How much carbohydrate is there in lupin beans?
Lupin beans seem to have a rather unique place in the world of beans: they are often claimed to contain zero carbohydrates other than fibre. But is this really true?
I would like to encourage anyone to read the nutrition and ingredient labels on any and all food.
The reasoning is simple: if a company thinks this information is important enough to put on a label, a process that costs money and takes time and effort, and potentially exposes the company to criticism and even lawsuits, I think this information is worth reading.
That does not mean the information should be taken at face value and believed without question. Mistakes can and do happen. Lupin beans, also called 'lupini (beans)' or Lupinus albus, are no exception to that rule, and there is certainly something fascinating going on with these beans.
At my neighbourhood Loblaws store, four different brands are sold: BRAMi, Cedar, Maçarico and Unico (in alphabetical order):
BRAMi makes lofty claims the others don't, and it is ridiculously expensive in comparison with the others. While that does not mean in any way that their claims are untrue, it does raise a red flag and it is a good reason to be extra cautious about what they are saying. Are they actually providing some worthwhile information, or is it merely empty marketing windbaggery?
As an aside, BRAMi is also the only company that uses vinegar in its product. I happen to loathe vinegar. It stinks, tastes terrible and makes me think of Windex. There is a reason I am using citric acid to clean my coffee maker. I just don't need the smell of vinegar anywhere. Bwerk. How people can put this in their bodies is beyond me. Given how popular it is, I guess I am really abnormal. No matter, I hate it, and that's the end of it. For me, anyway. Despite my bias against vinegar, I bought a bag of their product and tasted it. It tastes even worse than I had feared.
Unico makes the more standard marketing claim that the beans are high in fibre, while the other two make no claims whatsoever.
What are the ingredients?
What is the nutritional value of these products? At this particular occasion, I am only interested in the values for calories, fat, carbohydrates and fibre and proteins, but that's enough to see that there is a serious problem with the Canadian nutrition facts label. While this label was created with the best of intentions, it makes it often impossible to easily compare foods with each other.
I couldn't help but giggle at this: is Maçarico really using smaller beans than Cedar? Probably not.
In order to make this a little easier, I am 'normalising' the values to 100 g of product:
And yes, question marks for Unico. How many grammes are there in half a cup? It makes no sense to me to mix units of measurement like this and it also does not make sense to use volume measurements for solids, even less so if their size is not a constant. While this may be practical and accurate enough for large quantities, the quantities used for food are usually tiny and even the slightest error in measurement can create enormous differences.
So, how to proceed? In order to not exclude Unico, I weighed the contents of the can: beans as well as the liquid. For this one can, there were 340 g of beans and 255 g of liquid. I then looked at how many standard 250 ml cups I could fill with the beans. It turned out to be two, give or take a few beans. That would be consistent with the claim that a 540 ml can contains the equivalent of two cups.
In other words, one Unico can contains four half-cups and since dividing 340 g by 4 is not rocket science, one 125 ml half-cup turns out to be the equivalent of 85 g of canned beans. So, we now have a basis to determine the nutritional value of the Unico beans in comparison with the three others by normalising the half-cup to 100 g:
I think it is obvious that something is fishy here. Beans are biological items and they are not manufactured to high precision standards in a factory. As a result, size, appearance, taste and texture naturally vary and so do their nutritional values.
That said, the differences found here are not trivial. Assuming that Unico is using the values for dried beans instead of canned ones would bring their values more in line with the others, but there is no verifiable information available that would allow for such assumptions and even if they are correct, the company would show more respect for its customers by either adjusting the numbers or telling its customers how to correctly interpret them. Most of us are not doctors or registered dietitians after all. We have not done the years of gruelling studies these people have but we still need/want the information, which is precisely why providing this information is a legal requirement.
In addition, Maçarico's figures are bizarre as well. How do they manage to have less carbohydrate than fibre? After all, fibre is a type of carbohydrate. This means that the amount of carbohydrate will always be greater than or equal to the amount of fibre.
BRAMi has the distinction of having the least fat, less than a third of the others. Really?
But we are not done yet. Let's check whether or not the labels are internally consistent. Fat is said to have 9 Calories per g (or 9 kcal) and carbohydrate and protein are both counted as 4 Calories per g. These are all average values, but they are internationally agreed upon, and the differences are usually of (almost) no importance for nutrition purposes.
We can now calculate the Calories in a food item:
Calories = (grammes of carbohydrate + grammes of protein) * 4 + grammes of fat * 9
Let's do it for all four:
BRAMi: (14 + 14) * 4 + 2 * 9 = 130
Cedar: (6.7 + 13.3) * 4 + 6.7 * 9 = 140.3
Maçarico: (0 + 13.3) * 4 + 6.7 * 9 = 113.5 OR (6.7 + 13.3) * 4 + 6.7 * 9 = 140.3
Unico: (16.5 + 25.9) * 4 + 7 * 9 = 232.6
These numbers will often not add up and that is normal and acceptable. There are or can be several reasons for this, such as differences between samples taken at different times, the measurements being made independently of each other and so on. Variation is to be expected. However, they should be "close-enough". Any large differences should be investigated and explained, in my opinion.
Whether or not the data are correct is something we cannot know, but it seems that the labels provided by BRAMi, Cedar and Unico are internally consistent.
Even Maçarico may well be internally consistent and there are two possibilities for this: no one noticed the rather obvious typo, or it wasn't a typo at all and the company has simply subtracted the fibre count from the carbohydrate count.
The idea behind this is that we cannot digest fibre and that the calories in it should therefore not be counted. This is acceptable in certain jurisdictions but it is certainly confusing if the company doesn't bother telling the customer and to my knowledge, this is not an acceptable practice in Canada, but I may be wrong about this. Please tell me if I am. Spreading disinformation is *not* what I want.
On top of that, fibre, or at least part of it, is digested by microorganisms in our digestive system and some of those calories are absorbed by our bodies anyway. In any case, the practice of subtracting fibre from the calorie count seems to be ebbing away, as it probably should, even if the arguments in its favour are certainly worth considering.
That said, this was just the introduction. The cherry on the cake of confusion is provided by the venerable USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture, jawohl.
The USDA is my favourite go-to address for nutritional data. They almost always have at least something and, many times, it is quite reliable. However, there seems to be something fishy about their data on lupini:
Source:
https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/173804/nutrients
And this is what the Canadian Nutrient File says. I tend to ignore what the CNF says because it is often just a copy of the USDA file but, for completeness, I thought I should add it here as well.
Source:
https://food-nutrition.canada.ca/cnf-fce/
Unfortunately, they do not provide a direct link to the data.
I am only really interested in one type of information here: the carbohydrate and fibre counts. There seems to be a significant discrepancy between the information from the USDA and the information provided by the four companies above. They state that there are essentially no carbohydrates other than fibre in these beans, but the USDA seems to say that there are. Not only that, 70% of the carbohydrates in these beans are non-fibre according to them.
While this would still make lupini far less rich in carbohydrates than other beans, it changes them from something really special to nothing more than a soybean alternative.
This is the reason I started writing this post. It puzzles me and I would like to find out where this discrepancy between company information and USDA information comes from. Both databases (USDA and CNF) seem to suggest that the data provided is not data obtained from these beans, but from something similar. That could explain the discrepancy, but I'd surely like to know with certainty.
For now, my very tentative conclusion would have to be that the USDA data is wrong and the company-provided data is correct, but I am unwilling to accept this on the basis of such flimsy evidence.
If anyone has an idea about this, please tell me. When/if I find this out, I will post it here as well, because I am sure this issue puzzles many other people as well.
How am I using these beans?
So far, I am only using them in one way, and it just happens to be the way the Italian people have been doing for hundreds of years: I am eating them as a snack. I weigh 100 g in a small dish (the one in the picture), take them to my desk and snack on them while working.
This satisfies my hunger, and I waste no time on elaborate cooking schemes for which I don't have time anyway. It is also both a lot faster and cheaper than most "fast food" (which I tend to call "slow food" or at least "waste-of-time food").
While it is possible to buy them as dried beans and then prepare them, I balk at the perspective because it involves extensive soaking, boiling, and then soaking for days on end. I have neither the space nor the time to do this.
Fortunately, we can buy these beans canned. Unfortunately, they are very salty when bought this way, so I pour them in a container, add ample water and leave them in the fridge. When I take them out to eat them, I take the opportunity to change the water as well.
In short, I essentially treat these beans the way other people treat tofu. I love them because they are very neutral tasting, they are chewy and hence satisfying to eat (it takes a surprisingly long time to consume a 100 g of these beans), and there is next to no work involved in their preparation.
*****
Please note that I make no health claims and no nutritional claims. There are enough alternologists and quacks on the Internet already and I have no intention of joining them.
I sincerely encourage you to talk to an actual medical doctor or registered dietitian before making any health- or nutrition-related decisions.
If I made any mistakes in this post, please *do* feel free to point them out to me.
Lupin beans seem to have a rather unique place in the world of beans: they are often claimed to contain zero carbohydrates other than fibre. But is this really true?
I would like to encourage anyone to read the nutrition and ingredient labels on any and all food.
The reasoning is simple: if a company thinks this information is important enough to put on a label, a process that costs money and takes time and effort, and potentially exposes the company to criticism and even lawsuits, I think this information is worth reading.
That does not mean the information should be taken at face value and believed without question. Mistakes can and do happen. Lupin beans, also called 'lupini (beans)' or Lupinus albus, are no exception to that rule, and there is certainly something fascinating going on with these beans.
At my neighbourhood Loblaws store, four different brands are sold: BRAMi, Cedar, Maçarico and Unico (in alphabetical order):
| BRAMi | Cedar | Maçarico | Unico |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
BRAMi makes lofty claims the others don't, and it is ridiculously expensive in comparison with the others. While that does not mean in any way that their claims are untrue, it does raise a red flag and it is a good reason to be extra cautious about what they are saying. Are they actually providing some worthwhile information, or is it merely empty marketing windbaggery?
As an aside, BRAMi is also the only company that uses vinegar in its product. I happen to loathe vinegar. It stinks, tastes terrible and makes me think of Windex. There is a reason I am using citric acid to clean my coffee maker. I just don't need the smell of vinegar anywhere. Bwerk. How people can put this in their bodies is beyond me. Given how popular it is, I guess I am really abnormal. No matter, I hate it, and that's the end of it. For me, anyway. Despite my bias against vinegar, I bought a bag of their product and tasted it. It tastes even worse than I had feared.
Unico makes the more standard marketing claim that the beans are high in fibre, while the other two make no claims whatsoever.
What are the ingredients?
| BRAMi | Cedar | Maçarico | Unico |
| Water Lupini beans Sea salt Organic vinegar Garlic Rosemary Lactic acid from vegetable fermentation |
Lupin beans Water Salt Citric acid |
Lupin beans Water Salt Citric acid |
Lupini beans Water Salt |
What is the nutritional value of these products? At this particular occasion, I am only interested in the values for calories, fat, carbohydrates and fibre and proteins, but that's enough to see that there is a serious problem with the Canadian nutrition facts label. While this label was created with the best of intentions, it makes it often impossible to easily compare foods with each other.
| BRAMi | Cedar | Maçarico | Unico |
| Amount: 25 beans (50 g) Calories 60 Fat 1 g Carbohydrate 7 g Fibre 7 g Protein 7 g |
Amount: 9 beans (15 g) Calories 21 Fat 1 g Carbohydrate 1 g Fibre 1 g Protein 2 g |
Amount: 14 beans (15 g) Calories 15 Fat 1 g Carbohydrate 0 g Fibre 1 g Protein 2 g |
Amount: 1/2 cup (125 ml) Calories 190 Fat 6 g Carbohydrate 14 g Fibre 13 g Protein 22 g |
I couldn't help but giggle at this: is Maçarico really using smaller beans than Cedar? Probably not.
In order to make this a little easier, I am 'normalising' the values to 100 g of product:
| BRAMi | Cedar | Maçarico | Unico |
| Amount: 25 beans (50 g) Calories 120 Fat 2 g Carbohydrate 14 g Fibre 14 g Protein 14 g |
Amount: 9 beans (15 g) Calories 140 Fat 6.7 g Carbohydrate 6.7 g Fibre 6.7 g Protein 13.3 g |
Amount: 14 beans (15 g) Calories 100 Fat 6.7 g Carbohydrate 0 g Fibre 6.7 g Protein 13.3 g |
Amount: 1/2 cup (125 ml) Calories ? Fat ? g Carbohydrate ? g Fibre ? g Protein ? g |
And yes, question marks for Unico. How many grammes are there in half a cup? It makes no sense to me to mix units of measurement like this and it also does not make sense to use volume measurements for solids, even less so if their size is not a constant. While this may be practical and accurate enough for large quantities, the quantities used for food are usually tiny and even the slightest error in measurement can create enormous differences.
So, how to proceed? In order to not exclude Unico, I weighed the contents of the can: beans as well as the liquid. For this one can, there were 340 g of beans and 255 g of liquid. I then looked at how many standard 250 ml cups I could fill with the beans. It turned out to be two, give or take a few beans. That would be consistent with the claim that a 540 ml can contains the equivalent of two cups.
In other words, one Unico can contains four half-cups and since dividing 340 g by 4 is not rocket science, one 125 ml half-cup turns out to be the equivalent of 85 g of canned beans. So, we now have a basis to determine the nutritional value of the Unico beans in comparison with the three others by normalising the half-cup to 100 g:
| BRAMi | Cedar | Maçarico | Unico |
| Calories 120 Fat 2 g Carbohydrate 14 g Fibre 14 g Protein 14 g | Calories 140 Fat 6.7 g Carbohydrate 6.7 g Fibre 6.7 g Protein 13.3 g | Calories 100 Fat 6.7 g Carbohydrate 0 g Fibre 6.7 g Protein 13.3 g | Calories 224 Fat 7 g Carbohydrate 16.5 g Fibre 15.3 g Protein 25.9 g |
I think it is obvious that something is fishy here. Beans are biological items and they are not manufactured to high precision standards in a factory. As a result, size, appearance, taste and texture naturally vary and so do their nutritional values.
That said, the differences found here are not trivial. Assuming that Unico is using the values for dried beans instead of canned ones would bring their values more in line with the others, but there is no verifiable information available that would allow for such assumptions and even if they are correct, the company would show more respect for its customers by either adjusting the numbers or telling its customers how to correctly interpret them. Most of us are not doctors or registered dietitians after all. We have not done the years of gruelling studies these people have but we still need/want the information, which is precisely why providing this information is a legal requirement.
In addition, Maçarico's figures are bizarre as well. How do they manage to have less carbohydrate than fibre? After all, fibre is a type of carbohydrate. This means that the amount of carbohydrate will always be greater than or equal to the amount of fibre.
BRAMi has the distinction of having the least fat, less than a third of the others. Really?
But we are not done yet. Let's check whether or not the labels are internally consistent. Fat is said to have 9 Calories per g (or 9 kcal) and carbohydrate and protein are both counted as 4 Calories per g. These are all average values, but they are internationally agreed upon, and the differences are usually of (almost) no importance for nutrition purposes.
We can now calculate the Calories in a food item:
Calories = (grammes of carbohydrate + grammes of protein) * 4 + grammes of fat * 9
Let's do it for all four:
BRAMi: (14 + 14) * 4 + 2 * 9 = 130
Cedar: (6.7 + 13.3) * 4 + 6.7 * 9 = 140.3
Maçarico: (0 + 13.3) * 4 + 6.7 * 9 = 113.5 OR (6.7 + 13.3) * 4 + 6.7 * 9 = 140.3
Unico: (16.5 + 25.9) * 4 + 7 * 9 = 232.6
| BRAMi | Cedar | Maçarico | Unico |
| Label 120 Calculated 130 | Label 140 Calculated 140.3 | Label 100 Calculated If carbohydrate is 0 113.5 If carbohydrate is 6.7 140.3 | Label 224 Calculated 232.6 |
These numbers will often not add up and that is normal and acceptable. There are or can be several reasons for this, such as differences between samples taken at different times, the measurements being made independently of each other and so on. Variation is to be expected. However, they should be "close-enough". Any large differences should be investigated and explained, in my opinion.
Whether or not the data are correct is something we cannot know, but it seems that the labels provided by BRAMi, Cedar and Unico are internally consistent.
Even Maçarico may well be internally consistent and there are two possibilities for this: no one noticed the rather obvious typo, or it wasn't a typo at all and the company has simply subtracted the fibre count from the carbohydrate count.
The idea behind this is that we cannot digest fibre and that the calories in it should therefore not be counted. This is acceptable in certain jurisdictions but it is certainly confusing if the company doesn't bother telling the customer and to my knowledge, this is not an acceptable practice in Canada, but I may be wrong about this. Please tell me if I am. Spreading disinformation is *not* what I want.
On top of that, fibre, or at least part of it, is digested by microorganisms in our digestive system and some of those calories are absorbed by our bodies anyway. In any case, the practice of subtracting fibre from the calorie count seems to be ebbing away, as it probably should, even if the arguments in its favour are certainly worth considering.
That said, this was just the introduction. The cherry on the cake of confusion is provided by the venerable USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture, jawohl.
The USDA is my favourite go-to address for nutritional data. They almost always have at least something and, many times, it is quite reliable. However, there seems to be something fishy about their data on lupini:
https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/173804/nutrients
Source:
https://food-nutrition.canada.ca/cnf-fce/
Unfortunately, they do not provide a direct link to the data.
While this would still make lupini far less rich in carbohydrates than other beans, it changes them from something really special to nothing more than a soybean alternative.
This is the reason I started writing this post. It puzzles me and I would like to find out where this discrepancy between company information and USDA information comes from. Both databases (USDA and CNF) seem to suggest that the data provided is not data obtained from these beans, but from something similar. That could explain the discrepancy, but I'd surely like to know with certainty.
For now, my very tentative conclusion would have to be that the USDA data is wrong and the company-provided data is correct, but I am unwilling to accept this on the basis of such flimsy evidence.
If anyone has an idea about this, please tell me. When/if I find this out, I will post it here as well, because I am sure this issue puzzles many other people as well.
How am I using these beans?
So far, I am only using them in one way, and it just happens to be the way the Italian people have been doing for hundreds of years: I am eating them as a snack. I weigh 100 g in a small dish (the one in the picture), take them to my desk and snack on them while working.
This satisfies my hunger, and I waste no time on elaborate cooking schemes for which I don't have time anyway. It is also both a lot faster and cheaper than most "fast food" (which I tend to call "slow food" or at least "waste-of-time food").
While it is possible to buy them as dried beans and then prepare them, I balk at the perspective because it involves extensive soaking, boiling, and then soaking for days on end. I have neither the space nor the time to do this.
Fortunately, we can buy these beans canned. Unfortunately, they are very salty when bought this way, so I pour them in a container, add ample water and leave them in the fridge. When I take them out to eat them, I take the opportunity to change the water as well.
In short, I essentially treat these beans the way other people treat tofu. I love them because they are very neutral tasting, they are chewy and hence satisfying to eat (it takes a surprisingly long time to consume a 100 g of these beans), and there is next to no work involved in their preparation.
*****
Please note that I make no health claims and no nutritional claims. There are enough alternologists and quacks on the Internet already and I have no intention of joining them.
I sincerely encourage you to talk to an actual medical doctor or registered dietitian before making any health- or nutrition-related decisions.
If I made any mistakes in this post, please *do* feel free to point them out to me.
28carbs/ 3fiber/ 130g Joycie brand from Amazon and others with similar numbers. I'm betting this is a more likely scenario. When looking at Lupin Flour as the new miracle keto food due to all the fiber nearly equal to the carbs, I think there is some serious misleading or faulty information. The values are so all over the place, I can't discern if they are healthy or not.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your reaction! Sorry I replied so late, I only just saw it.
DeleteYou may well be correct. The problem is that many nutrition fact labels are not created on the basis of actual tests, but simply based on nutritional databases. Even the USDA says somewhere that its numbers are based on "a similar product".
I certainly don't trust Brami, they are clearly a brand trying to catch the gullible who are into fads. I am less sure about the others, because they are aimed at a clientele that buys these products out of tradition, not for health reasons. The only way to find out what the correct numbers are would be to send samples to a few different labs and have them tested, but given that tests like these are not cheap, I balk at the idea.
I also don't know if they are healthful or not. However, I think it is relatively safe to assume that they stand a good chance of being less bad than potato chips or jelly beans ^_^.
Fascinating read, thank you!
ReplyDelete