My experience with eating beans for pregnancy nausea as a cure for morning sickness.
I open my eyes in the morning, and the all-too-familiar sensation hit : part roller coaster, part wind-tossed boat.
Lying in bed, unable to move as the room seemed to spin around me, my stomach lurched.
Courtesy of pregnancy hormones, my now super-sensitive sniffer could detect the sharp odor of chlorine in the toilet water, even with the bathroom door shut.
My husband moved the coffee pot into our basement so the odor of its (formerly life-sustaining) contents didn’t trigger vomiting. Forget cooking our usual bacon and eggs. I could barely walk past the kitchen trash can without my middle-of-the-night snack coming back up.
When I read about Karen Hurd and her bean cure for pregnancy nausea and morning sickness, I was fascinated.
What if the months of vomiting and unrelenting, 24/7 nausea I suffered through in my pregnancies was as easy to solve as… including beans with each meal?
Beans, beans, the magical fruit. The more you eat, the… less you puke?
When I first encountered the bean cure for morning sickness, I remembered that I’d craved Mexican food while I was pregnant. I always felt better after having beans with my steak fajita. And in my 5th and 6th pregnancies, I had intense cravings for Taco Bell bean burritos and ate those for months.
Perhaps eating beans for pregnancy nausea really does work? Here’s my experience.
Table of contents
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11/27/2011
I took a pregnancy test first thing this morning. It was positive.
I ate beans several times today in an attempt to fight the morning sickness that plagued me in all my pregnancies.
Why Would Beans Help with Pregnancy Nausea?
According to Karen Hurd, a nutritionist who writes about the bean cure, the nausea a pregnant woman feels is due to the impact of hCG on bile production.
HCG is the hormone pregnancy tests are looking for when you pee on a stick. HCG is responsible for sustaining the pregnancy. That’s why women who experience nausea are statistically less likely to miscarry – it’s a sign of “good strong hormones”.
HCG increases bile flow. According to the theory, it’s the bile that makes you feel sick. As bile picks up more toxins in your body (that’s its job, by the way, to help you digest fats and clean out your innards), those toxins keep flowing through, making you feel worse and worse.
“Bile is used in the digestion of the fats that we eat. Bile is also the vehicle that the liver uses to rid the body of fat-soluble toxins.”
Karen Hurd
The fix?
Eat beans.
Beans contain a lot of soluble fiber, which bind to the nasty bile and take it out, courtesy of your poo.
Pooping is difficult during pregnancy thanks to our other friend, progesterone, which slows your digestive system to a sloth’s pace.
This is so your body can get the maximum nutritional “oomph” from the food you eat, but it also has the effect of making you constipated. Beans can help with that too!
What kind of beans clean the bile and help pregnancy nausea?
“They are pinto beans, kidney beans, garbanzo beans, white beans, navy beans, black beans, lentils, split peas, black-eyed peas, and lima beans, to name just a few.”
As soon as the nausea hit me this time (literally the day after I got a positive pregnancy test) I started eating beans. I usually feel better within minutes.
You might be thinking this is the placebo effect. I don’t mind. If it works to ease the nausea, I’m sold.
During my pregnancies I’ve tried every morning sickness remedy known. Sucking pregnancy lollipops, eating ginger, using seasickness bands: none of them worked for me.
Some took the edge off a little, but nothing made me feel instantly better like eating beans.
How to Eat Beans For Morning Sickness
I’ve been eating beans as soon as I wake up (around 5 am), then again every time I eat. I eat about 1/4 – 1/2 cup at a time. When I run errands, I take a commuter coffee cup and… fill it with beans. (Not the fun, caffeinated kind of my former self!)
The recommendation is to consume 3 cups of beans daily, spread out into six 1/2 cup servings.
The point of this is to keep the soluble fiber in the body at all times so it can soak up and bind with the dirty bile. Eventually there will be only clean bile.
By this point, I’ve been eating beans about 6 times a day for 3 weeks. Honestly, they’re the last thing I desire or crave. But beans have become my friend because they quiet the nausea.
The nausea gets pretty bad if I go too long without eating any beans. My mouth fills up with spit the way it does just before you vomit. The extra spit triggers more nausea. It’s a vicious cycle.
But at this point, I’m not vomiting. I’ve never not vomited at this point in a pregnancy. It looks like the beans are working.
To Recap: How the Bean Cure Works:
- Pregnancy makes you produce hCG
- hCG makes you produce more bile
- Extra bile makes you nauseated
- Dirty, recirculating bile makes you even sicker
- Soluble fiber in beans binds to bile
- Bile is pooped out with soluble fiber
- Beans have far more soluble fiber than other foods
- Eat beans = cleaner bile, less bile = less nausea!
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I bought Katie’s Everything Beans book to get more ideas on incorporating beans into my meal planning. It’s fine to just sit down with a bowl of beans, because thankfully I enjoy eating legumes.
But as the pregnancy progresses and my food aversions get stronger, it will be more difficult, I’m sure. Having the cookbook gives me ideas for bean-y variety.
More tips for eating beans for pregnancy nausea:
- Try a variety of beans. I’ve found that my favorite is pintos. If I eat one variety too often I begin to develop an aversion and eating them isn’t as pleasant. So mix it up. Limas, blackeyed peas, butter beans, white beans, black beans, kidney beans, pintos… there are plenty to try.
- Add spice to your beans. I find that a dash of Tabasco makes my early morning beans much more palatable. The vinegar in the hot sauce is pleasant when I’m pregnant.
- Try hummus (chickpeas). Buy the plain (no garlic!) variety and dip raw veggies in it. Sometimes cold beans go down more easily.
- Skip the onions and garlic. While the addition of those two ingredients normally makes beans yummy, many pregnant women are sensitive to them during the first few months.
- Hide the beans. Eat them with chili, with huevos rancheros, in soups, in pasta (blend them with sauces), even in brownies! Yes, you can hide black beans in brownies. There’s a recipe in the Everything Beans books! You can even hide white beans in a smoothie. Or brownies. Or “cookie dough”. Chocolate Covered Katie has several dessert recipes with hidden beans.
- Add chips. The salty and crispy crunch of a tortilla chip to scoop up beans gets them down a little easier.
- Legumes, le fumes? If you’re worried about gas, get over it. Pregnant women fart a lot anyway! Your body will adjust to the extra beans in a day or two. You can reduce the gassiness by soaking your beans for 24 hours and then cooking them for several hours in a slow cooker.
- Just do it. Force yourself to eat them if you have to. Distract yourself while eating beans if you must. I often eat my beans while I’m reading or browsing something interesting online. I promise you’ll feel better. Isn’t it better than vomiting?
At this point in my pregnancies I am typically nearly incapacitated with severe nausea and vomiting. I don’t leave the house for weeks, cooking is impossible, forget cleaning or keeping to any kind of schedule.
The bean thing is definitely helping me. I wish I could say that it’s a cure, and Karen Hurd seems to imply that it is on her website, but it isn’t – at least not for me.
I still have nausea in the background 24 hours a day, and sometimes it’s severe, but eating beans makes me feel better. I’m able to clean, cook and do school with the kids. This is a definite blessing for me!
As I mentioned above, beans are a gift that keeps on giving. Why? Because the constipation that plagues many women during their pregnancy will not be an issue when you’re eating all these beans!
Until the baby is born and I can enjoy my other favorite bean (dark-roasted and served with cream) beans became my pregnancy bestie.
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Carrie, Vitamin B6 is supposed to help with pregnancy nausea. Beans like kidney, lentils, soybeans and chickpeas are a good source of this vitamin. I would think getting it in real foods and not pill form would be the way to go. This could be just the reason why your nausea is better this time around. By the way, congratulations!
Very interesting! I wonder if the hcg thing is why I had diarrhea the entire time I was pregnant with both babies. I don’t have a gall bladder to hold the extra bile and it just runs through your intestines, irritating it along the way. Hmmm…definitely makes sense.
This is fascinating! Though I don’t want to get pregnant to see for myself 😉 LOL!
Bile and I are way too intimately acquainted since I had to have my gall bladder removed after my first pregnancy.
First off congratulations. I love babies.
I like this idea. I just munch a lot during first trimester.
But this sounds like a good idea. I had bean burritos for dinner tonight (cooked in crockpot with taco seasoning mixture). They were good refried in olive oil and cumin and salt and oddly a dash of oregano (all good mexican recipes benefit from this dash).
Peace!
Dang, wish I’d known that. I couldn’t eat very much in my first trimester w/o getting nauseated, but never tried beans.
Wow – that is definitely not something I would have tried for nausea.
It makes since though if hcg increases bile flow which makes you nauseated when pregnant that eating something to bind the bile would eliminate or decrease the nausea.
When I was pregnant I ate saltines to get rid of morning sickness.
Like Kelly said, I’m not going to get pregnant to test this theory out, I’ll just take your word for it.
First of all, I actually am one of those weirdos who like beans so this is cool.
Secondly I’m pretty sure I’m not done having babies so I’ll definitely put it to the test next time.
Thirdly, the bile thing sounds gross so if I wasn’t going to have morning sickness next time after reading this article I think I will cause I’ll be thinking of bile. Glad I got the bean fix to get be out of that little predicament, lol!
This is so cool. Beans are seriously a wonder food. I need to eat more beans but I’m not too sure HOW to incorporate them into my diet. I will check out that book you recommended. 🙂
Very interesting! I am lucky that I had no nausea at all with any of my pregnancies but I will remember this for any others who ask about it.
I have been completely nauseous all day every day. Nothing helped… I have been miserable for days. Absolutely torture! I decided to have chili for lunch… Not only delicious but for the first time in days I’m feeling normal! It only lasted two hours but what a wonderful feeling! That’s when I decided to look up beans and pregnancy… I am Absolutely convinced beans are magic! Try it… It’s so nice not being sick… Even if just for a couple hours!
I think the molybdenum (very high in pulses) is what did the trick. Thank you for posting this! Here’s a video if you want to learn about the theory behind why molybdenum works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaweHPbUPL0
Or you can read about it on my blog, Petticoat Government.
@CT, thanks for posting the link to the video, excellent information and I hope you get the word out to many women who are miserable during pregnancy!
OMG I just tried them the other night after reading this and Yes it worked. Beans are my new found friend!
@Soontobemommyof3: So glad to hear it! Pregnancy nausea is NO FUN.
beans works for me! anytime I see an herbalist or acupuncturist I am always told I have liver stagnation. It totally makes sense why I am struggling with nausea during pregnancy. Ive been eating beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner and I have felt better than ever! Thank you for your article!
So glad it helped Tyra!
I will be trying I’m makes me so miserable to be sick b 6 I’m done
Ment to mention I have all boys hopefully I’m luck this time I have a long way to go have a bless day
So! I randomly came across this site because of my “discovery” this morning. I suddenly stopped feeling nauseous yesterday evening and was able to digest a little more food. This morning when i woke up, i was even able to have a decent bile movement. Although that’s something to be happy about, it scared me a little.. I’m like.. “okay now those are the only indicators i had to know i was pregnant and now they’re gone. I was all too worried until i found myself eating my leftover chilli from Wendy’s yesterday. I looked down and guess what i saw BEANS. So MANY beans. Suddenly i laughed and slapped my forehead.. the beans helped!!! I hopped on google and it led me to this article.. so yes ladies! It make not work for everyone but I’ve found another Aid for myself and I’m SOOOO GLAD
So glad it helped!!
ALL I have wanted to eat lately is Mexican food, especially beans! Huevos rancheros, burritos, nachos, and just plain old beans and cheese have all been utterly delicious to me lately. Morning sickness has been worse this pregnancy than the last one, and I’m a total wimp, so I’m so glad I’ve finally found something nutritious I can consistently enjoy, and it’s good to know that there’s a rhyme and reason to the cravings! 🙂 Thanks for this informative blog post!
I just came across this article in search for a cure for my morning sickness. It’s been HORRIBLE starting at 6-7 weeks. I’m at 14 weeks and still vomiting. Giving this bean theory a shot!
This is crazy! I live in Costa Rica and one of our main dishes is Gallo Pinto which is rice and beans (delicious by the way). I haven’t been craving anything cause I just feel nauseous almost all day. However I did have some Gallo Pinto at a brunch I had with my family and ended up having thirds! My aunt gave me some to take home and I ate more that same day and finished it all off on the next day. It was sooo comforting and I was like…this is weird! Just now I had some black bean soup with some rice (which again I love) and again felt pretty good. I thought this was so strange I got on Google and typed in: beans nausea pregnancy and low and behold it brought me here! Amazing! I don’t think it’s a placebo thing!!! Beans all the way ladies!!!! Happy pregnancies and God bless!
awesome Melissa! My father in law lives in Costa Rica. 🙂 Glad the article was helpful
I am in my first trimester of my first pregnancy, and i have been very nauseous and have also been throwing up alot lately. I had lentil soup as i am not able to keep many foods down. For some reason after having lentil soup i instantly felt better. I decided to look up lentils and nausea during pregnancy, which then directed me to your site. I really don’t want to be taking any medication for nausea during my pregnancy but i was kind of forced to do so the past couple of days, so i’m going to continue eating lots of beans to see if it will continue working for me. Thank you for sharing your story!
so glad it was helpful Navi!
This is amazing!!! I’m 8 weeks pregnant with baby number 7 and have been so nauseated every time I eat. Tonight though, we had bean burritos for dinner and I’ve been totally shocked that I haven’t felt a bit nauseated since!! I’ve been trying to make sense of it, until I came across this blog post! Now it makes sense, and I’m now planning out all of tomorrow’s bean meals!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing this incredible information!!!