# Beetroot Extract: What 50:1 on the Label Means, and What It Doesn't Tell You

Published: 2026-10-30

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Nutrition

# Beetroot extract: what 50:1 on the label means, and what it doesn’t tell you

Nearly every beetroot capsule prints a ratio. A ratio describes how much root went into the batch, which isn’t the same as how much nitrate came out of it. Here’s what the two numbers each mean, and the one worth looking for.

[NK Medically reviewed by Dr Nouman Kazmi, MBBS FCPS](https://getmatter.co/pages/matter-cardiologist-dr-syed-nouman-kazmi)
·11 min read

## Key Takeaways

* An extract ratio such as 50:1 or 65:1 is a concentration figure. It says how much starting material the maker put in for every one part that came out, so it describes the batch rather than the dose you swallow.
* It doesn’t tell you how much nitrate you’re getting, and nitrate is the part of beetroot that nearly all the research is about.
* Standardisation is the figure that does tell you. One UK extract label states a 6% nitrate standardisation and then prints the milligrams: 4,800mg of extract per serving, of which 288mg is nitrate.
* The same page also promises “the power of 2 kilos of beetroot in one serving”. Its own numbers come to roughly 312g, so the ratio and the kilos only agree if they’re counting two different things, and the label never says which.
* The trials are on juice. A 2022 systematic review of seven randomised trials used 70ml to 250ml of beetroot juice a day; none of them tested an extract capsule.
* Capsules skip a step that happens in your mouth. Dr Kirsten Brandt of Newcastle University points out that the conversion of nitrate starts on your tongue, and a capsule carries its contents past it.

In This Article

1. [What 50:1 actually counts](#what-the-ratio-means)
2. [The number that tells you something](#the-nitrate-number)
3. [What the research is actually on](#the-research)
4. [The step a capsule skips](#the-mouth-step)
5. [Reading an extract label in the shop](#reading-the-label)
6. [Frequently asked questions](#faq)
7. [The bottom line](#bottom-line)

## What 50:1 actually counts

A beetroot extract is beetroot with most of the beetroot taken away. The root is processed so that the water and the bulk go and a concentrated fraction stays, and the ratio on the front of the pack is the bookkeeping for that step: 50 parts went in, one part came out.

So a 50:1 extract is fifty times more concentrated than whatever the maker started with. That is genuinely useful information about the manufacturing, and it’s why the number is printed so prominently. It tells you this is a concentrate rather than a milled-up vegetable.

What it doesn’t tell you is what came out the other end. Concentrating something fifty-fold concentrates everything that survives the process, and the processes differ. One UK extract we read end to end says its concentrate is made by water extraction, which is a specific route with a specific set of things it carries through and a specific set it leaves behind. A different maker using a different solvent at a different temperature can print the same ratio and deliver a different powder.

There’s a second gap, and it’s the one that undoes the arithmetic. A ratio needs a starting weight to mean anything, and the label almost never gives you one. Fifty parts of what? Fresh root, which is mostly water, or dried root, which isn’t? The same 50:1 claim describes two very different batches depending on which of those the maker meant, and the pack doesn’t tell you.

You can watch that ambiguity work on a real page. The same pack states a 65:1 ratio, and its serving panel gives 4,800mg of extract per six-capsule serving. Multiply those out and the serving represents about 312g of starting material. A few lines up, it offers “the power of 2 kilos of beetroot in one serving”. Both figures are the maker’s own, and they only reconcile if the ratio is counting dried root while the kilos are counting fresh. The page doesn’t say, and we’re not going to decide on its behalf.

None of which makes the ratio a trick. It makes it a number about the factory, answering a question you probably weren’t asking.

312g

**what one 65:1 label’s own serving panel works out to, on a page that also promises the power of 2 kilos.** Both numbers belong to the same maker. A ratio without a stated starting weight can carry either reading. So it’s the wrong number to shop on.

## The number that tells you something

Beetroot carries two groups of compounds that matter here, and Dr Kirsten Brandt, Visiting Lecturer in Food and Human Nutrition at Newcastle University, names both. One is the betalains, which give beetroot its purple colour and, she writes, offer heart-protecting qualities. The other is nitrate, which the body converts to nitric oxide, and that is the compound that causes blood vessels to widen so oxygen and nutrients move more easily.

Nitrate is also what the research measures. Our guide to [how beetroot supports nitric oxide](https://getmatter.co/blogs/heart-health/how-beetroot-supports-nitric-oxide) walks through that conversion properly. For label-reading purposes, one line does the job: if nitrate is the part being studied, nitrate is the figure that belongs on the pack.

The word to look for is **standardised**. A standardised extract has been measured and adjusted so that each batch carries a stated percentage of a named compound, which turns the pack from a description into a specification. That same label states a 6% nitrate standardisation and then does the multiplication for you: 4,800mg of beetroot extract in a six-capsule serving, of which 288mg is nitrate. Six per cent of 4,800 is 288, so the two halves of that label agree, and a reader can compare it to anything else that prints the same thing.

🔍

**Three words, in this order.** Look for *standardised*, then a percentage, then a milligram figure for a stated serving. A ratio with none of those behind it is a claim about the process. A percentage with milligrams attached is a claim about what you’re taking, and it’s the one you can hold a maker to.

Hardly any labels do. Of the beetroot extract pages we read for this guide, exactly one printed a nitrate figure, and the two UK capsule labels we went through for an earlier one printed none between them. Ours doesn’t either, and we’ll come back to that. When the figure is missing the product may still be a good one, but nobody can tell you how it compares, and a ratio in its place doesn’t close the gap.

A ratio tells you what went into the batch. A standardised percentage tells you what came out. Only one of those is a number you can shop with.

Brandt is direct about this corner of the industry. Companies selling beetroot’s compounds have been inflating the benefits, she writes, and doing it widely. The supplement industry has to stick to authorised health claims, and the Great Britain nutrition and health claims register is the list of claims that may be made in commercial communications here. Her complaint is that getting a new claim approved is expensive and slow, so a company that invests in one hands the benefit to its competitors too, and the incentive runs the wrong way.

## What the research is actually on

Here’s the thing a ratio can’t fix, and it applies to every beetroot capsule on the shelf, ours as much as anyone’s. The trials people cite when they talk about beetroot were almost all run on juice.

A systematic review published in *Frontiers in Nutrition* in March 2022 pooled seven randomised controlled trials, 218 participants in total, all of them with raised blood pressure at the start. The daily dose in those trials ran from 70ml to 250ml of beetroot juice, taken for anywhere between three and sixty days. Pooled, the systolic readings came in 4.95 mmHg below the control group’s, with a 95% confidence interval running from 8.88 mmHg down to 1.01, and the authors grading the certainty as moderate. The diastolic number didn’t move measurably.

Two things in that paragraph matter. The confidence interval is wide, which is what seven small trials give you. And the intervention was juice, in millilitres. Not one of those seven tested an extract capsule.

Brandt reads the evidence differently. Describing a review of eleven studies, she writes that healthy people who drank beetroot juice daily for three to sixty days came out five systolic points below the control group, and then adds that it does not help people who suffer from hypertension, because their blood vessels have lost the ability to relax.

So a senior academic says the effect belongs to healthy volunteers and stops at the clinic door, while a 2022 meta-analysis run specifically in people with raised blood pressure reports a systolic difference anyway. They’re reading overlapping evidence and reaching different conclusions about the group most readers of this page belong to. That is the state of play. Anyone selling you a capsule on the strength of “the studies” is quietly picking one side of it.

Brandt also offers a tidy piece of perspective on beetroot’s reputation. Lettuce, she notes, can carry three to five times more nitrate than the same weight of beetroot. Beetroot dominates the research less because it is unique than because a juice company worked out how to strip the nitrate out of its own product, which gave researchers a convincing placebo to test against.

## The step a capsule skips

The conversion of nitrate doesn’t begin in your stomach. Brandt is precise about this: it starts before you’ve even swallowed, because a particular type of bacteria on your tongue turns nitrate into nitrite, which is the intermediate the body works with next. A capsule carries its contents straight past your tongue and lands further down the digestive tract, so it misses that first step.

That isn’t a footnote, and we sell capsules. If the mouth stage matters, a swallowed capsule starts at a disadvantage against a liquid that spends a few seconds in contact with your tongue.

The same mechanism explains an odd piece of practical advice. Antibacterial mouthwash containing chlorhexidine harms the bacteria doing the converting, and Brandt writes that it eliminates the possible benefits nitrate could provide, because the conversion simply doesn’t happen and the nitrate is excreted instead. Whatever form you’re taking, the mouthwash is better off at the other end of the day.

🧠

**What a capsule is good at.** Still being taken in week eight. The same amount lands every morning, there’s no earthy taste to get past, nothing stains, and it travels. A routine you keep for two months tells you more than a better one you abandon in a fortnight, and your readings make more sense as a trend than a day at a time.

The pack also tells you to take its six capsules two to three hours before prolonged physical activity, which tells you plainly who it was built for. A dose timed around training is a different product from a dose you take with breakfast every day, and the ratio on the front won’t distinguish them for you either.

## Reading an extract label in the shop

You’re standing in the aisle with a pack in each hand, one of them shouting 50:1 and the other saying nothing of the kind. Four questions, in order, and the back of each pack answers all of them or admits it can’t.

1. **Is there a nitrate figure?** A percentage with the word standardised in front of it, and milligrams for a stated serving. If it’s there, you can compare this pack to the next one. If it isn’t, nothing else on the label will substitute for it.
2. **What is the serving?** Milligrams of extract, and how many capsules you need to get there. One pack we read needs six capsules a day, which turns 120 capsules into twenty days. The capsule count on the front and the days in the pack can be very different numbers.
3. **Does the ratio come with a starting weight?** Fresh or dried. Almost no label says, so the arithmetic won’t come out either way.
4. **Who is it for?** A pack that tells you to take it two or three hours before exercise is aimed at athletes. That might suit you exactly, and it’s a different thing from something designed for every morning.

And then the part no label is going to tell you, which both the NHS and the British Heart Foundation put first. The NHS begins its list of things that help with blood pressure with having a healthy, balanced diet. The BHF asks for a variety of foods including fruit, vegetables, whole grains and oily fish, with less salt and fewer ultra-processed foods. Neither mentions an extract, a shot or a capsule, and that is the right way round. A supplement is an addition to that, never a replacement for it.

Choosing a supplement

## Our label has the same *gap*, and we’d rather say so

Daily Beets uses a 50:1 beetroot extract, and we don’t print a nitrate figure either, for the reason above. The biggest dose in a serving goes to hibiscus, 700mg across the two capsules, which is why beetroot carries the name on the front rather than the weight. Our guide to the best beetroot supplement in the UK goes through what each kind of label does and doesn’t tell you, ours included. It’s a bag of capsules, two a day, designed to support healthy circulation.

[Read the beetroot supplement guide →](https://getmatter.co/pages/best-beetroot-supplement-uk?utm_source=resource_centre&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=beetroot-extract&utm_content=cta_section)
What the labels say·And what they leave out

## Frequently asked questions

Is a higher extract ratio better?

Not on its own. A ratio counts how much starting material went in for every one part that came out, so 65:1 is more concentrated than 50:1 of the same material prepared the same way. The trouble is that labels rarely state the material or the method, and a ratio says nothing about how much nitrate survived. A standardised nitrate percentage with a milligram figure beats any ratio as a basis for comparison.

What does a standardised beetroot extract mean?

That the extract has been measured and adjusted so every batch carries a stated percentage of a named compound. One UK extract label states a 6% nitrate standardisation and prints 4,800mg of extract per six-capsule serving, of which 288mg is nitrate. That is a specification you can hold a maker to, which an unstandardised extract isn’t.

How much nitrate is in a beetroot capsule?

Most packs don’t say, and without a figure there is no honest way to work it out from the ratio. Of the beetroot extract pages we read for this guide, only one printed a nitrate figure at all. If the number matters to you, a label that prints it is the only one you can actually compare.

Is beetroot extract as good as beetroot juice?

None of the research we read has tested that directly. The 2022 systematic review in *Frontiers in Nutrition* pooled seven trials that all used juice, 70ml to 250ml a day, and none of them involved an extract capsule. Dr Kirsten Brandt of Newcastle University also points out that nitrate conversion begins with bacteria on the tongue, a step a swallowed capsule goes past. What a capsule has over juice is that people keep taking it.

Does beetroot extract help with blood pressure?

The honest answer is that two good sources disagree about the group most people asking this question are in. A 2022 review of seven randomised trials in people with raised blood pressure reported systolic readings about 5 mmHg below the control group, with a wide confidence interval. Dr Kirsten Brandt, writing for Newcastle University, says the effect belongs to healthy volunteers and does not carry over to people with hypertension. Both describe juice, not capsules. Anything you are taking should be discussed with your GP, especially alongside prescribed medicine.

Should I avoid mouthwash if I take beetroot?

Timing is the point rather than avoidance. Brandt writes that antibacterial mouthwash containing chlorhexidine harms the tongue bacteria that start the nitrate conversion, so the nitrate is excreted without ever becoming nitric oxide. If you use that kind of mouthwash, putting it at the opposite end of the day from your beetroot costs you nothing.

## The bottom line

A ratio like 50:1 or 65:1 is a true statement about how a powder was made. It counts what went into the batch, it needs a starting weight nobody prints to mean anything exact, and it says nothing at all about how much nitrate ended up in the capsule you’re holding.

A standardised nitrate percentage with milligrams beside it is the one you can compare. Look for that, note how many capsules a serving takes, and read the ratio as background. If the nitrate figure isn’t on the pack, you’ve learned something real about what you can and can’t compare, which is more than a bigger ratio would have given you.

Keep the research in proportion while you’re at it. It was mostly run on juice, measured in millilitres, and two good sources disagree about whether it carries over to people already managing raised blood pressure. Then pick the form you’ll still be taking in eight weeks, because consistency is the part that nobody can put a ratio on.

## Continue Learning

[🥈

Nutrition

Best Beetroot Supplement UK 2026: An Honest Buyer’s Guide](https://getmatter.co/pages/best-beetroot-supplement-uk)
[🥤

Nutrition

Beetroot Shots vs Capsules: What You Actually Get From Each](https://getmatter.co/blogs/heart-health/beetroot-shots-vs-capsules)
[📖

Nutrition

Beetroot Benefits: What the Evidence Actually Shows](https://getmatter.co/blogs/heart-health/beetroot-benefits-what-the-evidence-shows)
[🧭

Circulation

How Beetroot Supports Nitric Oxide](https://getmatter.co/blogs/heart-health/how-beetroot-supports-nitric-oxide)
[🥦

Nutrition

What Foods Are Highest in Nitric Oxide?](https://getmatter.co/blogs/heart-health/foods-highest-in-nitric-oxide)

**Medically reviewed by Dr Nouman Kazmi**
Consultant Cardiologist (MBBS, FCPS). Dr Kazmi reviews clinical content on the Matter Heart Health Resource Centre for accuracy.

[View Dr Kazmi’s profile →](https://getmatter.co/pages/matter-cardiologist-dr-syed-nouman-kazmi)

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## References

1. NHS. High blood pressure (hypertension). Available at: [nhs.uk](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/high-blood-pressure-hypertension/)
2. British Heart Foundation. High blood pressure (hypertension), causes and symptoms. Available at: [bhf.org.uk](https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/risk-factors/high-blood-pressure)
3. Brandt K. Do beetroot supplements really boost your body as they claim? Newcastle University, 20 May 2026. Dr Kirsten Brandt, Visiting Lecturer in Food and Human Nutrition, on betalains and nitrate, the oral conversion step and capsules, chlorhexidine mouthwash, the eleven-study review, lettuce nitrate, the placebo-juice history and authorised health claims. Available at: [from.ncl.ac.uk](https://from.ncl.ac.uk/do-beetroot-supplements-really-boost-your-body-as-they-claim)
4. Benjamim CJR, Porto AA, Valenti VE, da Silva Sobrinho AC, Garner DM, Gualano B, Bueno Júnior CR. Nitrate derived from beetroot juice and blood pressure in patients with arterial hypertension: a systematic review and meta-analysis. *Frontiers in Nutrition*, 15 March 2022; 9:823039. Seven randomised trials, 218 participants, 70–250ml daily for 3–60 days. Available at: [frontiersin.org](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.823039/full)
5. Department of Health and Social Care. Great Britain nutrition and health claims (NHC) register. GOV.UK. Cited for the register’s own scope, the claims that may be made in commercial communications in Great Britain; the register itself is published as a spreadsheet attachment and was not read. Available at: [gov.uk](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/great-britain-nutrition-and-health-claims-nhc-register)
6. Vilgain. Beet Root Extract, product page. The 65:1 water-extraction ratio, the 6% nitrate standardisation, the 4,800mg per six-capsule serving with 288mg of nitrate, the 120-capsule pack at twenty servings, the dosing instruction and the “power of 2 kilos of beetroot” line, all captured 26 October 2026. A self-describing product property; re-verify on any refresh, because a product page changes without notice. Available at: [vilgain.co.uk](https://vilgain.co.uk/vilgain-beet-root-extract)

 [Back to the Heart Health Resource Centre](/pages/heart-health)

Tags: beetroot, beetroot extract, circulation, heart health, nitrate, nutrition

Source: https://getmatter.co/blogs/heart-health/beetroot-extract