Chapter 1 of 15
Beetroot
If You Read Nothing Else
About one cup of juice a day is the dose used in most blood-pressure trials.
Read the whole guide on one page →Red urine after eating beets is harmless and has its own name: beeturia.
The leaves are food too, and they're better eating than the root for minerals.
Beetroot is packed with dietary nitrate. Your body turns that nitrate into nitric oxide, which relaxes the lining of your blood vessels and helps blood move more easily. That simple process sits behind the blood-pressure and endurance research, and it's unusually well tested for a vegetable. In Iran, beetroot has another life as labu, served hot from steaming pots on winter street corners.
Known to botanists as Beta vulgaris.