Buzz
Beans, beans, the musical fruit. The more you consume, the more you toot. However, don’t place the blame entirely on the beans themselves. The real culprit is the swarm of tiny creatures living in your gut.
After you chew a serving of barbecue baked beans into a fine paste in your mouth and stomach, it travels to the small intestine. This organ serves as a molecular processing plant, where digestive enzymes break down your meal into usable components. Proteins become peptides and amino acids, fats are turned into fatty acids and glycerol, and some carbohydrates break down into simple sugars. These nutrients are then absorbed through the intestinal wall, fueling your body.
Beans don’t get processed as smoothly as other foods, though.
The natural sweetness of beans comes from a group of sugars known as oligosaccharides (some of the more common ones found in beans are raffinose and stachyose, which sound like names of forgotten Musketeers). These sugars are large, cumbersome molecules that are too big to pass through the intestinal walls on their own, and our digestive enzymes lack the proper tools to break them down into smaller, digestible components. So these sugars make it through the small intestine undisturbed, traveling into the large intestine unscathed.
This is where their journey ends, as they meet your 700+ species of bacteria that reside in your lower gut. These bacteria, equipped to handle this hearty meal and always eager to finish off your leftovers, begin to digest the sugars. During this process, they release gases like hydrogen and methane. The resulting gas builds up and eventually escapes your body as a fart, which you may or may not choose to blame on the dog.
Not all organisms face this issue with oligosaccharides. Some fungi have the necessary enzymes to break them down. These enzymes can be easily extracted and are often used in gas-reducing supplements. Beano, the most popular of these, contains the enzyme alpha galactosidase, derived from the fungus Aspergillus niger. If you take a tablet before eating, the enzyme breaks down those large sugars into smaller, digestible sugars like sucrose, glucose, and fructose, giving your body what it needs and preventing the performance associated with the musical fruit.
