How much beet juice for blood pressure?

Trials generally use about one cup, 250 mL, a day. The effect builds over one to four weeks and fades within a couple of days of stopping.

Why has my urine turned red?

That is beeturia, and it happens to roughly one person in seven. The pigment passes straight through. It isn't blood and it needs no attention.

Is juice better than eating the root?

Depends what you're after. Pressing removes the pulp, which concentrates the nitrate into a small glass you can drink in one go. Chewing the whole vegetable keeps the pulp, so the sugar arrives slowly and you stay full. Most people are better off chewing.

Chapter 1 of 15

Beetroot

If You Read Nothing Else

About one cup of juice a day is the dose used in most blood-pressure trials.

Red urine after eating beets is harmless and has its own name: beeturia.

The leaves are food too, and they are better eating than the root for minerals.

Beetroot is a dense source of dietary nitrate. Your body turns that nitrate into nitric oxide, and nitric oxide relaxes the lining of the blood vessels so blood moves more easily. That is the whole story behind the blood-pressure and endurance research, and it's unusually well tested for a vegetable. In Iran the root has a second life as labu, sold hot from a steaming pot on winter street corners.

Known to botanists as Beta vulgaris.