Dec 17, 2010 15:29 GMT  ·  By

For a while now, athletes have been using beetroot juice for its performance enhancing properties, but it seems that this 'miracle potion' could help everybody feel much better.

Researchers at the University of Exeter found about a year ago that beetroot juice enables people to exercise even up to 16% longer than they would normally be able to.

Ever since this discovery, there has been a beetroot frenzy among athletes – from Premiership footballers to professional cyclists.

Today, a new piece of research conducted by the University along with the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry has concluded that the physiological effects of drinking beetroot juice could help a much wider range of people.

For this last study, the researchers experimented on low intensity exercise and concluded that the participants used less oxygen while walking, thus decreasing their walking effort by 12%.

It seems that when consumed, beetroot juice has two marked physiological effects: it widens blood vessels reducing the blood pressure and allowing more blood flow, and then it affects muscle tissue by reducing the amount of oxygen the muscles need during activity.

This discovery could be very useful for elderly people, because, as Katie Lansley, a PhD student from the University's Sport and Health Sciences department and lead author of the study, says, “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.

“This means that, for some people, even simple tasks like walking may not be manageable.

“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.”

Until now, the impact of beetroot juice has only been tested on young people, but there no reason for which it should not have positive results on other people too.

Katie Lansley added that “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.”

Beetroot juice contains high levels of nitrate, and this last study proved that this is the key ingredient that improves performance.

“In this study, we were able to use - for the first time - both normal beetroot juice and beetroot juice with the nitrate filtered out,” said Professor Andy Jones, the senior scientist on the study.

“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.”