Drinking beetroot juice may help reduce BP, same with other fruits and vegetables also.

Jojy Cheriyan MD; MPH-April 17, 2013

A study published on April 15th 2013, in the journal Hypertension of American Heart Association has been widely reported in some Malayalam news papers with the title 'Beet root will reduce blood pressure'. Some newspapers have given wrong message to the people reporting this as a cure. But the fact is that this study does not suggest that supplementing your diet with one cup of beet root juice benefits your health.

This is only a preliminary finding of a study done on a very small number of people ( 8 women and 7 men) who were not taking any treatment for blood pressure and also had no other medical complications.

The study was conducted by a group of Indian and British researchers in the Barts Medical School London. According to Amrita Ahluwalia, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a professor of vascular pharmacology, the study was planned with the hope that increasing one’s intake of vegetables with a high dietary nitrate content, such as green leafy vegetables or beetroot, might be a lifestyle approach that one could easily employ to improve cardiovascular health.

Several studies in the past have shown that eating prune (Ahmed et al 2010) or lettuce or vegetables or fruits (Appel et al 1997; Corboda et al 2009; Wang et al 2012 and other studies) can reduce the blood pressure. Most of these vegetables and fruits contain nitrates which is converted to a chemical called nitrite in the body and then to nitric oxide that reaches the blood. Nitric oxide is a gas that expands blood vessels and thereby decrease the blood pressure.

In this study the researchers used one cup of beetroot juice (ie.8 ounces or 240 ml) which is estimated to have 0.2 grams of dietary nitrate. People with high blood pressure who drank about 8 ounces of beetroot juice experienced a decrease in blood pressure of about 10 mm Hg. Compared with the placebo group (the group that didn't drink the juice), participants drinking beetroot juice had reduced systolic and diastolic blood pressure — even after nitrite circulating in the blood had returned to their previous levels prior to drinking beetroot. The effect was most pronounced three to six hours after drinking the juice but still present even 24 hours later.

Caution: This study does not suggest that people who are on blood pressure medications or nitrates for heart complaints can take 250 ml of beetroot juice. Such people should consult their doctors before trying this. Beetroot juice can change the color of urine to orange or red and may cause panic in some people. The study does not say that people who had normal blood pressure showed reduction in Blood Pressure after drinking beetroot juice. This study also doesn't suggest that beetroot juice is a treatment for blood pressure.

The US Department of Agriculture recommends filling half your plate with fruits and vegetables, and the American Heart Association recommends eating eight or more fruit and vegetable servings every day. In U.K., the general public is told to eat five portions of fruit or vegetables a day. This is the actual take home message of this study also.

Images-Courtesy American Heart Association with permission.

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