Health effects of drinking lots of nitrates from raw vegetable juices. New study.

Are drinking lots of nitrates from raw vegetables juices good or bad? That depends on how much you drink. There seems to be a controversy on the health effects of drinking too many nitrates in vegetable juices.

On one hand, beet juice can help people and on the other hand, too many nitrates have health effects that maybe you don't want. What have the most recent studies found? Just how healthy is heavy juicing of raw vegetables?

According to the December 17, 2010 news article based on a new study of beet juice, "Beetroot juice could help people live more active lives," new research into the health benefits of beetroot juice suggests it's not only athletes who can benefit from its performance enhancing properties - its physiological effects could help the elderly or people with heart or lung-conditions enjoy more active lives. The new University of Exeter, UK study appears this week in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

In the Sacramento-Davis area, UC Davis studies the health effects of vegetable juices. Can drinking vegetable juice lower your blood pressure and help you lose weight? Or are too many nitrates from vegetable juices bad for you?

If drinking vegetable juice can lower your blood pressure because you're drinking nitrates that supposedly create more nitric acid in your blood, how much can vegetable juices lower your blood pressure, assuming you're using fresh vegetable juices not certain types of bottled or canned juices loaded with added salt or mixed with additional potassium chloride (rather than potassium citrate) for taste? Last summer, researchers at the University of California-Davis conducted a 12-week study among adults ages 40-65 years.

All of the people in the study who drank at least two cups of vegetable juice met daily vegetable recommendations. But only seven percent of the non-juice drinkers met the goal. The participants in the study with borderline high blood pressure who drank one to two servings of V8 juice lowered their blood pressure significantly.

That study didn't note the effects of vegetable juice on people with hypertension rather than borderline high blood pressure, that is people who want to use natural juices to lower their blood pressure instead of going on pills at a certain age. No, the study used borderline people who were otherwise healthy and under age 65. But what effects would vegetable juices have on people over age 65 with varying conditions who may want to at least try to help their body without prescription medicines?

UC Davis also did a study a few months ago on how strawberries can lower blood pressure. UC Davis recruited for the study pre-hypertensive (systolic 120-139 mmHg and/or diastolic 80-89 mmHg) men and women ages 25 - 65 years who were not taking blood pressure medication or receiving treatment, did not have an allergy or intolerance for dairy or strawberry products, did not take any other medications or supplements, and females were not taking birth control.

The volunteers had to consume a strawberry drink for ten weeks, have five clinic visits (not including screening) consisting of blood pressure monitoring, blood draws, an electrocardiogram (ECG), and brachial artery flow mediated vasodilation test (a test to examine the ability of your blood vessels to relax, only 2 throughout the study duration). And subjects were asked to wear a 24-hour blood pressure monitor five times during the study (including screening).

See the UC Davis Strawberry Study site at the UC Davis Nutrition Department. Let's take a look at a study done on specific health benefits of vegetable juices. The University of California - Davis and Baylor College of Medicine teamed up to study the effects of fresh vegetable juices on weight loss and lowering blood pressure.

Several months ago, UC Davis nutrition scientists also ran a 15-week study to test whether diets that contain potatoes would be useful in weight loss or maintaining current body weight and how these diets affect your blood sugar. Check out the UC Davis Department of Nutrition - Potato Study.

In another study of what happens to your body when you drink vegetable juices, the University of California-Davis involved 90 healthy adults, ages 40-65 years. The Baylor study enrolled 81 adults (83.5% of whom were minority) with metabolic syndrome risk factors. The studies were supported in part by Campbell Soup Company and by resources provided from University of California-Davis and Baylor College of Medicine.

The problem with this study is that those that drank at least two cups of vegetable juice were drinking juice from a can or bottle. Have you read the label on canned or bottled juice? Is it mostly tomato paste coming from another can along with squeezed vegetable juice and water?

Or is it freshly juiced vegetables coming out of your juicing machine? What vegetables were juiced? How long had the vegetable juice been in the can.

If we narrow the study down to drinking cans of V8, let's discuss the ingredients on the bottle or can. Was it a plastic bottle or glass or a metal can? All these factors could change what the juice tastes like. Was it low sodium juice or juice that has been salted with table salt.

Was the table salt labeled as sea salt? Or is your salt some of the commercial kind processed perhaps with aluminum.

How do you know whether your salt has been processed with aluminum or is naturally derived from the ocean? Or would you rather have more potassium than salt in your vegetable juices, low sodium bottled juices, or make your own? Consumers have to consider all these factors if they have health issues.

Consumers don't know any of these variables. All readers know is that the participants drank vegetable juice. The juice was V8, and the studies were financially supported in part by Campbell Soup Company that makes canned soup and canned vegetable juice.

If results were this great with canned juice, think of what juicing your own fresh vegetables will do. The only problem with fresh vegetables you have at home is you don't know if they've been washed thoroughly or still have dirt caked in crevices when you're dealing with people juicing vegetables at home.

So many factors could be taken into consideration. Were the vegetables scrubbed or peeled, for example. Did you use a blender to get the fiber or a juicer to take out the fiber? Was it the fiber in the vegetables, the pulp or the watery juice of your own vegetables that had any effect on your weight or blood pressure? Think about it.

In the meantime, the results of the study were great. Every naturopath knows that studies for the last fifty years have documented the link between eating a diet rich in vegetables and lower blood pressure. The question is do you salt your vegetable juice? If so, what if you have a genetic variation in some of your kidney genes that causes salt sensitivity--where your blood pressure rises when you drink a lot of salty juices?

On the other hand, you need to eat more vegetables and vegetable juice for a variety of health benefits from the antioxidants in vegetable juice. Currently statistics say almost eight out of 10 people worldwide fall short of the daily recommendation, according to the article, "Vegetable Juice Aided in Dietary Support for Weight Loss and Lower Blood Pressure," published October 21, 2009 in Medical News Today.

Research presented at the International Symposium on Human Health Effects of Fruits and Vegetables suggests the best approach may be to focus on the factors that are often behind this vegetable gap: convenience and enjoyment. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and (FAO) fruit and vegetable promotion initiative, "Low fruit and vegetable intake was identified as an important risk factor for chronic diseases in the WHO World Health Report 2002.

Overall, it is estimated that up to 2.7 million lives could potentially be saved each year if fruit and vegetable consumption was sufficiently increased." Currently, studies around the world continue.

For example, two studies presented at the symposium on human health effects of fruits and vegetables found that the addition of vegetable juice in people's diets was a successful strategy to help them reach the vegetable guidelines (at least 4 servings per day).

The goal is to get people to carry vegetable juice with them to work or school when they are not at home. Studies found that "the addition of a portable drink, such as V8® 100% vegetable juice, was more successful than an approach that focused solely on nutrition education, or offering dietary counseling on ways to increase vegetable intake," according to the article, "Vegetable Juice Aided in Dietary Support for Weight Loss and Lower Blood Pressure."

On the opposite side is a letter noting that consuming too many nitrates is not healthy, including pickled food. Read the letter published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, "Beware of the pickle: health effects of nitrate intake." If people with no scientific background read that letter, they may not be able to distinguish the effects of pickled food versus the effects of raw vegetable juices high in nitrates. If pickled food and raw vegetable juices are both high in nitrates, what effects would either or both have on someone's health?

And how much can be safely consumed of either pickled vegetables such as fermented sauerkraut or raw vegetable juices to get the health benefits without the downside? Would anyone know for sure whether pickled food full of nitrates is carcinogenic? And in what amounts? And how would that compare to the nitrates in vegetable juices? Are some nitrates different than other nitrates once in the body?

So now you're getting two opinions opposite of one another. Beetroot juice is good, but consuming too many nitrates is not so good. The letter reports, "What health risks could possibly be expected from the nitrate content of a—on first thought—normal dose of vegetables, such as beetroot or spinach?

The daily ingested dose of nitrate of 4.16 mg/kg body wt as beetroot juice (2) or 6.2 mg/kg body wt as sodium nitrate (4) exceeds the acceptable daily intake (ADI) of 3.65 mg/kg body wt in both studies. The concern about nitrate is possible carcinogenicity."

Do scientists really know how carcinogenic nitrates can be? The letter implies a maybe not or maybe so indecision. So what is needed? More research. In the meantime, beetroot juice is touted in the actual study. The letter concludes with the note, "The safety of new ergogenic supplements falls under our responsibility and should be subject to further investigation."

According to the latest study on beetroot juice (beet juice), beetroot juice has been one of the biggest stories in sports science over the past year after researchers at the University of Exeter found it enables people to exercise for up to 16% longer. The startling results have led to a host of athletes - from Premiership footballers to professional cyclists - looking into its potential uses.

A new piece of research by the university in conjunction with the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry has revealed the physiological effects of drinking beetroot juice could help a much wider range of people. In the latest study, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, the researchers looked at low intensity exercise and found that test subjects used less oxygen while walking - effectively reducing the effort it took to walk by 12%.

Katie Lansley, a PhD student from the university's Sport and Health Sciences department and lead author of the study, said: "As you get older, or if you have conditions which affect your cardiovascular system, the amount of oxygen you can take in to use during exercise drops considerably," according to the news release. "This means that, for some people, even simple tasks like walking may not be manageable."

So can beetroot juice help older adults? Dr. Lansley explained in the news release, "What we've seen in this study is that beetroot juice can actually reduce the amount of oxygen you need to perform even low-intensity exercise. In principle, this effect could help people do things they wouldn't otherwise be able to do."

When consumed, beetroot juice has two marked physiological effects. Firstly, it widens blood vessels, reducing blood pressure and allowing more blood flow. Secondly, it affects muscle tissue, reducing the amount of oxygen needed by muscles during activity. The combined effects have a significant impact on performing physical tasks, whether it involves low-intensity or high-intensity effort.

So far the research on the impacts of beetroot juice has only been carried out on younger people who are in good health, but the researchers believe there is no reason why the effects of beetroot juice wouldn't help others.

"While we haven't yet measured the effects on the elderly or those with heart or lung conditions, there is the potential for a positive impact in these populations which we intend to go on and investigate further," Katie Lansley added, according to the December 17, 2010 news release.

Beetroot juice contains high levels of nitrate. The latest study has proved that this is the key ingredient which causes the increase in performance, rather than any other component of the beetroot juice.

Professor Andy Jones, the senior scientist on the study and a pioneer of research into beetroot juice, said: "In this study, we were able to use - for the first time - both normal beetroot juice and beetroot juice with the nitrate filtered out. Test subjects didn't know which one they were getting. The drinks both looked and tasted exactly the same. Each time the normal, nitrate-rich juice was used, we saw a marked improvement in performance which wasn't there with the filtered juice - so we know the nitrate is the active ingredient."

Also check out the study, Effects of dietary nitrate on oxygen cost during exercise . Acta Physiol (Oxf) 191 : 59 - 66 , 2007. The abstract of the study also is at the Pubmed site. According to that 2007 study, "dietary nitrate supplementation, in an amount achievable through a diet rich in vegetables, results in a lower oxygen demand during submaximal work. This highly surprising effect occurred without an accompanying increase in lactate concentration, indicating that the energy production had become more efficient. The mechanism of action needs to be clarified but a likely first step is the in vivo reduction of dietary nitrate into bioactive nitrogen oxides including nitrite and nitric oxide."

The research paper also noted that dietary nitrate supplementation reduces the energy cost of walking and running: a placebo controlled study is available to view online as an article in press in the Journal of Applied Physiology here. Also see the study, "Use of ascorbic acid to inhibit nitrosation: kinetic and mass transfer considerations for an in vitro system . Carcinogenesis ," 9 : 365 - 372 , 1988. Abstract / FREE Full Text .

In the most recent, December 2010 University of Exeter, UK study, James White Drinks provided the beetroot juice for that study, including the nitrate filtered placebo version.

Another Beet Juice Study for Health Effects on BorderlineBorderline Hypertension

Why are so many food research studies done on young and healthy volunteers when the majority of consumers of the studies are older and are trying to reverse chronic health problems possibly caused by prior unbalanced diets? See the article, Daily Glass Of Beet Juice Can Beat High Blood Pressure, Study Shows.

How would juicing or these studies help those with hypertension that are highly resistant to treatment whether with drugs or on raw vegetable diets? Studies also should be done with vegetable juices on those with uncontrolled blood pressure and on older persons that want to use only natural foods and supplements or breathing exercises.

The newest candidate for natural blood pressure control is drinking two cups a day of beet juice. However, that much beet juice is potent. Will your stomach be able to take it? Otherwise you could mix it with carrot and celery juice.

A study in the journal Hypertension (online Feb. 4, 2008) showed that two cups (500 ml) of beet alone juice lowered blood pressure by approximately 10 points. That is better than many prescription drugs. The effect lasts up to 24 hours. Beet juice drinkers were compared with water drinkers in the study.

For the beet juice drinkers, blood pressure dropped one hour after the volunteers drank the beet juice. It reached its lowest point 2.5 to 3 hours after ingestion and continued to have an effect for up to 24 hours.

It has been reported that more than 25 per cent of the world's adult populations are hypertensive. And it has been estimated that this figure will increase to 29 per cent by 2025, according to the Feb 2008 Hypertension study using beet juice with healthy volunteers.

Are your kidneys healthy enough to consume beets and other nitrate-rich vegetables, such as spinach? Is there a simpler way to maintain a healthy cardiovascular system as scientists work to pinpoint how aging bodies with specific genetic variations react biochemically to foods, including juices? Have news reports or medical journal articles announced a variety of solutions to the genetic causes of hypertension yet?

See the Science Blog article to find out more about the biochemical error in human kidney cells that raise the risk of hypertension over a lifetime. Science should be looking for what will correct the error, and research is underway in Japan.

Read the scientific journal paper titled, "Acute blood pressure lowering, vasoprotective and anti-platelet properties of dietary nitrate via bioconversion to nitrite." It's published online in the February 2008 edition of Hypertension.

In plain language, if your blood vessels have trouble expanding or contracting to handle changes in blood flow, you might need some nitric oxide in your blood stream from vegetable juices, vegetables, and fruit. And if you have thick blood that clots too easily, beet juice may have anti-clotting, called anti-platelet properties.

According to that study in medical language, the study reported, "Diets rich in fruits and vegetables reduce blood pressure (BP)and the risk of adverse cardiovascular events. However, themechanisms of this effect have not been elucidated. Certain vegetables possess a high nitrate content, and we hypothesizedthat this might represent a source of vasoprotective nitricoxide via bioactivation."

In that study, scientists used healthy volunteers, approximately 3 hours after ingestion of a dietary nitrate load (beetroot juice 500 mL), BP was substantially reduced (max -10.4/8mm Hg); an effect that correlated with peak increases in plasma nitrite concentration.

If you read the abstract, which is in medical lingo, you'll note that the "dietary nitrate load also prevented endothelial dysfunction induced by an acute ischemic insult in the human forearm and significantly attenuated ex vivo platelet aggregation in response to collagen and ADP.

"Interruption of the enterosalivary conversion of nitrate to nitrite (facilitated by bacterial anaerobes situated on the surface of the tongue) prevented the rise in plasma nitrite, blocked the decrease inBP, and abolished the inhibitory effects on platelet aggregation, confirming that these vasoprotective effects were attributable to the activity of nitrite converted from the ingested nitrate."

In plain language, what the study is trying to explain is that, "these findings suggest that dietary nitrate underlies the beneficial effects of a vegetable-rich diet and highlights the potential of a 'natural' low cost approach for the treatment of cardiovascular disease."

Some dark red and green vegetables are high in nitrates

What happens when you drink beet juice is that the bacteria on your tongue changes the nitrates in the beet juice into nitrite. In your stomach, nitrite turns into nitric oxide. Then it gets into your bloodstream as nitrites.

Beets are one vegetable among many such as lettuce, spinach, and most green, leafy vegetables high in nitrates. Dietary nitrates help to increase the amount of nitric oxide in the body. Nitric oxide (NO) helps blood vessels relax, lowering blood pressure. Nitric oxide (NO) has anti-inflammatory activity as well inhibits blood clot formation somewhat.

Your blood pressure goes down when the nitrites in your bloodstream are highest. But no single food can be singled out over the long term.

You need a diet high in raw vegetables and some fruits as well—more vegetables than fruits on a daily basis. Healthy vegetables also include red cabbage, radishes, green, leafy vegetables, and whole grains.

Other vegetables and fruits that help blood pressure include pomegranate and grape juice, magnesium supplements and breathing exercises. Four stalks of celery is an old Japanese wise food tradition for lowering blood pressure. Eating sliced beets with lemon juice is an old Slavic tradition.

What helps most people's general health (unless an individual is allergic to certain vegetables such as corn, nuts, or wheat) is a diet high in raw vegetables and vegetable juices that are high in nitrates. You'll have to juice the peeled beets yourself or buy it online.

Sure, drinking two cups of beet juice a day may protect against endothelial dysfunction defined as when blood vessels have trouble expanding or contracting to handle changes in blood flow. Beets as well as green, leafy vegetables also have anti-platelet properties which help to prevent thick blood from clotting too easily.

So find out from your health care providers whether you have thick or thin blood first. Are your kidneys healthy enough to consume vegetables and fruits? If you're looking for beet juice online, find beet juice (Biotta Organic Beat Juice) online at True Foods Market or see the beet juice on sale best price site. Also, you can juice or puree your own organic fresh beets in a juicer or blender to make an emulsion.

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