Last updated on July 29th, 2017
Green beans (a.k.a. snap beans or string beans) are a familiar vegetable, and reasonably low-carb and nutritious. I find it hard to get excited about them, though. Like most people in the American mid-lands, I’ve been eating green beans my whole life.
As a kid, I ate a lot of canned veggies — including corn, spinach, peas, lima beans, and, yes, green beans. Today, the only canned vegetable I eat at home is spinach. However, I often encounter canned green beans at restaurants. I go ahead and eat them, not wanting to be a food snob. Usually, I get to eat Anita’s canned green beans, too, because she is a food snob. (Please, don’t tell her I said that.) In case you’re wondering, Anita doesn’t eat the canned spinach I enjoy at home, either, but that’s a different case because she doesn’t like spinach at all.
The green beans we eat at home these days are either fresh or frozen. A few years, we have even managed to grow our own string beans in the backyard garden. It’s not something I count on, though. If the rabbits don’t get to the plants, some sort of blight does. But some years we get lucky, and then there’s nothing better on a summer day than to pick string beans in our own garden and pair them with a charcoal grilled steak.
We probably eat green beans with dinner at least once a week, and often twice if there are good, fresh 
beans to be had. One of our favorite ways to have green beans in the summer-time is in Anita’s family recipe for a salad with red onions and tomatoes.
A cup of cooked green beans provides about 44 calories, 10g of carbs, 4g of fiber, and 2.5g of protein. As with broccoli, anyone on an LCHF diet will want to top the beans with butter. Maybe even add some bacon crumbles because the natural fat content of the beans is virtually nil.
The calories and carbs are a little higher for a cup of green beans that for a cup of broccoli, but I don’t think it will matter unless you are on the induction phase of Atkins. Then just eat half-a-cup.
Green beans are a good source of vitamins A, C, and K, as well as folate. They also provide several minerals.
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