Are Legumes Fattening? [Can You Live Off of Beans]

While fat has been reviled (at least in the United States and other Western nations) since the 1960s, many have recently come around to the fact that fat is a required macronutrient in the human diet.

At the same time, since individuals rely on legumes for basic sustenance, they may ask whether beans are a good source of healthful fat.

Are Legumes High in Fat?

A comparison of five widely consumed varieties of legumes is shown in the table below:

Observe how low in fat black beans, lentils, and chickpeas are.

These foods’ caloric value is mostly derived from carbs.

Carbohydrates, for example, account for 76% of the calories in a cup of cooked black beans.

They also have some protein in them (I.e., there are 14.2 grams of protein in a cup of cooked black beans).

Soybeans, on the other hand, include a more balanced nutritional profile.

Soybeans provide 296 calories per cup cooked. Protein accounts for 37% of these calories, carbohydrates for 20%, and fat for 44%.

The nutritional makeup of peanuts differs much more dramatically. A cup of dry roasted peanuts has 857 calories. Protein accounts for 14% of these calories, carbohydrates for 15%, and fat accounts for 71%.

Since fat comprises 9 calories per gram, this explains why peanuts have a substantially greater calorie load than low-fat legumes.

According to the NCCDB database, monounsaturated fat accounts for more than half of the fat content in peanuts, with the remainder being polyunsaturated or saturated. Because of their typically favorable influence on cardiovascular disease risk factors such as LDL and triglycerides, monounsaturated fats are commonly considered as good fats.

Yet, it is crucial to remember that even good fats include a lot of calories.

If you want to lose weight, you must limit your calorie consumption.

This entails being mindful of your portion size anytime you consume peanuts or peanut butter, as well as other high fat and high carb items.

The fact that some fats are categorized as healthy does not imply that you should consume them with abandon and expect to lose weight!

One of the most significant benefits of beans and rice is their low cost, which explains why they feed so much of the globe.

Eating rice and beans together is a long-standing custom in many cultures, so craving rice and beans is nearly genetic.

Rice and beans, typically accompanied with hot tortillas, sour cream and cheese, and freshly produced pico de gallo, may be found at the heart of many tables where family and friends gather to enjoy meals all over the globe.

With our often excessively reductionist thinking and inclination to limit the advantages of food to its macronutrient composition, we frequently overlook this aspect of food and nutrition in our contemporary society.

Food is much more than just vitamins, minerals, and protein.

Beans and rice recipes have long served as a means of connecting us with our family, friends, and cultures.

As compared to rice, beans are the more nutritionally dense food.

In terms of macronutrients, rice is mostly carbohydrate, but beans offer protein in addition to carbohydrates. Please see the table below:

Beans and rice are both low in micronutrients, however beans are the more nutritious of the two.

White rice has trace quantities of B vitamins and minerals (such as manganese), but black beans include much more folate and a greater level of certain minerals (like phosphorus).

Additionally, beans contain more fiber and therefore decrease the release of carbohydrates into the circulation, which may improve blood sugar regulation, which is important to consider when taking a meal heavy in carbs, such as rice and beans.

Carbohydrates are the principal macronutrients given by beans and grains.

Carbohydrates are beneficial as an energy source for people if you have well-functioning hormones that can utilise them effectively.

Yet, carbohydrates are not as necessary to the human diet as protein and fat are.

Protein is required for the maintenance, repair, and construction of almost every structure in the human body.

Fats are required for the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, the formation and maintenance of cells, and the maintenance of brain function.

Carbohydrates, on the other hand, are interchangeable and, from a physiological standpoint, are not required.

Since neither beans nor rice supply the fundamental quantity of essential fatty acids required to sustain health, they fall short if used as your only source of nourishment.

Beans certainly give some protein, but you’d have to consume at least 2-3 times more beans than rice to receive even the basic minimum of protein required to prevent sickness.

In addition, many impoverished people depend on beans and rice as staple meals since they are inexpensive and widely available in many regions of the globe.

Yet beans are generally the more costly of the two meals, so what many people do is eat more rice and fewer beans.

This is problematic since it considerably dilutes the meal’s already meager nutritional content.

It’s difficult to establish a hard and fast guideline for how long you could live on beans alone.

In reality, the world record for the longest time spent without food is 382 days, so if you had a big quantity of fat stored in your body, you could conceivably live for an extended period of time consuming nothing or just beans (its important to note that the record-breaking fast was carried out under medical supervision, and the subject also consumed vitamins and minerals during his fast).

It is, nevertheless, critical to differentiate between flourishing and just surviving.

If you are lucky enough to be able to buy, hunt, harvest, or otherwise get food, your objective should be to flourish rather than just survive.

You will not flourish if you simply consume beans for a few days.

If I had to consume just one sort of food for the rest of my life, it would be beef.

There are an increasing number of individuals who prefer to eat this way and seem to be not just surviving but flourishing, even after eating exclusively beef on a regular basis for many years.

As previously stated, the necessary macronutrients for humans are protein and fat, both of which are abundant in beef.

Beef also contains B vitamins, choline, and a variety of minerals such as phosphorus, potassium, and zinc.

It also contains important fatty acids, such as omega-3 lipids.

Beef contains nutrients that are highly accessible and so utilised effectively in the body.

Beef is also simple to digest for the average individual.

Tel Aviv University in Israel researchers gathered several lines of evidence from various disciplines of study and utilized this to recreate the diet of Stone Age people.

Based on this reconstruction, the researchers hypothesized that Stone Age people subsisted mostly on meat (most likely the flesh of huge creatures such as mammoths) and nothing else.

Personally, if I had to limit my diet to just one item for the remainder of my life, I believe I would have the greatest chance of survival if I followed the diet of our Stone Age predecessors.

True, beef is lower in some micronutrients, including vitamins A and C, as well as several minerals, and I’m not sure how long it would take for these deficits to start affecting my health.

I may not survive on a single meal, but if I had no other option, I feel ruminant animal flesh (i.e., beef) would be my greatest chance of survival, if not flourishing.