I eat quite a lot of legumes these days. But put me in front of a supermarket wall of kidney beans, chickpeas, lentils, cannellini beans and half a dozen varieties I barely recognise, and I still have a nagging sense that there must be a right one to buy.
What I cook depends more on what happens to be sitting in my kitchen cabinets than any culinary vision.
I couldn’t have given you a confident explanation of why cannellini beans should go into one dish and borlotti beans into another. I’m better at it now, after writing this article, but I’m certainly not about to challenge an Italian grandmother to a bean identification contest.
Last week, we made the case for eating more legumes, particularly when they replace foods such as red and processed meat or eggs.
Those eating the most had a 4–6% lower risk of dying prematurely from any cause. And the figures were substantially bigger when legumes replaced red or processed meat or eggs: estimated reductions of 7–10% in all-cause mortality, 12–23% in cardiovascular disease and 12–14% in type 2 diabetes.
So this week, let’s deal with the obvious next question: if you’re going to eat more of them, which should you choose?
Surely one bean is healthier than the others?
I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time comparing beans, and what I’ve found makes bean shopping easier.
Calories, protein and fibre: a surprisingly flat playing field
I checked the nutritional questions people most commonly search for about legumes online. The big three were overwhelmingly calories, protein and fibre.
Let’s start with calories, because this one can be disposed of fairly quickly.
Across the cooked legumes I compared, most fell into a fairly narrow range of roughly 105–140kcal per 100g. That’s 3.5oz, or a little less than half a cup.
We’re not comparing cucumber with cheesecake here, so I wouldn’t choose tonight’s dinner on the basis of these differences.
Protein is a little less uniform, but only a little.
Lentils and borlotti, or cranberry, beans do particularly well, with split peas also towards the top of the pack. If you’re deliberately trying to squeeze a little more protein into your diet, that’s worth knowing.
So, a few pull ahead, but the whole field is fairly tightly bunched. Lentils may win, but not by enough to plan your shopping list around them.
Fibre tells much the same story.
Again, lentils, borlotti beans and split peas sit towards the top, but they’re not in a different nutritional universe from everything else.
There is an important caveat here. When I compared several nutrition databases while preparing these figures, the values for individual legumes differed more than I’d expected. Variety, origin and preparation are all likely reasons.
So don’t get too attached to the precise rankings. The numbers vary between sources, but the overall pattern is consistent. All the legumes I looked at are nutritionally substantial.
Beyond protein and fibre
Protein and fibre get most of the attention, but legumes also bring a useful package of vitamins and minerals. Across the group, you’ll find folate, iron, magnesium, potassium, copper and manganese, alongside very little saturated fat, but there’s no clear winner.
One practical detail to keep in mind is that the iron in legumes is non-haem, which means it’s not as easily absorbed as the iron in meat. If legumes are becoming an important source of iron in your diet, pairing them with vitamin C-rich foods such as tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, or citrus is an easy habit to build into your meals and boosts absorption.
But the useful nutritional unit is still legumes as a food group, rather than whichever bean happens to edge ahead on this week’s spreadsheet.
Dried or canned?
There is, however, one choice in the bean aisle where the nutritional difference becomes a little more apparent.
Dried versus canned.
I prefer beans I’ve cooked from dried. The texture is usually better, and I think they taste better too. My problem is planning.
Quite often I’ll find myself with some unexpected time to cook, but without the time machine required to travel back to the previous evening and tell myself to soak the beans.
Since I was writing about beans, I wanted to find out whether dried and canned are nutritionally equivalent.
Fortunately, a group of French researchers compared beans that had been soaked and boiled with canned versions. The canned beans generally contained somewhat less of several measured nutrients, with protein reductions of around 17–30% in their comparisons.
Some nutrients are lost during processing, and some leach into the liquid in the can. Canning also reduced phytate and lectin in the researchers’ analysis, and that’s a good thing.
Does that 17–30% protein difference matter?
For many readers, probably not much. If beans are one of several protein sources, I’d be reluctant to turn this into yet another dietary optimisation project.
It becomes more relevant if legumes are doing a lot of your protein heavy lifting. That might include someone eating a predominantly plant-based diet, particularly later in life when protein requirements are higher. In that situation, getting more protein from the same volume of food can make life easier.
So dried beans get a modest gold star.
However, convenience counts. If dried beans mean that you cook beans twice a month while canned beans mean you eat them several times a week, I wouldn’t lose a moment’s sleep over the difference.
Use dried when you have the time and prefer them. Keep canned beans around for the evenings when yesterday’s soaking plan somehow failed to materialise.
Preparing dried beans safely
There is one aspect of dried-bean preparation that isn’t just culinary fussiness.
They need to be cooked properly.
Raw and undercooked beans can contain enough lectins to make you distinctly unwell - plants use them to deal with pesky insects. Heat deals with the problem, but recommendations vary on exactly how much preparation is required.
WHO guidance recommends soaking dried beans for 12 hours and boiling them for at least 10 minutes. FDA guidance recommends soaking for at least 5 hours and boiling them for at least 30 minutes, while also noting that around 10 minutes of boiling is sufficient to inactivate lectins.
Essentially, soak dried beans (usually overnight), then give them a proper boil.
Don’t put raw soaked beans straight into a slow cooker and assume that several hours of gentle warmth will do the same job. Some slow cookers may not get hot enough.
Canned beans have already been thoroughly heat-treated, so you don’t need to worry about this when opening a tin.
What about baked beans and hummus?
For anyone who’s not yet enthusiastically simmering lentils on a Saturday afternoon, two of the easiest introductory foods are probably baked beans and hummus.
There are Heinz baked beans in my cupboard. My one attempt at making Boston baked beans produced a result that didn’t justify the amount of optimism I’d invested in it.
It’s worth checking the label. Formulations differ considerably between products and countries, particularly in how much sugar is added. UK Heinz baked beans contain about 4.3% added sugar. I found US versions with as much as 15% sugar.
This was also how I discovered apple pie-flavoured baked beans in an American supermarket.
Fellow Brits may need a moment.
American food manufacturers have a strange habit of looking at a perfectly respectable savoury food and asking, “But could it be dessert?”
Hummus is an easy way to get chickpeas into your routine, but it’s worth checking the ingredients. Western diets already tend to provide plenty of omega-6 and relatively little omega-3, and many commercial hummus products add substantial amounts of sunflower or soybean oil.
If hummus is going to become a regular part of your diet, I’d look for one made primarily with extra-virgin olive oil instead, or make your own. It’s easy, and I think it tastes considerably better anyway.
Last week I asked how often you eat beans, lentils or chickpeas. Here’s what you told me:
One in five of you eat legumes every day or most days
Just over half of you eat legumes at least weekly: about a quarter 1–2 times a week and another quarter 3–5 times. About a quarter eat them less than once a week.
Only 1 in 20 never eat legumes.
Only 1 in 10 found legumes upset their stomach too much, while 1 in 8 thought they took too much preparation.
A whopping 43% of you, almost half, said what held you back from eating more was not knowing good legume recipes
That sounds to me like a call to action!
Share a recipe we should all try
I’ve already admitted that I’m still something of a bean amateur. But I know many of you cook with beans, lentils, and chickpeas regularly and have a few dishes you come back to again and again.
So let’s pool that knowledge.
If you have a legume-based recipe that’s easy enough for someone relatively new to this kind of cooking and delicious enough to make again, please share it in the comments, either as the recipe itself or a link.
The aim is to give everyone reading this a collection of tried-and-tested ideas from other readers, especially dishes that might help turn beans and lentils from something we should eat into something we actually want in the weekly rotation.
To get us started, I asked a couple of fellow writers for their suggestions.
Author and YouTuber Caroline J. Beck writes Mediterranean Minutes from her home in Spain. It’s full of delicious recipes all built around the Mediterranean diet.
Caroline’s delicious suggestions were:
Caroline also shared one of her excellent and very popular meal plans. Look for the PDF download in the post.
Another writer whose recipes I love is Ellen Kornmehl MD, Harvard cancer doc and wellness writer. Ellen’s recipes are that rare combination of healthy and aspirational - the kind of food you can serve to impress at a dinner party.
Ellen shared a couple of delicious recipes for cannellini beans and chickpeas.
I’d highly recommend checking out both Caroline’s and Ellen’s newsletters.
What this means for your health
Once you stop trying to rank legumes nutritionally, the useful differences become culinary. What do you want them to do in the dish?
Red lentils and yellow or red split peas soften and partly break down, so they’re ideal when you want them to disappear into soups, dals, curries, ragù or sauces. Green and brown lentils stay more distinct; Puy or French lentils are firmer and earthier still.
For creaminess, think cannellini or butter beans. If you want more bite and a more substantial presence, chickpeas, kidney beans, black beans and pinto beans work naturally in chilli, curries, salads, tacos and grain bowls. Black beans, adzuki and mung beans are useful when you want the bean itself to contribute more character.
For someone still slightly bean-sceptical, I’d probably start with red lentils. They need no soaking, cook quickly and can almost vanish into the surrounding sauce. Chickpeas are the opposite sort of gateway: more obvious, but extraordinarily versatile, working intact or puréed.
My own shift towards eating less meat and more legumes started because I was thinking about long-term health. What surprised me was that I eventually began to prefer many of the legume-based meals.
If you want a dietary change to last, don’t build it around food you think you ought to eat. There are too many delicious curries, dals, ragùs, soups, chillies and stews in the world to choke down beans and kale as though someone has prescribed them as penance.
HEALTH TWEAK OF THE WEEK
There’s no compelling reason to hunt for the healthiest legume. Common beans, lentils, chickpeas and split peas are all nutritionally useful, and the modest differences between them matter much less than whether you enjoy eating them regularly. Dried beans have a measurable nutritional edge in composition studies, but canned beans remain an excellent option when convenience is what gets them onto your plate.
1. Choose according to what you’re cooking.
Red lentils work well when you want them to soften into a curry, soup or sauce. Cannellini and butter beans are creamier, while chickpeas, kidney beans, black beans and pinto beans have more bite and tend to hold their shape.
You don’t need to memorise all of that. Just start with the sort of meal you already enjoy and choose a legume that fits it.
2. Keep a convenient option around.
Use dried beans when you have the time and prefer the taste and texture. I still keep canned beans in the cupboard because they’re much more useful when dinner wasn’t planned 12 hours earlier.
If they’re packed in brine, rinse them before using, or choose a no-added-salt version. And if you’re cooking dried beans, soak them and boil them properly rather than relying on a slow cooker alone.
3. Start with one dish that genuinely appeals to you.
For your first few experiments, forget about choosing the recipe that looks the most virtuous. Pick one that makes you think, That looks yummy.
A red-lentil curry or soup is an easy place to start. Lentil ragù works well if you’d rather the legumes blend into something familiar, while creamy white-bean dishes are a good option if you want the beans to be more obvious.
If you enjoy the result, put it into your regular rotation. Once you’ve found one or two legume dishes you actually look forward to, eating them more often becomes natural.
🎧 Prefer to listen while wondering why the bean aisle suddenly seems to require specialist knowledge?
🎙️ This week’s One Health Tweak a Week podcast is about choosing legumes without turning dinner into another optimisation project: which beans and lentils are nutritionally strongest, whether dried really beat canned, and which varieties work best in different dishes.
You’ll hear:
Why the nutritional differences between most common legumes are smaller than you might expect
Which beans and lentils have a modest edge for protein and fibre
Whether dried beans are genuinely better than canned, and when the difference might matter
The simple preparation rule that makes dried beans safe to eat
Why choosing by taste, texture and what you’re cooking matters more than finding the nutritional winner
👉 Good company for your next walk, commute, or while looking at six nearly identical tins of beans and wondering whether choosing the wrong one could possibly matter this much.
(Episodes are free for now. Paid subscribers support the deeper research - and unlock practical tools to help you improve your health without turning it into a second job.)
🧭 Before you go
💬 What’s the legume dish you’d genuinely be pleased to eat again next week? It could be a dal, chilli, hummus, lentil ragù, baked beans on toast, or something considerably more sophisticated than anything currently emerging from my kitchen.
📤 Know someone who wants to eat more beans or lentils but gets stuck at the what on earth do I buy? stage? Forward this to them.
👥 Paid corner - If there’s a bean, lentil or chickpea dish you make regularly and genuinely love, share it in our private chat. I’d like to build up a collection of reader-tested ideas that are delicious enough to earn a permanent place in the rotation.
Until next Saturday - buy whichever bean suits dinner, keep a tin or two for emergencies, and don’t lose sleep over whether cannellini narrowly beat chickpeas on somebody’s nutrient spreadsheet.
– Ben
One of my favorites (that I made up) is red lentils drenched in low-sodium veggie broth. I add tarragon, thyme, and crushed red pepper flakes. Added are: sweet potatoes (cut up), carrots and parsnips (the latter when in season) (both cut up), cut up red onion, and (if in season) cut up eggplant. I call it my kitchen sink lentil stew. After it comes to a boil, I lower the temperature and cook it for about 18 minutes. I get four dinners out of it, and I love it.
>>American food manufacturers have a strange habit of looking at a perfectly respectable savoury food and asking, “But could it be dessert?”
LOL. So true!