Canned and preserved foods are not as healthy. Specifically, when using canned chickpeas instead of dried ones to make hummus, you loose half the nutrients.

Most of the recipes for homemade hummus found on the web, are based on canned chickpeas (a.k.a garbanzo beens). To those of you who are acquainted with the original flavor of hummus (not the industrial type, that is), this probably sound like a but idea. True, the use of canned peas demands less effort, but it doesn’t taste that good.

For those of you who see think canned chickpeas are a reasonable substitute, I collected some data about the nutritional differences between cooked dried chickpeas and canned ones.

Minerals. Canned chickpeas contain 52% more sodium than cooked chickpeas, although in the process of making the final product (the hummus, that is), this might change.

raw data source:
NutritionalData

But the use of canned chickpeas leaves you with 48% less Iron, 42% less Copper, about 30% less Magnesium, Phosphors and Potassium and 10-25 percent less Zinc, Calcium and Selenium.

Vitamins. Vitamin C is not affected by cooking and can-conserving. The canned chickpeas contain 55-75% less Niacin and Folate though.

Amino Acids. Chickpeas contain 18 essential amino acids. About 35% in average of that content is missing from the canned product.

Omega-3. About 48% of the Omega-3 fatty acids found in dried chickpeas after it is cooked, are absent from the canned product. On the other hand, the Tahini (second most important ingredient in hummus) contains a triple amount of Omega-3.

Summery
Canned chickpeas nutritional value is very poor compared with cooked traditionally chickpeas. In general, about 50 percent of the nutrients are lost, and in some cases even more. This is, of course, a potential case-study for the general effect of nutritional value loss when using preserved foods instead of fresh ones, but of course – this blog talks about hummus, so our special concern is about what happens to chickpeas.