Bean pod

Bean pod: what was it used for?

A medicine for the kidneys and the water. Culpeper gives the beans to Venus and has them dried and powdered, “as great strengtheners of the kidneys as any are,” a dram at a time in white wine to prevent the stone and cleanse the kidneys of gravel; the ordinary French beans, he adds, “move the belly, provoke urine,” ease shortness of breath, and “incite to venery.” The seedless pod is what the European monograph covers.

Bean pod: what does modern science say?

The European Medicines Agency’s herbal committee accepts the seedless pod as a traditional herbal medicine “exclusively based upon long-standing use,” to increase the amount of urine and so flush the urinary tract, as an adjuvant in minor urinary complaints (monograph of 2013). Its assessment report names arginine, silicic acid, and chromium salts in the pod. Trials have tested other parts of the plant, not the pod: a 2011 review of bean extract as a slimming aid found six trials, all with serious methodological flaws, no significant difference in weight lost against placebo, and a small reduction in body fat, and concluded that “The poor quality of the included RCT prevents us from drawing any firm conclusions.”

Bean pod: what did the older authorities say?

Dioscorides

His garden smilax, which the modern translation, following Fuchs, suggests is the kidney bean, climbs with tendrils over neighbouring shrubs and grows so freely that it is made into bowers; its pods hold seeds like kidneys and are eaten with the seeds, boiled like asparagus. It encourages urine, he says, and causes troublesome dreams.

Nicholas Culpeper

Of the scarlet-flowered bean he writes that set by a quickset hedge it will climb and adorn it “so that they may be discerned a great way, not without admiration of the beholders at a distance. But they will go near to kill the quicksets by cloathing them in scarlet.”