The sweet and red beet root is a favorite to many people for its color, taste and nutritional value. The latest research on beet root has added another feather to its crown, by suggesting to drink beet juice to promote brain health. The study proved the fact that regular consumption of beet juice helped to increase the blood flow into various parts of brain ensuring more healthy and nourished brain for the older adults. Based on this finding, you can safely start drinking beet juice to promote brain health, particularly if you fall under that age group. When the health of the brain gets improved, it becomes easy to combat brain diseases like dementia.

According to Daniel Kim-Shapiro, the director of Wake Forest University's Translational Science Center; Fostering Independence in Aging; "There have been several very high-profile studies showing that drinking beet juice can lower blood pressure, but we wanted to show that drinking beet juice also increases perfusion, or blood flow, to the brain".

The reason behind this observation is that the beet root is a source of high amount of nitrates. Other than beet root, there are several other vegetables having high concentration of nitrates such as cabbage, celery, spinach, lettuce etc. These high-nitrate compounds of the foods get converted to nitrites when we eat them. Actually the good bacteria present inside the mouth, performs this task of converting nitrates into nitrites. These nitrites are quite helpful in opening up the blood vessels in the human body, which ensures more blood and more oxygen to the remotest part of the body. The increased blood flow and oxygen flow helps the cells to stay and grow healthy.

To conduct the study, the researchers of the Translational Science Center had selected 14 adults of age 70 and more for a period of 4 days.

The senior adults were asked to report at the lab in the morning after fasting for 10 hours. They had to go through a health status checkup first and then they were given to consume breakfast containing either high or low nitrates. The breakfast in high-nitrate category included 16 oz beet juice. After the breakfast, they were assigned with their regular diets for other meals of the day and were sent back to home.

On the second day, the senior citizens hit the lab again in the morning after fasting for 10 hours. Similar to the previous day, they were asked to consume their specified breakfast. After an hour of breakfast, an MRI test was done for every person to record the blood flow in their brain. At the same time, blood tests were performed to know the nitrite level in the body before and after the breakfast.

For the next two consecutive days, the subjects were asked to switch the diets and similar tests were performed for everyone. 

The result of the MRI test depicted that the subjects had increased rate of blood flow into the white part of the frontal lobes after having a high-nitrate breakfast. This area of brain is particularly associated with the brain degeneration, which eventually leads to dementia and other cognitive situations.

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