Important health reasons to avoid aquafaba also known as chickpea “bean water” as a plant-based egg substitute as harms include inflammation of the gut and elevated miscarriage risk.
Over the last few years, aquafaba has become all the rage within some alternative cooking circles.
In essence, it is the bean water from canned or cooked chickpeas (garbanzo beans). Sometimes other types of legumes like fava (faba) beans are included in the definition as well.
Technically speaking, aquafaba is similar to rice water, which has many health benefits. However, while the water from cooking rice is safe to consume, bean water is best avoided.
What is Aquafaba and How is it Used?
The sticky, thickened water from cooking beans has the curious ability to whip up just like egg whites, stiff peaks and all! Thus, it makes an excellent egg replacer for those allergic to eggs or those espousing a vegan diet.
Chickpea water, in particular, is useful for whipping up egg-free desserts from brownies to homemade ice cream. One reader of this blog commented that it works extremely well as nondairy milk for making homebrewed lattes.
Social media groups with thousands of fans regularly share a seemingly endless array of ideas, recipes and other suggestions for using it.
But, should you really be consuming this slimy, gel-like liquid? Is it safe?
And more importantly, did traditional cultures use it?
Certainly, given their frugality and “waste not, want not” mentality, if cooked bean water was healthy to use, a clear pattern of historical use would prove it, right?
The History of Aquafaba
Aquafaba as food for humanity is very new on the scene. A French tenor named Joël Roessel first considered its use as a foodstuff in 2014 while investigating the possibilities of vegetable-based foams.
Later, a pair of French thrill-seekers independently posted a viral video showing how to make a dessert out of whipped chickpea foam.
Goose Wohlt, a vegan software engineer living in Indiana, perfected aquafaba in 2015. He first used chickpea cooking water to make a meringue to take to Passover seder.
After vegan blogs picked up the idea, it migrated to social media forums, and a movement was quickly born.
The name aquafaba is a blend word combining “aqua”, meaning water, and “faba” for faba beans. Goose Wohlt originally coined the term with a community of social media fans adopting it. (1)
Not to be outdone, aquafaba quickly gained the attention of the food industry.
In 2015, the New York condiment company Sir Kensington’s debuted Fabanaise, the first aquafaba-based vegan mayo. $8.5 million in investment funding quickly followed.
The product is highly profitable because the cooked chickpea water in the mayo is sourced as a waste product from an upstate hummus company. (2)
More industrial food uses are sure to follow.
Scientific Research
Suffice it to say that the science of what constitutes aquafaba is not at all clear at the present time. This is not surprising given that aquafaba didn’t exist as a culinary ingredient prior to 2014.
Only the peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) that publishes experimental methods in video format, uses the term as of this writing with research published in February 2018. (3)
Dr. Martin Reaney of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada led a team that found that the foam from canned chickpea aquafaba varies in composition depending on the commercial source.
Processing methods are the determining factor such as soaking, cooking and/or dehydration. The pH, temperature, pressure, and duration of these methods affect its makeup as well.
Analysis using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy reveals that the foam consists mainly of polysaccharides, sucrose, and heat soluble protein fractions including defensin, histone, and superoxide dismutase among others. NMR also detected the storage proteins provicillin and leguminin.
Findings presented at the 2nd International Conference on Food Chemistry & Nutrition found that aquafaba quality from commercially canned chickpeas is inconsistent. (4)
Most alarmingly, Dr. Reaney’s research demonstrated the presence of saponins in aquafaba responsible for its soap-like foaming effect. This confirmed a hunch to that effect prior to testing.
These chemicals are dangerous to human health, contributing to the development of leaky gut and potentially a miscarriage risk. More on this with citations below.
Reasons to Avoid Aquafaba
If you’ve been intrigued by the buzz about aquafaba and the chorus of some alternative voices who advocate using it, I would strongly advise you to hold back your enthusiasm and avoid jumping on the bandwagon at least for the time being.
Here are 6 reasons to stay cautious and not be an early adopter of this trend.
Canned Chickpea Water Dangers
Canned bean or chickpea water (liquid from any canned food for that matter!) is almost certainly laced with a chemical cocktail of hormone-disrupting substances.
The industrialized packaging process involves pouring boiling hot food into cans lined with a thin layer of plastic containing the industrial chemical BPA. This triggers the leaching of the chemicals into the water, and to a lesser extent, the food too.
The companies that profess to use BPA-free cans typically use another chemical called BPS, which is just as bad. The risks to your endocrine system from these chemicals are simply not worth it. Stay away!
If you absolutely must use chickpea water, then at least use the water from chickpeas packaged in glass jars.
Bean Water Not a Traditional Food
Evidence that suggests that traditional societies consumed legume cooking water is hard to find. Ancestral diet advocate Dr. Chris Masterjohn recommends drinking the water from soaking legumes for the folate content. (5)
However, I could not find a solid ancestral reason for doing that either.
This piece of wisdom on the matter from the well-respected cookbook Nourishing Traditions:
Traditional societies whose cuisines are based on legumes prepare them with great care. Beans are soaked for long periods before they are cooked. The soaking water is poured off, the beans are rinsed and in the case of chickpeas the skins picked off. As the legumes cook, all foam that rises to the top of the cooking water is carefully skimmed off. Sometimes water is replaced midway during the cooking process. Such care in preparation ensures that legumes will be thoroughly digestible, and all the nutrients they provide well assimilated because such careful preparation neutralizes phytic acid and enzyme inhibitors and breaks down difficult to digest sugars.
It seems that if consuming the soaking or cooking water for beans and other legumes was a good idea, at least one culture would have done it. They certainly wouldn’t have replaced the cooking water halfway through cooking if they thought it was valuable to use as food!
Obviously, carefully soaking and then replacing the cooking water indicates they were attempting to get rid of something. That something is anti-nutrients that harm health.
Old cookbooks published prior to the Green Revolution which kicked off around 1930-40 do not advocate using legume cooking water other than suggesting very small amounts for mashing beans.
Until some solid anthropological evidence of this practice comes to light, it seems prudent to abstain from this recently popularized method.
File aquafaba under “fad” until further notice.
Aquafaba = Ultragassy
So you’ve decided that avoiding canned bean water because of the chemical risks from the packaging is a good idea. What about making aquafaba at home instead?
I’m sorry to tell you that homemade aquafaba is a bad idea too.
The reason is the large, complex sugars called oligosaccharides that are present in abundance in legumes. Humans, in fact, all mammals cannot digest them because they do not produce the enzyme alpha-galactosidase, which is necessary to break them down.
No worries, as methane-producing microbes in the colon are happy to break them down for you instead. This makes for potentially embarrassing, smelly encounters with others. Gas, bloating and diarrhea are also common when these substances are eaten. (6)
Soaking and thoroughly cooking legumes have traditionally been the solution to eliminate this problem. However, if you consume the soaking and/or cooking water where the oligosaccharides go when they leave the chickpea, lentil or bean, then the gas prevention strategy is lost.
Keep a bottle of Beano on hand in that case as it contains the necessary enzyme and will beat the methane microbes to the bean the punch.
Better yet, skip the aquafaba meringues at the office party.
Dangers of Saponins
As confirmed by research, the presence of saponins is responsible for the egg white-like foaming effect from whipping chickpea water.
Saponins are a class of chemicals present in legumes in significant amounts. (7, 8, 9)
Agave also contains a lot.
Saponins are a toxic steroid derivative that disrupts red blood cells. They should be avoided during pregnancy as consumption can induce a miscarriage by stimulating uterine blood flow. They also contribute to the development of leaky gut over time by damaging the gut wall.
Does eating aquafaba once or twice damage the gut? Probably not. But using it as your primary egg replacement for months or years is a risky move!
Saponins are thermally sensitive and dissolve in water when soaked or blanched causing a detergent-like effect. Notice the picture of the cooking beans on my stove below.
Do you want to eat that saponin-loaded foam?
Really?? Maybe try whipping the detergent water from washing your clothes for that next batch of egg-free macaroons too.
Just kidding.
Note that the quotation from Nourishing Traditions above states that legume-eating traditional cultures carefully skimmed off this foam. Obviously, they knew that this stuff was dangerous since their preparation methods incorporated this step.
Beware of propaganda suggesting that consumption of saponins increases hydration and cellular uptake of water or is otherwise beneficial to health. Eating them has no benefit in the diet whatsoever.
Avoiding them is one reason we cook beans and shouldn’t consume the cooking water even if it whips up nice and pretty for making desserts.
Faba Bean Dangers
Naming aquafaba after the faba bean, in particular, was clearly a Freudian slip! Faba beans are the most dangerous legume of all that can cause serious health problems in a large swath of the world’s population.
Faba beans, more popularly known as fava beans, are the most dangerous legume in the world, accounting for a serious and potentially life-threatening reaction that 400 million people worldwide are susceptible to.
Consumption can trigger a hemolytic anemia episode known as Favism after the fava (faba) bean. This is due to the most common human enzyme deficiency-related response in the world called Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency.
It typically occurs in people of Mediterranean, Southeast Asian, or African descent. It is particularly dangerous in children.
If you are genetically susceptible to the dangers of faba beans, I sure wouldn’t be going and consuming aquafaba made from them either!
Egg Nutrition “Whips” Aquafaba
Ultimately, the biggest reason to avoid aquafaba is that it doesn’t come close to replacing the nutrition of eggs.
Comparing anti-nutrient loaded, detergent-like bean water that few if anyone in history consumed to Nature’s perfect food prized by numerous indigenous societies for its unmatched blend of healthy fats and complete protein is just plain foolish!
My advice to aquafaba fans? Eat your eggs my friends and get them from your own backyard hens, a neighbor, or farmer’s market if you are rightfully concerned about the horrid abuse of birds used to produce commercial eggs.
If you are allergic to chicken eggs, try duck eggs or goose eggs which some people tolerate much better.
If you truly need an egg substitute, try this chia seed egg replacement. You won’t get gas from it or damage your intestinal health like with bean water!
I’m going to go collect the gorgeous eggs from my backyard henhouse now!
*The Healthy Home Economist receives no revenue from the meat, egg or dairy industry. Nor does she own stock or have any financial interest in companies supporting these industries.
(1) Origins of Aquafaba
(2) Aquafaba: An Explanation and History
(3) Composition and Properties of Aquafaba: Water Recovered from Commercially Canned Chickpeas
(4) Factors affecting functional properties of aquafaba, water recovered from commercially canned chickpeas
(5) How to Get Enough Folate
(6) Putting the Polish on Those Humble Beans
(7) How Do Grains, Legumes and Dairy Cause a Leaky Gut? Part 2: Saponins and Protease Inhibitors
(8) Saponins of quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa): Effects of processing on their abundance in quinoa products and their biological effects on intestinal mucosal tissue
(9) Saponins as cytotoxic agents: a review
Just saw an article in a women’s magazine toting Aquafaba as the answer to fixing a sluggish liver and aiding in losing fat weight. Im confused about whether to use aquafaba but am 100%sure I don’t want leaky gut. Is there any safe method of obtaining and using aquafaba?
There is no safe aquafaba that I have come across.
Hi, I would like to know what do you think about the aquafava powder now available in the market? Can I use chickpea powder as an egg substitute?
Even if dried, the chickpea powder would still be loaded with anti-nutrients. Using it regularly would be a grave risk to gut health.
Oh darn. I got a bag of 13 bean soup mix from the store, and since it contained both kidney shaped and non kidney shaped beans I soaked them overnight with baking soda, rinsed, and replaced the water and added whey to it for about 6 hours before I started cooking. The bag said to bring the beans to a boil and then simmer for 3 hrs before adding veggies. I now feel like an idiot because I cooked it in my precious homemade bone broth and then added veggies. It was very delicious, and I did get to skim off the bit of foam, but my peppercorns kept coming with it, so I didn’t try very hard… and now I’m realizing it’s not even good for me and I’m going to be gassy tomorrow? :(((((((((. I should know better than to follow directions on the bag. Should I throw away the leftovers? Not let my kids eat it? It was sooooo yummy!
It should be fine! Don’t throw it out!
This is a very informative and useful article Sarah, thank you. My intuition said to me “Don’t use that cooked chickpea water for anything else.” But I don’t like waste, so Googled “Is it safe?”. I scanned through six posts raving about how great Aquafaba is (complete with recipes) before reaching your site. Your points make good sense to me and feel right ‘in my gut’. So thank you, once again.
> I own five chickens myself…. they are HAPPY to lay eggs for you and will come and get you to let you know when they lay one.
50%* of them won’t produce any eggs. I don’t know what the exact birth rates of male and female chickens is, but if all the males get killed for meat production and the females lead long happy egg laying lives, then that is exploitation. That said, there are developments underway that will allow farmers breed a chosen sex of chickens, to reduce wastage in meat and egg farming.
BTW i’m not vegan or vegetarian and I do not have any objection to the exploitation of animals, but to say your chickens aren’t exploited, when their brothers were in all likelihood killed at a day old, just seems a little wrong.
Thank you very much for this great information! I was just considering trying whipping the liquid from garbanzo beans, but hadn’t done so yet. You certainly give me many reasons not to! I would like to see a reply for the soaking & not boiling comment; will just soaking remove the toxins or do the beans have to be boiled as well? I will begin reading labels more carefully to be sure they don’t contain any of the bean liquid. (Just so you know, it’s hard to take your critics seriously when their grammar is incorrect! Loose vs lose, exploration vs exploitation, etc)
Well egg health is a controversy, some research support it while others do not. On top of that, the well known study in the harvard university limited paticipant to one egg a day…
Anyway i think instead of demonizing aquafaba, you should do it on sugar instead which is known to be linked to health problem, since most aquafaba recipe are use for sweats.
Veganism is based on a solid philosophical foundation as well as a realistic view on human health and animal agriculture. You don’t have to like it, but I encourage you to do a little reading before dismissing it. Your “laughting farmers” argument is well known to vegans as a fallacy. This makes you loose your overall credibility. I suggest you start with “Answering The Objections to Veganism” by Vegan Future Now. And check pubmed for the “pay with you health” part (“Position of the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada: Vegetarian diets.” is a good starting point).
Dismissing reality as fallacy is what vegans seem to be especially good at. The American Dietetic Association’s annual conference welcomes fast food companies as sponsors, so suggesting this group has any credibility whatsoever is completely moronic.
So we shouldn’t eat bean soups either?
Bean soup is best prepared by soaking the beans, tossing the water and then cooking the beans separately. Then the beans are added to the soup at the end (without the cooking water). If you eat soup with the beans cooked in with the soup base and other ingredients, it will likely make you very gassy!
As someone who does not use much aquafaba I’m not overly concerned with your claims…however, as aa vegan I am highly offended by your telling fellow vegans they should “just eat eggs”. Most of us avoid eggs, not because of health reasons, but because of the exploration and torture of fellow creatures based on their consumption.
Seriously? You vegans need to get some chickens for yourselves and see that the chickens aren’t “tortured” when they are free ranging or pastured. I own five chickens myself…. they are HAPPY to lay eggs for you and will come and get you to let you know when they lay one. Get a grip. Not all animals are “exploited” for food. The only reason people are vegans is because they are so removed from where their food comes from that they have no clue about producing it at all. Do you have any idea how many animals are KILLED in the production of vegetables? Thousands upon thousands every year. The vegetable farmers I know LAUGH at vegans because they know they are so clueless about the realities of agriculture. Is a deer less important than a cow or a chicken? Veganism is based on a fantasy world that doesn’t exist and you eventually pay for your unrealistic idealism with your health.