Why Do Beets Taste Like Dirt?

Why Do Beets Taste Like Dirt?

Dr. Sarah  0:12  

This vegetable tastes like dirt to me, but I’ve seen it everywhere lately in juice form being called a superfood. Are these like beet juice supplements doing way more for us than me just adding some canned beets to my salad? What’s the deal?

Dr. Sarah  0:31  

Beets are so cool. I’m so I just want to nerd out about why beats are so awesome. But then we can talk about why beats taste like dirt to some people. And then I mean that, okay, actually, I’m just going to spoil. I’m going to spoil the answer, which is not just eat beets, like you don’t have to get beet juice or beet powder or whatever beets supplement, you can just eat beets. All the good stuff is in beets. You can get them pickled or canned. If you like those better, you can eat them actually, beets are really good raw. And that can be a really great way to eat them for people who don’t like the earthy taste. But let’s back up because beets. Beets are I want a pun and they don’t have one. You can’t beat beats. There we go. I found it. I found the pun. So the thing that beats have, they’re so cool. They’re very nutrient dense. But what’s really cool is the thing that makes them beat colored even if you have golden beats or like candy cane beets, that thing is a class of phytonutrients called betta lanes. And what’s really cool about Beech lanes if you think about others like purple, violet, blue foods, right, so other foods that might have a similar color like red cabbage or radicchio. Other foods get their distinctive violet purple color from anthocyanin polyphenols beads and only a handful of other foods get their distinctive violet you reddish purplish color from betweens and there seems to be like in the in the biochemistry of producing these compounds in the plant. The Pathways seem to be mutually exclusive. So, you can only have anthocyanin polyphenols or BT lines, we never find them in the same plant. I cannot tell you how much it grates on my nerves. When I see someone go, all the beets are so great. They’re a great source of anthocyanins. They are not, they don’t have anthocyanins. They have beetle lanes, but people go oh, they’re purple foods. So that must be anthocyanins. And, and it’s not, it’s even cooler. It’s a beetle and so beetle lanes are classified in nutrients. Their strongest benefits are to cardiovascular disease risk. But they’re I mean, they’re like an all purpose great antioxidant, they also reduce risk of type two diabetes and can cause some kind of cancers, like most phytonutrients are kind of just really broadly beneficial. But betweens have this ability to improve exercise performance and muscle recovery. And that’s been shown in so many different studies, both in trained individuals and untrained. So there’s these studies where they like to take athletes, and they give them a beat route supplement, they do that to standardize the amount of beat lanes that they’re getting. So they’ll get a beat route supplement like say every day for two weeks. And then they’ll go, you know, run a half marathon or do a triathlon. And so their performance will be measured, like how like the people who got the placebo, versus the the beat route? How did they do? And maybe they’ll do a crossover design for some of these studies. So the same person will kind of do both things, and then they don’t know when they’re doing the placebo versus the beats, to how they do and then they’ll have them come in the next day. And they’ll have them do like a recovery 5k. Now, I used to do running in turns when I was like a long, long, long, long, long, long time ago when I was in grad school. Nowadays, a recovery 5k is an oxymoron. Like that’s not what does not fit my current lifestyle. But they would have in these studies, right? They have trained athletes do a recovery 5k And then they would look at like how fast do they do that? 5k How tired Do they feel? They would do some tests for markers like inflammation and muscle recovery. And what they show is that the BT supplement improves exercise performance but then also improves recovery after they’ve also shown it in weightlifters. So It’s not just endurance sports. So they’ve also shown it with, like back squat and bench press and like jumping pipe tests. It doesn’t seem to be great for Sprint type things. So like studies of short, short distance swimmers, is that what you call it? Do you call it short distance swimming versus long distance swimming? Swimming where swimmers? I don’t know, like the sprint equivalent of swimming, right? You’re not swimming really long distances. So it doesn’t seem to help in that situation. But it does help untrained people who are like walking on a treadmill. If they’ve had the beat supplement beforehand, they’ll walk farther in the state, like more steps in the same amount of time. So like, a really wide, like different types of activity that are benefited from BT supplement. But they’ve also done those types of studies. In the there’s this one study that they gave, I think it was just in men with atherosclerosis, I can’t remember if women were included in the study, but they gave so these were people who were at risk, right, they had atherosclerosis, so they’re at risk of a cardiovascular event. And they gave them a BT supplement and all of their cardiovascular disease risk factors improved. So lots of really cool studies showing benefits to beats is what I’m trying to say. Beats are very cool. The only other foods that have beaten lanes other than beats, so you get it from beet greens, which are edible, you can eat the whole plant the whole beat the plant.

Dr. Sarah  6:49  

Chard is in the beet family.It’s especially higher in rainbow chard. So the more colorful the chart is, the more betweens it has. So you can get it from chard, you can get it from amaranth, amaranth, both the green and the green amaranth greens. If the amaranth greens are kind of more like a farmer’s market slash backyard garden type thing, but that’s another source. And then we can get it from, like cactus fruit, like prickly pear, or dragon fruit. And that’s about it, there’s a few species of wild mushroom that are kind of red that get that color from beetle lanes. So it’s really not in very many foods. And beets are pretty accessible, pretty, you know, like, you can find canned beets or pickled beets, even in a place where you might not be able to get fresh beets. So beets are like a great source. So betweens are the really cool things that beets have that are super beneficial, but they are not the thing that some people think tastes like dirt and it. They don’t know if there’s a gene, but it probably is a gene. It’s probably kind of like the cilantro supergene. We don’t know what Gene is. But the thing that some people feel tastes like dirt in beets is called Jasmine or geosmin. I don’t actually know how it’s pronounced, I probably should have just gone with one of those instead of more confidently. But it is different, like phytonutrients with different chemical compounds. And what’s cool about Jasmine, Jasmine is that it can be deactivated by acid. So that’s why a lot of people will like pickled beets, but not fresh beets because of the vinegar in the pickling brine. And you can do that yourself by cooking beets with a bit of vinegar. Or you can add a dressing at the end. And that will basically cause a chemical transformation that makes that geosmin into something else that doesn’t taste earthy. So yeah, if beets are like dirt flavored for you, definitely combine them with an acid like vinegar, or lemon juice or something like that. And then that’s also where raw beets are a very different flavor experience graded into a salad especially golden beets can be great. And also different varieties of beets have different amounts of Jasmine. So a golden beet I think in general is a little bit less earthy than all the different varieties like the deep red ones. So yeah, so they’re super beneficial food. definitely worthwhile incorporating into our diets regularly. No need to get the fancy beet juice, beet smoothie beet powder, any any beets will do or rainbow chard or dragon fruit, very specifically the red flesh dragon fruit. The white one, the white flesh ones that are more common in the grocery stores don’t have as much bitcoins in them now Gotcha.

Dr. Sarah  10:00  

And we also don’t have to eat beets if we don’t like them. If we just can’t get past the dirt, dirt tastes.

Dr. Sarah  10:08  

Functionally. anthocyanins are probably the most similar class of phytonutrients. There’s definitely some things that betweens do that anthocyanins don’t so if you do like them, it’s definitely worthwhile incorporating them. But functionally you’re getting a lot of the same benefits from anthocyanins which are like red cabbage and radicchio and red leaf lettuce and purple carrots and other other foods with like blue, violet purple colors.

Dr. Sarah  10:39  

Love that love that. So if someone wants to learn more about these kinds of things about like, what kind of nutrients are in what foods, where can they go to learn more about that,

Dr. Sarah  10:53  

I think the best place to learn more about that would be my book Nutrivore, or the radical new science for getting the nutrients you need from the foods you eat. So I have actually, what I do in part two of this book is discuss how one nutrient relates to like one health condition and actually 27 examinations of the connection between one nutrient and one like common health condition or symptom, actually talk about betweens and exercise recovery, and go through all of those different studies in here. But then I also have a table in the appendix that lists every nutrient associated with 120 different health conditions and symptoms. But then, in each of those sections, I also like to talk. I also always list like, what are the best food sources of each nutrient? Like where can you get them? How hard is it to get this nutrient? So I’d say my book is a great place to start. And this is like all the most accessible, like just how do I eat a nutrient dense diet without having to think too hard about it, and certainly without having to give up my favorite foods. That is what this book is geared at. But if you want to get even more into the weeds of what foods have, what nutrients like what, like, where am I going to get these then newspaper.com has both like foods with really detailed nutrient breakdowns of what’s in that food, as well as like, what all the top nutrients in that food, what they actually do in the body. And then also really detailed articles about the nutrients themselves and all of the different things that they do and then listing all of the best food sources.