A woman declaring “beans” as the solution to nearly every problem has created a viral flurry, partly for her delivery and partly for her message. Funnily enough, she’s actually right that eating beans can genuinely help with major life problems.
Britt, aka “BIG BRITT” on TikTok, started with a bold statement: “The answer to 90% of your problems is beans.” Then she gave a few examples:
“Oh my God, groceries are just so expensive! I need something more affordable–BEANS.“
“Oh my God, I just feel like no matter how much I eat—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—I’m still not full after I eat. BEANS.”
“Oh my God, I just eat so much junk food, I need to eat something that has better nutritional value—BEANS.”
After joking about beans being no help when “your baby daddy is acting up,” she summed up some of the virtues of the small but mighty bean. But there are even more problem-solving benefits she didn’t touch on.
Beans are good for your health
Britt is spot on when she says beans are high in nutrition and high in fiber. There’s a reason—several, actually—why UCLA Health calls beans “nature’s perfect food.”
First, the fiber. Only about 5% of Americans get the recommended amount of fiber. Low-fiber diets can affect cholesterol levels, constipation, gut flora, and more. With about 25% of your daily fiber needs met in just 1/2 cup, beans are a simple solution to the fiber problem.
Second, beans are a good source of plant-based protein. They’re high in potassium, copper, folic acid, iron, magnesium, and vitamin B6. UCLA Health says beans can help regulate blood sugar, keep you regular, protect against colon cancer, and aid in weight management. And replacing meat with beans can improve your heart health.
Beans are good for your finances
We’ve all felt the increase in our grocery bills over the past several years. Since we can’t do a whole lot about prices, adjusting our diets to eat cheaper foods can help us save money.
As Britt says, a can of beans is about 80 cents, which amounts to about two to three servings once you drain the liquid (which you should—we’ll get to that in a bit). So that’s 30 to 40 cents per serving for a source of protein. And if you buy them dry and cook them yourself, they’re even cheaper.
In fact, Protein Atlas ranked protein sources by cost, and beans are the clear winner. Their analysis puts chicken at nearly four times the cost of dried beans and beef somewhere between seven and 16 times the cost. So eating beans genuinely makes a difference if you eat meat regularly.
Beans are good for the environment
One thing Britt didn’t mention was beans as an answer to problems stemming from climate change. While they may not be as direct a solution to environmental problems as they are to health and financial ones, one could argue that eating beans is one solution to the environmental crisis.
Beans are a much more sustainable source of protein than meat, producing far fewer greenhouse gas emissions, using far less water, and taking up far less land than livestock.
According to Bastyr University, “Analyses by scientists show that switching out beef for beans would significantly reduce greenhouse gases,” and “Swapping beef for beans would especially lower methane and carbon dioxide emissions, two of the gases that have some of the worst impact on the atmosphere.”
Basically, to add to Britt’s list of examples: “Oh my God, the air is so smoky due to so many wildfires made worse by climate change—BEANS.“
What about farts? Solving the ‘beans make me gassy’ problem
Solving problems with beans is all well and good until you run up against the big problem they’re known to cause: gas.
Farting your way through solving problems isn’t exactly ideal, but there’s some hope here. Everyone and their grandma seems to have advice for making beans less farty. Still, the folks at Serious Eats tested a bunch of gas-reducing methods with help from Harvard University scientists. Here’s what they found: Rinsing canned beans definitely helps. A lot of the oligosaccharides in beans that cause flatulence reside in the liquid in which the beans are canned.
“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,” they write. “The liquid in the bean can has many more farts per gram than the beans themselves do.”
In their experiments, no specific method of cooking dry beans made any difference in fart potential. Not soaking for shorter or longer, not discarding the cooking water, not pressure-cooking, and not adding bay leaf or kombu. (In fact, adding bay leaf appeared to have the opposite effect in their experiment.)
Of course, you can always take a Beano pill, which contains a specific enzyme that helps break down the offending compounds to reduce or eliminate bean farts.
Beans won’t solve every problem we have, of course, but they honestly might solve more than we think.
