This year, I planted three types of cucumbers - a Japanese variety called Satsuki , a slicing cucumber, and bush cucumber called Fanfare. As I was selecting seeds, the slicing cucumbers were highlighted as "Burpless". Evidently some people are adversely affected by cucumbers.
I've never had a problem with cucumbers, so I was curious. Is there such a thing a burp causing cucumber?
Inquiring minds want a clinical trial.
One was done by NC State University.
Cucumbers were divided into burpful and burpless.
Test subjects were divided into burp prone and burp resistant.
The outcome?
Asian trellis cucumbers do reduce burping in burp prone eaters.
Thus, burpless is really a marketing term for Asian trellis cucumbers and a small number of people will notice the difference.
Now you know!
Dr. Halamka,
ReplyDeleteThis is a wonderful bit of trivia that will end an argument in my house over my cucumber choices for our organic garden.
You continue to amaze me, I read daily looking for more news on HIT, MUC, going Vegan & Green and at the appropriate time, a nugget of wisdom like today to enrich me in a way I would have never expected.
Thanks for all you do for the HIT community and for settling the discussion on burping cucumbers (for reference, all 7 cucumber plants in our garden would be considered burpless)
Cucumbers are indeed flatulogenic. I usually do not have any food problems at all - but cucumbers make me gasy. Two days ago my wife cleaned out the fridge. We do not throw any food away, so we are always on the outlook for alternative uses of food that is about to spoil. Usually we feed it to our livestock. But that day, my wife decided to try to make a smoothy drink by throughing a ripe pineapple and a very ripe cucumber into the blender. It turned out to be a very tasty combination and I drank a lot of it, without knowing that it contained an entire cucumber. As a result, my stomach grew very bloated. Since it appears that the flatulogenic components also are very foam-generating, there was very little pain/pressure relief in burping nor farting. I just had to wait out the passage of the food, until it had left the digestive tract in an unpleasant foamy manner...
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