Beans Calories
How Bean Calories Affect You
Bean calories depend greatly upon the ways in which they are prepared, packaged, or enhanced. The bean calories in a can of salted green beans will be far different than those found in a ½ cup serving of plain, boiled pinto beans. Likewise, a salted can of prepackaged, precooked pinto beans will have far more bean calories than would a ½ cup serving of fresh snapped green beans from your garden. That said, bean calories can be difficult to track, and all packaged bean products should have special attention to the nutrition labels provided by the manufacturer. We will discuss the amount of bean calories that you can expect to find in the most common dishes revolving around beans.
Bean soup, a common and quite delicious bean dish, takes some of our favorite vegetables including carrots and potatoes and combines them with smoked ham hock or pork suet, bringing the beans within the dish to live with a sweet and salty kick. Although a much better alternative to, say, frying fresh green beans with bacon, you may want to be careful with your bean calories here. When coupled with fatty meats, most otherwise nutritious foods lose out to the power of cholesterol. It is the weakest link theory in regards to food, just like the caramel coated apple or the candied almond. All the nutrition remains, but the overlapping sugars and fats may zero out your efforts.
The same rule pertains to such delectables as home baked beans, especially those which are repacked with pork. That tasty looking, meaty chunk of pork that you see in the picture on the can is never actually found within the beans themselves. What you will find while warming or consuming them are chunks of white, fatty lard. You will also find a whopping 320 bean calories, 36 of which come fat according to the nutrition label on one of our most time honored name brands. This information is given for a strictly measured ½ cup serving, and we all know that we so rarely stick to these portions as directed. Just imagine how many fat calories we are really consuming based on the amount that we ate at dinner time.
Bean calories in some of our other most frequently sought after dishes include those in a ½ cup serving of edamame are quite low, and therefore considered favorable amongst most dieters. At a mere 85 calories per measured portion, the edamame bean affords less than 20% of the calories found in baked beans with pork. 27 % of these calories are from fat, giving this type of bean about 3 grams of dietary fat per recommended daily amount.