You've Bean Framed - Humble Bean My Not Be To Blame For Flatulence

There’s nothing quite as unpleasant as excessive flatulence - both for the sufferer and the person, well, downwind of them.
But it seems that the food most commonly associated with this unfortunate disorder may have been treated unfairly. In fact, it could be a case of 'you've bean framed' when it comes to intestinal wind.

The findings are likely to bring a smile to manufacturers of beans  everywhere and especially the mighty Heinz corporation.
In a study published in the Nutrition Journal Donna Winham of Arizona State University and Andrea Hutchins of the University of Colorado, say that “People's concerns about excessive flatulence from eating beans may be exaggerated."
The authors added:"Many consumers avoid eating beans because they believe legume consumption will cause excessive intestinal gas or flatulence."
The university academics asked volunteers eat half a cup of beans daily and to fill in a weekly questionnaire. At the end of the first seven days less than 50 per cent of the bean eaters reported increases in gas production.
But as the study progressed so the researchers started getting responses they had not been expecting. "Seventy per cent or more of the participants who experienced flatulence felt that it dissipated by the second or third week of bean consumption."
Donna Winham and Andrea Hutchins have come up with a theory to explain this phenomena and say that it boils down to beans garnering an undeserved reputation so that people really belive that they will give them wind, or as the academics put it “beans owe their unhappy reputation to psychological anticipation of flatulence problems".
But being academia it may well be that their findings could spark an ongoing debate in the world of university studies. For instance, their study is almost precisely opposite to the findings of a study by Geoffrey Wynne-Jones of Waikato Hospital in Hamilton, New Zealand, in 1975.
Dr Wynn-Jones published a treatise in highly respected medical journal The Lancet, under the heading Flatus Retention is the Major Factor in Diverticular Disease.  As he went on to explain: "Diverticular disease is confined to modern urban communities: flatus retention in a rural, primitive society would be pointless. It afflicts the cultured, the refined, the considerate. It should be recognised as originating in suppression of a normal bodily function."
Or to put it in other words, you need to avoid “windy foods” and the doctor said beans were a prime culprit.