New Delhi, July 23
Older adults with high blood pressure may benefit from drinking beetroot juice, claimed a study on Wednesday.
The blood pressure-lowering effect of nitrate-rich beetroot juice in older individuals may be attributed to specific changes in their oral microbiome, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Exeter in the UK.
Nitrate is crucial to the body and is consumed as a natural part of a vegetable-rich diet.
In the study, when the older adults drank a concentrated beetroot juice ‘shot’ twice a day for two weeks, their blood pressure decreased. However, the effect was not observed in the younger group, as revealed by the findings published in the journal Free Radical Biology and Medicine.
“This study shows that nitrate-rich foods alter the oral microbiome in a way that could result in less inflammation, as well as a lowering of blood pressure in older people. This paves the way for larger studies to explore the influence of lifestyle factors and biological sex in how people respond to dietary nitrate supplementation,” said Professor Andy Jones, of the University of Exeter.
The study recruited 39 adults aged under 30 and 36 adults in their 60s and 70s who spent two weeks taking regular doses of nitrate-rich beetroot juice and two weeks on a placebo version of the juice with nitrate stripped out.