 If you compared the total antioxidant content of 10 different legumes, which do you think would come out on top? Pinto beans, lima beans, red kidney beans, black kidney beans, for which I think they just mean black beans, navy beans, small red beans, black-eyed peas, mung beans, lentils, versus chickpeas. Who can guess the winner and the loser? Quick, pause the video. Bring in at number 10, bottom of the barrel, lima beans, then navy beans, both pretty sad then, black-eyed peas, then mung beans, which is what they typically make bean sprouts out of, then moving into the winner's circle, kidney beans. I bet there were some of you that guessed that that would be our number one, but no, they're just middle of the pack. There are five better. Wanna pause again and reconsider? Next, pinto beans, and black beans, and the bronze, two small red beans, and who do you think got the gold? Anyone want to take any bets? Lentil soup or hummus? What do you think? And it's lentils for the win. You can see how lentils pull away from the pack, in terms of scavenging up free radicals. Lentils top the charts based on a variety of different measures, maybe because they're so small, and the nutrients are concentrated in the seed coat, and so smaller means more surface area. That'd be my guess. When pitted against cholesterol in vitro to try to prevent oxidation, lentils also seem to stand out, perhaps making it the best candidate for the development of a dietary supplement for promoting heart health and for preventing cancers. Or you could just have some lentil soup. I just throw them in my pressure cooker with oat grotes. When I make oatmeal, aside from lentils, black beans, black soybeans, and red kidney beans also seem to top the list. Here's the breakfast. Now, if you also serve a bowl of black bean soup, or just the amount of fiber in that bowl of soup, or just the amount of antioxidants found in that bowl of soup, which do you think works better? Whole plant foods can be greater than just the sum of their parts. Nowadays it's popular to isolate and sell functional components of foods as dietary supplements. However, the extracted ingredients may not produce the same effects when delivered outside of a whole food form. In this study, for example, they compared the ability of black beans to attenuate after-meal metabolic, oxidative stress, and inflammatory responses to a crappy breakfast, and determined the relative contributions of dietary fiber and antioxidant capacity to the overall effect. Well, it's kind of a no-brainer. The results of the whole black beans in a meal improve metabolic responses that could not be explained by either the fiber or antioxidant fractions alone. Beans can even affect our responses to subsequent meals. When our body detects starch in our small intestine, it slows down the rate at which our stomach empties. That makes sense. The body wants to finish digesting before the next meal comes down the pike. And so, might eating a slowly digesting starch, such as lentils, trigger these potent mechanisms to result in a sustained delaying effect on stomach empty. Here's the stomach emptying rate at a second meal, four and a half hours later, after you eat a quickly-digesting starch-like bread. This is not how fast you're emptying the bread. This is how fast your stomach is emptying a second meal hours later after you eat the bread. But what about the same meal eaten four and a half hours after eating lentils? It's significantly slower, like up to an hour slower, which means you would feel that much fuller, that much longer after lunch, because you had some beans for breakfast. Then when all the fiber and resistance starch make it down to our large intestine, they can feed the good bacteria in our colon. Researchers fed people a little over a cup of canned chickpeas a day, and in just three weeks some of the bad bacteria, the pathogenic and putrefrication bacteria, got crowded out, cutting the number of people colonizing a high ammonia-producing bacteria at nearly in half, indicating that chickpeas have the potential to modulate our intestinal microbiome to promote intestinal health within a matter of weeks.