Beans may be the musical fruit but they are far more than that because a new study suggests that eating a few more beans along with the rest of the pulses (peas, chickpeas and lentils) can help you shed the kilos.
The word “pulse” comes from the Latin puls meaning thick soup and that is a clue to how we tend to use our pulses. Pulses are part of the legume family, but they are only the dried seed. The most common pulses are dried peas, beans, lentils and chickpeas. Pulses are very high in protein and fibre, and are low in fat. Like their cousins in the legume family, pulses are nitrogen-fixing crops that improve the environmental sustainability of annual cropping systems. Pulses are the good guys when it comes to food and according to a new study they are even better than we knew.
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For the study, these researchers looked at 21 clinical trials involving 940 subjects. The trials all compared the weight loss effects of diets containing pulses with diets that did not. Each trial lasted for a minimum of three weeks.
The compiled results showed that over a median length of six weeks people who consumed 130 grams of pulses a day had an average weight loss of 0.34kg. This was true when the subjects’ only dietary change was to add pulses to their daily diet. The reason for this may lie in what previous research has shown, which is that eating pulses increases feelings of fullness by around 31 per cent. Pulses also have a low glycaemic index, meaning that they are broken down slowly, and of course they have all the nutritional advantages mentioned above. So as well as losing weight you are being well nourished.
That has to be what you would call pulse-eating weight loss.
