Good News for Bean Lovers

A British agricultural consultant has come up with a new type of bean that reportedly doesn’t cause gas. That’s good news for people who know that eating beans gives them a good case of the whiz-bangs.

Here’s why beans give people gas: the complex sugars found in beans (carbohydrates or starches known as disaccharides) are too large to pass through the walls of our small intestine, and our body doesn’t produce an enzyme that can break them down.

This forces the body to move the beans through our large intestine, where they’re eaten – literally – by hundreds of bacteria species that live there.

The bacteria produce carbon dioxide and methane as they break the foodstuffs down. As those gasses build up, they’re passed out of the body in the form of breaking wind.