A new diet super-food that helps prevent heart attacks, lowers blood pressure, and improves brain function!  Are you ready to shell out big bucks to get it?  Keep your money in your wallet.  It does, indeed, do wonderful things for your heart as it helps you in your journey to a healthier weight, but it isn’t new and it isn’t imported from a mountain jungle thousands of miles away.  You can pick it up for pennies at your grocery store.

The diet super food?  Beans.

Yes, the lowly pinto bean — and just about all the other varieties as well — are a perfect blend of fiber and protein.  The combination gives them a low glycemic index number and helps regulate your blood sugar. You get  long-lasting energy and hunger control as they slowly digest and insulin is released in a controlled, steady stream rather than in a fat-storing dump.

Troubled with high cholesterol?  The fiber in beans can help lower it. A cup of cooked pinto beans provides 58.8% of  your daily fiber needs.

And beans are a heart-healthy food.  They have significant levels of folate, which help lower levels of  homocysteine.  Elevated homocysteine levels are a risk factor for heart attack.  One cup of beans provides 73.5% of the recommended daily intake for folate.

The good supply of magnesium in beans also makes it a heart-healthy food.  Magnesium is a natural calcium channel blocker. When your body has enough magnesium, veins and arteries relax, which improves the supply of blood, oxygen and nutrients throughout your body.  And, yes, you can buy magnesium, but most of it will be wasted unless you buy a natural supplement in a food matrix.  Much of the supplements — and nearly all the inexpensive ones — are synthetic, made from coal tar and petroleum byproducts.  Better to get it from real food so your body can actually absorb and use it.

Beans are also a good source of potassium, which is also good for your heart and helps prevent high blood pressure naturally.

Those things would be good enough — but there’s more!  Beans are a good source of iron, which is important, among other things, for maintaining energy levels.  The copper and manganese in beans have an anti-oxidant effect and the thiamin in beans will help  support your brain functions.

Beans do take some time to cook, but canned beans don’t lose their nutrients like canned vegetables do.  It’s easy to open a can of beans, and they can be the base of any number of recipes.

Eating healthy doesn’t have to be expensive — and you don’t have to starve yourself to get rid of belly fat.  Why buy exotic and pricey foods? Healthy, filling foods like simple beans are there on the shelves — waiting for you to take advantage of them.

Eating to live and living for Christ,

Susan Jordan Brown