How many servings of pulses per week and how much is a portion

The question that comes up at the counter is not whether pulses are healthy. Everyone knows that already. The question is how many you should eat and how much a serving actually is, because there is an awkward gap between what the authorities recommend and what people really buy: AESAN, the Spanish food safety and nutrition agency, asks for at least four servings a week, and the Spanish agriculture ministry's consumption panel reports that Spain buys 3.36 kilos of pulses per person per year. That works out at nine grams a day, dry weight. A fifth of the recommendation.

This article puts numbers on both questions: how many grams a serving is, dry and cooked, and what a daily serving really does, with the margins from the studies rather than the headlines. It also sets out what EU law allows you to claim about a pulse and what it does not — which is less than most people assume — and why lentil pasta does not count as a serving of pulses.

The short version

• The official Spanish recommendation is 2-4 servings a week (AESAN, 2020) or at least 4, working up to daily (AESAN, 2022). Two reports from the same committee, and they do not agree.
• A serving is 60-80 g dry, which becomes 166-222 g cooked, because one gram of dry pulse yields 2.77 g cooked.
• Spain buys 3.36 kg per person per year (agriculture ministry, 2024): about 9 g a day dry, against the 34-46 g that four servings would mean.
• There is no authorised health claim for "pulses" as such. There are claims for their nutrients: eight for folate and three for protein.
• At 100 g, cooked lentils qualify as "high fibre", "high protein", "high folate", "source of iron" and "low fat". They fall short of "high iron".
• A daily serving lowers LDL by 0.17 mmol/l (about 6.6 mg/dl) across 26 trials and 1,037 participants, with high heterogeneity (I² of 80%).
• The wind settles on its own: from 50% of participants noticing it in week one to 6% in week two.

What EU law lets you say about a pulse, and what it does not

The EU list of authorised health claims — Regulation (EU) 432/2012 — has no entry for "pulses", none for "lentils" and none for "chickpeas". That surprises people, because oats have their own, and even one of the rare disease risk reduction claims, as we explained in the article on how much oats per day. Pulses have none of their own. What they have are the claims for the nutrients they contain, which is a different thing and is used differently.

The ones a cooked pulse can carry are the eight authorised folate claims and the three protein claims, provided the food meets the content condition. In the official wording: "Folate contributes to normal blood formation", "Folate contributes to the reduction of tiredness and fatigue", "Protein contributes to the maintenance of muscle mass" and "Protein contributes to the maintenance of normal bones". The condition is being at least a "source of" that nutrient under the Annex to Regulation (EC) 1924/2006: 15% of the reference intake for folate (200 µg) and 12% of energy for protein.

And there is one claim that looks written for pulses and that, read carefully, cannot be applied to them: resistant starch. It says, word for word, that "replacing digestible starches with resistant starch in a meal contributes to a reduction in the blood glucose rise after that meal", and its condition is that the claim "may be used only for food in which digestible starch has been replaced by resistant starch so that the final content of resistant starch is at least 14% of total starch" (EFSA opinion — EFSA is the European Food Safety Authority — EFSA Journal 2011;9(4):2024). A plate of lentils is not a reformulated food: nothing has replaced its starch. Pulses are rich in resistant starch, especially cooked and then cooled, but the claim requires reformulation, not a food as it comes.

Three different official numbers for the same question

AESAN's scientific committee published a review of dietary recommendations for the Spanish population in 2020 and set 2-4 servings of pulses a week (Revista del Comité Científico de la AESAN, 2020, 32, pp. 11-58). Two years later the same committee published its sustainable dietary recommendations and raised the bar: at least 4 servings a week, working up to daily consumption (report AESAN-2022-007, Revista del Comité Científico de la AESAN, 2022, 36, pp. 11-70).

The 2022 report also cites the EAT-Lancet Commission, which proposes at least one daily serving of 50 g dry weight, and gives the argument behind the change: there is scientific unanimity that animal protein foods have the greater environmental impact, with the figure that producing the same amount of protein from pulses emits roughly fifty times less greenhouse gas than beef. In the same report the recommended maximum for meat drops to three servings a week.

Neither report says how many grams a serving is, and that is the practical problem. The real consumption figure is no comfort either: 3.36 kg per person per year, 1.5% more than the year before, according to the 2024 food consumption report of Spain's agriculture ministry. That is 9.2 g a day dry, with the caveat that the panel measures household purchases and not what people eat away from home.

How much a serving of pulses is, in grams

The serving used in practice in Spain is 60-80 g of dry pulses per person, roughly what fits in a loosely filled small glass. The conversion factor you need to get that onto the plate has been measured: one gram of dry pulse yields about 2.77 g cooked, because it takes up water. So 60-80 g dry is 166-222 g cooked, and the EAT-Lancet Commission's 50 g is 139 g cooked.

Starting from a jar or a tin makes the sum easier still, since they are already cooked: a drained 540 g jar of cooked chickpeas leaves about 350-400 g of pulses, which is two good servings. A 350 g jar like the cooked lentils makes one generous serving for one person. Worth knowing before you work out dinner for four.

Dry, the pack size matters too: 500 g of pedrosillano chickpeas is six to eight servings, which is why dry pulses work out so cheap per plate. The cost per serving of pulses is the lowest in the whole protein aisle, including canned fish and eggs.

How to reach four servings a week without any fuss

Four servings are not a change of diet, they are a change to four meals. These are the six steps that actually work in real kitchens, easiest first.

1. Start with cooked pulses, not dry ones

Jarred pulses have practically the same composition as home-cooked ones and need no planning the night before. The only real drawback is the salt in the liquid, and that takes ten seconds to fix: draining cuts sodium by 36% and draining plus rinsing cuts it by 41%, measured across five varieties from five different brands, from 503 mg down to 295 mg per half cup (Duyff, Mount and Jones, Journal of Culinary Science and Technology 2011;9(2):106-112). By variety, draining alone cut 29% for black beans and 42% for red kidney beans.

Between the canned section and the pulses section there are fourteen ready-cooked lines, from white beans to azuki beans. It is the shortest route from one serving a week to three.

2. Weigh dry once and never weigh again

Weighing out 70 g a single time and seeing which glass or spoon holds it solves the problem for good. It is the kind of thing best done with the product in front of you, and the reason having six loose lines is not only about price: you can buy 200 g of castellana lentils to try them before committing to half a kilo.

Pardina lentils and red lentils cook in very different times — red ones collapse in fifteen minutes and thicken the pot — so the format shapes the recipe more than the variety does.

3. Twelve hours' soaking and a hard boil, for one specific reason

Soaking shortens cooking and reduces the oligosaccharides that ferment in the colon, and the water is best thrown away. But the serious reason is another: raw or undercooked beans contain phytohaemagglutinin, and as few as four or five raw beans are enough to cause nausea and vomiting one to three hours later. The advice from Hong Kong's Centre for Food Safety (Food Safety Focus no. 208, November 2023) is to soak for at least 12 hours and boil vigorously for at least 10 minutes at 100 °C in fresh water.

The detail almost nobody mentions: a slow cooker on low is precisely the method that never reaches those 100 °C. With dried white beans, or any bean, the initial hard boil is not optional. Lentils do not have this problem in practice, and neither do frozen peas.

4. Build the amount up slowly, because the wind passes

In three feeding studies with half a cup of pulses a day, the share of participants noticing more flatulence fell from 50% in the first week to 6% in the second with pinto beans, and from 47% to 24% and then 11% with baked beans (Winham and Hutchins, Nutrition Journal 2011;10:128). In the twelve-week study with 80 adults, reports fell from 45% to 15-23% from the sixth week on, against 3-8% in the control group.

In plain terms: the discomfort is real, it is temporary and it depends on the starting dose. Half a serving for a fortnight works better than starting with a full stew and giving up.

5. Pair them with a grain, but not necessarily in the same meal

Pulse protein is short of the sulphur amino acids — methionine and cysteine — against the FAO and WHO reference pattern, and rich in lysine, leucine and isoleucine, which is exactly the opposite of rice and cereals. Hence the classic pairing. What no longer holds is the idea that they must meet on the same plate: the body keeps a pool of amino acids and complementation works across the day.

With one serving of pulses and one of wholegrain in the day, the "incomplete protein" worry stops being a problem. We go into it in the article on how much protein per day.

6. Do not count pulse pasta or pulse flour as a serving

Lentil macaroni and chickpea flour are useful products — especially gluten free — but they are not a serving of pulses. Fine milling changes the structure of the starch and the glycaemic response, the fibre per 100 g is not the same, and the resistant starch claim cannot be applied to them either, for the reason set out above.

Put another way: red lentil macaroni replaces pasta, not a plate of lentils. And hummus only half counts, because a typical 60-80 g serving from the tub contains rather less chickpea than it appears to.

What the evidence shows, with its margins

The reference meta-analysis on pulses and cholesterol pooled 26 randomised trials and 1,037 participants, at a median dose of 130 g a day — one serving — over a median of six weeks. The result: LDL falls by 0.17 mmol/l (95% CI −0.25 to −0.09), about 6.6 mg/dl (Ha et al., CMAJ 2014;186(8):E252-E262).

And here is the part that is almost never told. Heterogeneity was 80% for LDL and no subgroup analysis explained it; non-HDL cholesterol did not change significantly (−0.09 mmol/l; 95% CI −0.19 to 0.00) with an I² of 98%; apolipoprotein B was measured by a single trial; and only 7 of the 22 reports were rated high methodological quality. The authors themselves write that longer, better trials are needed. The direction of the effect is solid; how much it drops in any one person is hard to predict.

On weight, the meta-analysis by Kim and De Souza pooled 21 trials and 940 participants at the same 130 g daily serving and found a loss of 0.34 kg over six weeks without restricting calories (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2016;103(5):1213). It is small, and that is what makes it interesting: adding pulses does not cause weight gain, but it is not a weight-loss treatment either.

On post-meal glucose, the most recent meta-analysis on chickpeas found a reduction in the area under the curve of −47.89 (95% CI −64.20 to −31.58) against meals matched for carbohydrate, across 15 studies, but with an I² of 87%, no effect on the glucose peak (−0.23; 95% CI −1.48 to 1.02, from only three studies), low certainty of evidence, in healthy adults only and with single meals (Mah et al., Nutrition Journal 2025;24:111). It is worth adding that the work was funded by PepsiCo and that several authors work for the company or for Biofortis; that does not invalidate it, but it gets said.

Wind, antinutrients and the one risk that has been measured

The antinutrients in pulses are three different things worth keeping apart. Phytates reduce the absorption of non-haem iron, which is why 3.33 mg of iron in 100 g of cooked lentils is not the same as 3.33 mg of iron from meat. We cover it in detail in the article on iron and tiredness: soaking, fermentation and serving pulses with vitamin C-rich vegetables all improve absorption, and so does keeping coffee and tea away from the meal.

The oligosaccharides — raffinose, stachyose — are what cause the wind and, unlike phytates, are not a drawback: they are fermentable fibre that feeds the colonic microbiota. Soaking and rinsing reduce them, and over time the gut adapts, as the habituation figures above show. If the problem persists, alpha-galactosidase is the enzyme that digests them, and we discuss that in the article on digestive enzymes: the evidence is modest and the only decent trial was in 52 children.

The real risk, the one with figures rather than opinions, is phytohaemagglutinin in raw beans: four or five beans are enough, symptoms appear within one to three hours and resolve in three or four, although some cases have needed hospital care. It is a bounded risk with a known and free solution: a long soak and a hard boil. That such a specific procedure exists is the best proof the risk is well defined.

What is not needed is dropping pulses out of the diet for fear of lectins, which is what some diet books propose. Properly cooked pulses do not have that problem, and what you lose by removing them is measured in the paragraphs above.

Four myths worth dismantling

"Pulse pasta and pulse flour count as a serving of pulses"

They do not. They are different foods with a different matrix and a different glycaemic response, and no EU claim treats them as equal to the cooked grain. We say so knowing that our own range includes six pulse pastas and four pulse flours or proteins: they are good products and they sort out a gluten-free dinner, but anyone buying them believing the serving is covered is fooling themselves.

"Pulses are fattening"

The measured effect is the opposite, and small: 0.34 kg less over six weeks with a daily serving and no calorie restriction, across 21 trials and 940 participants. Cooked pulses carry 116-164 kcal per 100 g, less than almost any side dish, and the fat in lentils is 0.38 g per 100 g.

"Canned pulses are far worse than dry ones"

They are not, and we say so even though loose dry pulses are our best commercial argument. The nutritional difference that matters is the salt, and draining and rinsing settles it, with 41% less sodium. Between eating jarred pulses four times a week and eating dry pulses once a month, the jar wins by a mile.

"You need a fibre supplement or protein powder"

Two hundred grams of cooked lentils — an ordinary serving — provide about 15.8 g of fibre and 18 g of protein. That is more fibre than most of the psyllium doses we sell in digestive system and a protein amount comparable to a scoop of powder. With four servings a week most people need neither, and the article on how much fibre per day explains how to reach 25 g.

The shopping list

For the week's four servings, the practical approach is to keep two things at once: dry for stews and cooked for salads and emergency dinners. Dry, loose and therefore in whatever quantity you want: pardina lentils, castellana lentils, red lentils, local pedrosillano chickpeas, dried white beans and peas. Pre-packed, the La Grana pardina lentils.

Already cooked, in the canned section and the pulses section: Cal Valls cooked lentils, Casa Amella cooked chickpeas, cooked white beans and cooked azuki beans. In chilled there are seven lines of hummus, and in frozen, peas and vegetable burgers made with lentils and chickpeas.

To go with them: rice, extra virgin olive oil for the sofrito, spices — cumin and bay are the two classics for pulses —, seeds, nuts and dried fruit and fresh vegetables. If you would rather not decide, the organic boxes bring seasonal vegetables, and the offers usually include a pulse line. Gluten free: chickpea flour and lentil macaroni.

Do you need supplements?

To meet the pulse recommendation, no. What we sell in diet and nutrition, in superfoods and in vitamins and minerals has its uses, but none of them is "replacing four plates of pulses a week". Pea protein powder is a good resource for someone training who struggles to hit a target; it is not a cheaper or more complete pulse.

There are two situations where looking beyond the plate makes sense. First, a diagnosed iron deficiency: the dose that corrects anaemia does not fit in a meal and a doctor decides it. Second, digestive symptoms that do not settle with adaptation: the enzymes in digestive and probiotic enzymes may help, with the modest evidence already cited.

And if the goal is lowering cholesterol, pulses are one of the pieces with evidence behind them, along with oats and olive oil; what sits in circulatory system comes after, not before, and never instead of what a doctor has prescribed, and the article on red yeast rice explains why. The articles on how much olive oil per day and oats fill in the rest of the picture.

Where to buy pulses in Barcelona and Sant Cugat

We keep loose pulses in all three shops — all three in Spain, in the Barcelona area — and that is where we can do what no online shop does: weigh out 70 g of pardina lentils in front of you so you can see exactly what a serving looks like in your own kitchen, and take home 200 g of a new variety to try it before committing to half a kilo. At the counter we will also compare the salt on two jars of cooked pulses with both packs in hand, which is a difference you cannot see in a photograph.

• Provença 242, 08008 Barcelona (Eixample, between Balmes and Enric Granados).
• Còrsega 78, 08029 Barcelona (Eixample, near Sants and Entença station).
• Antoni Bell 2, 08174 Sant Cugat del Vallès (Volpelleres, next to Volpelleres station).

The phone number is +34 683 118 961 and the email address is linverd@linverd.com. To order from home, the pulses catalogue is in the online shop, along with drinks and the rest of the shopping.

Frequently asked questions

How many servings of pulses should you eat per week?

AESAN's 2022 report recommends at least four servings a week, with the aim of working up to daily consumption. The same committee's 2020 report said between two and four. Spain buys 3.36 kg per person per year, which is about nine grams a day dry.

How many grams is a serving of pulses?

Between 60 and 80 grams dry per person, which is 166-222 grams once cooked, because one gram of dry pulse yields 2.77 grams cooked. If you start from a jar, a drained 350 g pack is roughly one generous serving.

Where can you buy loose pulses in Barcelona or Sant Cugat?

In Linverd Market's three shops: Provença 242 and Còrsega 78 in Barcelona, and Antoni Bell 2 in Sant Cugat del Vallès. There are six loose lines and you can buy from 200 grams to try a variety. Phone +34 683 118 961.

Are canned pulses worse than dry ones?

Not in any way that matters. The relevant difference is the salt in the liquid: draining cuts sodium by 36% and draining plus rinsing by 41%. Eating jarred pulses four times a week beats eating dry pulses once a month.

Do pulses lower cholesterol?

A daily serving of about 130 grams lowers LDL by 0.17 mmol/l, roughly 6.6 mg/dl, across 26 trials with 1,037 participants. Heterogeneity between studies was high (I² of 80%), so the direction is clear while the size of the effect in one person is hard to predict.

How do I avoid wind from pulses?

Soak for twelve hours and throw the water away, start with half a serving and build up slowly. In feeding studies, participants reporting wind fell from 50% in the first week to 6% in the second. The adaptation is real and takes weeks, not days.

Do you really have to eat pulses with rice in the same meal?

No. Pulses are short of methionine and cysteine and rich in lysine, and grains are the other way round, so they complement each other; but the body keeps a pool of amino acids and complementation works across the day, not plate by plate.

In short, and where to read on

Four servings a week, 60-80 g dry each, and the jar as a legitimate shortcut. That is the whole recommendation. The rest — the soak, the boil, the pairing with a grain, rinsing the tin — are details that cost ten seconds and explain the difference between eating pulses once a month and eating them four times a week.

You can buy organic pulses in the online shop or come into any of the three shops and have us weigh out a serving. And if the nutrient detail interests you, the articles on how much fibre per day, how much protein per day and iron and tiredness pick up where this one stops. The whole blog is in the health section.

This information is for general guidance and does not replace advice from a healthcare professional. If you take medication, have a digestive or kidney condition, are pregnant or breastfeeding, speak to your doctor or a registered dietitian before making a major change to your diet.