Best beans...

Cooking notes again...

What are the best beans based on nutrition?

 I enjoyed this article which appeared on FaceBook from TDVI (https://thisdishisvegetarian.com/about/)

Soybeans - top of the list?

Now we’re in the part of the list most “healthiest beans” articles quietly skip. Plain cooked soybeans carry the most protein of anything ranked here, a serious 16.9 grams, plus a field-leading 4.8 milligrams of iron and a 274.3 score, all per 100 grams. That’s not a nudge past the pantry beans. That’s a different weight class.

Simmer them into a Japanese-style nimono, fold them into a hearty stew, or blend them into a spread. They’re denser and richer than a standard pulse, so a smaller scoop goes further.

White Beans

Transparency note before the praise: the federal dataset doesn’t break out navy, Great Northern, or cannellini as separate beans. They’re all folded into one “white beans” bucket, so treat this as the whole white-bean family, not one specific variety.

As a group they’re a mineral powerhouse, topping the entire list on potassium at 497 milligrams, with a 222.6 score at 211 calories per 100 grams, measured from canned and reduced-sodium. Creamy, mild, endlessly useful. Smash cannellini into a Tuscan-style rosemary spread, or drop navy beans into a brothy soup with kale. This is the bean that makes cheap ingredients taste expensive.

Black Beans

If this were a fiber contest, we could stop right here. Black beans deliver the most fiber of anything on the list, a hefty 9.8 grams, next to a 218.5 score at 178 calories per 100 grams, measured from canned with fat. That fiber is a big reason a bowl of black beans and rice feels filling and steady instead of gone in twenty minutes.

Tacos, a smoky black bean soup, a burrito bowl with lime and cilantro. It’s the bean I reach for most, and the numbers say that instinct is fine.

Chickpeas

Hummus, falafel, the crunchy roasted snack you physically cannot stop eating. Chickpeas are the extrovert of the bean world, and they’ve got the numbers to back the confidence: a 217.1 score with a strong 162 micrograms of folate at 163 calories per 100 grams, measured from dried with no added fat.

They also hold their shape better than almost anything else, which is why they survive a hot oven and a long stew without dissolving. Roast them crisp with smoked paprika, blend them into hummus, or drop them whole into a coconut chickpea curry.

Pinto Beans

The soul of a burrito and the reason refried beans exist. Pintos score 213.6 with 152 micrograms of folate at 191 calories per 100 grams, measured from dried with a little fat. Nothing here spikes and nothing’s weak, which is exactly why they’re the default bean in so many kitchens. Mash them with cumin for tacos, or simmer a pot borracho-style with onions and peppers.

Lentils

Not technically a bean to a botanist. Absolutely a bean to anyone standing in a kitchen, so they’re staying.

Here’s their case. Among the beans here that aren’t soy, lentils lead on iron at 3.3 milligrams, and they pull it off at just 115 calories, the lowest of anything ranked here, measured from dried with no added fat. Add 171 micrograms of folate and a 210.9 score and you’ve got the efficiency winner, big nutrition for a small calorie footprint.

Red lentils melt into a silky dal. French green lentils hold their shape for a warm salad with roasted vegetables and feta. Same aisle, two completely different textures.

Black-Eyed Peas

The good-luck bean. New Year’s Day, a pot of Hoppin’ John, the whole superstition. Their real headline is folate, 184 micrograms, one of the highest here, wrapped around a 205.0 score at 166 calories per 100 grams from dried. They cook fast and stay a little firm, so they shine in a cold marinated salad with diced tomato, red onion, and vinaigrette that only gets better the next day.

Kidney Beans

The classic chili bean, and also the one on this list that comes with a real safety asterisk when it’s raw or undercooked.

Kidney beans score 192.8 at 177 calories per 100 grams, measured from dried with fat added. Cooked properly they’re a workhorse. Raw or undercooked, they’re a different story, and this is the one safety fact I want everyone to walk away with.

The one bean warning worth knowing: Raw kidney beans carry a natural toxin called phytohaemagglutinin (PHA). Food-safety authorities including the FDA note that raw beans hold far more of it than fully boiled ones, and eating even a small handful of raw or undercooked beans can trigger nausea and vomiting within a few hours.

The fix is easy: give them a hard, rolling boil before you do anything else. And skip cooking dried kidney beans in a slow cooker on their own, because it may never get hot enough to knock the toxin out. Canned beans are already fully cooked, so none of this applies to them.

Once they’re properly cooked, load them into a three-bean chili or a rajma over rice and forget the drama entirely.

Split Peas

Bottom of the list, and I’ll defend them anyway. A score of 152.9 sounds like a loss until you remember these turn into dinner for about a dollar a bag. Measured from dried with a little fat, they run 168 calories per 100 grams and stick to your ribs.

They fall apart when you cook them. That’s the point. Simmer them with smoked paprika and a bay leaf, or push them into a thick dal over rice.

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Why beans make you gassy (and the actual fix)

Time for the question everyone’s too polite to ask out loud.

Beans are high in a fiber-type carb called GOS (galacto-oligosaccharides). Your small intestine can’t break it down, so it travels to your colon, where gut bacteria ferment it and produce gas. That’s the whole mechanism. It’s not a flaw in you, it’s chemistry.

The easiest fix costs nothing: drain and rinse your canned beans, and toss the soaking water from dried ones. Ditching that liquid carries off a meaningful share of the GOS, which is often enough to take the edge off. Building up your bean intake slowly helps too. If beans reliably wreck you no matter what, that’s worth asking your doctor about rather than something a food article should diagnose. 

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Edamame

Yep. The bar snack. The thing you squeeze out of the pod and eat by the fistful is the healthiest bean on this entire board.

Edamame tops the ranking at 287.8, clear of every classic pantry bean, and its standout number is folate at a huge 286 micrograms, far above the rest of the field. All that for 140 calories per 100 grams cooked.

And you basically can’t overthink it. Steam the pods, hit them with flaky salt, eat. Or shell them into a grain bowl, a stir-fry, or a bright edamame and mint smash on toast.

The tastiest bean to eat mindlessly is also the one that wins on paper. That almost never happens.

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I left out a few beans that I don't eat myself. After all, this blog is a reference that I hope will be around when I forget these details. I did edit the original article.

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Written bySarah Rose Levy Covering vegetarian food, restaurants, and grocery finds across the U.S.

Pardon me, I'll be in the kitchen

 

I  haven't had a slow cooker in a while. Then Prime did it's special sales days, and I had a gift certificate which covered all but $3 of this gadget. Now I even have a pressure cooker, which can make yogurt too. Thanks to family who really gave it to me as a birthday present.

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I had a great talk with our new UU minister, Rev. Jamie Boyce. It was kind of personal, but also I needed to find some helpers, so she channeled me towards the right people. I think I'd rather try a new mechanic for my old car based on their recommendations rather than FaceBook.

Nobel winners find light responsive cells in algae that may help brains

I find some science interesting to consider, from a creative viewpoint. I've been having some eye difficulty, and have a friend with another eye problem. Just saying, I'm interested in vision in a new way these days. So this article caught my attention. 

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 How pond algae led to a Nobel prize and a new way to study the brain

Published: October 5, 2026 in The Conversation

Scientists who worked out how to control brain cells with light have won this year’s Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel were honoured for their research into “light-gated ion channels and optogenetics”.

Peter Hegemann, at Humboldt University of Berlin, and Georg Nagel, at the University of Würzburg, wanted to understand how a tiny, single-celled alga called Chlamydomonas senses light. Light-sensing is not unique to animals with eyes: organisms throughout the living world use light to detect their surroundings and respond to changes in their environment. Even single-cell organisms have proteins that respond to light. These proteins are used to move towards or away from light, to generate energy and to respond to the various demands of a 24-hour day.

Hegemann and Nagel discovered that Chlamydomonas has a beautifully ingenious mechanism of light detection that relies on a single protein called channelrhodopsin.

Channelrhodopsin is built into the outer membrane of the algal cell. Part of the protein faces the water outside the cell and part faces the inside. The protein also contains a small molecule called retinaldehyde, which is able to absorb light.

When light hits the retinaldehyde inside channelrhodopsin, it changes shape. This makes the channelrhodopsin protein change shape too. That change opens a tiny passage through the cell membrane. Positively charged particles, including sodium, can then flow from the water outside the alga into the cell. This movement of charged particles sends a signal inside the alga that helps it swim.

How fantastic to have solved such an interesting biological question, but why the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine? The answer lies in the way nerve cells work. Nerve cells use the movement of charged particles (called “ions”) across their membranes to control their activity. When positively charged particles flow into a nerve cell, they can make it more active.

The researchers realised that if they could put channelrhodopsin into nerve cells, they might be able to switch those cells on simply by shining a light on them. That is exactly what Hegemann, Nagel and the third Nobel-prize winner, Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and bioengineer at Stanford University in California, went on to do.

Switching on nerve cells with light

The ability to control nerve cells with light is called optogenetics. It has become a powerful research tool because scientists can use it to switch specific groups of nerve cells on and off and see what happens.

First, scientists deliver the gene for channelrhodopsin to the nerve cells they want to study. The gene is usually carried into the cells by a virus that has been altered so that it cannot cause disease. The cells then make the channelrhodopsin protein, which makes them respond to light.

In animals such as mice, scientists can shine light into the brain through a thin optical fibre. When the light reaches the cells, channelrhodopsin opens and the cells become active. Nearby nerve cells that do not contain the protein are unaffected.

Light can be aimed at a very small part of the brain and switched on and off extremely quickly. This makes optogenetics a powerful way to investigate how the brain works. For example, if scientists want to know whether a particular group of nerve cells is involved in memory, sleep, sensation or movement, say, they can switch those cells on with light and see what happens.

In one experiment in 2012, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave mice a mild electric shock in a particular cage. They used optogenetics to tag the nerve cells in the brain’s memory centre that were active during that the fear-conditioning experiment. Days later, in a different cage, they switched those cells on with light. The mice froze in fear, as if they remembered the shock.

Mice that were not shocked did not freeze, which showed that the light was reactivating a specific memory. Deisseroth was one of the study’s authors.

Optogenetics has transformed scientists’ ability to investigate how the brain and nervous system work. It may also have a future as a treatment. Optogenetics is already in early-stage clinical trials for people with retinal degeneration. In these trials, researchers introduce light-sensitive proteins into nerve cells that remain in the retina after the cells that normally detect light – called rods and cones – have been lost. This can make surviving cells respond to light and restore some vision.

Researchers are also investigating whether optogenetics could eventually be used to treat neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s and epilepsy.

This year’s Nobel prize celebrates work that started with a question that may sound esoteric: how do Chlamydomonas swim toward light? This question has no obvious practical importance. It doesn’t address an urgent need in human health, nor is it a clear route to riches. The success of optogenetics is an illustration of the importance of continuing to ask questions simply to understand the world around us because it’s impossible to predict where knowledge will take us.

Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, winners of the 2026 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. 

Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach, CC BY

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Just moving

 I'm enjoying thinking about an article I recently read, so here's an excerpt...

A question I’ve been exploring for most of my life is: what changes when we move our spirituality, or let movement become our spiritual practice? In this essay I offer some characteristics of a moving spirituality that I explored in my PhD and later in my book Dancing in the Muddy Temple: A Moving Spirituality of Land and Body.

Dove in the Branches. Image by Andy Murray

Movement is about Connection & Transformation

First of all, movement adds a different language for encountering the sacred. It’s not just ‘sitting still and emptying the mind’, or ‘dancing ecstatically’ (did you know that ecstasy means something like ‘having the god within’?).

Instead, it is a way of searching for and communicating with the layers of the seen and unseen world.… Recently I even start to see it as a way of encountering the mystery in the space between, between objects, emotions and thoughts.

Movement strengthens an immanent (instead of transcendent) spirituality that is expressed in our living, breathing body. Instead of still form mediation while the mind travels, movement mobilises our spine, (called the ‘Hollow Bone’ in some traditions), to enable receiving divine wisdom. Instead of consciousness travelling outward, beyond the corporeality of the body, we draw it in, and ‘wake up’ inside this interior reality where we are a spirit in a body. That way, we can experience the divine with literally just a movement away.

Movement also offers a way of ‘transforming’ states on the plains of the body, heart, mind and consciousness. A simple breathing exercise or repetitive gesture can help to transform different emotions. It’s like we are giving clear ‘direction’ to meditation in this way, by gently swaying from side to side, or calming our mental activity with a grounding movement from up to down. The combination of moving the spine in conjunction with conscious breathing seems to reset the nervous system more effectively than anything I know. 

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 From Feminism in Religion, by Eileen Kieft

You may have read several years ago when I enjoyed practicing Feldenkrais movements. Slow and minimal body gestures and postures were different but somewhat like yoga...but mainly the awareness one gained was a big part of it. Muscle memories are wonderful.

I even remember some of the Tai Chi that I learned years ago.

This morning I watched a jogger running down the street below my apartment. I haven't ever been interested in that practice myself, but watch the rhythm of motion that those people enjoy.

Yes, movement and meditation are really great.

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Joy is our birthright. Each and every one of us, especially those of us who have been conditioned to feel unworthy of it.

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