The juice reduced blood pressure by an average of five points.
Drinking beetroot juice can help improve brain health and reduce blood pressure, new research finds.
Beetroot juice is rich in inorganic nitrate, like other foods including celery, spinach and lettuce.
Nitrate is turned into nitric oxide in the mouth, which helps regulate blood vessels and neurotransmitters.
With age, though, people tend to have a lower production of nitric oxide and this is linked to worse brain health and higher blood pressure.
For the study, researchers gave 26 people aged 70- to 80-years-old nitrate-rich beetroot juice to drink twice a day.
Compared with another period when they had a placebo drink, the beetroot juice reduced blood pressure by an average of five points.
Professor Anni Vanhatalo, the study’s first author, said:
“We are really excited about these findings, which have important implications for healthy aging.
Previous studies have compared the oral bacteria of young and older people, and healthy people compared to those with diseases, but ours is the first to test nitrate-rich diet in this way.
Our findings suggest that adding nitrate-rich foods to the diet—in this case via beetroot juice—for just ten days can substantially alter the oral microbiome (mix of bacteria) for the better.
Maintaining this healthy oral microbiome in the long term might slow down the negative vascular and cognitive changes associated with aging.”
The researchers looked at how the bacteria in the mouth changed after supplementation with beetroot juice.
The results showed that bacteria linked to lower inflammation increased after supplementation.
Now the researchers want to look at other age-groups, Professor Vanhatalo said:
“Our participants were healthy, active older people with generally good blood pressure.
Dietary nitrate reduced their blood pressure on average, and we are keen to find out whether the same would happen in other age groups and among people in poorer health.
We are working with colleagues in the University of Exeter Medical School to investigate interactions between the oral bacteria and cognition to better understand the how diet could be used to delay cognitive decline in older age.”
Foods high in nitrate
Apart from beetroot, celery, spinach and lettuce, other foods with very high levels of nitrate include rocket, chervil and cress.
Foods with high levels of nitrate include fennel, leek, parsley and celeriac.
Cabbages and turnips also have moderate levels of nitrate.
The study was published in the journal Redox Biology (Vanhatalo et al., 2021).
