Beetroot Juice good for the Heart

Drinking concentrated beet juice, which is high in nitrates, increases muscle power in patients with heart failure, a new study shows.

“It’s a small study, but we see robust changes in muscle power about two hours after patients drink the beet juice,” says senior author Linda R Peterson, associate professor of medicine at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

“I have compared the Beet-juice effect to Popeye eating his spinach. A lot of the activities of daily living are power-based—getting out of a chair, lifting groceries, climbing stairs. And they have a major impact on quality of life. We want to help make people more powerful because power is such an important predictor of how well people do, whether they have heart failure, cancer, or other conditions.

In general, physically more powerful people live longer.”

Based on research in elite athletes, especially cyclists who use beet juice to boost performance, the study’s corresponding author, Andrew R Coggan, assistant professor of radiology, suggested trying the same strategy in patients with heart failure.

In the journal Circulation: Heart Failure, the scientists report data from nine patients with heart failure. Two hours after the treatment, patients demonstrated a 13 percent increase in power in muscles that extend the knee. The researchers observed the most substantial benefit when the muscles moved at the highest velocities. The increase in muscle performance was significant in quick, power-based actions, but researchers saw no improvements in performance during longer tests that measure muscle fatigue.

Patients in the study served as their own controls, with each receiving the beet juice treatment and an identical beet juice placebo that had only the nitrate content removed. There was a one to two week period between trial sessions to be sure any effects of the first treatment did not carry over to the second. Neither the trial participants nor the investigators knew the order in which patients received the treatment and placebo beet juice.

Participants experienced no major side effects from the beet juice, including no increase in heart rates or drops in blood pressure, which is important in patients with heart failure.

Heart failure can have various triggers, from heart valve problems to infections, but the result is the heart’s gradual loss of pumping capacity.

“The heart can’t pump enough in these patients, but that’s just where the problems start,” says Peterson, a cardiologist and director of Cardiac Rehabilitation at Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

While the trial was not designed to find out whether patients noticed an improved ability to function, researchers estimated the benefit by comparing the improvement in muscle power with what is seen from an exercise program.

The nitrates in beet juice, spinach, and other leafy green vegetables such as arugula and celery are processed by the body into nitric oxide, which is known to relax blood vessels and have other beneficial effects on metabolism.