Edgar’s paper has now been published (in electronic format, anyway…print copy to follow) in the* International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism*:
As I mentioned in the original thread, the nitrate content of beets varies widely, depending upon both growing conditions and the variety of beet.
Moreover, you would still have to drink the juice from 3-4 nitrate-rich beets to achieve the apparent *minimal *effective dose of ~5 mmol.
Thus, while I would never discourage anyone from eating their vegetables as their grandmother told them to, I don’t think you can really count on juicing beets yourself as a guaranteed way of providing sufficient nitrate to enhance athletic performance.
Conventionally-grown vegetables do tend to have higher nitrate content than their organically-grown equivalents. However, there are numerous other factors that play a role as well. I would therefore have said “partially” instead of “largely”.
ETA: We did in fact analyze our data in light of this issue, but the results were skewed by the uneven distribution of conventional/organic products across the different categories (i.e., powders, mixed drinks, concentrates, bulk juices).
I tend to buy beets in bulk from the local Mexican market as they are inexpensive and I’m too che… frugal to buy processed products…
I’ll make sure I drink more than the juice of 4 beets before races. Shouldn’t be a problem as I love the stuff and drink a bunch daily anyways.
Became a beet convert years ago thanks in large part to articles about your work on them, but had never researched beyond reading that I had to drink a minimum of 500mL an hour or two before a race
The one I use at the moment isn’t on the list. Beet VO2max.
I’ve used Beet Elite also.
I’m a moderate believer in it. Sometimes I swear at given data set for workout or something looks like it benefited, then again, could be my personal confirmation bias.
Beet Elite is a bit of a special case, because it (and the company’s Superbeets powder) contains sufficient nitrite to at least potentially have physiological effects.
That aside, yes, you are interpreting the graph correctly, i.e., panel A shows content or concentration, panel B shows how much you would receive if you ingested the recommended dose (or, in the case of bulk juices for which no specific volume is recommended, 500 mL, as used in early research studies and also assumed by another paper).
Note that there are potential disadvantages of ingesting greater amounts than recommended by the manufacturers, e.g., increased cost, greater intake of oxaloacetate, larger volume filling stomach, etc.
Despite the fact that it targets athletes directly, we excluded Beet VO2max from our testing because it also contains L-arginine.
Similarly, we also excluded some products that contained beets along with other nitrate-rich vegetables (to keep things apples-to-apples…er, beet-to-beet).
Thanks Andrew. I was actually the person who mentioned the Lakewood juice. I drink 8oz 2x a day the 2 days before and 8oz morning of. Gun to my head, I think it works.
I believe that Super Beets and Beet Elite are the exact same thing, except for serving size. A few years ago, I compared the nutritional information on the canisters, and for the same size Super Beets had twice as many servings, each serving was half the size (1 scoop instead of 2), and all the other numbers were half of Beet Elite…
There have only been a couple/three formal dose-response studies, so it is difficult to determine the optimal dose. Because of this, we are currently comparing 10 vs. 20 mmol (as KNO3) in HF patients and 0.15 vs. 0.30 mmol/kg (from concentrated BRJ) in healthy older men and women.
In general, though, it seems that the standard “take two shots of Beet It! and call me in the morning” approach works just fine.
On a related note, despite what you might read various places there really isn’t much, if any, good evidence that supplementing for multiple days provides any significant benefit. IOW, at least at this stage it seems to simply be an acute effect (in humans, anyway…rats could be different, but their nitrate/nitrite/nitric oxide metabolism is considerably different from that in people, making extrapolation of such studies to humans questionable).
I asked you in the original thread about altRED. At the time you said you were not impressed by the marketing. Do you have any more thoughts on this now?