Beetroot Supplements: What the Research Actually Shows
If you've walked down a supplement aisle or scrolled past an ad in the last few years, you've probably seen beetroot supplements marketed as a near cure-all — for blood pressure, for stamina, for brain fog, sometimes for all three at once.
As a studio built around adults who want their training time to actually accomplish something, we get asked about different kinds of supplements all the time and whether they’re worth the spend. Beetroot is worth talking about for a few different reasons.
They’re not terribly expensive depending on the brand, so the real harm is going to come from a little bit of an ironic place. Usually, supplements marketed as cure-alls do nothing. Beetroot, however, has a very real effect on the body, so you need to proceed with caution when supplementing.
The Short Version
Beetroot's active compound, dietary nitrate, converts to nitric oxide — a molecule that relaxes and widens blood vessels.
Blood pressure is the best-supported benefit: meta-analyses show measurable reductions, especially with elevated starting readings.
Evidence for endurance exercise is strong; support for strength training is more modest, but still meaningful.
Cognitive benefits are plausible but inconsistent across trials — not yet a settled question.
Real caveats: it can compound blood pressure medication, isn't ideal for kidney stone formers, and quality varies by product.
How Do Beetroot Supplements Work: The Nitrate-to-Nitric-Oxide Pathway
Beets are naturally rich in inorganic nitrate. Once you eat or drink it, your body converts it in stages — first to nitrite, then to nitric oxide — through a pathway that runs partly through bacteria living on your tongue.
Nitric oxide is a signaling molecule that tells the smooth muscle in your blood vessel walls to relax, which widens the vessel and improves blood flow. It's the same basic mechanism your body already uses during exercise and heat exposure; beetroot just gives it a nutritional nudge.
This is why nearly every claim made about beetroot supplements — blood pressure, endurance, muscle oxygenation — traces back to the same starting point: more nitric oxide, better circulation.
The Blood Pressure Evidence
Research is very consistent here. A 2013 meta-analysis of controlled trials found that nitrate and beetroot juice supplementation produced meaningful reductions in systolic blood pressure, with more pronounced effects in people who started with higher readings.
A 2017 analysis went a step further, finding that beetroot's blood-pressure-lowering effect isn't purely a nitrate story — other compounds in the whole vegetable, including betalains and polyphenols, appear to contribute independently.
For adults over 40, many of whom are managing blood pressure as a primary marker of cardiovascular and longevity risk, this is legit - a great reason to take the supplement.
Exercise Performance: Strong for Endurance, Promising for Strength
The original beetroot research “boom” happened in endurance sports, and the evidence there is also massive. A 2025 umbrella review covering 20 separate meta-analyses concluded that dietary nitrate supplementation reliably improves time-to-exhaustion and time-trial performance, largely by making the oxygen your muscles already have go further.
The strength and resistance-training picture is thinner but interesting: an older-adults trial found that a single dose of dietary nitrate improved forearm muscle oxygenation and blood volume, with modest strength gains. That's relevant to a training style like ARX, where the adaptive resistance adjusts to your force output in real time — anything that improves oxygen delivery to working muscle during that kind of effort has a plausible, if not yet dramatic, upside. It’s not going to make you much bigger or much stronger, but if you’re taking it for other health reasons, you might enjoy the effect.
Beetroot supplements effect on the brain
Hype and claims outweigh the science here.
It's reasonable to assume, based on what you’ve read so far, that more blood flow to the brain would support cognitive function, and a 2025 systematic review on beetroot juice and healthy aging found encouraging signals for both physical performance and some cognitive measures.
But not every trial agrees — one crossover trial in healthy older adults found no meaningful change in physical activity or daily function from dietary nitrate.
The honest summary: nitric oxide and brain blood flow are connected, but "take beetroot and think more clearly" isn't yet something anyone should be promising you at this stage of the research.
Should I be cautious when taking beetroot supplements?
Beetroot supplements are generally well tolerated. The most common side effect is harmless red or pink urine (beeturia), which looks alarming but isn't dangerous. (I had this happen to me recently after eating a bunch of red dragonfruit and boy was I kind of freaked out for a second.)
If you're on blood pressure medication, adding a nitrate supplement can compound the effect and drop your pressure further than intended — talk to your doctor if you’re currently on any prescriptions.
If you get kidney stones, know that beets are high in oxalates, so concentrated supplement forms may be a poor fit.
It's also worth thinking about how beetroot supplements interact with the other ways you're already supporting circulation. Modalities like Vasper, which pairs exercise with mild compression and cooling to enhance blood flow and recovery signaling, or Sunlighten infrared sauna sessions, which relax blood vessels through heat rather than nitric oxide, work on a similar vascular target through different mechanisms. Stacking all three without paying attention to how your body responds — especially if you're managing blood pressure — is worth discussing with us or your physician rather than assuming more is automatically better.
When should I take beetroot supplements?
Because nitrate's effects are relatively short-lived — peaking within a few hours and largely gone by the next day — timing matters more than most supplement marketing lets on; a beetroot shot an hour before a workout does more for that session than one taken at breakfast for an evening workout.
The Bottom Line
Beetroot supplements aren't a scam, but they aren't magic, either — they're a genuinely researched way to support blood pressure and, to a lesser extent, exercise performance, with a mechanism that holds up under scrutiny.
Whether they belong in your routine depends on what you're actually trying to solve, what medications you're on, and how your body already responds to training.