Beans, beans, the musical fruit…
To clear up any confusion from the title of the post, the research was actually done by the Harvard Science of Cooking class, and the Harvard Fart Squad were the student volunteer subjects, whose contributions were vital. The question was: Which method of preparing beans results in the greatest reduction in flatulence? Food scientist and chef Dave Arnold of Serious Eats prepared pinto bean dip using 16 different common fart-reducing methods, plus one that would test his own hypothesis involving Beano, along with control samples, and mailed them to Harvard for testing. These samples were run through a mass spectrometer to analyze their chemistry and were ranked by the amount of fart-inducing oligosaccharides that remained. The analysis found that common fart-reducing methods were not all that great in reducing farts.
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However, the Beano preparation method was the most promising, and that’s where the Harvard Fart Squad came in. Bean dip was given to 45 students in a double-blind experiment, along with a questionnaire to record the effects. Read the entire story of the study, plus bean preparation recipes, at Serious Eats. -via Metafilter
Source: neatorama