Beetroot! Beetroot! is it really as good as they say?

Beetroot is a brilliant vegetable with lots of health and performance benefits.

But what makes beetroot so brilliant I hear you ask?

Let’s start with the general stuff, did you know that beetroot has been found to be a powerful antioxidant, has anti-inflammatory properties and also vascular-protective effects which have been repeatedly shown in multiple studies (Clifford, et al., 2015). No you haven’t? Well now you know! These findings have led to increased popularity as a nutritional approach to help manage cardiovascular disease (Lundberg, et al., 2008) and cancer (Kapadia, et al., 2011).

Beetroot can help to improve blood pressure (Lansley, et al., 2011), reduce inflammation (Pietrzkowski, et al., 2010), prevent oxidative stress (Clifford, et al., 2015) preserve endothelial (a thin membrane that lines the inside of the heart and blood vessels) function (Webb, et al., 2008), and can increase blood flow in the frontal cortex (Presley, et al., 2011). As well as all these amazing benefits beetroot supplementation has repeatedly been found to improve athletic performance (Lansley, et al., 2011; Larsen, et al., 2007; Santana, et al., 2019).

One of the ingredients in beetroot that helps to produce all these amazing benefits is nitrate (NO3–). Nitrate helps facilitate the production of nitric oxide (NO) which occurs naturally in the human body and is a potent signalling molecule that influences an array of physiological responses (Bailey, et al., 2012). It does this through the metabolic conversion of NO3– to Nitrite (NO2– ) and nitric oxide (Benjamin, et al., 1994)

Studies investigating the consumption of beetroot on exercise performance have found that it increases how long it takes a person to reach exhaustion by up to 15% during severe-intensity running (Lansley, et al., 2011). It also lowers oxygen demand during submaximal work which increases performance (Larsen, et al., 2007) and more importantly has been shown to significantly improve 10km running time trial performance (Santana, et al., 2019)

Taking 310–560 mg of NO3– has been found to improve performance within 2-3 hours of ingesting (Hoon, et al., 2013) but you don’t have to take it all in one go to increase performance as other research has shown that accumulating NO3– over multiple days can also be beneficial (Thompson, et al., 2016). The performance benefits of NO3– can also be maintained for at least 15 days, if consumption of the supplement is continued for this duration (Vanhatalo, et al., 2010).

So there you have it!

Check out any Beetroot juice, my particular favourite is Cawston Press and if you can't stomach that they try it in a Bar at Vo2 Vegan bars which is actually where this interesting piece has come from.

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