Beetroot is a superstar supplement: it fights inflammation, reduces oxidative stress, and can even boost your performance in endurance exercise.
For these reasons, beet juice and beetroot supplements are popular among a wide range of fitness and health enthusiasts, and has been hailed as one of the top superfoods out there. It’s also used as a core ingredient for many pre-workout drinks.
Our research team put together these rankings of the top beetroot supplements right now.
Research
Rankings
Last updated: December 23, 2022
Biotin supplements considered: 27
Hours of research: 42
Experts reviewed: 8
Scientific papers referenced: 19
1. Organifi Red Juice
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Note: we reached out to Organifi and they were nice enough to hook us up with an exclusive coupon for our readers: use coupon code BN15 at checkout to get an additional 15% off your total purchase.
Organifi Red Juice doesn’t settle for less when it comes to providing all the benefits that beetroot can provide. It’s specially designed to boost your energy, fight aging, and burn fat all while tasting great.
It comes with a large amount of organic beetroot powder to provide magnesium, folate, and nitric oxide to increase your endurance and help fight infection, but they don’t stop there. R
ed juice includes a litany of powerhouse superfoods including:
- Acai
- Beets
- Pomegranate
- Blueberries
- Ginseng
- And much more
With its 11 superfoods and only 1 gram of sugar, it’s easy to see why Organifi Red Juice is our #1 pick for 2021.
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2. HumanN BeetElite
When it comes to beets for increasing athletic performance, BeetElite is the best choice. It’s the brand that is used by dozens of elite athletes and pro teams to increase performance, and it strikes a good balance between purity and usability.
Each serving contains the equivalent of six whole beets, and the powder is flavored with natural black cherry and stevia leaf extract. This eliminates the astringent, unpleasantly tart taste you can get from a pure beetroot juice powder, but it doesn’t introduce anything unnatural, it keeps the carb content low, and it doesn’t go overboard with extra ingredients.
The company also offers a lower-dosage beet supplement called SuperBeets, but BeetElite comes in a higher dose per package.
3. Ora Renewable Energy
Ora offers something new: a plant-based pre-workout energy supplement. As you might guess, the nitric oxide boosting effects of beetroot powder play a central role in this supplement.
Beetroot is accompanied by supplements like matcha and green coffee bean to boost energy, and coconut water for electrolytes.
If you want a workout supplement that doesn’t include artificial ingredients and flavors, Ora should be one of your top choices.
4. Havasu Beet Root Powder +
Havasu Beet Root Powder + is a strong candidate for people looking to improve their endurance exercise performance with a beetroot powder supplement.
If you just want to take beetroot for its health benefits, you don’t need the added ingredients, but these can make a big difference if you are running, cycling, swimming, or doing another endurance sport.
5. Starwest Botanicals Beetroot Powder
When it comes to bulk beet powder, Starwest Botanicals takes the crown. With a pure, organic product with a well-renowned reputation, Starwest is the best choice if you will be mixing up your own supplements or are looking for a pure beetroot powder to incorporate into a smoothie.
If you want a little something extra in your beetroot supplement, then there are other options out there.
6. Horbaach Beet Root
For a simple capsule-based beet supplement, Horbaach is a solid choice. While powders are better-suited for most people, capsules are good if you’re on the go and don’t want to bother with the mess of a powder.
It’s clearly geared towards people oriented towards improving their overall health, so there aren’t any ancillary ingredients to boost athletic performance, but sometimes that’s just what you want.
7. BulkSupplements Pure Beet Root Powder
Bulk Supplements comes through again for the rigorously minimal do it yourself-ers. They offer a large, highly pure package of beet root powder with nothing extra added.
BulkSupplements offers a quality beetroot product that’s hard to call a bad choice. If you want huge volumes of beetroot powder, BulkSupplements is the only way to go–you can get up to five kilograms in one bag!
8. Zhou Nutrition N.O. Pro
Zhou Nutrition makes one of the few beetroot based supplements that comes in capsule form. It includes a blend of amino acids alongside the beetroot powder; these are supposed to further augment the nitric acid boosting properties of the supplement.
The downside of the pill based form is you have to take a lot of them to get even a small dose of beetroot powder. Most people should opt for a powder based beetroot supplement so they can get a higher dosage of beets.
9. BPI One More Rep
If the name doesn’t give it away, one look at the ingredients list should reveal that this supplement is something of a hodgepodge of different supplement ingredients that are currently popular, and they don’t all necessarily go together.
The beetroot dose is great, but adding all these additional extras doesn’t always make sense if the purpose is increasing performance.
10. Snap Nitric Oxide Organic Beets
Snap Nitric Oxide includes beetroot powder alongside potent antioxidants like pomegranate juice and red spinach, plus high doses of vitamins C, B3, and B12.
The problem, though, is that many of these ingredients are wrapped up in a proprietary blend, making it hard to determine whether the beet dosage is effective.
Category winners
Best beet supplement overall: Organifi Red Juice
Organifi provides the nitric oxide boosting power of beet juice alongside extremely potent antioxidants like acai and pomegranate. The powder is easily mixed up at whatever dose you need, making Organifi an excellent choice and our all-around winner.
Best beet supplement for athletes: HumanN BeetElite
HumanN BeetElite is specially-made for athletes: it has a high dose of beet extract and just the right amount of all-natural flavor and natural sweetener (stevia) to make it go down easy before a tough workout. There’s no question it should be your first choice if you are a high-caliber athlete.
Best beet supplement for sexual health and ED: Havasu Beet Root Powder +
For better performance in the bedroom, you want a fast and reliable boost to your nitric oxide levels, and that’s exactly what Havasu provides. With no extraneous ingredients, you’re getting the concentrated beet extract you need for better sexual performance.
Best beet supplement for heart health: Havasu Beet Root Powder +
Thanks to its ultra-pure composition, Havasu Beet Root Powder + is excellent for heart health, too. Some of the ingredients you’d find in an athlete-oriented beet supplement aren’t what you’re looking for when it comes to heart health, so go with a supplement that delivers pure beet extract for cardiovascular health.
Best beet supplement for more energy: Ora Renewable Energy
Ora is best if you are using beets for more energy, because it combines beet extract with other energy-boosting compounds like matcha and green coffee bean extract. The synergistic effect of these ingredients results in a bigger energy boost than you’d get from beets alone.
Best beet supplement for runners: HumanN BeetElite
HumanN BeetElite contains a high concentration of nitric oxide boosting compounds from beets, and very little else. It’s excellent for runners in particular because of how few extra ingredients it has—just natural cherry flavor and stevia for flavoring. This makes it far less likely to upset your stomach when you’re out for a long, hard run.
Who should buy beets?
Most of the health benefits of beets are oriented towards its ability to help your body produce nitric oxide, which helps relax your blood vessels and increase blood flow.
There are three primary health outcomes that have solid scientific evidence supporting beets:
People who want improved endurance. Runners, cyclists, triathletes, and other endurance athletes are big-time users of beets because of the improved oxygen efficiency that you can get with the nitric oxide delivered by beets.
People who want better cognitive function, both short-term and long-term. Beets increase blood flow to the brain, so they’re great for boosting cognitive capacity, as well as improving brain health over the long-term as you get older.
Men who want better erectile function. Erectile problems can often be traced to poor blood flow, and beets show some promise of addressing this problem. You’ll find beetroot extract in many male enhancement pills for exactly this reason.
If one or more of these benefits sounds like what you are looking for, beets are a great option.
How we ranked
When formulating our rankings of beet supplements, we had a range of stringent criteria for choosing the best beet products on the market.
Targeted, effective dosage. Our first requirement was that the dosage of raw beet material be in line with scientific recommendations based on the latest research.
We referred to comprehensive, systematic reviews of all of the research on beets and beetroot conducted to date, which discuss dozens of different studies which use both liquid and solid beet extracts.
Since no decisive advantage appeared for one or the other form, we included both types in our rankings. However, we did eliminate products which had too little beet extract, or diluted beet juice with too many other ingredients.
Clean ingredient list. Next up, we looked at the other ingredients included in the beet products. Powder-form beet supplements are typically designed to be mixed with water as soon as you are ready to take the supplement, so they virtually always include flavoring and a non-caloric sweetener like stevia.
With the powder based supplements that remained on our list, we checked to see if they used natural sweeteners instead of artificial sweeteners, and likewise for artificial flavoring versus natural flavoring.
Products like HumanN Beet Elite, which uses black cherry flavoring and stevia for flavoring, scored well. We eliminated products that relied on sugar or artificial flavoring.
No unnecessary extras. Finally, we cut products that had too much in the way of additional ingredients. While beet extract is included in many supplements alongside other ingredients to boost nitrate levels, we wanted to stick as close to the scientific literature as possible.
That means primarily or exclusively delivering beet in supplement form. So, products like N.O. Rush from Goliath by Dr. Emil didn’t make the final list, because of their heavy reliance on additional ingredients.
FAQ
Q: How many carbs are in a beetroot supplement?
A: The amount of carbs in a beetroot supplement depends entirely on the form of the supplement. Pure beetroot juice contains about 23 grams of carbohydrates (20 of which are naturally occuring sugar) per eight fluid ounce cup.
On the other hand, a pure beet extract has essentially no carbs. The same is true for powder based beet supplements that use a natural sweetener like stevia and a non-caloric flavoring agent. You’ll find several of these carb-free beet supplements in our top-ranked beet supplements.
Q: What is the most pure brand of beet supplement?
A: If purity is all you care about, we recommend Starwest Botanicals Beetroot Powder. This bulk powder-form supplement contains 100% pure beet powder with no stabilizers, flavoring agents, or sweeteners.
While other beet supplements are higher on our rankings, they achieved their higher place thanks to ease of use and taste, without compromising much on purity.
Q: How much cooked beet is equivalent to a beet supplement?
A: To get the amount of nitrate from cooked beets that you’d get from a beet supplement, you’d need a pretty hefty serving of beets: 8 mmol of nitrate is the standard effective dose in scientific studies, and it takes 12 ounces of cooked beets, or about 344 grams, to achieve this nitrate dosage.
In terms of beet juice, it only takes about 150 ml of liquid to get the equivalent dosage. After looking over these numbers, it’s pretty clear why beet supplements are so popular: getting a strong performance enhancing effect would require a tremendous and probably unpalatable amount of cooked beets in your diet.
Q: How much beet juice supplement should you drink?
A: In terms of beet juice supplement, research has been conducted on doses ranging from as little as 70 ml to as much as 500 ml.
The most effective dosage appears to be at least 150 ml (five fluid ounces). Doses lower than this don’t provide enough nitrates to help your body increase its nitric oxide production. Beyond 150 ml, it’s not clear whether more beet juice, and therefore more nitrates, are better, but some studies have used up to 500 mL with success.
Q: How often should you take a beet supplement?
A: If you are looking purely for the performance enhancing effects of beets, you only need to take a beet supplement on days where you are going to do a high intensity workout or a cognitively demanding task.
If, however, you are looking for the chronic benefits of beet supplementation, such as lowered blood pressure, taking a beet supplement once per day for at least 15 days is necessary to start seeing the benefits.
So far, research has focused on one single dose of beets per day, and has not examined whether splitting the dosage up across the day would be more beneficial.
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Recap
Beetroot is a highly nutritious root vegetable that can lower blood pressure, improves cardiac health, fights diseases and prevent cell damage.
It also helps slow down the progression of dementia in seniors. However, excessive consumption of beetroot can result in kidney stones and disrupt the digestive system of those that suffer from irritable bowel syndrome.
For BodyNutrition‘s #1 beet recommendation, click here.
