Just Beet It!

The secret to the healing powers of the humble beetroot?

Turns out, it’s an incredibly concentrated source of dietary nitrate. If you’ve never heard of “dietary nitrate,” you’re far from alone. Only recently has nitrate—and supplements containing it in the form of beetroot—gained serious scientific interest. Nitrate is now coming out of obscurity, with studies showing it can help to lower blood pressure, protect against glaucoma, improve athletic performance, and more.

- Jack Challem

The story of dietary nitrate begins with nitric oxide, not to be confused with nitrous oxide—aka laughing gas. The journal Science once declared nitric oxide to be the “molecule of the year,” and three scientists earned the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on this substance. That’s an impressive pedigree.

Nitric oxide helps the body’s cells talk with each other, and one of its functions is to tell the endothelial cells that line blood vessels to dilate or relax. Because of this property, nitric oxide plays a key role in maintaining normal blood pressure.

Nitric oxide’s nutritional precursors include the amino acid L-arginine, but dietary nitrate is also an often overlooked and excellent precursor. Through a series of steps, the body converts nitrate to nitric oxide.

Many fruits and vegetables are good sources of nitrate, and there are significant amounts of nitrate in celery, lettuce, arugula, and spinach. But the hands-down richest source is beetroot and, in particular, beetroot juice and concentrate. (The juice is extracted from the red beetroots you cook with or use in salads, not the sugar beets used for making sucrose.)

HOW TO LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE WITH BEETROOT JUICE

The studies on the benefits of beetroot juice and hypertension show remarkably consistent benefits. Researchers at Queen Mary University in London asked 68 people with hypertension to drink either 1 cup (150 ml) of nitrate-rich beetroot juice or nitrate-free beetroot juice daily. The drinks were switched so that everyone in the study

HOW TO USE BEETROOT JUICE