Any adults got a legume intolerance?

[BreatheAndFocus]

I’ve developed some unpleasant food intolerances during peri. One is to mackerel, which I love and used to eat frequently; another is to dairy products including my beloved Greek yoghurt. A few months ago, I realised peanuts weren’t kind to me (huge stomach swelling and pain). It took me a while to work out because I’d been eating peanut butter multiple times a week since my teens.

Just to make things more annoying, I’ve now found I can no longer tolerate legumes. I had a tiny amount of black beans (tinned and baked) - about 1/6 to 1/8 of a can - and had the most awful upset stomach, pain and faintness. The first time I thought this was a coincidence but after 3 occurrences, I’m sure it’s the beans. I also had similar but not quite as bad after some aduki beans and some red lentils. It wasn’t ‘a bit too much fibre’ thing. I eat a fair bit of fibre anyway and this was horrid and made me feel ill.

Anyway…..does anyone else have a legume intolerance? I’m going to avoid them from now on, but what about things like green beans? Should I avoid them too? What do you eat? I’m a pescatarian, so the mackerel intolerance, dairy intolerance and now the legume intolerance has really messed with my meal planning 😞

Any help or comments would be appreciated.

No-one? Ok, well if anyone comes across this on Google, I first noticed it with peanuts (sudden, very painful stomach after eating some salted peanuts). I then started to wonder if peanut butter was also affecting me. I hadn’t had any pain but I’d been thinking I had IBS because of an unhappy digestive system. Because I ate peanut butter daily, I decided to see what happened if I cut it out. Within a few days, my digestion greatly improved.

It took me longer to work out that I could no longer tolerate other legumes (peanuts being a legume) as I usually use them in meals with other ingredients that I could blame. It seems to be all legumes to varying extents, with black beans being the worst. By legumes, I mean beans, pulses and lentils. In fact, lentils, which I love, gave me a nasty reaction 😞

Even tiny amounts of legumes upset me, so I’ve cut them out completely. I’m also wary of green beans and peas, as I had a reaction to broad beans years ago, and also to runner beans last Autumn, which I thought was a freakish one-off.

So if anyone’s reading this, yes an intolerance to legumes is a thing, and yes it can develop suddenly even if you’ve previously eaten them with no problem.

Not me, but my friend is allergic to peas. Not life threatening but makes her ill.

Try sprouting them. They lose the proteins that cause all the problems that way.

Choose the lower oxalate ones like mung, lentils, alfalfa, tendril pea and black eyed peas and you access the amazing nutrient profile without the lectins, saponins etc, that make you inflamed and ill.

I've sprouted my own greens for thirty years. It's fun. You can decide how long to leave them before eating them to adjust the taste and whether to leave them in the dark or let them green up. I would never eat unsprouted legumes. They don't want you to eat them so they are loaded with toxic weapons. With civilisation, we have lost the ability to detect these compounds.

I developed an intolerance to red kidney beans. It took me ages to figure out what was causing the dreadful heartburn. Now if I eat them I am sick the next day with stomach cramps for about a week, so I avoid them like crazy. I have no other known intolerances so it was rather a shock, and a bit sad as I love kidney beans.

But this has been life long, not menopause related.

Yep, me. Also dairy. Also at menopause.

I read that about sprouting them but, for god's sake, life is short! I can just eat meat, fish and soya for protein, and nobody needs that much fibre if they have a healthy mixed diet.

I miss CHEESE though!! Vegan cheese just ... isn't.

Peanuts are a legume also not a nut technically, so many people allergic to Peanuts cant tolerate other legumes like beans and peas

Ds has a peanut allergy and they did blood tests to checks the others and then we had to introduce slowly

I found I developed a histamine intolerence at menopause which meant I could not tolerate some fermented food (especially blue cheese) and some smoked fish. I wonder if your symptoms could be something similar? It is more common then due to the hormonal fluctuations as oestrogen helps regulate histamine production.

I sprout legumes in the dark and eat them before meals as they are high in the dao enzyme which helps break down histamines.

If not a histamine issue it sounds like you have some sort of microbiome imbalence. The book Fibre Fuelled has helpful advice about reintroducing foods you have an intolerence to and improving your microbiome.

Useful link for anyone interested in histamine intolerence in menopause
https://balance-menopause.com/uploads/2021/09/Histamine-Intolerance-1.pdf

I used to sprout mung beans and others but my reactions have been so unpleasant to cooked beans/pulses/legumes, I’m scared to try sprouted ones. I’ll keep it in mind though, so thank you for posting 😊

That’s very interesting - thank you 😊 Yes, after the black beans I felt ill for a number of days. I’m usually fairly stoic but the pain, upset stomach and general feeling of faintness was very nasty. I’ll never eat them again.

I don’t know. The mackerel I can no longer tolerate isn’t smoked, and I’ve eaten blue cheese with no apparent problems. See, this is what I thought my bad stomach was at first - SIBO or some kind of microbiome issue. But, stopping the peanut butter had a massive effect so I can see it’s that. I take probiotics when I feel I need them and I avoid antibiotics as much as possible. I also try to avoid UPFs and junk food. It can’t be the fibre as other fibre is ok. When I ate those black beans, they felt almost toxic and very irritating to my gut. Without TMI, it wasn’t just a bit of an upset stomach, I felt unwell and faint as well as in a lot of pain.

But thank you for your comment and I won’t discount it as a possible problem. Thank you too for the book recommendation 😊

My kidney bean intolerance started during early peri, so possibly linked. I am totally bemused by it as it doesn’t seem to be a “thing”, hardly anyone seems to be intolerant to them. But luckily kidney beans are quite easy to avoid, so not a major problem compared to other people issues

BTW the pain when I eat kidney beans is so bad that once I was worried I was having a major medical episode (a heart attack or something). So what you are experiencing sound similar.

I get similar symptoms to you and I do have SIBO. Pain, faintness, weakness etc. It’s also worth noting that you can have an imbalance anywhere in your digestive tract not just your small intestine so sudden onset of symptoms can be linked to that.

Legumes including peanuts have a lot of GOS (Galacto-oligosaccharides). It’s a FODMAP. Sometimes they are referred to as galactans.

This is often used in probiotics as prebiotic “food” for the probiotic so it might be worth checking your probiotic for that. Both in itself and also because it might be that your probiotic is using up some or all of your GOS capacity (i.e. taking you towards the limit of how much your system can handle) and then other foods tip you over that.

It’s also in oats and oat milk so if you eat those regularly that could be another factor in taking you toward your tolerance level. The Monash app is good if you want to investigate further.

There’s an enzyme called alpha-galactosidaise that can help with that if you want to be able to eat those foods on occasion. There’s one called Fibractase Forte by a company called Intolerans, they do sample size packs. It’s also in a product called FODZYME, which includes other digestive enzymes too, and again it is available in sample packs.

https://www.intoleran.com/en/product/fibractase-1200-sample-5-capsules/

https://fodmarket.co.uk/products/fodzyme%C2%AE-enzyme-supplement-starter-kit-5-servings

I don’t eat legumes anymore as a food in themselves, but these products help me if there is e.g. some chickpea flour in a gluten free bread.

Thank you @KatPurrson That’s extremely helpful. I hadn’t heard of Galacto-oligosaccharides and I didn’t know there were supplements that could possibly help. That’s very useful to know and much appreciated 😊 😎

I’ve just checked and my probiotic contains FOS - Fructooligosaccharides, so I presume that’s ok?

I don’t have oat milk but I do sometimes have the Oat ‘cream’ on desserts. I haven’t noticed a problem with that. I eat oats in biscuits and an oat granola sometimes for breakfast, but not regularly so I couldn’t say if they affected me. Interestingly, I’m going to try Overnight Oats this week so it will be good to see how that goes.

@BreatheAndFocus Glad it helped.

FOS can cause similar problems for some people, so it might be either part of the cause or at least exacerbating it. It is also a FODMAP. It can come down to individual sensitivities. You might be very sensitive to GOS, but a little bit sensitive to something else as well.

I tend to look for a probiotic that either has no prebiotic fibres or has something FODMAP free like potato starch.

The thing with FODMAPs is it’s a threshold type situation.

So imagine a bowl, you pour some water in a bowl and it’s fine. You add some juice, then some wine, all ok. You then drink a cup of coffee and the bowl overflows. So it looks like it’s the coffee. But actually it’s the whole situation where everything is cumulative.

As you were eating peanut butter every day, that looks like it’s the thing. And it is part of it. But it doesn’t mean that other things aren’t contributing too.

I was vegetarian then got awful stomach pain after eating lentils/beans/chickpeas so I stopped eating them for something like 10 years. Started eating fish as wasn’t getting enough protein. Then slowly started eating the pulses and seen to be ok now. This thread is v interesting

I have always been intolerant of anything beany. Terrible tummy aches, acid indigestion and gas. I used to eat a few when mixed in other things, then recently it has got worse, now I can't eat chili, or eat beans on toast at all.

Waving and farting.

Yes, peri really kicked off things although my male siblings had always been legume intolerant. Soya is the kicker, it’s in everything (well nearly) and really is in almost all Chinese and Japanese cuisine. And if it isn’t in that particular dish, the pans have often been seasoned with sesame oil or soy. And edamame beans. Ugh.

I haven’t found any cure but I whack in lots of certitizine when I’ve accidentally had some. The intolerance gives me itches, dermographism, shocking wind and rotten gut pain and then I’m exhausted and often sweating for a few hours afterwards too. And vinegar smelling stools which are a bit orange.

I foolishly ate waffles which had lupin flour in. Hideous.

Me.

I have multiple food intelorances including dairy. They developed in my thirties.

Wow! Thank you everyone 😊 I feel less alone now - and much more informed. The sad thing is I really like legumes. Not worth eating now though. I was blithely choosing a diet based on health but now I think I’m going to focus on what makes my stomach happy. Until you have problems, I don’t think you realise how miserable it is.

Your description of the overflowing bowl was excellent @KatPurrson That was a really simple way to visualise what you were explaining.

I had some tofu last week and managed that ok - I think! I can’t eat edamame at all though. Can you not have soy sauce? 😟