Today is National Bean Day.
As per Wikipedia, there are about 40,000 bean varieties in the world and only a fraction of these are mass produced for global consumption.
Being a vegetarian, I am always on the look out for vegetarian protein sources. And beans are one of the best sources of vegetarian protein.
To add a little complexity, I decided to plot the protein, fiber and iron content of 18 bean varieties. Here is the visual of the day.
[Click for an enlarged view]
The purpose of my visual here is to answer 2 questions.
- Which beans are packed the most with protein, fiber and iron?
- What’s the protein or fiber or iron content of a particular bean?
Sometimes there isn’t one single chart that can answer our questions.
The bubble chart (the first visual) is hard to read. The circles representing the beans overlap and names don’t fit in the chart. Iron content is very hard to decipher because we are not good at judging areas. But the outliers are clear. And it answers the question which beans are packed with most protein, fiber and iron.
The side by side bar gives every bit of detail. But it makes the reader work to get a combined view of all 3 parameters.
The 2 charts together though balance out the negatives.
The data for this visual is available here. I compiled the data from Wikipedia.
