"Oxygenating Blood With Nitrate-Rich Vegetables"
It's great that we can improve athletic performance eating a few beets,
but so what if you run 5% faster?
It can be a fun experiment to eat a can of beets
and maybe shave a minute off your 5k time.
But these are the people who could really benefit
from a more efficient use of oxygen: those suffering from emphysema.
Yeah, young healthy adults eating greens and beets
can swim, run, and cycle faster and farther,
but what about those who get out of breath just walking up the stairs?
Do nitrate-rich vegetables work where it counts?
Yes, significantly extended time
on the treadmill after two shots of beet juice.
It's great that beet juice can decrease
blood pressures in young healthy adults,
but what about in those who really need it, older overweight subjects?
Just one shot of beet juice a day versus berry juice as a control,
and in a few weeks a significant drop in blood pressure.
But within just a few days after stopping
after three weeks of beeting themselves up,
blood pressures went back up.
So we have to eat our vegetables and keep eating our vegetables.
Why did it take until 2015 to publish a study
on lowering blood pressure in people with high blood pressure?
You'd think that'd be the first group to try it on.
Who's going to fund it, though — Big Beet?
Blood pressure medications rake in more than $10 billion dollars a year.
You can't make billions on beets.
But that's why we have charities like the British Heart Foundation,
which funded a study to give folks with high blood pressure
a cup of beet juice a day for four weeks.
After all, high blood pressure may be the #1 risk factor
for premature death in the world.
In ten years it could affect nearly one in three adults on this planet.
But put them on beet juice and blood pressures dropped
and kept dropping until it was stopped after a month.
With so many people with high blood pressure even despite treatment,
an additional strategy, based on the intake of nitrate-rich vegetables,
may prove to be both cost-effective, affordable,
and favorable for a public health approach to hypertension.
What about those with peripheral artery disease?
Tens of millions with atherosclerotic clogs impairing blood flow to their legs,
which can cause a cramping pain in the calves called claudication
due to lack of blood flow through the blocked arteries,
severely limiting one's ability to even just walk around,
but just drink some beet juice and walk 18% longer.
Now this is really neat; I've never seen this before.
They measured the actual oxygenation of their blood within their calf muscle.
Placebo's in white; beet is in black, showing how they were able to maintain
more oxygen in their muscles with just vegetables.
The nitric oxide from vegetable nitrates not only improves oxygen efficiency
but oxygen delivery by vasodilating blood vessels,
opening up arteries so there's more blood flow.
I’m surprised beet juice companies
aren’t trying to position themselves as veggie Viagra.
It could certainly explain why those eating more veggies
have such improved sexual function,
though this study was a snapshot in time,
so you can't tell which came first. However, it seems more reasonable
that low fruit and vegetable consumption contributes to erectile dysfunction,
rather than the other way around.
What about the most important organ, the brain?
Poor cerebral perfusion – lack of blood flow and oxygen in the brain –
is associated with cognitive decline and dementia,
and they showed that the nitrate in vegetables
may be beneficial in treating age-related cognitive decline.
They showed a direct effect of dietary nitrate
on cerebral blood flow within the frontal lobes,
the areas particularly compromised by aging.
This is a critical brain area for so-called executive function,
basic task and problem solving, important for day-to-day functioning.
The nitrite from nitrate has been shown
to not just increase blood flow to certain areas of the body,
but also acts preferentially in low oxygen conditions,
allowing it to increase blood flow
precisely in the areas where it's needed the most.
And that's what they found in the brain:
increased blood flow to the at-risk areas of the aging brain.
And the only side effect of beeting your brains out?
A little extra color in your life.