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Beetroot juice lowers blood pressure by changing oral microbiome: study
- treetalker 1y agoIs there a material difference between drinking beetroot juice and just eating a mess of beets?
- doytch 1y agoThe dosage of this study was "2 × 70 ml ∙d−1, each containing ∼595 mg NO3−". That's probably gonna be tough to get daily by eating beets...
- MiscIdeaMaker99 1y ago[flagged]
- bognition 1y agoBack in school I was often told the lead pipes in Roman aqueducts likely played a key role in the fall of Roman. We know lead is a poison with negative long term effects on cognition. The aqueducts were also responsible for Romes ability to proliferate and grow. Lead was both a blessing and a curse. I wonder what future generations will say about our highly enriched and processed diets. Calories have never been cheaper and food is ubiquitous. However I believe our food is playing a huge role in our degraded health. It’s not surprising that most studies looking at the consumption of unprocessed food, fresh fruit and vegetables show benefits to our health. The challenge is how do we get this food in the hands of those who need it cheaply and without sacrificing the nutritional (and microbial) content.
- papercrane 1y agoThe lead pipes theory is mostly just pop-science. Romans were likely getting more lead exposure from using lead cooking vessels and utensils.
- edwardbernays 1y agoSo is the idea that widespread lead exposure led to the decline of the Roman empire largely pop science? Are you saying that's not accurate, or that the source of the lead exposure is miscounted?
- Quarrel 1y agoYes, that is the modern understanding. Widespread lead exposure had very little / nothing to do with the decline the Roman Empire.
- Isamu 1y agoPlus to prove the lead connection you have to discount the centuries of Roman dominance and growth during which lead exposure was common.
- wredcoll 1y agoThis is a much better point. It's not like there were more lead pipes during the decline than the rise.
- edwardbernays 1y agoWouldn't there necessarily be more lead pipes at the peak and post-peak? Assuming that pipe-building was some non-linear function of dominance, which seems a fair assumption, we would start with 0% pipes at 0% rome and asymptotically close to 100% pipes at the asymptotic 100% peak rome. Is this a bad assumption, or is it basically just pedantry?
- wredcoll 1y agoIt would be more about lead pipes per capita, possibly as rome itself grew wealthier from conquests they added more and more piping, but it would be hard to relate this to any specific moment in time. Presumably the wealthy elites had their pipes installed first anyways.
- giantg2 1y ago"Back in school I was often told the lead pipes in Roman aqueducts likely played a key role in the fall of Roman. We know lead is a poison with negative long term effects on cognition." I highly doubt there was much effect from the pipes. They would quickly be sealed in mineral scale. Cups or utensils - maybe, but would be more about specific important people using them rather than being widespread.
- MengerSponge 1y agoWine (and grape juice) was cooked in lead vessels, which generates Lead(II) Acetate aka Sugar of Lead. They lead poisoned themselves coming and going. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate
- hinkley 1y agoPre enlightenment Europe also saw cheap wine being sweetened with a lump of lead suspended in wine barrels. Around the World in Six Glasses will tell you that tea replacing wine lead to Progress in Europe because they weren’t drunk all day but I wonder how much was inebriation and how much was lead exposure.
- MengerSponge 1y agoSmells like a little of column A, a little of column B. Beer was also widely prevalent, right? Even if it's just small beer (<3%ABV), it's not exactly making you smarter. It's hard to hit the Ballmer peak, after all
- hinkley 1y agoBeer was their water treatment plan. You drank watered down alcohol as a way to avoid waterborne illnesses. Tea is boiling water which we still use to this day to deal with the water supply being contaminated.
- underlipton 1y agoIt should be noted that juice is a highly-processed food. It concentrates the sugar, vitamin, mineral, and water content of a plant while removing the fiber. As to your last question, part of it may be rethinking the profit motive in food production. Food waste to keep prices high is a huge issue.
- Etheryte 1y agoThe lead pipe thing is one of the best known urban legends that's both completely false and also constantly making rounds on the internet.
- SapporoChris 1y agoNot sure where you get completely false. Like most urban legends it's a little truth and a lot of falsehoods. Lead pipes are a known health hazard. Lead pipes didn't lead to the fall of the Roman Empire.
- Etheryte 1y agoIt's completely false as in lead pipes didn't have anything to do with the fall of the Roman Empire as originally mentioned in the top comment.
- kmeisthax 1y agoThe Roman Empire did not fall because of lead pipe. It fell because the empire's elites ran out of territory to conquer and turned against one another. Also, the Roman Empire didn't fall, either. It split in two. The Western half continued splitting into a bunch of competing kingdoms while the Eastern half slowly shrank over about a thousand years. It eventually wound up being rolled into the Ottoman Empire, which lasted until WWI.
- bigmattystyles 1y agoDon’t lead pipes or any pipes for water actually get a patina of calcium carbonate or something so while not great it’s not as bad as told. Only if the ph of the water changes because you change the water source, kinda like in flint?
- bongodongobob 1y agoYes. There's nothing wrong with lead pipes.
- bigmattystyles 1y agoNot sure if sarcasm if I don't know enough beyond my own comment that I remembered from a PBS documentary.....
- throawaywpg 1y agoApparently it wasn't the pipes, which wouldn't have leached enough to make a difference. It was the fact that the Romans used lead acetate as a sweetener in their food and drinks!
- boston_clone 1y agoCould you provide some evidence to support your assertion that highly enriched foods are degrading health? Public health experts contend that enriched foods have improved baseline quality of life. Wheat breads with iron, folate, and B vitamins in the US is an easy example.
- cpursley 1y agoTrace those public health experts funding sources... Hint: it's the farm-bill dependent carb farmers who apparently need our money via farm subsidies and want poor people hooked as they get it from the other end in the form of SNAP.
- boston_clone 1y agoNo; this is a deliberately misleading non-sequitur with decades of evidence to refute. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10609867 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10609867
- cpursley 1y agoThe American waistline disagrees. The idea that highly processed sugar added white bread with all fiber and nutrients stripped with token vitamins added are added is a good thing is ludicrous. Why not just promote eating real food, including real bread?
- boston_clone 1y agoIt sounds like you're hypothesizing / gish galloping / strawmanning until you find something that "sticks". Instead try researching things that support your claim, like the notion that sugary beverages are the main culprit to the obesity epidemic, even though most health experts don't have the evidence to isolate that as the core factor. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9611578/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9611578/
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
- tim333 1y agoThe Victorians used lead pipes and then the British Empire declined. Coincidence?
- djtango 1y agoI can't remember where (maybe here) that you shouldn't use mouthwash after working out because of the effects on your oral microbiome. That fact shocked me just like this article does because it was unintuitive that your oral microbiome could have such an impact on your physiology. The effect may actually be a similar one because nitrates do sound familiar...
- DuzAwe 1y agoAlcohol or just fluoride? I have an aversion to the alcohol washes after reading years ago that the change to your mouth biome may lead to the issues that they are meant to stop.
- ta988 1y agofluoride with no kind of antibacterial is fine (careful with thymol etc). Check your toothpaste for anti bacterial as well. you want to remove food and plaque, not good bacteria.
- justinator 1y agoBut fluoride IS antibacterial.
- christophilus 1y agoYou shouldn’t use mouthwash at all ever. It’s a nuke to the microbes in your mouth. There was a long, rambling discussion with a functional dentist on the Primal Podcast[0] that goes into this. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jNrm-9sp-RQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jNrm-9sp-RQ
- giantg2 1y agoThere are situations where mouthwashes are beneficial, such as with injuries... Just not the stuff you buy at the store. The best mouthwash for those situations is just warm salty water.
- nradov 1y agoThat's interesting. I had always assumed that the effect was due to vasodilation but perhaps not.
- giantg2 1y agoIt is. The article is about how the beet juice affects the microbiome in a way that increases the conversion of nitrate to vasodialating nitric oxide.
- healsdata 1y agoIsn't nitrates what makes processed meats so unhealthy? Does this mean the bacon that claims to be cured with celery juice is actually on to something?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xyzzy_plugh 1y agoNo, you're thinking of nitrites. Celery juice is very high in nitrates, which then get converted to nitrites, which they don't have to put on the label. It's entirely marketing. Nothing has materially changed.
- cobbal 1y agoCelery is just a "natural" source of nitrates/nitrates. This makes it legal somehow to lie and claim "no added nitrates" on the label.
- Workaccount2 1y agoI can't believe the tiktok health cult hasn't caught on to this yet. Seed oils are the devil but "uncured" meats? All good!
- mrob 1y agoThe main preservative for processed meats, and the one that reacts with other compounds to form carcinogens, is nitrites not nitrates. Nitrates are sometimes used too, especially for meats that are cured for a long time, because some bacteria will reduce them to nitrites, making them effectively work as a sustained release form of nitrite. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curing_salt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curing_salt
- jijijijij 1y agoBut the article paints this bacterial conversion of nitrates as beneficial. It’s unclear whether the conversion into nitric oxide implies the conversion into nitrites. To me it seems likely the NO benefit may come with nitrosamine production, which may raise colon cancer risk. I think nitrosamines aren’t exclusively formed in the gut, but are present in cured meat beforehand, though. As far as I know, vitamin C prevents the nitrite to nitrosamine reaction, so fresh nitrate rich vegetable juices may not be inherently harmful through secondary nitrosamine production from converted nitrites. Additionally, their amino acid content is probably low, so as long as they are not consumed with a meal, production may be limited.
- hotpotat 1y agoIf you have trouble in bed, ask yourself if you use Listerine. It kills your mouth’s microbiome and lowers your Nitric Oxide production [0]. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31709856/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31709856/
- riffraff 1y agoI don't use Listerine but I didn't get this: trouble in bed of what kind? I couldn't get it from the linked article. I never knew high blood pressure correlates with bad sleep or bad sex (if anything, meds for high blood pressure come with negative effects on that).
- hotpotat 1y agoThe physical performance kind. Conversely beet root, L-Citruline, and supplemental NO are commonly used for ED. That’s why medications like tadalafil and sildenafil work. NO relaxes your blood vessels and increases blood flow generally.
- Workaccount2 1y agoNitric oxide relaxes your blood cells, letting blood flow easier into parts that erect themselves with blood. Try taking arginine for a week if you want to experience the effect first hand.
- adastra22 1y ago> I never knew high blood pressure correlates with bad sleep or bad sex. I don't know about bad sleep, but definitely bad sex. ED is an early indicator of hypertension.
- rickydroll 1y agoFrom personal experience, yes, it does. My blood pressure comes down only when I sleep in a very quiet room with no light.
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- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 1970-01-01 1y agoComfortable and uninterrupted sleeping, eating mostly plants, and getting your heart rate up and muscles moving for half an hour per day. Anything else is going from 90% healthy to 99%.
- dinfinity 1y agoI'd like to add: Stretching or some other kind of flexibility improving activities. Muscles moving for half an hour a day doesn't (necessarily) do anything for that (may even make it worse if you're doing heavy stuff). The effects on quality of life of a bit of flexibility are huge. Back pain, knee pain, shoulder pain, "RSI", and so many other ails are often just pretty much permanently cramped muscles negatively affecting ligaments and nerves.
- pstorm 1y agoBeing flexible is important, but the latest research shows that heavy lifting improves flexibility about as much as a dedicated stretching program: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9935664/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9935664/
- rafaelmn 1y agoOn the phone so can't see study details - what do day consider strength training ? I used to lift heavy (well by regular people standards) and for example my squat mobility was shit. Trying to improve that with significant load would have ripped my tendons I feel. Decreasing the load to the point where it wouldn't might as well be called stretching cause it wouldn't qualify as heavy lifting. Also most powerlifters I know have shit mobility.
- adrianN 1y agoFor the movements that you happen to make with the barbell.
- scotty79 1y ago
- mariusor 1y agoI think this is also one of the latest "marginal gains" advantages the cycling pro peloton is making use of. After races you can see them all chug a 150-200ml bottle of beetroot juice as a recovery drink while making the afferent faces. :D
- cowmoo728 1y agobeetroot juice was a few years ago and it's for a different purpose - nitric oxide to relax smooth muscle in the airways. the red recovery drink at recent events is tart cherry juice, which is thought to aid in muscle recovery.
- ulf-77723 1y agoSome time ago I read the book Complete Guide to Sports Nutrition by Anita Bean, which does also emphasize on not using antibacterial mouthwash since it removes the beneficial bacteria in the mouth which convert nitrate to nitrite. I‘m drinking beetroot juice since 3 years now and asked myself if beetroot capsules might be an alternative.
- cpursley 1y agoYou could also make Borscht with good quality beef for a balanced, healthy meal. It's the best.
- fhars 1y agoHow would capsules affect the mouth biome, though?
- ulf-77723 1y agoNot sure, probably it doesn’t - in this regard the capsules might just be snake oil if they are not good in any other way
- dinfinity 1y agoFor people who don't like drinking beetroot juice, you can also regularly (French) kiss with people with healthy oral microbiomes [0][1]. Best to really get in there. [0] https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2024/02/20/mouth-to-mouth-tactic-may-stop-dental-decay https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2024/02/20/mo... [1] https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2049-2618-2-41 https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...
- bapak 1y agoOk but what happens when unhealthy kisses healthy? Does it balance out? If it's not risky, I'm about to embark on a mission.
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- nothrowaways 1y agoCooked or raw?
- mythrwy 1y agoFor those who don't like beets, I eat beet regularly by dropping a few chunks in a fruit smoothie. Makes it nice and pink and the earthy flavor is much diluted.
- cpursley 1y agoI don't like beets but borscht is amazing.
- throwaway422432 1y agoI've baked a few beetroot cakes lately (substitute grated carrot for beetroot). It's a little more bitter despite the outrageous sugar level, but wondering if the nitrates come through ok?
- thallium205 1y agoOne of the problems with beetroot though is that it is loaded with sugar.
- jeffbee 1y agoSo? Every living human needs a lot of calories every day.
- hinkley 1y agoThousands, even.
- thenaturalist 1y agoIf you do not differentiate between sugar and calories you clearly can learn a lot about the human digestion and microbiomes. Complex (slow) carbs [does it feed your microbiome predominantly] != easy (fast) carbs [does it quickly go into your bloodstream and cells]
- jeffbee 1y agoCalorie for calorie beetroot juice has the same sugar content as beets. I am certain you are not asserting that beets are not something that humans would normally digest.
- thenaturalist 1y agoWell the difference between the veggie and the juice is that the former contains a whole lot more of fiber which is an especially beneficial nutrient for our gut microbiome. Reading up on juices, I've only heard of experts not being fans of 'em.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoWell, you don’t need to guzzle 600 calories of it.
- bufordtwain 1y agoI wonder if they could test this by comparing blood pressures of older folks in Australia with those in other countries since I hear they really like beetroot there :)
- silenced_trope 1y agoI started consuming Beet Chews recently. I'm not convinced of it though. I think it's just one of those things where I see a YouTube video and go to Amazon to add a new supplement to my life. Then once the supply of the supplement is up I choose not to re-up on it. That's what I'm planning for the Beet Chews too. I wonder really how much it really lowers BP and what quantity to consume? The linked article doesn't specify how much was consumed? A single cup? A liter? Likewise I'm just consuming 2 Beet Chews per day per the suggested serving size. But who knows if that really is the "minimum effective dose". There is value to the placebo effect of course, I'm taking something in order to convince myself I'm healthier.
- _the_inflator 1y agoBeetroot juice is legal “doping”. Of course nothing illegal, only natural, a disadvantage if you don’t utilize it for you. There are beetroot parties at almost any Triathlon event for the runners, apnea divers also get a huge natural and healthy boost. I use it for long runs I don’t really feel the difference every time, but stats and data speak their own language. Give it a try, timing is a bit tricky depending on your feast. But caution: don’t overdo it due to oxalate as potential risk. And mustn’t be the juice, the beetroot itself already does the job.
- pinkmuffinere 1y agoDo we know the mechanism by which this works? Is it just anecdotal, or is this studied at a population/statistical level?
- canucker2016 1y agofrom https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/beet-juice-performance-benefits https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/be... The key ingredient in beet juice, from an endurance perspective, is nitrate. Once you eat it, bacteria in your mouth convert nitrate to nitrite. Then the acidity in your stomach helps convert the nitrite to nitric oxide. Nitric oxide plays a whole bunch of roles in the body. That includes cueing your blood vessels to dilate, or widen, delivering more oxygen to the muscles, faster. The article summarizes the results of several studies into beetroot juice for physical athletic performance. I sent the following summary to Andy Jones, the scientist most associated with beet juice research, to see whether he would agree: “It works. It probably works less well in elites, like most things, but there may still be an effect. Higher doses taken for at least a few days in a row probably increase your chances of a positive effect.” Jones thought that sounded reasonable. He pointed out that there’s a separate body of evidence emerging that beet juice also enhances muscle strength and power in some circumstances, an effect that Poon’s review confirms.
- jbotz 1y agoI see everybody talking about the nitrate, but there is another substance in beets that might be relevant... betaine, also known as trimethylglycine HCL. I take about 800mg of this pure in my orange juice in the mornings and it gives me a very noticeable boost. But it is possible that this effect is specific to me and maybe other people who are "under-methylators" (which I think is a somewhat pseudo-scientific concept, but it led me to try betaine and I got results). Betaine was first isolated from beets, hence the name, and as the other name, trimethylglycine, hints it has 3 easily donated methyl groups, so if you do need those for some reason it may be useful to you. It's also pretty cheap and unlikely to be harmful. Edit: I found this... https://www.strongerbyscience.com/betaine/ https://www.strongerbyscience.com/betaine/
- ck2 1y agoWell no if it changed it then you wouldn't need to keep drinking it for the same effect It's the nitrates which have a short half-life And the thing is high quality Beet juice is very expensive because it has to be grown in good soil with lots of nitrates, most of the stuff coming out of China is poor quality with just the name and people don't know any better
- Havoc 1y agoWouldn't this stain teeth over time?
- oguz-ismail 1y agoNot as much as tea, coffee and tobacco
- karenbass 1y ago[dead]
- appguy 1y agoI drink kvass, a fermented beetroot drink and it has helped reduce abdominal pain that i occasionally get below my right rib after eating certain foods.