There’s been quite a lot of talk about nitrate and it’s effects on the human body over the past few years. The use of beetroot as a natural source of this dietary nitrate is perhaps one of the most interesting developments, there are hundreds of scientific studies showing that the concentrated juice can improve both physical and mental performance.
Whilst you could increase your diet of vegetables rich in dietary nitrate, you’d need to eat an awful lot – fruit and veg juice maker, James White developed a concentrated beetroot 7cl shot which provides 0.4g of dietary nitrate. To put that into perspective, you’d have to eat over half a kilo of beetroots to get this amount!
The Sport Shot was developed specifically for the elite and sub-elite sporting world, and is currently being used by many athletes (including international rugby, premier league football and UCI Pro Tour cycling teams, as well as the GB, Australian, Canadian, US, Dutch and New Zealand Olympic teams).
As well as the well documented performance benefits, Beetroots have a whole host of other health boosting and nutritional benefits including:
- Helps regulate blood pressure
- Promotes cognitive health
- Prevention against anemia
- Antioxidant properties
- Anti-inflammatory properties
- Detoxification properties
- Lowers bad cholesterol
- A Stamina enhancer via oxygen usage efficiency
- A weapon against infection
- A gate keeper of blood flow to certain organs
- Improves digestion
There’s still some debate about if you need to have a ‘loading phase’ of dietary nitrate to see the performance gains. Beet It say that most people can see results after just one of their concentrated sports shots, whereas other studies indicate that you need to have one shot per day for 3 days leading up to a training session/race.
Concentrated beetroot juice has a very distinct ‘earthy’ flavour – it’s pretty strong but palatable, especially when you can down it in one go. Whilst there’s no such thing as ‘get fit quick’ magic potion, beetroot shots are proven to increase cycling performance, are completely natural, and also count towards your 1 a day!
Learn more about dietary nitrate here and check out our review of the new Pro Elite Flapjack Bars if you want a more palatable source.
Buy the Beet It Sport range from Wiggle
beet-it.com