Новинарско - научна - детална анализа на фактот дали прдиме од гравот од кои произлеуваат неколку потпрашања.

- дали прдењето е здраво за нас

- колку испуштањето гасови (прдењето) е добро и зошто

ако ве мрзи да читате ќе скратам - одлично е - колку повеќе грав - повеќе гасови - повеќе прдежи - поздраво срце - подобро здравје

In the whisper-down-the-lane evolution of schoolyard chants, I grew up hearing the famous legume-based one beginning with “Beans, beans, the musical fruit.” The alternate, and much more correct, version begins “Beans, beans, they’re good for your heart.” 

The version I remember is a collision of lies; I can let the description of beans as musical go, a bit of poetic license, but I refuse to believe that the restrictions of perfect rhyme were so tight as to force the author to identify a bean as a fruit. The alternate version is delightful; it promotes cardiac health in place of telling children taxonomic lies about produce. 

In the interest of confirming the facts of alternate version, hopefully cementing it as the canonic version, and embarrassing myself by talking about farts with someone who has a medical degree, I called up Katherine Zeratsky, a nutritionist and dietician at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

When we’re talking about beans, we’re talking about legumes: the diverse group of foods including black beans, pinto beans, peas, chick peas, peanuts, and lentils. They’re super healthy for plenty of reasons, but we’re concerned primarily about the heart and the fart here, so fiber is the material we really have to focus on. So what is fiber?

“Some people will lump fiber in with nutrients, but it's really non-nutritive, in the sense that it really isn't digested,” says Zeratsky. There are two kinds of fiber, soluble and insoluble, and neither of them is broken down properly by the body in the way that other nutrients, like, say, protein or potassium, are. Legumes have both kinds of fiber, but a much higher level of soluble fiber, so named because it dissolves in water. But it doesn’t dissolve easily; “it becomes like a gel,” says Zeratsky, attracting water to it and becoming sticky, slowing down the movement of food from mouth to poop.

Soluble fiber is also able, according to various studies, to control the amount of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), otherwise known as “the bad kind of cholesterol.” Cholesterol is usually described as a waxy sort of substance that needs to be transported around the body to help with various projects: creating hormones, building vitamin D, that kind of thing. The body naturally produces the stuff, but sometimes, it can make too much, usually due to a fatty diet. 

When there’s too much LDL cholesterol, it ends up sticking to the sides of arteries and clogging them, almost like creating a bottleneck within your body. When the traffic jam gets to be too much, bam: heart attack. Heart attacks, according to most medical experts, are bad.

The way in which soluble fiber helps battle LDL cholesterol is sort of complicated. Basically, your body doesn’t particularly want to get rid of cholesterol; it can be useful stuff, remember? So, another thing cholesterol is used for is creating bile acids, which are used to break down fatty foods into smaller bits that your body can absorb and use. That bile ends up cycling through the intestines, where it does its business with fats, then is reabsorbed and heads back to the gall bladder, where it’s stored. Soluble fiber, being a sort of snowballing gooey mass of fiber and water and lord-knows-what-else, also picks up a whole mess of those bile acids on its way to your toilet. This sounds scary, but it’s actually great.

Because the fiber has taken a bunch of bile acid out of circulation, your body freaks out: it has to make more! And to make more, your liver uses up some of your store of bad LDL cholesterol to construct more bile acid. That decreases the total amount of bad LDL cholesterol in your system!

This is fairly well-understood, at least by the sorts of people who went to medical school where presumably they explain it in a way that those people can understand it. A 2009 survey found that all legumes, not just the thoroughly-studied soybean, have this positive effect on cardiac health. And a 2010 study found that that’s not the only benefit; legumes also have positive effects in treating diabetes and are absurdly nutrient-dense, meaning they give an awful lot of health bang for your calorie buck.

But what about the farts (or, alternately, the toots)?

It is, unfortunately, no myth: beans absolutely, 100 percent make you fart. There’s another important non-digestible element in legumes in addition to soluble fiber, and they’re called oligosaccharides. Oligosaccharides are, weirdly, a sort of sugar, but not one that humans can break down. “The bond can't be broken by the body so it's not digestible to absorb any nutrients or calories from it,” says Zeratsky. 

But our bodies aren’t just our own: they’re also home to literally hundreds of different types of bacteria, the total number somewhere around 100 trillion. Those bacteria are our friends, breaking down fats, cleaning out our intestines, and providing us with various vitamins and minerals we can’t make ourselves.

Taking care of our bacteria (usually referred to as gut flora) is like tending a garden: you have to make sure they have enough food, enough water, that the pH level is conducive to growth, and that they’re happy. Because if our gut flora isn’t happy, we’re not happy.

Beans make the bacteria happy.

Oligosaccharides might not do anything for us, but many kinds of bacteria in our intestines just go nuts for them. They eat those weird nondigestible sugars right up, and produce various kinds of gas as a byproduct, typically carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, and methane. “When it gets into your colon, the bacteria there will ferment it, start breaking it down and using it for their own energy. And in that process, they make gas,” says Zeratsky.

Gas can sometimes be painful or uncomfortable, but that’s not the fault of beans. Gas from beans is totally normal and even, says Zeratsky, an indicator of good health in your colon. Where things can get rough is if you’re constipated already; if the oligosaccharides or various other foods for your gut bacteria are trapped in the intestine, the bacteria will eat for too long, leading to excessive fermentation that can create more gas than you’re really prepared for. 

But if you’re eating beans, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem, because the fiber in beans is so good for keeping you regular and non-constipated.

According to the schoolyard chant’s Wikipedia page, which includes several different versions I’d never heard before (like a really crude one that has the word “ass” in it, which I hope recess monitors nationwide are discouraging), a few of the chants end with “So eat your beans at every meal.” Good advice! Because they really are good for your heart. And the more you eat the more you fart. Scientifically speaking.