Beetroot juice lowers blood pressure by changing oral microbiome: study
news.exeter.ac.uk
news.exeter.ac.uk
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.
So I can see "Functional Dentist" being more like a dentist that is willing to try more ways to save teeth & gums by using more traditional methods (eg. Balancing the oral microbiome, suggesting softer foods more often), rather than a "Real Dentist" suggesting extractions or root canals without ever mentioning the hardness of foods or oral microbiome.
This is the functional medicine fallacy: That “real doctors” are “shoving pills” that are secretly bad for the patient, while functional medicine doctors are also “shoving pills” but they’re a laundry list of supplements and traditional remedies.
In my experience, the functional medicine practitioners push far more pills and unnecessary tests than anyone else, but they’re given the benefit of the doubt because they’re operating under the alternative medicine fallacy that primary care doctors are the ones doing the bad things.
> (but may require more effort from the patient).
This is another concept used to justify the ineffective alternative medicine treatments; If they don’t work, it’s the patient’s fault for failing to do some effort. Another common explanation for when they don’t work is to “discover” yet another thing that needs to be treated. The additional demands of the patient are also designed to create buy-in which amplifies any placebo effect. The more rituals and supplements you can get a patient taking, the more they believe it’s going to work.
Optimal outcomes at the aggregate don't always translate to optimal outcomes for the individual.
This can mean that strategies like effective triage and prioritization lets people fall through the cracks of conventional medical treatment. This is especially true for both public healthcare and separately chronic issues which are often too hard to treat vs acute medicine.
Then in private medicine it can be a bit of a crapshoot of practitioners who are incentivised to upsell or recommend preferred treatments.
I think this has soured people's opinions of conventional medicine.
My own personal anecdote to offer on the subject is a friend who suffered from severe eczema and over their life and was just put on progressively higher doses of steroids until that stopped working. The last advice from the doctor was "we give up - our next recommendation is chemotherapy to shock your body. Maybe you would like to consider alternative medicine first"
They went to try traditional Chinese medicine and for the first time in their life got control of their eczema.
Given alternative medicine is a dirty word here what I'd say is missing these days is the family doctor who has excellent holistic patient history and is willing to provide a mixture of therapy and lifestyle guidance eg exercise or nutrition intervention.
Some people might claim a GP should do this but the reality is that GPs often aren't allowed to provide this kind of care due to capacity constraints or top down strategic planning.
Ironically you see the gap being bridged from the other direction with therapists increasing their scope - eg someone close to me went to an osteopath for neck issues to get diagnosed (correctly!) that the root cause was sleep apnoea
most chinese medicine is hokum, utter BS, but that doesn't mean they can't use plants whose utility have not been fully explored by modern science.
and even if it does work, that doesn't mean it didn't utterly ravage his liver -- but hey, at least his skin looks a lil better
I went to Swedish Hospital's Pain Services Clinic. https://www.swedish.org/services/pain-services Transformative.
Funny thing: the techniques and skills they teach work, even if you don't think they will.
I think most (all?) new age stuff -- naturopathy, chiropractics, reiki, whatever -- is BS. But I can't argue with my lived experience of using tai chi, mindfulness, education, and other new skills to proactively manage my disease.
This is my first time hearing (reading) the phrase "functional doctor". WebMD defines them as specialists in digging deeper, seeing the whole picture. Perfect.
--
YMMV. Consult your doctor, etc. Most treatments don't help with treatment resistant conditions. Beware adverse effects. Yadda, yadda.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nate+the+hoof+g...
https://expatcircle.com/cms/how-to-clean-your-teeth-and-save...
Also not really advisable for people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Peter Attia has a blog entry about the weak xylitol-cardiovascular disease research. For Xylitol, see https://peterattiamd.com/xylitol-and-cvd/
The problem with interpreting these results as a condemnation of xylitol consumption is that diet isn’t the only source of circulating xylitol. This compound is also produced by our own bodies through a process known as the glucuronate pathway, one of the pathways by which we metabolize glucose. So how did the authors ensure they were investigating the relationship between dietary xylitol intake and MACE risk?
They didn’t. ...
The rapid rate of xylitol excretion observed in healthy volunteers with return to near baseline (fasting) levels within hours following ingestion of a significant dietary exposure suggests that the plasma levels observed in our observational (validation) cohort represent variations in endogenous production/levels and not food intake.Erythritol is commonly found in sugar-free or keto-friendly products like beverages, desserts, and snacks. A single serving of an erythritol-sweetened product (e.g., a sugar-free soda, keto ice cream, or protein bar) often contains 10–30 g of erythritol.
Studies, such as the 2023 Nature Medicine study, used a 30 g dose in intervention experiments to simulate typical consumption (e.g., one sweetened beverage or dessert). This dose raised plasma erythritol to 5–7 mM within 30 minutes, a level linked to increased platelet reactivity and clotting risk.
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.
Correlation has no causation direction so you are absolutely right.
What I meant is that ED can be caused by hypertension, so if you get ED you should start checking your blood pressure. AFAIK chronic bad sleep doesn’t CAUSE high blood pressure in the same way. Not sleeping well will elevate your blood pressure, but not make it chronically worse. Put differently, if you have trouble sleeping at night, that doesn’t mean you have elevated risk of high blood pressure when rested.
But yeah, if you have high blood pressure (as I do), getting good sleep makes a huge difference in your numbers.
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...
If it's not risky, I'm about to embark on a mission.
If you're lucky, sparks fly ;-)
> If it's not risky, I'm about to embark on a mission.
"Hey baby, can I sample your oral microbiome?"
Also not really advisable for people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Can’t speak for IBS, ymmv there, but similarly you are rinsing and spitting, basically just microdosing.
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.
Is there any evidence that modern low calorie sweeteners have deleterious population-level effects, and what are they compared to high calorie sweeteners?
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/xylitol...
It's too easy to point at the Claudians as the beginning of the fall. In a way, the "Real" Roman empire began to fail once Augustus took over.
My point is that while it may have been unclear to the Romans as to the cause of changes in behavior they did notice a change and did complain about it a lot. I accept the premise that lead poisoning leads to lower intelligence.
I expect that whatever effect was going on in Rome if there was one, which seems to be up for debate, counted on pregnant women exposed to lead via alcohol and acidic foods, neither of which young children would normally encounter. Meanwhile lead dust from exhaust got -everywhere-, and paint a lot of places.
My pet hypothesis for the generation born after in the mid postwar era having been a general scourge on America is that we had a population boom amidst lead.
Presumably the wealthy elites had their pipes installed first anyways.
The lead pipes had too much calcification, and not much lead would have leached out. But the Romans did use lead acetate as a sweetener, so they were adding lead directly to many (most?) of their meals.
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.
Of course, him mentioning "Don't do this" suggests that lead water pipes into the home were common enough to need a warning against.
> "Don't do this" suggests that lead water pipes into the home were common enough to need a warning against.
sadly, they still are today sometimes, in areas with a lot of 125+year old infrastructure :/
[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.
You’re close. According to the paper, that changed with agriculture some 480 generations ago; enrichment is merely the solution.
Whoops, typo—I meant nutritionally deficient.
Hunter-gatherers had a varied but volatile diet. Agriculture solved the volatility at the expense of variety. Most agricultural humans across history were nutritionally deficient.
Enrichment (a/k/a fortification) started to solve for the lack of variety, though it’s been historically stymied by our lack of understanding what e.g. vitamins are; modern farming, biology and logistics enable us to actually solve for the problems agriculture introduced to society for the first time.
The crux is that adding vital minerals to food is good. We can certainly distinguish between that and a Dorito.
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.
Instead try researching things that support your claim, like the notion that sugary beverages are the main culprit to the obesity epidemic, even though most health experts don't have the evidence to isolate that as the core factor.
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.
Around the World in Six Glasses will tell you that tea replacing wine lead to Progress in Europe because they weren’t drunk all day but I wonder how much was inebriation and how much was lead exposure.
Beer was also widely prevalent, right? Even if it's just small beer (<3%ABV), it's not exactly making you smarter. It's hard to hit the Ballmer peak, after all
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]
Reading up on juices, I've only heard of experts not being fans of 'em.