What Vitamins Do Beets Have? Folate, C, and More

Beets pack a surprisingly broad range of vitamins, with folate (vitamin B9) and vitamin C as the headliners. They also deliver meaningful amounts of potassium, iron, and calcium, along with smaller quantities of other B vitamins and carotenoids. But the vitamin story in beets is more interesting than a simple nutrient list, because how you store, cook, and prepare them changes what you actually absorb.

Folate Is the Star

If beets are famous for one vitamin, it is folate. A single cup of raw beets supplies a significant chunk of the daily recommended intake of this B vitamin, which your body uses to make DNA and red blood cells. Folate is especially important during pregnancy, when demand spikes to support fetal development. Beets are recognized as a rich natural source of folate alongside their other bioactive compounds, including betalains, polyphenols, and nitrates.¹

One thing that sets beet folate apart from synthetic folic acid supplements is how it arrives. In whole beets, folate comes embedded in a matrix of fiber and other nutrients, which can slow its release during digestion. Research has found that processing beets into juice with the pulp still included actually increases the measurable folate concentration compared to the raw root, likely because breaking down cell walls frees the vitamin from its bound form.² So juicing or blending beets may not destroy their folate; it can make more of it available.

A clinical trial in Tanzanian adults with elevated blood pressure tested a 60-day regimen of beetroot juice combined with folate supplementation. Compliance was above 90 percent, and blood tests confirmed that the participants’ plasma folate levels rose significantly in the treatment group.³ That study was small and primarily a feasibility trial, but it does show that the folate in and alongside beet juice reaches the bloodstream in a meaningful way.

Vitamin C in Beets

Beets are not citrus fruits, and nobody confuses them with oranges, but they do carry a useful dose of vitamin C. The amount varies depending on how the beet is prepared. In fermented beetroot juice enriched with iodine, researchers measured vitamin C at roughly 52 mg per 100 mL, a substantial concentration.⁴ Raw beets contain less than that, and the precise amount shifts with growing conditions, variety, and storage. Still, the vitamin C in beets does real work in your body beyond just meeting a daily target.

The most practical thing vitamin C does inside a beet-containing meal is help you absorb iron. Beets supply non-heme iron, the plant form that your gut absorbs less efficiently than the heme iron in meat. Vitamin C steps in by converting the less-absorbable ferric form of iron into the ferrous form, which your intestinal cells take up more readily.⁵ This pairing has practical implications for people who rely heavily on plant-based iron sources. Eating beets as part of a meal with other vitamin-C-rich foods, or simply eating them alongside their own native vitamin C, boosts the amount of iron your body actually captures.⁶

Key Minerals That Come Along for the Ride

While the title question focuses on vitamins, the minerals in beets are inseparable from the overall nutrition picture and worth knowing about. A comparative analysis of beetroot alongside other vegetables found that beets stood out for their potassium levels, at about 704 mg per 100 grams on a dry-weight basis, along with calcium at roughly 37 mg per 100 g and iron at about 0.36 mg per 100 g.⁷ Those potassium numbers are relevant because potassium helps regulate blood pressure, and most people do not eat enough of it.

Beets also contain a broad swath of health-promoting compounds beyond the classic vitamin categories. The pigments that give beets their deep red color, called betalains, function as antioxidants, and the root also provides phenolic compounds and carotenoids.⁸ Those carotenoids include small amounts of beta-carotene, which the body can convert into vitamin A. Research on processed beetroot variants found beta-carotene concentrations of roughly 19 to 21 micrograms per 100 g on a dry-weight basis in juice with residue, with processing freeing more of the compound from the plant matrix.² Those are modest amounts compared to carrots or sweet potatoes, but they contribute to the overall nutrient profile.

Root Versus Greens

Most people think of the deep-red bulb when they hear “beets,” but the leafy green tops are a completely different nutritional story. Beet greens are rich in vitamin K1 (phylloquinone), the form of vitamin K that helps your blood clot properly. The root itself is relatively low in vitamin K. This distinction matters most for people on anticoagulant medications like warfarin, because vitamin K can counteract those drugs. Eating the greens inconsistently can cause swings in anticoagulant control.⁹

If you are on warfarin or a similar blood thinner, the general guidance is not to avoid beet greens entirely but to eat them in consistent amounts so your medication dose stays calibrated. Eating the root part of the beet poses much less concern on this front. For everyone else, beet greens are simply a bonus leafy green, nutritionally comparable to spinach or Swiss chard, and worth adding to salads or stir-fries rather than tossing in the compost.

How Cooking and Processing Change the Vitamin Content

Vitamins in beets do not survive every cooking method equally. Vitamin C is the most fragile. It degrades with heat, light exposure, and contact with water, which means boiling beets in a large pot of water is probably the fastest way to lose it. Steaming or roasting preserves more, because there is less water to leach the vitamin out and shorter exposure to the highest temperatures.

Folate tells a different story. While it too can degrade with prolonged heat, research on processed beetroot variants found that mechanical processing, such as juicing with the residue left in, actually increased measurable folate levels compared to the raw root.² The explanation is that crushing the cell walls frees folate that was previously trapped inside. This does not mean cooking always raises folate levels, because extended boiling at high temperatures would eventually break the molecule down. But blending or juicing raw or lightly cooked beets is a good strategy if folate is your priority.

Fermentation adds another twist. Fermented beetroot juice retains significant levels of vitamin C and gains additional bioactive compounds from the fermentation process itself. In one study, fermented beet juice enriched with iodine measured about 52 mg of vitamin C per 100 mL.⁴ Fermented beet products like kvass or pickled beets are popular in Eastern European cuisines, and they preserve more of the vitamin C than you might expect, partly because the acidic environment from fermentation helps stabilize the vitamin.

Storage and Freshness

The vitamins in a beet begin declining the moment it is pulled from the ground, and how quickly depends almost entirely on temperature. In cold storage at around 1°C (about 34°F), beets lost 39 to 41 percent of their vitamin C over 150 days. At a warmer storage temperature of 15°C (about 59°F), the loss was much faster: vitamin C content dropped by 1.5 to 1.8 times within just 90 days.¹⁰ The reason is straightforward: warmer temperatures speed up the chemical reactions that consume vitamin C.

The practical takeaway is that keeping beets in the refrigerator makes a measurable difference to their vitamin content, especially if you are buying them in bulk and using them over several weeks. Beets that sit on a countertop in a warm kitchen lose their vitamins considerably faster. If you buy beets at a farmers’ market in summer, getting them into the fridge quickly pays off more than you might guess.

Does It Matter Whether Beets Are Organic

This is a question people frequently ask about vegetables in general, and for beets there is actually data. A study comparing organic and conventionally grown beetroots found that organic beets contained significantly more vitamin C and certain phenolic compounds than their conventional counterparts.¹¹ The organic beets also had higher dry matter content, which partly explains the concentration difference: less water in the tissue means the nutrients are more concentrated per gram.

Whether that difference is large enough to matter to your health is a separate question. The gap in vitamin C between organic and conventional produce, across many vegetables, tends to be modest compared to the much larger effects of storage conditions and cooking methods. A conventionally grown beet eaten fresh from the fridge likely beats an organic beet that has been sitting on a shelf for two weeks. Soil quality, climate, and harvest timing all influence vitamin content too, so “organic” is not a guarantee of higher nutrition on its own. But if you are comparing two equally fresh beets at the store, the evidence leans in favor of the organic option for vitamin C content.

The Oxalate Trade-Off

Beets are one of the higher-oxalate foods you can eat, alongside spinach and rhubarb. Oxalates are naturally occurring compounds in plants that bind to calcium and other minerals in your gut, reducing how much of those minerals you absorb.¹² This is particularly relevant for vegetarians or anyone relying on beets as a calcium source, because some of that calcium is effectively locked up by the oxalates and passes through you unabsorbed.

Oxalates also matter for people prone to kidney stones, since calcium oxalate stones are the most common type. If your doctor has flagged oxalate intake as a concern, large daily servings of raw beet juice might not be ideal. Cooking beets and discarding the cooking water reduces oxalate levels to some extent, though it also washes away some water-soluble vitamins like vitamin C and folate. There is no way around this trade-off entirely, but moderate portions of beets are not a problem for most people. The oxalate concern is really about concentrated, daily, high-volume consumption, not an occasional roasted beet in a salad.

Beet Nitrates and Vascular Health

Nitrates are not a vitamin, but they are one of the most-studied compounds in beets and worth understanding alongside the vitamin profile because they often influence how people decide to eat (or drink) beets. Your body converts the inorganic nitrates in beets into nitric oxide, a molecule that relaxes blood vessels. A systematic review and meta-analysis found that beetroot consumption was associated with measurable improvement in vascular function, and the benefit scaled with the dose of nitrate consumed.¹³

This finding has driven the popularity of concentrated beetroot juice shots among athletes and people managing blood pressure. But here is where the vitamin story intersects: many of those concentrated products strip out fiber and reduce certain heat-sensitive vitamins during processing. A cold-pressed beet juice retains more vitamin C than a pasteurized one. If your goal is both the nitrate benefits and the vitamin content, raw or minimally processed forms of beets, whether grated into a salad, blended into a smoothie, or eaten as lightly steamed wedges, give you the most complete package.

Getting the Most From Your Beets

Pulling together what the research shows about beet vitamins leads to a few practical principles. Eating beets raw or lightly processed preserves vitamin C best, while blending or juicing can actually boost the bioavailability of folate and beta-carotene by freeing them from cell walls. Cold storage protects vitamins far better than leaving beets at room temperature. Pairing beets with other vitamin-C-rich foods in a meal helps you absorb more of their iron. And if you have access to beet greens, they add a completely different vitamin profile, particularly vitamin K, that the root alone does not offer.

One underappreciated strategy is variety of preparation across the week. Roast beets one night, juice them raw another morning, toss the greens into a sauté. Each method emphasizes a slightly different mix of nutrients. No single preparation is best for every vitamin beets contain, so rotating how you eat them is the closest thing to an optimization strategy. The vitamins in beets are real, they are well-documented, and they survive the journey from garden to gut better than many people assume, provided you treat them with a little care along the way.

1
PubMed Central. Ameliorative Effect of Beetroot Against Folic Acid Deficiency: A Review
2
Scientific Reports. Processing-induced modulation of nutraceutical and anti-nutritional profiles of beetroot variants targeting enhanced iron retention
3
PubMed. Feasibility and acceptability of a nutritional intervention testing the effects of nitrate-rich beetroot juice and folic acid on blood pressure in Tanzanian adults with elevated blood pressure
4
PubMed Central. Phenolic Compounds and Antioxidant Properties of Fermented Beetroot Juices Enriched with Different Additives
5
Food Chemistry Advances. Enhancing iron bioavailability and bioactive stability in sweet-sour beetroot sauce through liposomal vitamin C
6
Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences. Beetroot Juice and Red Spinach Juice to Increase Hemoglobin Levels in Anemic Adolescent Girls
7
Heliyon. Comparative nutritional and phytochemical analyses of turmeric (Curcuma longa L.), beetroot (Beta vulgaris L.) and carrot (Daucus carota L.) – Section: Nutritional Profile
8
Food Chemistry. Bioactive compounds of beetroot and utilization in food processing industry: A critical review
9
PubMed Central. Warfarin and beetroot
10
Eastern-European Journal of Enterprise Technologies. Determining the effect of treating table beet with biopreparations before storage on its preservation
11
PubMed. Beetroot (Beta vulgaris L.) and naturally fermented beetroot juices from organic and conventional production: metabolomics, antioxidant levels and anticancer activity
12
Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Oxalate content of foods and its effect on humans
13
European Journal of Nutrition. Effects of inorganic nitrate and beetroot supplementation on endothelial function: a systematic review and meta-analysis