Peak Performance: Beans

Although beans are the perfect food for endurance athletes, British and American athletes don’t eat a lot of them - for a couple of reasons. Beans take a long time to cook, for one thing, and require some preparation skill to produce an optimal taste, but the key problem of course is that bean ingestion produces a lot of wind and diarrhoea, two outcomes which are not traditionally linked with peak athletic performances.

That’s sad, because beans are high in carbohydrate, fairly rich in protein, and low in fat- or in other words, absolutely perfect for individuals who want to ingest high-performance food (small wonder that elite Kenyan runners eat beans on a regular basis).

Fortunately, it is possible to eat beans without chuming up your digestive system and gassing your loved ones…