Why use vinegar with beans?

Kelsey Marksteiner:  From my understanding, what it does is just helps to break down phytates and things. It kind of deactivates the phytates and helps that to kind of get out of the legumes. Again, cooking also deactivates that. I’d have to do a little more digging into whether … I know that cooking deactivates it almost completely, so I do wonder if it’s really necessary to do the vinegar, but since it’s such an easy thing to do, I would just rather play it safer in that regard and just do it. If you don’t do that half the time or you forget or something, I don’t think it’s probably a huge deal because, again, cooking is going to deactivate a lot of those phytates and antinutrients. Again, just because it’s super easy, I just do it anyway, and it’s what I recommend to my clients, but I’d have to do a little more digging to see how much that deactivates it and then how much cooking deactivates it to see… Like, if cooking is getting rid of 95 percent of the phytates, then I’d say there’s no point really, but if it’s only getting rid of, like, 80 and you can get rid of another 10 by doing the vinegar beforehand, why not? I would just recommend it because of that at this point. I’m not too, too worried about it, because again, legumes are a great source of carbs, but they’re not something that I’d want someone to be eating a ton of, having multiple servings of it per day, where it’s replacing other really nutrient-dense foods. If they’re eating it maybe once a day or so, even if they’re getting some phytates there, I don’t think it’s a big deal. If someone’s eating a handful of nuts, that probably has more phytates than some cooked legumes do. So in the scheme of things, it’s probably not a big deal to be getting that small amount of phytates and anti-nutrients from well-cooked legumes, but again, if you can decrease it just a little bit by doing the extra vinegar step, it’s easy enough to do.