If you have high blood pressure, your health care provider has probably encouraged you to eat more fruits and vegetables. This strategy is generally accepted as a helpful tool to reduce blood pressure. While increasing fruits and vegetables in general may be helpful, beets appear to offer special benefits, making them a super-food in the fight against high blood pressure.
General Benefits
Beets, like many vegetables, are a good source of fiber, and contain antioxidants plus other vitamins and minerals. A review article in the September, 1999 "American Journal of Clinical Nutrition" discusses the health benefits, including reducing blood pressure, of diets high in fruits and vegetables. The increased dietary fiber is believed to provide a direct benefit to blood pressure, as is the relative increase in potassium and magnesium intake. Indirect benefits may be seen in better control of body weight and reduction of dietary fat intake.
Special Benefits
Doctors will often prescribe nitrate medications for patients with heart failure and high blood pressure. These nitrate medications cause blood vessels to dilate which lowers blood pressure and reduces stress on the heart. The fact that beets are a concentrated dietary source of natural nitrates, led researchers to speculate that the nitrates in beets might be responsible for the substantial drops in blood pressure they were seeing in subjects within 3 hours of drinking about 16 oz. of beet juice. Their elegant study, published in the journal "Hypertension" in 2008, proved that it was indeed the nitrates that were responsible for the changes in blood pressure.
Research Evidence
Several studies have now demonstrated rapid reductions in blood pressure in response to drinking beet juice. The 2008 "Hypertension" study, for example, showed reductions in systolic blood pressure averaging 10 points in less than 3 hours. That study used subjects who had normal blood pressure to start with. The authors speculate that the benefits might be even greater for individuals with high blood pressure. An encouraging follow-up study published in the "American Journal of Physiology--Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology" demonstrated that 4 percent reductions in blood pressure seen shortly after ingestion of beet juice were maintained over time with continued daily consumption of the beet juice. The effect did not appear to diminish over time.
Warning
Drinking 16 oz. of beet juice daily will likely result in reddish discoloration of your urine and stools. This side effect is harmless but can be alarming as it may resemble blood. While other anecdotal cautions may be found warning of kidney stones or other side effects from eating too many beets or drinking beet juice, the scientific literature does not appear to support these claims.
References
- "American Journal of Clinical Nutrition"; Health Effects of Vegetables and Fruit: Assessing Mechanisms of Action in Human Experimental Studies; J. Lampe; September, 1999
- "Hypertension"; Acute Blood Pressure Lowering, Vasoprotective, and Antiplatelet Properties of Dietary Nitrate via Bioconversion to Nitrite; A. Webb, N. Patel, S. Loukogeorgakis, et. al.; 2008
- "American Journal of Physiology--Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology"; Acute and Chronic Effects of Dietary Nitrate Supplementation on Blood Pressure and the Physiological Responses to Moderate-Intensity and Incremental Exercise; A. Vanhalato, S. Bailey, J. Blackwell, et. al.; October, 2010
