Forget pills for digestive ills try a pressure cooker 🫕
plus Everyday Pressure Cooking reviewed, a recipe extract, plus which pot to buy
Bloated? Unsociable gas? Intestinal pain? Urgency? Undigested particles of food in your stool? Constipation? Heartburn? Urrghhhh!
Have you been told it’s “just a bit of IBS” (irritable bowel syndrome) or “leaky gut”?
Maybe you avoid “legumes” as beans and pulses are known?
And you definitely aren’t getting anywhere near your 30 different plants a week (or 30g of fibre daily).
OMG unimaginable trying to digest all that. Right?
Some of you may be proceeding very cautiously around food right now, or taking a pill box of digestive enzymes out and about - to help breakdown food better.
If eating has become a mine field, I highly recommend looking at HOW your food is cooked.
Namely, looking at pressure cooking and fellow Substacker Catherine Phipps’s new book.
In my experience pressure cooking can be key to digestive comfort and getting more nutrition absorbed out of what you are eating, which in turn gives you more energy and wellbeing.
But before we get to the solution, let’s look at the problem.
Any of you who have been subscribing here for a while will know that showering your microbiome (the trillions of bacteria living mainly in your colon) with plants is key.
“Plants” includes beans and pulses, a wide variety of different unprocessed grains. Herbs and spices, all vegetables and fruit, nuts and seeds.
30 different varieties a week (not day!).
If you have any of the above symptoms you may be grimacing.
The plant fibre and the polyphenols (plant chemicals) in the colour in them feed good bacteria in the gut to help form a healthy pattern.
A healthy pattern of diverse bacteria helps digestion function better, produces short chain fatty acids such as a substance called butyrate to keep your gut lining in good condition which can lead to a happier immune system.
But if you have digestive symptoms (and accompanying inflammation) - a heavy plant diet is probably looking unattractive.
So how do you improve your gut function so you can eat more plants, and then get all the long-term benefits of improved digestion and immune system, energy etc?
For many people I’ve worked with as a nutritional therapist, the answer has come in the form of a pressure cooker.
So why can plants be problematic for some?
The reason is that they contain substances called anti-nutrients. These are present in plants as defence mechanisms to repel pests and help survival in hard growing conditions.
These substances have names like lectins, saponins, phytates, oxalates, and protease inhibitors.
Some - such as lectins and saponins - might lead to leaky gut (though there is much debate on this).
Leaky gut is where your gut lining becomes damaged, inflammed and may lead to inflammation in other parts of the body too (think of any issue where you feel red and raw - eg skin flares, or it could be as simple as a violent sneezing reaction).
Stress and too much alcohol can contribute to leaky gut too.
Also beans and pulses that haven’t been soaked and thoroughly cooked properly can irritate the gut lining if they haven’t had the anti-nutrients in them reduced by soaking, and thorough cooking, causing bloating and wind and some of the other reactions just mentioned.
Here are some of the anti-nutrient main players…
Saponins are in many plants, particularly beans like chickpeas. Ever noticed the foam forming when you boil or soak them? Saponin comes from the word soap. A possible gut lining irritant.
Lectins (found in many cereals, beans, potatoes, soybeans, peas and most vegetables actually) may also irritate the gut lining.
Phytates in many plants (such as wheat and oats, fava beans, chickpeas) may reduce calcium absorption from your food and encourage kidney stones to form.
Oxalates - eg found in pulses and lots of green leafy veg like kale and spinach. They can reduce your ability to absorb calcium and iron.
Protease inhibitors are proteins contained in legumes. They can block digestion of protein, meaning you don’t get the nutrition out of said beans or pulses easily and can get symptoms of indigestion if not soaked and cooked properly. This could be an issue if you are vegan/vegetarian trying to get a lot of your protein from beans and lentils and aren’t soaking/cooking them long enough.
You’ll find masses online on all of the above and long and complicated exclusion diets and gut-healing supplement pill protocols. Which in my experience are unnecessary.
Why?
Because if you cook plants on a high-temperature, most of the anti-nutrients are significantly reduced (see the 3 science papers below if you want to dig in further on this).
Regarding beans and lentils - they also come out in water, hence soaking before cooking is so important.
Regarding cooking - this is where the pressure cooker comes in. Because not only does it reduce the anti-nutrient compounds significantly, it gets it all over and done with at HIGH SPEED.
Who has time, or deep pockets for the energy bills attached to multiple hours of boiling beans?
(Or bone broth - my recipe here would take 30 minutes in a pressure cooker instead of up to 4 hours in a regular pot).
The crux of the matter is that soaking and fully-cooking beans and pulses is key to reducing anti-nutrients.
Think of it like you’re basically removing the itching powder!
It’s that simple.
I know you can buy ready-cooked beans and pulses in tins and jars, but two things to say.
Firstly in my experience the tinned ones are sometimes not cooked well enough for my liking - eg are slightly hard and undercooked, so can be hard to digest leading to bloating, wind, even pain sometimes!
Secondly, the better-cooked ones in jars are very expensive.
If you are going to eat a plant-heavy diet - a pressure cooker is probably going to save money in the long run, not only on the jars, but on your energy bills too.
As for meat, there are also advantages of cooking in a pressure cooker. Meat becomes tenderised and easy to break down in the digestive system. This means less work for your gut (which has to produce litres of enzymes and acid each day to break food into smaller pieces).
Food going through you too quickly? I think you definitely need pressure cooked dishes. Eg bone broth and stews retain nutrients in the juice which is easy to digest and absorb and restore you.
(Plus saves energy bills boiling bones and connective tissue for the collagen - also useful for keeping your gut lining healthy).
Pressure cooking also locks flavours in the pot.
Conclusion
If you want good digestion and all the health benefits of pulses and beans, a wide range of grains and vegetables to shower your microbiome with goodies and put you on track to optimum health while saving you time and money on energy bills, pressure cook your plants!
Final tips
If you currently don’t eat pulses and beans due to digestive discomfort, build up gradually. Eg you could add a teaspoon at a time to a soup batch to start with to get your gut bacteria used to eating them. Of course, if you aren’t used to eating much “prebiotic” fibre, your microbiome will still have to get used to digesting said fibre, but if you reduce the anti-nutrients first, it is one less problem for your digestive system to deal with.
Traumatised by 1970s pressure cookers? Don’t be! The modern ones have the latest technology featuring multiple valves, not just one. The worst that can happen is the food boils dry if you walk off and forget it’s coming to high pressure.
So far I’ve cooked these from Everyday Pressure Cooking…
Chickpea and Roast Cauliflower Chaat (page 146) - diversity on a plate, delicious way to get prebiotic chickpeas and cauliflower (minus the anti-nutrients!). I sprinkled Bombay mix on top for crunch. I’m going to remake and remake, it’s that good!
Pumpkin, and Peanut Soup (page 24). The recipe said to use chicken, but I didn’t have any in the house. So made without. Nice and spicy and I made a few for the freezer - so there is a microbiome-feeding meal any time needed. I used ready-cut squash instead of the pumpkin to save time (pumpkins are a pain to cut).
An Adaptable Chicken Curry (page 74). At 6.30pm last evening I realised I had nothing planned. Looked in the fridge, found some leftover chicken from a roast, an onion, spices and 2 cans of tomatoes and made this. Absolutely delicious, miles cheaper and healthier than a takeaway curry and only needed 10 minutes cooking time!
Best Beef and Vegetable Soup (page 26) - using beef shin (which has lots of collagen) and piles of mushrooms, tomato, leeks, onions, carrots, celery, plus red wine and anchovies. A great way to get your plant count up for the week and feed your microbiome and strengthen your gut lining.
The pressure cooker Catherine likes a lot…