Beans and lentils: tinned beats dried, and not for the reason you think

Legumes are the cheapest protein a fighter can buy and the food most likely to be removed for the wrong reason.

They also carry more fibre per 100 grams than anything else on this site, which makes them excellent in week six and impossible in week 12.

What they actually are

Beans, lentils, chickpeas and split peas differ from chicken: they are a protein and a carbohydrate arriving together, and treating them as either one alone leads to a mistake.

Dry legumes run somewhere between 17 and 30 percent protein depending on type, which is high for a plant food and considerably better than any grain.

They are also rich in lysine, the amino acid that wheat, rice, corn and oats are short of. That is the entire basis of the beans-and-rice tradition: legumes cover what cereals lack.

What legumes are short of, in turn, is methionine and cysteine, the sulphur-containing amino acids, and tryptophan. Grains carry more of those. The two complete each other, which is why the combination appears independently in the cooking of half the world.

One correction, the same one made under quinoa. The old rule that complementary proteins had to be eaten at the same meal has been relaxed. Across a day is sufficient.

Rice at lunch and lentils at dinner works.

The fibre, which is the whole story

Nothing else here is in that range.

In ordinary camp that fibre is doing useful work. It slows digestion, feeds gut bacteria, improves satiety in a deficit, and is one of the reasons legumes fill you up at a cost most foods cannot match.

In the final days it is the single largest source of residue you could put on a plate, and legumes sit firmly on the remove side of the low residue list.

There is no version of a bean that works in fight week. Not tinned, not soaked, not blended into hummus. This is one of the few foods here where the answer is simply no.

The gas problem, and the solution nobody expects

People avoid legumes because of what happens 3 hours later, and nutrition has nothing to do with it.

The specific culprits are galacto-oligosaccharides, a class of fermentable carbohydrate. Humans lack the enzyme to break them down, so they arrive intact in the large intestine, where bacteria ferment them and produce gas.

For dried legumes the equivalent is soaking for 12 to 24 hours, discarding the soaking water entirely, then cooking in fresh water until very soft. Discarding that water too helps further.

So the fighter who buys dried beans because they seem less processed, soaks them for an hour and cooks them in the soaking water, has chosen the version most likely to cause the problem he then blames on beans.

Portions, and individual tolerance

Tolerance varies enormously between people, and it is not something to reason about in the abstract.

As a rough starting point for somebody who has had trouble: tinned lentils are generally the best tolerated, with around half a cup manageable for most.

Chickpeas and butter beans are usually tolerated at smaller portions, around a quarter of a cup.

Those are starting points for somebody with a problem, not targets for somebody without one. A fighter who eats beans without difficulty has no reason to measure them.

Tolerance also builds with regular exposure. Somebody who eats legumes rarely and then has a large portion will have a worse time than somebody eating them several times a week.

Reintroducing gradually works better than deciding after one bad evening that they do not agree with you.

What they give you

Per half cup of tinned lentils, roughly 9 grams of protein, 8 grams of fibre, and a substantial share of daily folate.

Alongside that, meaningful iron, magnesium, potassium and B vitamins, and a form of starch that digests slowly.

The iron is worth a note. It is non-haem iron, absorbed far less efficiently than the iron in red meat, and absorption improves considerably alongside vitamin C.

That is a practical reason to have tomato or citrus in a lentil dish rather than a nutritional footnote.

Which legume for which job

For a fighter with limited time and limited money, red lentils and tinned chickpeas cover most of what this page describes.

The cost argument, which is the strongest one

Dried lentils and beans are among the cheapest sources of protein available anywhere in the world, by a wide margin.

A kilogram of dried lentils costs a fraction of a kilogram of chicken breast and provides a comparable quantity of protein, alongside carbohydrate that would otherwise have been bought separately.

The trade is protein quality, digestibility and volume. You eat more food for the same protein, and some of that protein is less well used than an equivalent amount from animal sources.

For somebody with money, that trade is not worth making as a default. For somebody without, legumes are the difference between hitting a protein target and not, and no amount of theoretical superiority in chicken helps a fighter who cannot afford it.

Cooking in batches

Dried legumes are one of the few foods where cooking a large quantity at once genuinely pays, because the cooking time is the obstacle rather than the effort.

Cooked legumes keep 3 to 4 days refrigerated, the same window as everything else here, and they freeze considerably better than rice or potato. Portions frozen flat in bags thaw quickly and lose nothing.

A practical routine: cook a large batch at the weekend, refrigerate 3 days' worth, freeze the rest in portions. That converts the longest-cooking food in the cupboard into one of the fastest.

Two notes. Salt added early was long said to toughen beans, and that has not held up well; acid does slow softening, so tomato goes in near the end rather than the start. And a pressure cooker reduces the time by a factor of three or four, which is the single largest practical improvement available if you eat them often.

The antinutrient question

Legumes carry phytates and lectins, and both attract more concern online than they warrant.

Phytates bind minerals and reduce absorption. Soaking, cooking and sprouting all reduce them, and in a varied diet the practical effect is small.

Hummus, and what is actually in it

Worth separating because it is the form most fighters eat chickpeas in.

Shop-bought hummus is chickpeas, tahini and oil, and the oil is where the calories are. A hundred grams commonly carries 250 to 300 calories, most of it fat, which makes it a fat-containing dip rather than a protein food.

Not a criticism. A correction to the idea that hummus is a light option, which it is not.

And it carries the same fibre as the chickpeas it was made from, which puts it on the wrong side of the line in the final days along with everything else here.

In a plant-based camp

For a fighter eating no animal products, legumes stop being optional and become the structural centre of the diet.

Everything on this page still applies, and the fibre load becomes a daily consideration rather than an occasional one. The volume of food required to hit a protein target from legumes alone is substantial, and the fibre arriving with it is the practical constraint.

The specific problems and the ways round them are set out under plant-based fighters. The summary is that it is workable and takes more planning than most people expect.

A note on soy

Soy sits apart from the rest of this page because it is the one legume with a complete amino acid profile, comparable to animal protein rather than complementary to grains.

Tofu, tempeh and edamame are therefore in a different category, and for a fighter eating no meat they do work that lentils cannot.

Firm tofu is worth knowing about for a reason specific to this site: it is considerably lower in fibre than every other food on this page, which makes it one of the few plant proteins that does not automatically fall off the plate in the final days.

Not fibre-free, and closer to workable than a bean.

The question of soy, hormones and male athletes comes up constantly, and the short version is that the concern is not supported at normal dietary intakes.

Where it sits by phase

Rinse the tin, throw the soaking water away

• They are a protein and a carbohydrate at once. Count them as both.
• Tinned beats dried for comfort, and rinsing the tin beats not rinsing it. If you use dried, soak them long and throw the water away.
• If they disagree with you, build tolerance gradually rather than concluding after one evening.
• Have something with vitamin C alongside them for the iron.
• Out completely in the final days, and out earlier than most things, because nothing here carries more fibre.
• And if money is the constraint, this is the page that solves it. Nothing else gives you protein at that price.