Beetroot is something of a superstar supplement. It fights inflammation, reduces oxidative stress, improves circulation and heart health, and can even boost your performance in endurance exercise.
For these reasons, beet juice and beetroot supplements are popular among a wide range of fitness and health enthusiasts, and has been hailed as one of the top superfoods out there.
Our research team put together these rankings of the top beetroot supplements right now.
1. Nitrobeets Super Juice from Organica Life.
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Nitrobeets Super Juice is new in the market, but it’s already our favorite when it comes to providing all the benefits that beetroot can provide. It’s carefully formulated to boost your energy, fight aging, support healthy blood pressure and burn fat all while tasting great — yes, it’s delicious.
This completely vegan and caffeine-free blend is packed with organic beetroot powder to provide magnesium, folate, and nitric oxide to increase your endurance and help fight infection. It’s flavored with natural black cherry.
With its 6 superfoods and only 2 grams of sugar per serving, it’s easy to see why Organica Life’s Super Juice is our #1 pick for 2020.
NOTE: we reached out to Organica Life and they were nice enough to hook us up with an exclusive coupon for our readers: use coupon code DB20 at checkout to get an additional 20% off your total purchase on their website.
2. Ora Renewable Energy
As you might guess, the nitric oxide boosting effects of beetroot powder play a central role in this supplement.
Beetroot is accompanied by supplements like matcha and green coffee bean to boost energy, and coconut water for electrolytes.
If you’re looking for a plant-based pre-workout energy supplement that doesn’t include artificial ingredients, Ora should be one of your top choices.
3. HumanN BeetElite
When it comes to beets for increasing energy, BeetElite is one of the best choices. It’s a brand used by dozens of elite athletes and pro teams to increase performance, and it strikes a good balance between purity and usability.
Each serving contains the equivalent of six whole beets, and it doesn’t introduce anything unnatural, it keeps the carb content low, and it doesn’t go overboard with extra ingredients.
4. Havasu Beet Root Powder +
Havasu Beet Root Powder + is a strong candidate for people looking to improve their endurance exercise performance with a beetroot powder supplement.
It throws in some additional supplements like cordyceps mushrooms to boost your VO2 max and increase aerobic performance. These extras simultaneously make it better for athletes and worse for the general population.
If you just want to take beetroot for its health benefits, you don’t need these added ingredients, but these can make a big difference if you are running, cycling, swimming, or doing another endurance sport.
5. Starwest Botanicals Beetroot Powder
When it comes to bulk beet powder, Starwest Botanicals takes the crown. With a pure, organic product with a well-renowned reputation, Starwest is the best choice if you will be mixing up your own supplements or are looking for a pure beetroot powder to incorporate into a smoothie.
If you want a little something extra in your beetroot supplement, then there are other options out there.
6. VivaDeo Pure Beets
Pure Beets by VivaDeo offers a one hundred percent pure powdered form of beetroot, and it’s organic to boot. The organic source means you can be confident there are no pesticides or herbicides that make it into the supplement, and the lack of other ingredients keeps the calorie count low and the purity high.
It’s clearly geared towards people oriented towards improving their overall health, so there aren’t any ancillary ingredients to boost athletic performance, but sometimes that’s just what you want.
7. BulkSupplements Pure Beet Root Powder
Bulk Supplements comes through again for the rigorously minimal do it yourself-ers. They offer a large, highly pure package of beet root powder with nothing extra added. The downside for this supplement specifically is that you don’t know a whole lot about the source of the beetroot powder. For example, is it organic?
Other powder forms have a leg up on BulkSupplements in this situation for this specific reason. Still, BulkSupplements offers a quality beetroot product that’s hard to call a bad choice. If you want huge volumes of beetroot powder, BulkSupplements is the only way to go–you can get up to five kilograms in one bag!
8. Zhou Nutrition N.O. Pro
Zhou Nutrition makes one of the few beetroot based supplements that comes in capsule form. It includes a blend of amino acids alongside the beetroot powder; these are supposed to further augment the nitric acid boosting properties of the supplement.
The downside of the pill-based form is you have to take a lot of them to get even a small dose of beetroot powder. Most people should opt for a powder-based beetroot supplement so they can get a higher dosage of beets.
How we ranked
When formulating our rankings of beet supplements, our first requirement was that the dosage of raw beet material be in line with scientific recommendations based on the latest research.
We referred to comprehensive, systematic reviews of all of the research on beets and beetroot conducted to date, which discuss dozens of different studies which use both liquid and solid beet extracts.
Since no decisive advantage appeared for one or the other form, we included both types in our rankings. However, we did eliminate products which had too little beet extract, or diluted beet juice with too many other ingredients.
While beet extract is included in many supplements alongside other ingredients to boost nitrate levels, we wanted to stick as close to the scientific literature as possible. That means primarily or exclusively delivering beet in supplement form.
Benefits
Beets are rich in fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Scientifically called “beta vulgaris,” beetroot is a highly nutritious root vegetable, which is also taken as a supplement.
This superfood is full of essential nutrients like fiber, vitamin B9 (folate), iron, manganese, vitamin C, and potassium.
Beets could help lower your blood pressure. Hypertension is a health condition in which blood pressure goes abnormally high which damages the heart and also the blood vessels. This condition has been identified as the biggest risk factor for cardiac diseases, stroke, and even premature death across the globe (2).
In this condition, high blood pressure leads to the thickening of the heart muscle which then needs a greater force for pumping blood. This action further injures the arteries and makes them stiffer. The stiffer the heart, the longer it takes to relax.
However, regular intake of beetroot juice can significantly reduce elevated levels of blood pressure. According to research studies conducted on nitric oxide and hypertension in the years 2014 and 2015 (3, 4), people with high blood pressure can lower their blood pressure by consuming a diet that is rich in inorganic nitrates (found in abundance in beetroot juice).
Beetroot is rich in inorganic nitrate content which converts into nitric oxide in the body. Nitric oxide is a biological messenger that passes through the arteries and sends signals to the muscle cells (present around the artery walls) to relax. When the muscle cells in the arteries relax, the blood vessels dilate, resulting in lower blood pressure.
Furthermore, researchers have confirmed that on a public health level such a reduction can equate to nearly 10 percent reduction in the number of deaths that occur due to cardiovascular diseases.
Also, if people with high blood pressure continue to drink beetroot juice on a daily basis, researchers say that it can have an even greater effect on their health.
Dietary nitrate found in beetroot juice offers cardiac benefits. This can be backed by a study ‘Heart & Circulatory Physiology’ that was published in the American Journal of Physiology. The research specifically focused on beetroot juice which is rich in dietary nitrate content and found out how it impacts patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases (6).
The research found that dietary nitrate content found in beetroot juice helped lower overstimulation of patient’s sympathetic nervous system in patients suffering from cardiac diseases. This further helped in keeping heart rate as well as blood pressure normal.
Drinking beetroot juice regularly can help slow down the progression of dementia. A study conducted by researchers at the Wake Forest University found out that beetroot juice helped improve oxygenation in the brain, which slowed down the progression of dementia.
Blood flow to different parts of the brain lowers with age which leads to cognitive decline and increases the chances of dementia. However, chances of developing this condition can be lowered through regular beetroot juice consumption.
Consumption of beetroot and beetroot juice can improve athletic performance. This improvement in performance and exercise duration is primarily because of dietary nitrate found in high concentration in this supplement. Studies show that increased levels of plasma nitrate can improve exercise tolerance, especially when athletes engage in long hours of endurance exercise and training.
Nitrates are known to reduce oxygen use when the body engages in physical activities by affecting mitochondria’s efficiency. Mitochondria are the cell organelles that are responsible for energy production through respiration (7).
Since beetroot improves the body’s oxygen use, it can also help increase stamina and result in better endurance exercise performance.
Rich in fiber content, beetroot is also helpful in keeping the digestive tract healthy. The fiber present in beetroot prevents constipation.
The numerous nutrients, antioxidants, minerals and vitamins found in beetroot such as folate, bioflavonoids, iron, Vitamin A, B and C and potassium keep the body healthy by fighting against diseases and preventing cell damage.
Nitrate from beets might help with erectile dysfunction. Since erectile dysfunction depends strongly on the ability of your body to redirect blood flow, a lack of a natural ability to produce nitric oxide (a natural vasodilator) can cause problems with sexual function and sexual wellness in men.
According to an interesting review by Nathan Bryan at the University of Texas Health Science Center, agents that promote nitric oxide production could assist with sexual dysfunction (8).
Typical supplements that provide your body with the prerequisites to synthesize nitric oxide on its own, like L-arginine, tend not to work, but the research we’ve already discussed suggests that beets might be able to assist through a different pathway.
