Legumes and Common Beans in sustainable diets: nutritional quality, environmental benefits, spread and use in food preparations Provisionally Accepted

Silvia Lisciani^1* Stefania Marconi¹ Cinzia Le Donne¹ Emanuela Camilli¹ Altero Aguzzi¹ Paolo Gabrielli¹ Loretta Gambelli¹ Karl Kunert² Diana Marais² Barend J. Vorster² Katherine Alvarado-Ramos³ Emmanuelle Reboul³ Eleonora Cominelli⁴ Chiara Preite⁴ Francesca Sparvoli⁴ Alessia Losa⁵ Tea Sala⁵ Anna-Maria Botha-Oberholster⁶ Marika Ferrari¹

• ¹Research Centre for Food and Nutrition, Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, Italy
• ²Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, University of Pretoria, South Africa
• ³Aix-Marseille Université, France
• ⁴Institute of Agricultural Biology and Biotechnology, National Research Council (CNR), Italy
• ⁵Research Centre for Genomics and Bioinformatics, Council for Agricultural and Economics Research, Italy
• ⁶Department of Genetics, Faculty of AgriSciences, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

In recent decades, scarcity of available resources, population growth and the widening in the consumption of processed foods and of animal origin have made the current food system unsustainable. High-income countries have shifted towards food consumption patterns which is causing an increasingly process of environmental degradation and depletion of natural resources, with the increased incidence of malnutrition due to excess (obesity and non-communicable disease) and due to chronic food deprivation. An urgent challenge is, therefore, to move towards more healthy and sustainable eating choices and reorientating food production and distribution to obtain a human and planetary health benefit. In this regard, grain legumes represent a less expensive source of nutrients for low-income countries, and a sustainable healthier option than animal-based proteins in developed countries. Although grain legumes are the basis of many traditional dishes worldwide, and in recent years they have also been used in the formulation of new food products, their consumption is still scarce. Common beans, which are among the most consumed pulses worldwide, have been the focus of many studies to boost their nutritional properties, to find strategies to facilitate cultivation under biotic/abiotic stress, to increase yield, reduce antinutrients contents and rise the micronutrient level. The versatility of beans could be the key for the increase of their consumption, as it allows to include them in a vast range of food preparations, to create new formulations and to reinvent traditional legume-based recipes with optimal nutritional healthy characteristics.