Red lentils

Red lentils are hulled, which lowers the fibre but not the nickel - the metal sits throughout the seed, not just in the skin. They cook faster than brown lentils and are just as high.

Red lentils are split and hulled, so they cook in ten minutes rather than forty - the shortest cooking of any pulse. Less time in the pot is less time for anything to happen, and they are usually cooked from dry rather than soaked overnight, which removes the step where amines have most often been measured to rise. That pattern was measured in broad bean, chick pea and lupine rather than in the lentil itself: cooking left those seeds free of biogenic amines, which turned up in the boiling water instead.

Red lentils are hulled and split, and that shows on the FODMAP and oligosaccharide axes, where they sit a level below the whole lentil. Hulling does not take the oxalate away, though: the seed coat carries part of it and the cotyledon carries the rest. Boiling in water you then throw away is the lever that works, and red lentils cook fast enough that people often keep the water.

Red lentils: low in salicylate, and split so they cook down quickly. As with all pulses, the FODMAP rating is the one that usually decides the portion.

Red lentils are low at half a cup, canned and rinsed, and canning is what makes that possible for a pulse: the galacto-oligosaccharides are water-soluble, so they leach into the brine and go down the sink when you rinse. Dried and boiled at home, the same pulse measures higher unless you throw the cooking water away too.

Red lentils are split and hulled, which means they cook in minutes and give up their water-soluble GOS quickly into the pot. They are the lowest of the pulses on this axis, and the split is why. Pulse oligosaccharides are water-soluble, and that is the practical point: the level here follows work on pulses AND on what cooking does to them, because soaking and boiling move part of them into water that is usually thrown away.

Red lentils are split and hulled, which means an extra processing step on machinery that may have handled gluten cereals - more handling, not less. They also cook to a purée, so a stray grain cannot be picked out at the pot the way it can with a whole lentil.