Beets are one of the most nutrient-dense vegetables you can eat, with measurable benefits for blood pressure, exercise performance, brain health, and liver function. A single 100-gram serving of raw beet (roughly one medium beet) delivers 328 mg of potassium, 100 µg of folate (about 25% of the daily value), and 2.5 grams of fiber, all for about 43 calories.
But the real standout in beets isn’t a vitamin or mineral. It’s their unusually high concentration of natural nitrates, which your body converts into a molecule that relaxes blood vessels and improves oxygen delivery to muscles and the brain.
Blood Pressure Reduction
The most well-studied benefit of beets is their ability to lower blood pressure. When you eat beets, bacteria on your tongue convert their nitrates into nitrite. Once you swallow, that nitrite enters your bloodstream and gets converted again into nitric oxide, a gas that signals blood vessels to widen. The result is lower blood pressure and improved circulation.
In a clinical trial published in the American Heart Association’s journal Hypertension, people with high blood pressure who consumed beetroot juice daily for four weeks saw their readings drop by an average of 7.7/5.2 mmHg over a full 24-hour monitoring period. That’s a meaningful reduction, roughly comparable to what some blood pressure medications achieve. Home blood pressure dropped by 8.1/3.8 mmHg, and the effect held steady across the entire four weeks with no sign of wearing off.
This benefit comes specifically from the nitrate content, so beet juice tends to produce stronger effects than cooked beets simply because it’s more concentrated. That said, regularly eating whole beets still contributes nitrates to your diet alongside fiber and other nutrients that support heart health.
Exercise Performance
Athletes and fitness enthusiasts have picked up on beetroot juice for a reason: it genuinely improves stamina, though the effect is modest. A large umbrella review in the journal Nutrients found that drinking beetroot juice two to three hours before exercise produced a small but statistically significant improvement in physical performance. Chronic supplementation over three or more days showed benefits as well.
The mechanism is the same nitric oxide pathway that lowers blood pressure. More nitric oxide means your blood vessels dilate more efficiently, delivering oxygen to working muscles with less effort. Your muscles can then produce energy using slightly less oxygen than they normally would, which effectively stretches your endurance further.
The effective dose in studies ranged from about 515 to 1,017 mg of nitrate per day, which translates to roughly 500 ml (about two cups) of regular beetroot juice or a smaller serving of concentrated beet juice. Timing matters: for a single pre-workout dose, two to three hours before exercise gives your body enough time to complete the conversion to nitric oxide.
Brain Health and Aging
Your brain is hungry for oxygen, consuming about 20% of your body’s supply despite making up only 2% of your weight. Beets help feed that demand. Research at Wake Forest University found that combining beetroot juice with exercise increased oxygen delivery to the brain in older adults, particularly to the region that processes signals from your muscles and coordinates movement.
The researchers noted that brain connectivity patterns in older adults who drank beetroot juice before exercise looked more like those of younger people. The area most affected, the somatomotor cortex, is critical for balance, coordination, and mobility. Strengthening its connections could help preserve physical independence as you age. This was the first study to test the combined effect of beetroot juice and exercise on these specific brain networks, so it’s an early but promising finding.
Liver Protection
Beets are one of the richest dietary sources of betaine, a compound that plays a protective role in liver health. Betaine helps your liver process an amino acid called homocysteine, which at elevated levels promotes fat buildup in liver cells. By helping clear homocysteine more efficiently, betaine reduces the signals that tell liver cells to produce and store fat.
Research published in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications found that betaine supplementation reversed unhealthy changes in liver metabolism, restoring levels of key compounds that had been disrupted by excess homocysteine. This is relevant because fatty liver disease affects roughly 25% of the global population, and dietary strategies that reduce liver fat accumulation are increasingly valued. Beets won’t reverse advanced liver disease, but including them regularly adds a compound that actively supports your liver’s ability to manage fat.
Cooking Changes the Nutrition
How you prepare beets affects what you get from them. Raw beets contain about 100 µg of folate per 100 grams, but cooking drops that to just 12.4 µg, a dramatic 88% loss. Folate is water-soluble and heat-sensitive, so it leaches out during boiling or roasting. Potassium and fiber hold up much better, staying nearly the same whether beets are raw or cooked. Manganese drops from 0.46 mg to 0.31 mg per 100 grams with cooking.
If you’re eating beets primarily for folate (important during pregnancy and for cardiovascular health), raw preparations like grating beets into salads or drinking beet juice preserve far more of it. For blood pressure and exercise benefits, juice is the most practical delivery method because you can consume a meaningful dose of nitrates in a single glass.
Oxalates and Kidney Stone Risk
Beets are high in oxalates, compounds that bind with calcium and can contribute to kidney stone formation in susceptible people. Beetroot juice contains between 60 and 70 mg of oxalate per 100 ml, which is dramatically higher than almost all other fruit and vegetable juices (most fall below 10 mg per 100 ml). Only rhubarb nectar ranks higher.
If you’ve had calcium oxalate kidney stones, this matters. Drinking 500 ml of beetroot juice daily would add a substantial amount of oxalate to your diet. For people with no history of kidney stones, the oxalate in normal dietary amounts of beets isn’t a concern. But if you’re a stone former, you’ll want to be deliberate about portion sizes and frequency, especially with concentrated beet juice.
Beeturia and Other Side Effects
If your urine or stool turns pink or red after eating beets, you’re experiencing beeturia. It looks alarming but is completely harmless. Only about 10% to 14% of people experience it, depending on how their body breaks down the red pigments in beets. The Cleveland Clinic describes it as “more of a curiosity” that “on its own doesn’t really mean much.”
There is one minor clinical footnote: beeturia shows up more often in people with iron-deficiency anemia or, paradoxically, in those with too much iron in their blood. It’s not something doctors use as a diagnostic tool, but if it happens to you consistently, it wouldn’t hurt to mention it at your next checkup so your provider can glance at your iron levels.
One other consideration is that concentrated beetroot juice can exceed the acceptable daily intake for nitrates. A single 70 ml bottle of concentrated beet juice contains about 400 mg of nitrate, which surpasses the recommended limit for most body weights. Occasional use is unlikely to cause problems, but daily high-dose supplementation over long periods hasn’t been thoroughly studied for safety.