The Hispanic Paradox

Beans—A Matter of the Heart

Unfortunately, only every 25th American eats anywhere close to a serving of legumes a day. Why aren’t more people loudly demanding their beans? Some are afraid of gas. “Every little bean makes a little tootin’,” as the saying goes, but isn’t that just hot air? A randomized controlled crossover study tested this hypothesis and concluded: “Concerns regarding excessive flatulence after bean consumption may be exaggerated.”

The study participants were randomized and ate pinto beans, black-eyed peas, or vegetarian white baked beans in separate trials. In the first week, 35 percent of participants had gas, but by the third week it was only 15 percent, in the fifth week 5 percent, and in the eighth week 3 percent. Beans may have gotten their bad reputation from short-term studies in the 1960s that did not take our bodies’ capacity for adaptation into account.

Most people who eat a lot of fiber do not seem to have significantly greater problems with gas over the long term. “If you add more beans and higher-fiber foods to your diet,” writes the Harvard Health Letter, “a little extra flatulence may be a sign that you are eating the right thing!” The indigestible sugar from beans that makes it all the way down into the colon may function as a prebiotic substance that feeds the good bacteria and makes the gut healthier.

Part of the problem may sit between our ears. Prejudices about beans may be so strong that the expectation of being gassy gives us the impression of being gassy. Studies show: If you eat something that is said to have an ingredient that could cause intestinal problems, the intestinal problems occur—regardless of whether the ingredient in question is actually present. In other words, simply believing you are eating something that causes gas makes us think we have more gas. Don’t let the farto-placebo effect keep you from eating healthier.

The Hispanic Paradox

The positive effect of beans could also explain the so-called Hispanic Paradox. Despite a socioeconomic framework that generally results in poor health, such as less education and less adequate health care, and although they are more often affected by poverty, Hispanic Americans tend to live longer than other ethnic groups in the United States. Hispanics have a 24 percent lower risk of dying prematurely from 9 of the 15 top causes of death, especially from heart disease and cancer. For more on this topic, see see.nf/hispanic.

In a study with Mexican Americans, researchers observed that compared to other groups, they not only eat more beans, but also more fruits and vegetables, including tomatoes and corn. (This healthy diet extends down into Central America. After rice and beans, corn tortillas are the most common food in the Blue Zone of Costa Rica.) People there also eat more chili. Can chili spice up longevity?

Bring on the Chili!

The heat in chili can extend the lifespan of fruit flies, but can it do that for us, too? For details, watch my two videos see.nf/spicy and see.nf/peppers, which go together. In brief: Four studies on spicy food and mortality agreed that in people who ate more hot chili, mortality and overall risk of death were significantly lower. On the subject of fat burners in my book How Not to Diet, I wrote an entire subchapter about chili in which I discuss how cayenne pepper can counteract the slowdown of metabolism during weight loss and, beyond that, can accelerate fat burning, but the benefit of chili for a long life remains even when the result is adjusted for body mass index.

On the U.S. market, there are at least a half dozen hot sauces without added salt. Even Tabasco is relatively low in salt, though only the original. (Imitations contain up to five times more salt.) You can also just add chili powder. I keep different varieties at home for every occasion in multiple shakers, for example chipotle, jalapeños, and crushed Thai chili when I want it really hot.

The Mediterranean Diet

Two of the world’s Blue Zones, the islands of Ikaria and Sardinia, lie in the Mediterranean, the origin of the Mediterranean diet, about which Jeremiah Stamler, the “father of preventive cardiology,” once wrote: “You hear nothing but uncritical approval.” Is the hype justified?

Club Med

More than a dozen countries border the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean diet refers to what was eaten more than half a century ago on the Greek island of Crete. After World War II, the Greek government asked the Rockefeller Foundation to come to the country and assess postwar conditions. The nutrition scientist Ancel Keys—after whom the daily “K-rations” for American soldiers are named—was impressed by the low rate of heart disease in the area, so he initiated his famous Seven Countries Study, a long-term study of diet and cardiovascular disease in men in seven regions of the world. The research team led by Keys found that the number of fatal heart disease cases among men on Crete was 20 times lower than in the United States, and that it also had the fewest cancer cases and the lowest overall mortality. What was eaten there? More than 90 percent plants, which explains why coronary heart disease was so rare. Rare, except among a small elite of the wealthy, whose dietary pattern differed from that of the general population—they ate meat every day instead of once every one or two weeks.

The main feature of the Mediterranean diet is that it consists primarily of plants, along with little meat and dairy products, for Dr. Keys the “most villainous scoundrels in the diet” because they contain so much saturated fat. Unfortunately, very few people eat in such a traditionally Mediterranean way anymore, even in the Mediterranean region. Coronary heart disease cases shot up dramatically on Crete within a few decades, which is attributed to the increasing consumption of meat and cheese that displace plant foods.

So although the Mediterranean diet is on everyone’s lips, that is only metaphorical, not literal. When people think of Italian food, they often think of pizza or spaghetti with meatballs. “Italian restaurants boast of the healthy Mediterranean diet,” wrote Dr. Keys, “but serve a caricature of it.” How are you supposed to study this diet if no one follows it anymore?