How many teaspoons of sugar in black-eyed peas?

Black-eyed peas, or cowpeas, are a legume with a small dark spot where the bean was attached to its pod. Despite the name, they are a bean rather than a pea. Cowpeas were domesticated in West Africa and remain central to dishes such as akara, fried bean fritters, and moi moi, a steamed bean pudding. They also go into rice-and-bean dishes across the Caribbean and the southern United States.

The African and Caribbean foods chart lists them as “Blackeyed peas boiled”, at a 150g serving. As with every food on that chart, only the serve size and a teaspoon figure are printed, so no glycaemic index or carbohydrate weight appears here and the glycaemic load was back-calculated.

Legumes hold their carbohydrate as starch alongside a substantial amount of protein and fibre. In the GI tables, beans and lentils as a group tend to be listed with low values, which is usually put down to starch enclosed in cell walls that survive cooking and slow digestion.

The chart does not say whether the peas were cooked from dried or came from a can, or how long they were boiled.

Two other legumes in the dataset come from the South Asian foods chart, measured at their own portion weights: red lentils, weighed dry, and chickpeas, weighed cooked.