Beet Health Benefits: Lower Blood Pressure, Boost Brain Blood Flow, and More

The humble beet—steamed, boiled, roasted, pickled, in borscht, but especially raw—is nutritious and offers many health benefits.

Why Beets Are Healthy

If you've never considered beets for breakfast, snacks, or potlucks, these facts may spark your imagination:

• Research shows eating beets (especially raw) or drinking beet juice can lower blood pressure and improve both exercise performance and blood flow to the brain—likely due to high nitrate concentration.

Our bodies convert nitrates to nitric oxide, which relaxes and opens blood vessels.

• Red and yellow pigments in beets (betalains) may help fight arthritis, several cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular disease, and liver disease.
• Beet greens are highly nutritious and contain carotenoid pigments beta-carotene, lutein, and zeaxanthin, important for eye health.

How to Prepare Beets

Heat destroys betalain pigments. For maximum health benefits, grate raw beets into salads, blend into smoothies, or steam/roast just long enough to tenderize.

Beet greens are delicious raw in salads or lightly steamed.

• Try a recipe for beet salad using both root and greens.

• Learn how to make Beet Kvass—a probiotic tonic!

Growing Beets

Even with little space, beets are easy to grow in containers. They attract few pests or diseases, grow quickly, and come in many shades of red, pink, striped, and yellow.

See our Beets Growing Guide.

Note: Betalain pigments in raw or cooked red beets may turn urine or stool pink or bright red for a day or two. Excreted pigment amount depends on stomach pH and food transit time.

~ By Margaret Boyles

About This Blog

Margaret Boyles lives in a wood-heated house in central New Hampshire. She grows vegetables, keeps chickens, swims in a backyard pond in summer, snowshoes in the surrounding woods in winter, and commutes by bike whenever possible.