Reading over the news recently, I kept coming across articles about how beet juice is apparently a key ingredient for staying young.
As someone who is getting older, I thought that I better investigate these bewildering beets bulletins before I forgot what I was thinking about.
Most of the articles were related to a recent study at Wake Forest University that focused on the anti-aging effects that beet juice can have on your brain.
The articles and the whole study is fascinating to me, mainly because I think beets taste terrible and I have no idea why anyone would want to drink juice out of them. I didn’t even know there was beet juice. Why would anyone make this? Can I also buy onion juice? How about an anchovy smoothie? Can I order a cough syrup milk shake, too?
I should add that many people apparently love beets and my wife cannot believe that I find beets so awful. They are very popular around the world, which I believe proves that the sense of taste must be incredibly complicated and different from one person to the next. Perhaps this is also why some people don’t find Carrot Top as funny as I do.
Anyway, according to this study, adding a beetroot juice supplement to your exercise results in “brain connectivity” that is more commonly seen in younger adults. I’m not sure what brain connectivity exactly means, but I would like mine to stay at least somewhat connected over the next few years, so I suppose it’s a good thing that they are doing this study.
In the study, they took 26 people age 55 and older and gave half of them a beetroot juice that was high in nitrates, while the other half received a beetroot juice placebo. I feel terrible for the “other half” of this study.
It would be bad enough take part in a study where I had to drink beetroot juice in order to further science, but it would even worse to end up drinking a beetroot juice placebo. It makes me wonder if these scientists just created this experiment in order to see if they could get people to drink something that tastes terrible.
“Say, I have a great idea for a study. Let’s see if drinking sour milk can cure baldness or help people learn to juggle. We’ll get a bunch of people in here, and then listen to this, we’ll tell them it is all for an important scientific experiment, and then we’ll make half of them drink sour milk and the other half will drink the sour milk placebo, which will actually be that eggnog left over in the office fridge from Christmas. And you know what, they’ll all drink it! What a bunch of idiots. They never should have made fun of us in high school!”
Despite my bitter beets bemoaning, though, many people love beets and there is an amazing amount of information on the internet about beets. Here are a few items I found interesting.
- Many nutritionists use beets and beet juice in order to test stomach acid levels. From what I read, if you consume beets and your urine turns pink, you have low stomach acid, but if your urine is clear it means you have high levels of stomach acid. In my own studies, I have found that if I consume beets, I just feel sick to my stomach.
- Some cultures believe that if a man and woman eat from the same beet, they will fall in love with each other. I believe this is mainly because it is so rare to find someone else who likes to eat beets.
- Some people boil beets in water and then massage the cooled down water into their scalps in order to cure dandruff. This may very well be true, but I have to question why someone would try this in the first place. Why would people take cooled down boiled water for anything and then put it on their heads? If they were going to do that, why not use at least beet water when it was still somewhat warm?
- Eating beets apparently also helps with exercise and stamina. Probably because after eating beets you are used to getting through things that make you feel terrible, so exercising doesn’t seem so bad.
- If you say beetroot juice three times fast, some people believe Michael Keaton will show up at your house.
- The entire beet plant is edible, from the tips of its leaves down to its root. Many people use beets for a wide range of products, including beet burgers or beet wine. I found a ton of websites about beets products, including one called lovebeets.com. This is not an ad for them, as I doubt they would like me talking so much about how much I hate beets, but they have built a beets based business basically because of beets benefits and the branding of the betterment of beets blends. They have become very successful selling their beets products, and somehow people all around the world love them.
I know, I don’t understand it either.
I don’t understand many things, though, and it may not be too long before more and more people are eating beets and drinking beetroot juice and it all seems very normal.
I can only hope, though, that by the time that happens my brain is disconnected enough that I don’t realize I am drinking abominably bad and beastly beets brews or I may become bellicose, blustery, barbarous, bold, brutish and belligerent.
Here is some information about beets benefits if you are interested, and here is a link to the beets business I mentioned, too. And if you have any beets related comments, please feel free to share them below. Thanks.
nickclaussen.com 
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