins can promote inflammation in the digestive tract, but also elsewhere in the body (since those little buggers punched holes in your gut and can get virtually everywhere via your bloodstream). Long story short: the fewer intact foreign proteins (including lectins) circulating in your bloodstream, the better. Foreign proteins in your bloodstream cause systemic inflammation. Boooo.

The Wrap-Up

In summary, the claimed benefits of legumes aren’t quite what they’re heralded to be, and there are significant downsides to legume consumption. Yes, there are ways to make them “less bad”, but why work so hard to continue to eat things that in the end still aren’t that healthy?   While prolonged soaking, rinsing, cooking and fermenting legumes neutralizes some of the lectins, we still don’t think that they offer enough in terms of micronutrition (vitamins, minerals, and beneficial phytochemicals) to justify regular consumption. And while the jury may be out on the long-term effects of phytoestrogens, we recommend generally avoiding legumes as part of your healthy, Eat-Good-Food diet.