Beetroot Chews for Heart Health: How Nitric Oxide Lowers Blood Pressure Naturally

Beetroot is one of the better-evidenced things in the supplement aisle. The nitrate-to-nitric-oxide pathway is well characterised, the blood pressure trials are numerous, and the mechanism holds up. What almost nobody does is connect that research to what is actually in a chew. This article does the arithmetic. Cures for Life sells beetroot chews, and the arithmetic is not entirely flattering to us.

How the pathway works

Nitric oxide is a signalling molecule produced by the endothelium, the cell layer lining your blood vessels. It tells the smooth muscle in artery walls to relax, which widens the vessel and lowers the resistance your heart pumps against.

Dietary nitrate offers a second route to the same molecule. Bacteria on the surface of the tongue reduce nitrate to nitrite; nitrite is then converted to nitric oxide further down. This is the entero-salivary pathway, described in detail by Lundberg and colleagues in 2008, and it is genuinely one of the more interesting findings in vascular nutrition.

Beetroot matters here because it is among the richest common dietary sources of inorganic nitrate — alongside rocket, spinach, celery and lettuce, which are all in the same league.

The number that decides everything

Here is the part that changes how you read every other beetroot article.

The trials showing blood pressure reductions overwhelmingly used concentrated beetroot juice shots, typically 70ml delivering in the region of 400mg of nitrate — around 6.4 millimoles. That is the dose behind the headline findings.

Now consider a 500mg serving of beetroot powder. Half a gram of powder cannot contain more than half a gram of anything. Nitrate makes up a fraction of one per cent of dried beetroot by weight, so a serving of that size delivers single-digit milligrams of nitrate at most — one to two orders of magnitude below the trial dose.

This is arithmetic, not opinion, and it applies to every beetroot capsule, gummy and chew on the market, ours included. The trial results are real. They were produced by a dose that concentrated powders and chews do not deliver.

What the blood pressure trials found

Stating the evidence accurately still matters, because it is the benchmark.

A 2013 meta-analysis in the Journal of Nutrition pooled trials of inorganic nitrate and beetroot juice and found statistically significant reductions in systolic blood pressure. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in Nutrition, Metabolism & Cardiovascular Diseases looked specifically at people meeting the European Society of Hypertension threshold and again found reductions in systolic pressure, with the authors suggesting beetroot juice could be considered alongside — explicitly not instead of — medical treatment.

Typical effect sizes in this literature are in the range of two to five mmHg systolic. That is a real effect for a food. It is also modest, and it was achieved with juice at the doses described above.

On the 64% figure

You may have seen it stated — including in an earlier version of this article — that beetroot reduces heart attack damage by 64%. That figure comes from mice, pre-treated for seven days before an artificially induced injury.

Preclinical work like that is a legitimate part of the research pipeline. Putting it in a headline next to a buy button is not. We should not have done it, and we would rather explain why than delete it quietly.

What is in the chews

Each serving provides 500mg of beetroot powder and 150mg of grape seed extract, in a pomegranate berry chew.

Stated honestly: that is a dietary contribution of beetroot and a polyphenol source, in a format people actually take consistently. It is not a therapeutic nitrate dose, and we are not going to describe it as one. If you specifically want the nitrate effect the trials describe, concentrated beetroot juice shots are the form that was studied.

Grape seed extract is included for its oligomeric proanthocyanidins, which have their own small blood pressure literature. Same caveat applies: the effects reported are modest and the doses vary.

View the product page

Getting more nitrate, practically

If the nitrate pathway is what interests you, the cheapest and best-evidenced route is food. Rocket, spinach, beetroot, celery and lettuce are all high-nitrate vegetables, and a decent portion of any of them will comfortably exceed what a chew provides.

Two practical notes that apply either way. Antibacterial mouthwash disrupts the oral bacteria that perform the first conversion step, which has been shown to blunt the effect — so if you are chasing this specifically, don't rinse right afterwards. And beeturia, a pink tinge to urine, affects a minority of people and is harmless.

If your blood pressure is high

This is the part that matters more than anything above. Hypertension is a medical condition, it is largely symptomless, and it is managed with treatment that works. A supplement is not an alternative to that and we won't imply otherwise.

If you already take blood pressure medication, tell your doctor before adding beetroot, because the effects can stack. And if you have never had your blood pressure measured, that is worth doing regardless of what you decide about supplements — it takes two minutes at a pharmacy.

Frequently asked questions