You’ve heard the saying “you are what you eat” and it might seem like a coincidence, but new research has proved that this superfood heart shaped root vegetable can in fact help your heart function.

Beetroot (beta vulgaris) is a rich source of potent antioxidants, such as vitamin C, carotenoids, phenolic acids, and flavonoids, along with nitrate. Nitrate is a chemical naturally occurring in certain foods and is converted into nitric oxide when consumed.

Drinking beet juice raises nitric oxide levels in your body. Research shows nitric oxide can increase blood flow, improve lung functionn, and strengthen muscle contraction. This combination has stimulated athletes to supplement with beet juice for improved cardiorespiratory endurance and performance.

The first hint came in 2007, when Swedish researchers reported that three days of sodium nitrate supplementation lowered the oxygen demand of nine cyclists and triathletes as they worked out, compared with a placebo of table salt. It also increased the blood plasma levels of nitrite, a byproduct of nitrate. That study caught the eye of exercise physiologist Andrew Jones of the University of Exeter in England. Usually, the oxygen demand of exercise is fixed, he says, so for a short-term intervention to change that “was unusual.”

Although it wasn’t clear how nitrate was doing what it did, Jones knew that green leafy vegetables and beets were rich sources. So he conducted a study, reported in the Journal of Applied Physiology, giving eight men active in recreational sports an equivalent amount of nitrate in a natural food source: beet juice. The volunteers consumed either 500 ml (17 ounces) of beet juice or a blackcurrant drink — which has negligible amounts of nitrate — every day for six days. Then, after a break of 10 days, the groups were switched around and drank the other drink for an additional six days.

By the last three days of the six, nitrate concentration in the blood of those drinking beet juice was almost doubled and their systolic blood pressure (which measures the pressure in your blood vessels as your heart beats) fell by an average of 6 points. The oxygen cost — the amount of oxygen consumed — when they exercised on a stationary bicycle was reduced by 19 percent. “When we asked them to continue to exercise to exhaustion, they were able to go longer,” recalls Jones, who co-wrote a review on dietary nitrates in the 2018 Annual Review of Nutrition.

So how does NO work you might be wondering? Nitric oxide (NO) works by stimulating body functions affecting oxygen utilization. It opens up your blood vessels (vasodilation) increasing blood flow and feeding more oxygen to working muscles. Nitric oxide also functions as a signaling molecule communicating with your cells and body tissues. This communication ensures more blood flow to the muscle and adequate oxygen intake inside the muscle.

The common goal of all research was to examine the beneficial effects of beetroot juice on athletic performance. However, this superfood isn’t just for runners: our improved oxygen flow means your high-intensity strength workouts may benefit as well as your runs. But if you're really looking to supercharge your run or workouts, you should really focus on the rest of your diet. We tend to look at easy fixes, and there are a lot of other things that will be more beneficial for any athlete than just beet juice. We need to start by making sure we’re getting adequate nutrients and eating right as the first steps. Then, on top of a really good nutritional program, we may be able to see benefits from the beet juice. Beet juice may make you faster, but not fast enough to bypass the basic steps.