Beetroot is rich in nitrates and has been thought to enhance muscle blood flow or vascular dilation during exercise, but this has been proved wrong in a new study.

Now, some patients are asking their doctors if they should drink the juice to lower their high blood pressure.
Researcher David Proctor of Penn State and his colleagues gave subjects either a placebo drink containing beetroot juice minus the nitrate or a relatively high dose of nitrate-rich beetroot juice and found that the latter did not enhance the natural rise in blood flow to the forearm muscles during graded hand-grip exercise.
Lead author Jin-Kwang Kim said that beetroot juice also had no effect on the dilation (widening) of the brachial artery in these volunteers.
Proctor added that although several studies have reported indirect evidence of improved muscle oxygenation during exercise after consuming nitrate-rich supplements such as beetroot juice, none of these studies directly measured blood flow to the contracting muscles and their study was the first to directly test this possibility in humans.
Proctor continued that the absence of any direct effect on forearm muscle blood flow or artery dilator function was not due to a lack of absorption of the supplement into the blood stream.
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Source-ANI