As we all fight our inner "prepper" and try not to succumb to panic buying, it seems many of us have turned to an old favourite: baked beans.
Bean production at Australia's largest fruit and vegetable cannery in Shepparton, Victoria, has doubled its usual volume to producing 500,000 cans a day.
While baked beans might not look particularly sexy, they're a favourite among nutrition experts, including Clare Collins, a professor of nutrition at the University of Newcastle.
"I think most people have no idea how great they are when it comes to nutrition," says Professor Collins on Catalyst's How Food Works.
So what is it that makes many dietitians so keen on the bean? And should we all be eating more of them?
Easy veggies
Only 7 per cent of Australian adults and 5 per cent of children eat sufficient serves of vegetables in their daily diet, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
So most of us need to be eating more veggies, and beans and legumes are one option that give you a lot of nutritional bang for your buck.
They are an inexpensive source of protein, particularly for vegetarians, and they also come packed with healthy levels of iron and other essential minerals such as folate, manganese and vitamin B1.
Beans have a high proportion of soluble fibre — the kind of fibre that attracts water and helps slow digestion — and a low glycaemic index or relative ability to affect blood glucose levels.
This means eating beans will generally make you feel full for longer, so less tempted to snack on other unhealthy options.
This is one reason why legumes and beans have been shown to be beneficial in preventing and managing diabetes.
What is a baked bean?
US company Heinz first started producing baked beans locally in the 1930s.
Let's clarify the terminology. The "beans" we are talking about are more correctly classified as pulses — that is, the dried seed of a plant from the legume family, such as bean and pea plants.
The baked beans Australians have grown to love go under various names.
They're haricot beans, but are more commonly called navy beans, because they were chosen in the 1800s to feed the American Navy.
And they came to Australia via America too.
The US company Heinz started producing them locally in the 1930s when tariffs made it prohibitively expensive to import tinned food.
Then, during WWII, with large numbers of American troops stationed in QLD, local farmers began to grow navy beans and a local canning industry flourished.
Baked is also a bit of a misnomer. The dried beans go through a blanching process, and are then steamed in the can in a process called retorting.
What's better, fresh or canned?
There's no doubt that fresh vegetables are good for you, but unless you're eating them straight out of the garden, you may not be getting as many nutrients as you think.
Many vegetables, particularly green vegetables with a high water content are extremely perishable.
Studies have shown that certain nutrients like vitamin C can decrease dramatically within a couple of days of picking.
Freezing, drying, pickling and canning all enable us to seasonally shift our food, saving some of the abundance and nutrition of one season to consume when times are lean.
The SPC Shepparton factory has doubled its production due to demand during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Canning, invented in the early 1800s, is one of the most reliable methods to keep food preserved.
It works by creating an airtight vacuum that prevents microorganisms from entering, and then heating the can with high pressure steam to kill any microorganisms inside.
Heat also deactivates the enzymes in the food that would normally cause it to break down and spoil.
While it's true that the levels of some vitamins and minerals can decrease with heat, canning technology aims for a delicate balance of temperature and heating time, called thermal death time, to kill the maximum number of bugs while maintaining as much nutrition and structure in the food as possible.
And in the case of beans, cooking also makes the valuable fibre more digestible.
Beans and tomato: a match made in nutritional heaven
It's also no accident that baked beans come with tomato sauce.
Foods with lower acidity require higher temperatures and longer cooking times to ensure they're safely sterilised.
Navy beans are a low-acid food, so adding the more acidic tomatoes allows less cooking and therefore more preservation of flavour and nutrition.
Professor Collins says the tomatoes deliver an added bonus: "Beans are a good source of iron, and the vitamin C in the tomatoes helps your body absorb more of that iron".
But what about the salt and sugar? We're often told to avoid them, but they are also part of the sterilisation process.
Sugar and salt both reduce the water content of vegetable matter by drawing water molecules out through osmosis.
This partial dehydration creates an inhospitable environment for microorganisms to live and multiply.
"People worry about the sugar content in baked beans, but often don't realise some of those sugars are naturally occurring in the tomatoes," Professor Collins says.
If you're really worried, check the labels as most companies make salt-reduced products these days.
And when it comes down to it, if you're in a hurry and reaching for a snack, any serve of veggies is probably be a better option than biscuits or cake.
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2020-04-25 06:51:25Z
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