Many studies have shown that beet juice can improve athletic performance. Now, a study conducted by scientists at Kansas State University and published in the Journal of Nitric Oxide, Biology, and Chemistry has shown that the beverage could also provide an important quality of life boost to people suffering from heart failure.
“Remember, for every one football player in the United States, there are many thousands of heart failure patients that would benefit from this therapy,” researcher David Poole said. “It’s a big deal because even if you can only increase oxygen delivery by 10 percent, that can be the difference between a patient being wheelchair-bound versus getting up and walking around and interacting with his or her family.”
Improves Patients’ Ability to Exercise
Prior research by the same team, published in the journal Physiology in 2013, showed that due to its high nitrate content, beet juice increases blood flow to skeletal muscles that are engaged in exercise. This, in turn, increases the oxygen flow to those muscles.
In the new study, the researchers found that after drinking beet juice, participants experienced a 38 percent increase in blood flow to their skeletal muscles while exercising. Significantly, blood flow increased most to the fast-twitch muscles that are used for explosive running. These muscles are typically less oxygenated than other skeletal muscles.
The increased oxygen flow would be enough to significantly improve quality of life in heart failure patients, the researchers said.
“Heart failure is a disease where oxygen delivery to particular tissues, especially working skeletal muscles, is impaired, decreasing the capacity to move the arms or legs and be physically active,” Poole said.
By enabling heart failure patients to get more exercise, beet juice could be the first step in producing deeper, more permanent health improvements.
“The best therapy for these patients is getting up and moving around,” Poole said. “However, that is often difficult. Increasing the oxygen delivery to these muscles through beetroot can provide a therapeutic avenue to improve the quality of life for these patients.”
The researchers have already begun a clinical trial to directly test the effects of beet juice in heart failure patients. The research is being conducted in collaboration with the University of Exeter and is funded by the National Institutes of Health.
