Of course nothing illegal, only natural, a disadvantage if you don’t utilize it for you.
There are beetroot parties at almost any Triathlon event for the runners, apnea divers also get a huge natural and healthy boost.
I use it for long runs I don’t really feel the difference every time, but stats and data speak their own language.
Give it a try, timing is a bit tricky depending on your feast.
But caution: don’t overdo it due to oxalate as potential risk.
And mustn’t be the juice, the beetroot itself already does the job.
The key ingredient in beet juice, from an endurance perspective, is nitrate. Once you eat it, bacteria in your mouth convert nitrate to nitrite. Then the acidity in your stomach helps convert the nitrite to nitric oxide. Nitric oxide plays a whole bunch of roles in the body. That includes cueing your blood vessels to dilate, or widen, delivering more oxygen to the muscles, faster.
I sent the following summary to Andy Jones, the scientist most associated with beet juice research, to see whether he would agree:
“It works. It probably works less well in elites, like most things, but there may still be an effect. Higher doses taken for at least a few days in a row probably increase your chances of a positive effect.”
Jones thought that sounded reasonable. He pointed out that there’s a separate body of evidence emerging that beet juice also enhances muscle strength and power in some circumstances, an effect that Poon’s review confirms.Betaine was first isolated from beets, hence the name, and as the other name, trimethylglycine, hints it has 3 easily donated methyl groups, so if you do need those for some reason it may be useful to you. It's also pretty cheap and unlikely to be harmful.
Edit: I found this... https://www.strongerbyscience.com/betaine/
The effect may actually be a similar one because nitrates do sound familiar...
I don’t know what a “functional dentist” is, but the term “functional medicine” is used to describe alternative medicine doctors. They traditional misinterpret studies and exaggerate their impacts, focusing on small studies in mice or theoretical in vitro studies and then extrapolating those to treatment decisions.
https://expatcircle.com/cms/how-to-clean-your-teeth-and-save...
Example: Tom’s of Maine Whole Care Natural Fluoride Mouthwash.
It’s extra beneficial if you live in a state / country that doesn’t add fluoride to drinking water.
I have an aversion to the alcohol washes after reading years ago that the change to your mouth biome may lead to the issues that they are meant to stop.
I never knew high blood pressure correlates with bad sleep or bad sex (if anything, meds for high blood pressure come with negative effects on that).
Try taking arginine for a week if you want to experience the effect first hand.
It’s really a mixed bag.
Recall that Sildenafil (aka brand name Viagra) was originally developed to treat high blood pressure. Turns out that while it does lower blood pressure, it’s really good for improving erections.
I don't know about bad sleep, but definitely bad sex. ED is an early indicator of hypertension.
It's a little more bitter despite the outrageous sugar level, but wondering if the nitrates come through ok?
I think nitrosamines aren’t exclusively formed in the gut, but are present in cured meat beforehand, though. As far as I know, vitamin C prevents the nitrite to nitrosamine reaction, so fresh nitrate rich vegetable juices may not be inherently harmful through secondary nitrosamine production from converted nitrites. Additionally, their amino acid content is probably low, so as long as they are not consumed with a meal, production may be limited.
Seed oils are the devil but "uncured" meats? All good!
If you are still not confused read this:
"Although prevalent in the diet, nitrates have been viewed negatively because they chemically form carcinogenic nitrosamines in acidic environments, e.g. stomach, purportedly leading to gastric cancer as well as neoplasia of the intestine, brain, pancreas, and contributing to Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. "
> Does this mean that you can eat a dozen hotdogs if you wash them down with a glass of beetroot juice?
I think it's just one of those things where I see a YouTube video and go to Amazon to add a new supplement to my life. Then once the supply of the supplement is up I choose not to re-up on it. That's what I'm planning for the Beet Chews too.
I wonder really how much it really lowers BP and what quantity to consume?
The linked article doesn't specify how much was consumed? A single cup? A liter? Likewise I'm just consuming 2 Beet Chews per day per the suggested serving size. But who knows if that really is the "minimum effective dose". There is value to the placebo effect of course, I'm taking something in order to convince myself I'm healthier.
I‘m drinking beetroot juice since 3 years now and asked myself if beetroot capsules might be an alternative.
[0] https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2024/02/20/mo...
[1] https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
Also not really advisable for people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
It's the nitrates which have a short half-life
And the thing is high quality Beet juice is very expensive because it has to be grown in good soil with lots of nitrates, most of the stuff coming out of China is poor quality with just the name and people don't know any better
Anything else is going from 90% healthy to 99%.
The effects on quality of life of a bit of flexibility are huge. Back pain, knee pain, shoulder pain, "RSI", and so many other ails are often just pretty much permanently cramped muscles negatively affecting ligaments and nerves.
The last time I looked into this theory it wasn’t nearly as robust as I was led to believe. It got circulated as fact for a few years but the people pushing it didn’t really have as much evidence for it as I assumed.
The aqueducts were also responsible for Romes ability to proliferate and grow. Lead was both a blessing and a curse.
I wonder what future generations will say about our highly enriched and processed diets. Calories have never been cheaper and food is ubiquitous. However I believe our food is playing a huge role in our degraded health.
It’s not surprising that most studies looking at the consumption of unprocessed food, fresh fruit and vegetables show benefits to our health.
The challenge is how do we get this food in the hands of those who need it cheaply and without sacrificing the nutritional (and microbial) content.
Headline science has a way of sticking around for a long time.
lead tastes sweet, sugar wasn't cheaply & widely available, honey is expensive etc.
and knowledge about lead poisoning was not really a think AFIK
at the same time lead pipes tend to gain a crust of chalk over time (depending on chalk content of the water) which mostly defuses their danger. Like you will find some very old houses with lead tape water pipes in the EU today but if you test their tape water you won't find (much of) an issue due to 1) the chalk 2) the water not staying long in the pipe if it's e.g. a 4 apartment house.
[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-evidence-that-lead-ex...
Public health experts contend that enriched foods have improved baseline quality of life. Wheat breads with iron, folate, and B vitamins in the US is an easy example.
Getting nutrients from whole foods is generally superior, for absorption and balance and avoiding overdosing, than getting it from supplements, whether taken directly or via enrichment.
That said, getting a nutrient any way is better than running a deficiency. For most of agricultural human history, in most societies, most of the population was nutritionally sufficient [1]. That changed with enrichment. It’s healthier to eat whole over enriched food; it’s better to have enriched food versus a vitamin decency.
It’s ahistoric to claim we’re unhealthier today than we’ve been over most of human history. But we can do better. In that way, Roman pipes brought clean water to its populations in a way that made them healthier than people had been in cities to date. But it also gave them lead poisoning, which while better than cholera, is worse than no lead.
Hint: it's the farm-bill dependent carb farmers who apparently need our money via farm subsidies and want poor people hooked as they get it from the other end in the form of SNAP.
I highly doubt there was much effect from the pipes. They would quickly be sealed in mineral scale. Cups or utensils - maybe, but would be more about specific important people using them rather than being widespread.
As to your last question, part of it may be rethinking the profit motive in food production. Food waste to keep prices high is a huge issue.
Also, the Roman Empire didn't fall, either. It split in two. The Western half continued splitting into a bunch of competing kingdoms while the Eastern half slowly shrank over about a thousand years. It eventually wound up being rolled into the Ottoman Empire, which lasted until WWI.
Complex (slow) carbs [does it feed your microbiome predominantly] != easy (fast) carbs [does it quickly go into your bloodstream and cells]