Beet juice substitutes

If you’ve read this magazine over the past few years, you know that beet juice is a potent booster of endurance performance. It also has remarkable health properties, i ncluding lowering blood pressure. The magic in the juice, a number of studies have demonstrated, comes from its high nitrate content, which is converted ( by friendly bacteria in your saliva) to nitrite, and then, elsewhere in your body, to nitric oxide.

So why not simply take a nitrate supplement? That’s what researchers in Switzerland tried in a study recently published in Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, putting 12 volunteers through a series of cycling and health tests on various doses of either beet juice or sodium nitrate. The surprising result: for equivalent doses of nitrate, the beet juice consistently outperformed the supplement.

The same was true in a subsequent study in the Journal of Nutrition, from researchers in the Netherlands, that compared beet juice and sodium nitrate with two other nitrate sources: spinach and arugula. Again, the real foods came out on top – and beets remain the champion. To get 800 mg of nitrate, which is equivalent to 1.5 shots of concentrated beet juice (a typical dose used by athletes), the study used 365 g of spinach, which is more than a typical box of prewashed greens, and 196 g of arugula.

It’s not entirely clear why the sodium nitrate supplement failed to deliver the same benefits, but both research teams suspect that the vegetables contain other ingredients such as vitamin C and various polyphenols that help in the process of converting nitrate to nitric oxide. In a way, it’s not surprising: foods are complex mixes of nutrients, and we shouldn’t expect to duplicate their effects by extracting one single element and taking it as a pill or powder.