People have known for some time that raw beetroot is good for you, which is why it is often included in fruit juice mixtures. This is because raw beetroot contains a variety of compounds that improve your health, including betaines, resveratrol and quercetin.
Recently researchers have found that athletes running 1,500 metre trials performed better after drinking raw beetroot juice than athletes who drank raw beetroot juice that had had nitrates removed. The beetroot juice containing nitrates did not work for athletes running long distances.
But perhaps more interesting is the research carried out by Meredith Petrie of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolinas, in 2016, that demonstrates that beetroot juice is good for the brain. He gave beetroot juice (or placebo) to 26 older men (average age 65.4 years) for six weeks. All the men exercised every day during the six week trial. The scientists scanned the brains of the men before and after the trial. They found that the men who drank the beetroot juice had formed more new nerve cell connections than the men who drank the placebo. They formed these new nerve cell connections in an area of the brain that controls motor signals to the muscles.
The researchers concluded that the people taking beetroot juice with exercise had brain networks that were more like those of younger adults.
References
Larsen FJ, Weitzberg E et al. Effects of dietry nitrate on oxygen cost during exercise. Acta Physiol. 2007; 191 (1):59-66.
Petrie M et al. Beetroot juice: An ergongenic aid for exercise and the aging brain. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2016. doi: 10. 1093/gerona/glw219.
No comments:
Post a Comment