Has Beetroot been done yet?

on a energy boosting thoughtline?

watched “food hospital” last week and they did a test of performance with beetroot juice vs performance without.

anyone else see it?

thoughts?

It has been discussed but a long time ago. Can’t stand the normal juice but do knock back the beet shot version. I see to do better with it than without.

Is is something you need to take regularly or just on the day / immediately before event?

One of our mates is very interested in sports nutrition and had been reading about this recently, just prior to the IOM End2End race a few weeks back he thought he’d try it and drank the best part of a litre of beetroot concentrate instead of the recommended much smaller amount and said that he was urinating a funny colour for a few days.

aye it does change your wee colour

N idea re health claims as i just eat them

A guy next to me during a race was worried as I was cramping and spitting blood! It does stay in your system for a while. I’ve not tried drinking a lot, found a small amount seemed to help.

Beetroot juice has been used for years now in endurance sports, the nitrate being the active ingredient. Generally it’s recommended to have 500-750ml an hour or two before the event, although the beet-it shots probably give you the equivalent (I find the normal beetroot + apple juice drink they do is more palatable though).
And yeah if you forget you’ve drunk it you’ll panic and think you need an A&E visit when you go to the toilet.
There’s been a decent amount of research on it with claims of 3-10% performance boost being recorded and attributed to it, I doubt you could say it’s conclusive yet though. I only use it before a long sportive or off-road marathon when I’m doing distances I don’t normally train at, no clue if it actually helps as my sample size is 1 but the power of placebo and purple piss shouldn’t be underestimated…

I saw that. There’s a deal on the shots on Sportpursuit at the moment which I was almost tempted by….. almost 🙂

Colleague who is a triathelete tried it before his last joyless exercise in misery event; said it did nothing except make him wee red.

Andy

they tried it out on that human powered flight program on TV. Did some tests at a University and showed some improvement but would want to see results of a study with placebos etc.

I drank a large bottle (1.5 L) of organic beetroot juice in one morning last week, that I had bought on a cheap deal from a well known high-street health food chain

for nearly 2 days, every time I went to pee, my urine was bright pink

I started getting concerned I had a problem (blood in urine?), but remembered reading about beet juice being expelled in urine

however, I felt very good that day (apart from funny coloured pee)

Roast beetroot is nice and does not just make your pee red. You could say that the next days visits to the room of contemplation are very healthy.

….. but would want to see results of a study with placebos etc

Research by the University of Exeter, published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, has shown drinking the juice enables competitive-level cyclists to cut down the time it takes to ride a given distance. This is the first study which has shown that beetroot juice can be effective in a simulated competition environment.

For the study, nine club-level competitive male cyclists were asked to compete in time trials over 4km (2.5 mile) and 16.1km (10 mile). All the riders were asked to do each time trial twice. Each time they drank half a litre of beetroot juice beforehand. On one occasion they had normal beetroot juice, on the other occasion – unbeknown to the triallists – the beetroot juice had a key ingredient, nitrate, removed.

The researchers monitored athletes’ VO2 levels (showing the amount of oxygen consumed) during exercise to ensure that the cyclists worked at maximum effort on each occasion.

Results showed that when the cyclists drank ordinary beetroot juice they had a higher power output (measured in watts) for the same level of effort – suggesting their muscles and cardio-vascular system were being more efficient.

On average, riders were 11 seconds (2.8%) quicker over the 4km distance and 45 seconds (2.7%) faster over the 16.1km distance.