... which I had never noticed. I guess because my favorite way to eat it was boiled, with lots of black pepper.
I never go to Reddit, but Google found quite a long discussion there on this topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/9vnee3/brussel_sprouts_any_ways_to_cook_that_lessen/
As a chemist, of course I wanted to know what the 'active ingredient' is:
Along with onions, dairy products and pulses, sprouts are pretty difficult to digest in the stomach and small intestine. This is because they contain a complex sugar called
raffinose. Raffinose is broken down by an enzyme called
alpha-galactosidase. Our digestive system doesn’t produce a huge amount of this enzyme and when we consume a lot of raffinose, in the form of those delicious balls of goodness, our body has to adapt.
So, although our bowel bacteria is perfectly capable of dealing with excess raffinose, there is a small price to pay in the form of hydrogen {sulfide}, carbon dioxide and methane emissions. In other words, pretty stinky farts.
And it’s not just Brussels that have this fart factor. Just like Brussels, kale, cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage – in fact all members of the brassica family of foods – contain high levels of raffinose and are essentially “fartinogenic”.
https://charlottehunternutrition.co.uk/sprout-sprout-let-it-all-out-why-brussels-sprouts-make-you-fart/Alpha-galactosidase is the active ingredient in Beano. I can't report on its effectiveness.
Wikipedia has quite a lot to say on raffinose. I wish I'd looked it up earlier:
It is non-digestible in humans and other monogastric animals (pigs and poultry) who do not possess the α-GAL enzyme to break down RFOs. These oligosaccharides pass undigested through the stomach and small intestine. In the large intestine, they are fermented by bacteria that do possess the α-GAL enzyme and make short-chain fatty acids (SCFA)(acetic, propionic, butyric acids), as well as the flatulence commonly associated with eating beans and other vegetables. These SCFAs have been recently found to impart a number of health benefits.[citation needed] α-GAL is present in digestive aids such as the product Beano.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaffinoseI had learned a long time ago that human digestive systems can break some polysaccharide bonds but not others, which is why
different starches digest differently. The bonds that don't get broken get passed into the intestine as (at least) disaccharides, which feed the bacteria there, causing gas. I hadn't realized that there were common oligosaccharides -- such as raffinose -- that produced the same result.
= new reply since forum marked as read