Fast-track your beans for better nutrition

The World Health Organization estimates about 2 billion people around the world are deficient in key vitamins and minerals, including iron and zinc.

Beans are a versatile, inexpensive staple that can boost essential nutrients in a diet, but dry beans often take a long time to cook, which can be a deterrent. People with limited resources also often rely on burning wood, charcoal or other biofuels that can require a lot of time to gather or a relatively high percentage of their income.

For these reasons, faster-cooking beans would be a good dietary option, but whether they carry the same nutritional value as slower-cooking varieties was unknown. Karen A Cichy, from the US Department of Agriculture, and colleagues set out to test them.

The researchers analysed the nutritional value of 12 fast-, moderate- and slow-cooking dry bean cultivars from four classes: yellow, cranberry, light red kidney and red mottled. The speedier beans maintained higher protein and mineral content after they were prepared than the moderate- and slow-cooking varieties. For example, the fast-cooking yellow bean Cebo Cela contained 20% more protein, 10% more iron and 10% more zinc than the yellow bean Canario, which took twice as long to prepare. Further testing showed that the iron bioavailability — the amount that a person’s body would absorb — is also higher in the quicker-cooking beans in each of the four classes examined.

The study was published in the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.