Bean is a flowering plant from the family Fabaceae, bean is actually a seed of various Genera worldwide used as human and animal food, which are commonly known as the legume, pea, or bean family. It offers many health benefits like protein, fibre .vitamin (thiamin, riboflavin) and iron.
As it is a very common food in whole over the world it has various ways to cook including boiling, frying, and baking. It is used in several traditional foods in different ways of cooking throughout the world. Among many longest-cultivated plants, Beans are one of them. It is called Broad beans, Fava beans etc. It is a vital source of protein throughout old and new world history and also till today.
Around the second millennium BCE, the oldest known domesticated beans were found in Guitarrecs, an archaeological site in Peru, in the Americas. However, the common bean Phaseolus‘s genetic analyses, showed that it originated in Mesoamerica and thoroughly spread around the southward along with corn and squash as traditional companion crops.
In the world gene bank, there are forty thousand varieties of beans, though some of the fractions are mass-produced for regular consumption.
Maximum verities of beans grow either as erect bushes or as climbing plants. And few important verities are grown as an intermediate form. The variety called Dwarf and Semi climbers is grown extensively. During harvesting artificial supports are necessary to facilitate growing which is applied in immature seedpods of climbing types of beans.
Beans are varies greatly in size, shape, colour and fibrousness or tenderness of the immature pods. In general, varieties grown for dry mature seeds produce pods that are too fibrous to be taken at any stage of development. Seed colours could range from white through green, yellow, tan, pink, red, brown, and violet to black in solid colours and countless contrasting patterns. And the shapes range from nearly spherical to flattened, elongated, and kidney-shaped. Pods have also different shades of colour like green, yellow, red, violet, a combination of red and violet etc; pod shapes range from flat to round, smooth to irregular, and straight to sharply curved; length ranges from 75 to 200 mm (3 to 8 inches) or many more.
There are many kinds of beans and has separate names, those are – Soybean, common bean, Broad bean, Lima bean, Garbanzo bean, Pinto bean etc.
There are many health benefits of beans, they have properties of high protein, folate, antioxidants, heart health, reduced risk of cancer, diabetes and glucose metabolism, preventing fatty liver and also control appetite. Of its different kinds of properties, it is a widely used vegetable whole over the world. As it is a fibre-containing food and can control appetite so it is a healthy food and is used in diet control.
So all the above Bean is a very simple but highly nutritious food. We all can add beans to our regular food as different dishes.
