Beetroot powder: what it is, how much to use, and how it compares to juice

What beetroot powder actually is

Beetroot with the water taken out. The root is washed, sometimes peeled, dried at a controlled temperature and milled to a fine powder. One UK bag tells you a 200g packet holds forty 5g servings, which is a useful way to picture it: a bag of beetroot powder is about forty teaspoons.

The UK labels that explain their process describe much the same route. One goes into the most detail: harvested, washed and peeled, then dried slowly at low temperatures so nothing is lost to heat, then milled and sieved. Another prints the four steps in four words, washed, peeled, dried, milled, and names Italy as the origin. A third says only that it is gently dried and finely milled. A fourth gives Egypt, China or Italy depending on the batch, which is a reminder that the process can be standard while the root isn’t.

Most are 100% beetroot and nothing else. One of the six we looked at adds an anti-caking agent so the powder doesn’t clump, which is worth knowing if you’re buying on the ingredients list rather than the picture.

Then there’s the other kind, and nothing on the front of the bag will tell you that’s what you’ve got. Writing in Men’s Health UK, Julie Stewart notes that beetroot powder is often just freeze-dried beetroot juice. That sounds like a technicality until you remember what juicing removes. Same jar, same two words on the front, a different food inside.

Kirsten Brandt, a senior lecturer at Newcastle University’s Human Nutrition and Exercise Research Centre, told the same magazine that beetroot carries two groups of compounds worth caring about: betalains, the pigment that gives it the colour, and nitrate, which she points out occurs in similar amounts in some other common vegetables such as celery and lettuce. Her point about processing is the one that matters when you’re holding two bags. Those compounds mostly survive being turned into powder or juice, but the concentrations vary with the variety of beet and with how it was handled.

Which, less politely, means what’s in the bag depends on the bag.

The one number almost nobody prints

Nitrate is the part of beetroot that the research keeps coming back to. Your body converts some of it, by a route that begins with bacteria in your mouth, and our guide to how beetroot supports nitric oxide walks through that properly. If you’re standing in front of two bags, you need one thing from all of it: nitrate is the part that does the work, so nitrate is the figure that belongs on the label.

Five of our six don’t print it. Four of those five do print a panel, and it covers fibre, sugars, protein and salt. Between them the labels add an organic certification code, a country of origin, and in one case a front-of-pack line about being rich in natural dietary nitrates, with no figure attached to it anywhere.

The sixth does. It states “contains approximately 1% nitrates” in its ingredients section, and recommends 5g a day. Those two figures on one label put roughly 50mg of nitrate in the serving the maker itself suggests, which is an actual number you can hold up against something else. Note the word approximately. Even the one maker willing to commit hedges it, and fairly: beetroot is a vegetable, and its nitrate content moves with the soil, the season and the batch.

The claims on the front vary a good deal more than the panels on the back, and the rules behind that are worth knowing. In Great Britain, a brand can only use a nutrition or health claim in its marketing if that exact claim is on the register the Department of Health and Social Care publishes. So a line on a packet about supporting blood flow is doing a different job from an authorised health claim, whatever it sounds like at arm’s length in a shop.

Brandt is worth quoting on the evidence itself, because she is less excitable about it than the category is. The beetroot supplement studies cited in that article have between five and eighty participants and lack the rigour of drug trials, she says. The magazine adds, in its own voice rather than hers, that a late-stage drug trial would likely run to a thousand participants or more, that this makes the results hard to generalise, and that there is no evidence the short-term effects of beetroot powder add up over time. Brandt’s own explanation for why nobody has settled it is the better one. The useful compounds in beetroot can’t be patented. As she puts it, that leaves the industry little economic incentive to run large well-controlled trials.

Boring, honest, and the opposite of what the category usually tells you.

Powder, juice, or a capsule

One of the six pitches itself squarely against juice, and the pitch is worth hearing. It sells its powder as the thing to reach for when fresh juice isn’t convenient, and adds that you keep the dietary fibre that juicing usually loses. It is also, as it happens, the one that prints no nutrition panel, so you have to take the fibre on trust. If that powder really is dried root rather than dried juice, the claim is a fair one, and the panel on the back is the only way to tell which you’ve got.

Brandt goes further than the makers do. Asked whether anyone should take beetroot supplements at all, she said the best bet is eating more beetroot in its whole vegetable form, because whole beets carry the fibre that some supplements lack. If you can’t stand the taste or can’t face the peeling, she says the supplements can help, as long as you’re getting fibre from elsewhere, wholegrains among them.

And on capsules she is blunter than we would be, so we’ll print it rather than paraphrase it away. Her advice when shopping for beetroot powder is to skip the capsules and choose a loose powder or a chewable instead. The reason is the mouth: the conversion of nitrate to nitric oxide starts there, with help from the bacteria on your tongue, and a capsule carries its contents past that step. She adds that antibacterial mouthwash works against the same conversion, so it’s not the thing to use just before your beets.

We sell capsules. Read that paragraph with our name attached to it and weigh it accordingly.

Powder is worst at one thing: still being taken on a Wednesday in February. A capsule is good at exactly that. You don’t need a spoon, nothing stains, there’s no earthy taste to get past and no sugar, and you get the same amount every day instead of whatever the teaspoon happened to hold. Powder gives you more beetroot, the fibre if it’s the dried-root kind, and the mouth step. Both are additions to a diet. Neither is a vegetable.

The UK guidance is firm on exactly that point. The NHS lists a healthy balanced diet first among the lifestyle changes it suggests for anyone managing their blood pressure. The BHF asks for at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and puts that group at just over a third of everything you eat. Neither mentions a powder, a shot or a capsule, and that is the right way round.

Whichever you settle on, it only pays off if you keep it up. Eight weeks of a routine you’ll actually keep beats a fortnight of the theoretically better one, and your numbers make more sense read as a trend than a day at a time.

The bottom line

Beetroot powder is dried, milled beetroot, and that description covers at least two different foods sitting side by side on the same shelf. One keeps the fibre. The other looks a lot like dried juice. The front of the bag won’t tell you which you’re holding, and the back of it will.

So the whole job comes down to turning the packet over. Find fibre and sugars per 100g, and find the word nitrate with a figure in milligrams after it. If the nitrate figure isn’t there, the powder may be a perfectly good one, but nobody can tell you how it compares to anything else. We can’t print ours either, and we’d rather tell you that than offer you some other number instead.

Then use it the way the pack says, start at the bottom of the range, and keep it in your week long enough to be worth judging. A teaspoon in water is a decent addition to a diet. It isn’t one of your five a day, and it was never meant to be.

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