The food pyramid for those over 70 usually emphasize a diet which is primarily plant-based and includes a variety of vegetables, fruits, and grains. But how much do we really know about them? What are the various health benefits and how can we best prepare them for ourselves and our families?

I have been wondering about this since reading that three of the plant-based foods – namely legumes, pulses, and beans – have been linked to longevity. This got my attention!

So, I did some research on them, and it turns out that while they may be related (they are all plants, after all) they are not the same things! Let’s look first at each so that we are on the same page.

Legumes

Legumes are vegetables whose fruit grows in pods. Common examples of legumes are peanuts, chickpeas, lentils, black-eyed peas, and pinto beans. Even asparagus is considered a legume! And, if you are wondering, there are about 16,000 different types of legumes cultivated around the world.

Pulses

Pulses are the seeds that grow inside legume pods. You can find them either fresh or dried at your local grocery store. A good example of these is peas (both fresh and dried), which grow inside pods and are removed from them before preparation and eating. Pulses are nutritionally quite dense, which makes them an ideal addition to boomer diets.

Beans

Beans are a member of the legume family. Since they are a seed of a legume, they are best categorized as a pulse. What is important to keep in mind is that while all beans are legumes, not all legumes are beans. In fact, beans are fruits (I had some trouble putting my mind around that also).

This helps explain why green beans and green peas are not technically beans. There are more than 40,000 types of beans grown around the world, even though only a very small portion of them is commercially produced and consumed.

Benefits of These “Big Three”

Legumes, beans, and pulses, as a group, share common nutrition and health benefits. These include being rich in fiber and proteins as well as having a low glycemic index. Legumes are also a great source of folate, niacin, thiamine, calcium, magnesium, zinc, fiber, iron, prebiotics, potassium, the B6 vitamins, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, and phosphorus.

They are so important to a healthy diet that that the U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend we consume about three cups of them a week. If we are trying to better manage blood pressure, the well-known DASH diet recommends from four to five half-cup servings per week. A bonus is that they have no cholesterol.

In addition to supporting management of hypertension, other health benefits of having legumes as a part of your plant-based diet include:

• Promoting better cardiovascular health since their fiber can help lower cholesterol levels.
• Aiding in the management of diabetes since they do not cause a spike in blood sugar levels given their high levels of fiber, resistant starch, and protein.
• Supporting a healthy weight, or helping you stick to your diet, since they tend to help you feel fuller.
• Providing your body with important anti-aging antioxidants called polyphenols (if you are shopping for beans, keep in mind that darker beans have higher antioxidant levels).

Including Legumes, Pulses and Beans in Your Diet

You may be wondering if you should give priority to one type of these boomer superfoods over another. The simple answer is “no” since, being from the same family, they all have similar benefits. What I like to do is mix and match them in a main or side dish, including salads.

For example, you can mix them to make veggie burgers, a healthy dip to snack on, and hearty soups. Other easy-to-prepare dishes are meatless chili and hummus. Also, remember that because of their texture, many legumes can substitute for animal-based proteins in your favorite recipes.

I do believe that many people, perhaps you are one of them, avoid including legumes, and especially beans and pulses, in their diets because they believe they are difficult to prepare. I’m not quite sure how some legumes got this reputation, but I can tell you from personal experience that it is not the case.

Yes, some may need a little extra prep, such as a soak, but otherwise cooking and serving them is very straightforward. The steps I take are to first clean the beans/pulses to get rid of any foreign objects or damaged/broken beans, give them a good rinse, soak them (not all need a soak), and then cook them. It is as easy as that.

Two other things that may make you concerned about these foods are the antinutrients that some members of the legume family may contain (which may impact their nutritional value) and the possibility of increased flatulence.

On the first, correctly cooking these foods can greatly reduce the amount of antinutrients consumed. Also, many antinutrients have their own health benefits which may, for example, help reduce cancer risk and support diabetes management.

When it comes to flatulence, it is indeed true that the non-digestible carbohydrates found in some beans and pulses, for example, may cause bloating and gas for some people. But it is equally true that they do not cause problems for others. The potential for flatulence can also be reduced by correct cooking methods.

If you are thinking about purchasing foods based on or made from legumes to get their nutrition and health benefits, be sure to check the labels before doing so. Depending on the level of processing required to manufacture the product you are considering, it may be packed with sodium, saturated fat, and sugar (among others). As you know, these can easily counter any health benefits. So read before you buy!

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Do you include legumes, beans, and pulses in your healthy diet? If so, did you find it easy to do so? What has your experience been? How often to you include them in your meal planning? Do you have a favorite way of preparing them or a favorite recipe? Please join the conversation.

Have you devoted years, if not decades, to therapeutic services in the search for the answer to how to love and forgive yourself and your ex-partner(s)? The self-help gurus, coaches, and TikTokers offer up many exercises that work to a limited degree by creating an awareness of the emotions we still need to process. Yet soundbites and buzzwords won’t replace self-discovery by learning and implementing how to get to that point!

My Story – or Is It Yours?

I forfeited the love of myself by giving it first to my nuclear family in my formative years, a disaster resulting in low self-esteem, doubting my every move, and pleasing people to my detriment. Later, I doled out more pieces of my heart to frenemies, intimate partners, and in-laws until the only thing left was me in a crumbled ball, agonizing over how unloved I was.

Deciding in my favor to speak out against the verbal abuse my mother, father, stepmother, in-laws, and partner hurled at me (and to be fair, me to them in true-to-form Pavlovian response) well into adulthood was excruciating. I’d resort to manipulation.

Are you able to pinpoint how you’ve been manipulative? It took a whopping amount of courage to admit my mistakes. I thought I was above resorting to subterfuge, as I was innocent.

NOT!

Redirecting Love

But once I saw my role in all the relationships, I hugged myself. Filled with remorse, I began to heal from that point of feeling.

Redirecting love to me has been an elusive procedure, frightening at first and disheartening. When you live listening to the voice of perfectionist tendencies, you find ways to believe you’re not good enough (performance anxiety) and push yourself harder and harder – in work, hobbies, and relationships, even after psychotherapy, past life recall, alternative vision quests, Shamanism, Gestalt therapy, and God knows what else.

Through a series of stressful, incomprehensible (at the time) events, which piled up and almost rendered me a zombie, I took the time to unravel and touch, smell, feel and taste the bitter fruit of my past decisions or lack thereof. I allowed myself to relive past hurts, rage, and disappointments from as far back as I could remember. I guess I put that at age four.

Getting to One

How many of you grew up in households where your parents, grandparents or even great grandparents pounded it into your head to find a mate and have a baby? Although my mother was from the Silent Generation, she was a Women’s Libber who gave me the birth control pill at 15. Yet my father wanted me to settle down and marry at 19!

Psychologists, anthropologists, behavioral scientists, and theologians tell us that no man is an island; we can expand our life expectancy by living with someone. Doomsayers claim that civilization will be extinct if we don’t have a partner with whom to procreate.

Both of these theories are incorrect. I don’t need to live with anyone, yet if at some point I choose to have another human being by my side, whether platonic or intimate, that will be my choice made in mutual consent with such a person. As to procreation, we do not need a partner. There’s IVF, for example.

Need Is Different from Desire

We trap ourselves in the mindset of need until we let go of our ancestral chatter about partners. Need begets neediness, a form of mind drudgery or mental slavery.

My life before 2008 feels like someone else’s. As if the third trimester began in 2009.

A late bloomer – emotionally as it stands, because from 2010 through 2016, I finally figured out the puzzle pieces of my life and sorted them into a cohesive whole. At 59 years old, I earned the grandest of all qualifications life could offer.

The key to unraveling the former need to be with someone was a concoction of patience and practicing in front of the mirror using NLP techniques, saying aloud, “I love you,” “You are everything just as you are,” and words to that effect. Before retiring for the night, I’d say, “Goodnight, I love you,” then kiss my palm and plant it on my cheek or forehead.

I Earned My Degree in Freedom

Freedom is not just another word for nothing left to lose. Freedom is the emergence and blossoming of the relegating fear, doubt, scarcity, rage, hatred, and other debilitating emotions to a place where these feelings have no punch. I realized I did not need to be with a significant other. I needed to be with me. 24/7 happily in love with me, warts and all. Tough times are when you must prove your commitment. I didn’t give up.

At the beginning of the end of need, I saw a vast difference between the words need and desire. I now choose what I want judiciously and find that my needs and desires are almost aligned. True happiness is not about love. It’s about the peace within from balancing need with desire.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Have you found balance within yourself? What prompted you to look for it? Do you think you are free to be who you are? What is stopping you?