Living Longer with Legumes

For more than ten years, the US government has been trying, with the MyPlate campaign, to encourage Americans to put together healthy meals. A plate is used as a visual guide. Vegetables and whole grains should fill most of the plate, with fruit and proteins making up the rest. Legumes are handled separately because they belong to both the protein and the vegetable group.

Legumes are packed with protein, zinc, and iron, as you would expect from other protein sources like meat, yet they are naturally low in salt and saturated fat and contain no cholesterol at all. They are also bursting with the nutrients found in the plant kingdom, such as fiber, potassium, and folate, which makes beans a real bargain when you calculate nutrient density per dollar.

In Costa Rica, researchers found that people who ate beans daily had a 38 percent lower risk of heart attack than those who ate no beans, even after taking saturated fats and cholesterol into account—so it wasn’t just that the affected individuals ate beans instead of beefsteak. Randomized controlled trials dating back as much as 60 years show that cardiovascular risk factors such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and inflammation markers can usually be lowered in as little as four to eight weeks by simply consuming about a cup of legumes every day. In one study, two daily servings of beans, chickpeas, lentils, and split peas lowered cholesterol so far that many participants over age 50 fell out of the range in which statins are normally prescribed to lower cholesterol. Dozens of randomized controlled trials found that soy can lower cholesterol and blood pressure; in addition, compilations of more than 60 randomized controlled trials found that other kinds of beans also lower cholesterol and have positive effects on blood sugar and insulin levels. Despite overwhelming evidence, surveys show that most US citizens are not aware of these benefits. They don’t know what beans can do!

In some of these studies, meat was replaced with beans, making it impossible to distinguish which effect was caused by the lots of beans and which by the reduced meat consumption. Nevertheless, intervention studies that directly compare beans, chickpeas, or lentils with other healthy foods like whole grains show advantages in terms of cholesterol, blood pressure, and weight loss. One particularly revealing study had participants eat chickpeas in addition to their diet for five months, and the result was that total cholesterol on average dropped from levels normal for the Western world (about 206 mg/dl) to 160, which comes very close to the goal of under 150. Interestingly, this study was conducted in North India, where participants originally had average cholesterol values of 123. To study the effect of chickpeas, the test subjects first had to raise their cholesterol before the study with saturated fat to typical American values. It would be best to eat healthier in the first place—so why not start with hummus—meaning little saturated fat and lots of legumes?

Reversing Artery Disease with Beans

Legumes are not interchangeable. A Venn diagram of the phytochemicals in lentils, beans, soybeans, and chickpeas showed only a 7-percent overlap, so we should strive for variety. Because you can enjoy them in such a wide variety of ways, that’s easier than ever. Have you ever eaten pasta made from vegetables? If, instead of ordinary pasta, you choose noodles with 40 percent less durum wheat flour but with flour from sprouted chickpeas, artery function can improve significantly within just a few hours after the meal, by comparison.

Are the improvements we can achieve through eating legumes sufficient to actually reverse artery disease? Researchers examined the relationship between legumes and peripheral artery disease, which arises when atherosclerotic plaque forms in the vessels, reducing blood flow to the legs. The disease is diagnosed and monitored with the ankle-brachial index, the ratio of blood pressure at the ankle to blood pressure in the arm. If this value falls below 0.9, that is an indication of a blockage of blood flow in the lower abdomen. Scientists had 26 patients with peripheral artery disease eat a half serving daily of beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils for one week and then a full serving daily for seven weeks. After just two months of bean eating, the ankle-brachial index jumped into the normal range in four participants. The research team concluded that “a diet high in legumes can produce massive improvements in arterial function.” There was no control group in the study, but the condition of patients with peripheral artery disease generally worsens; it does not get better.

You may remember my personal story and still know that my grandmother suffered from this disease. Among other reasons, it put her in a wheelchair, waiting for death—until her life was saved by evidence-based nutrition. That is my inspiration to do for the families of all people what Nathan Pritikin did for mine. I dedicate my life to that.

Calm Your Palpitations

In chemistry and physics there are constants—physical quantities that are assumed to be both universal and unchanging. Biology, by contrast, was considered too complex and chaotic to be governed by simple laws of nature. In 1997, however, a theoretical high-energy physicist from Los Alamos and two biologists came together to formulate scaling laws that appeared to be universally valid. For example, the number of heartbeats in a lifetime is very similar whether you are a hamster or a whale. Mice, which generally live less than two years, have a heart rate of 500 to 600 beats per minute—up to ten per second. By comparison, the heart of a Galápagos giant tortoise beats 100 times more slowly, and such a tortoise lives about 100 times longer than a mouse.

The number of heartbeats in a mammal’s life is so remarkably constant that a research team posed the provocative question: Can human life be extended by lowering the average number of heartbeats? For further exploration of this question, watch my video see.nf/pulse, but it seems to come down to the fact that an accelerated heartbeat leads to earlier death. We should aim for a resting pulse of no more than 65 beats per minute, that is, about one heartbeat per second. Starting from 65 beats per minute, each increase of ten beats per minute at rest can mean a 10 to 20 percent higher risk of premature death. Men with no visible signs of heart disease who had a pulse of 90 had a fivefold higher risk of sudden cardiac death than those who were in the safe range of fewer than 60 beats per minute. A resting pulse around 90 beats per minute increases the risk of heart disease about as much as smoking. Fortunately, we can do something about it with legumes, as I show in my in-depth video see.nf/heartrate.