Supplements
Beetroot Powder Benefits for Men: What the Research Actually Supports
One of the few supplement ingredients with repeatable human trials behind it, sold for three things it does and two it does not.
Search beetroot powder benefits for men and you get two extremes. One side sells it as a natural blood flow miracle that fixes your blood pressure, your workouts and your bedroom. The other side calls it juice with a marketing budget. The research sits in between, and it is more useful than either pitch.
Here is the verdict up front. The nitrate in beetroot is one of the few supplement ingredients with real, repeatable human blood pressure data behind it. The endurance effect is real but modest and fades the fitter you get. The strength effect is close to nothing. And a lot of what is sold as beetroot powder is not standardized for the ingredient that does the work, which is where most men waste their money.
What beetroot actually does in your body
Beets are loaded with inorganic nitrate. Nitrate itself is inert. What matters is what your body does with it.
You swallow nitrate, your salivary glands concentrate a share of it back into your mouth, and bacteria living on your tongue reduce it to nitrite. You swallow that, and in the low-oxygen conditions of your blood and tissue, nitrite converts to nitric oxide. Nitric oxide relaxes the smooth muscle in your blood vessels, which widens them and drops the pressure inside.
That chain is not a theory. Researchers gave healthy volunteers 500 mL of beetroot juice and blood pressure fell by up to 10.4/8 mmHg about three hours later, tracking the rise in plasma nitrite. Then they blocked the mouth bacteria step. The nitrite rise disappeared, and so did the blood pressure drop (Webb, 2008). The bacteria on your tongue are a required part of the machinery.
Does beetroot powder lower blood pressure?
This is the strongest claim on the list, and it holds up.
The best trial randomized 68 people with high blood pressure to 250 mL of nitrate-rich beetroot juice or nitrate-free beetroot juice daily for four weeks. Clinic blood pressure fell 7.7/2.4 mmHg. Twenty-four hour ambulatory pressure fell 7.7/5.2. Home readings fell 8.1/3.8. Endothelial function improved by around 20 percent, arterial stiffness dropped, and the effect did not wear off across the month (Kapil, 2015).
Pool the smaller studies and the number comes down, which is what you should expect. Across 16 randomized crossover trials, nitrate and beetroot juice lowered systolic pressure by 4.4 mmHg on average. Diastolic pressure moved 1.1 mmHg, which did not reach significance. Bigger daily nitrate doses produced bigger systolic drops (Siervo, 2013).
So the honest range is somewhere between 4 and 8 points off the top number, larger if your pressure is high to begin with. That is not a medication replacement and nobody should treat it as one. It is roughly what you would get from a serious sodium cut, and it stacks with the rest of the levers. If you have not read how to take your blood pressure at home without getting a garbage number, do that first, because you cannot tell whether any of this is working without a decent baseline. If you are on blood pressure medication, talk to your prescriber before adding a daily nitrate load.
How much beetroot powder should a man take?
Forget grams of powder. The dose that matters is millimoles of nitrate, and the research has mapped it cleanly.
Ten healthy men took 70, 140, or 280 mL of concentrated beetroot juice, containing 4.2, 8.4, and 16.8 mmol of nitrate. The 4.2 mmol dose did nothing to their exercise responses. The 8.4 mmol dose cut the oxygen cost of moderate exercise and extended time to exhaustion by 14 percent. Tripling that to 16.8 mmol did not add anything (Wylie, 2013).
That gives you a target. Roughly 8 mmol of nitrate, which is about 500 mg, is the working dose. More is not better. Plasma nitrite peaks about two to three hours after you take it, so if you are using it before a session, take it two to three hours out, not on the way to the gym.
Here is the part the supplement aisle does not advertise. Almost every trial above used a concentrated juice standardized to a stated nitrate content. Plenty of beetroot powders on the shelf list grams of beet and say nothing about nitrate at all. If the label does not tell you the nitrate dose, you do not know whether you are taking 8 mmol or 0.8. Buy the number, not the vegetable.
Does beetroot powder actually help your training?
It depends entirely on what kind of training you do.
Endurance and repeat efforts: yes, modestly. A meta-analysis of 17 studies found a moderate benefit for time-to-exhaustion tests. Time trials and graded exercise tests improved slightly but not significantly. Two details matter more than the headline: benefits showed up most in inactive to recreationally active people, and loading for several days beat a single dose (Hoon, 2013). In 36 male team-sport players who took 6.4 mmol daily for five days, 20 m sprint times improved by 1.2 percent and distance covered in a high-intensity intermittent running test rose by 3.9 percent (Thompson, 2016).
Lifting: no. Eighteen resistance-trained men took beetroot juice at roughly 6, 12, or 24 mmol of nitrate and then did countermovement jumps, back squats and bench press at 50 and 75 percent of their one-rep max. Nothing differed from placebo at any dose (Tan, 2025). If you want something that reliably moves a barbell, that is creatine, which does more than build muscle, and caffeine dosed to your bodyweight.
The pattern is consistent. Nitrate makes your muscles slightly more efficient with oxygen. That pays off when oxygen delivery is the limiting factor, which is exactly the case in easy aerobic base work and in hard repeated efforts. It does not pay off in a five-rep set.
Does it still work after 40 and 50?
Most nitrate research ran in young men, which is a fair thing to be skeptical about. One study went after that directly. Twelve healthy adults aged 60 to 70 took about 9.6 mmol of nitrate daily for three days. Resting systolic pressure came down from 120 to 115 mmHg and diastolic from 73 to 70, both statistically significant, and the speed of their oxygen uptake at the start of walking improved (Kelly, 2013).
What did not change is worth saying out loud. Their six-minute walk performance, their muscle metabolic response, and their cognitive test scores were all unchanged. So the cardiovascular effect carries into older men. The promise that beetroot sharpens your brain does not have the same backing.
What about erections and blood flow?
This is where the men's supplement market gets loud, and where the evidence gets thin.
The logic is sound as far as it goes. Erections depend on nitric oxide signaling, the same pathway that ED medications act on further downstream. Nitrate raises nitric oxide availability. But wanting a mechanism to pay off is not the same as testing it, and there is no solid randomized trial showing beetroot supplementation improves erectile function. What there is instead is a real, measured improvement in endothelial function and arterial stiffness in people with high blood pressure (Kapil, 2015), which is the vascular health that matters underneath.
Treat that as a reasonable bet on general vascular function, not a proven fix. If erections have changed noticeably, that is a signal worth taking to a doctor rather than a supplement, because it often shows up before other cardiovascular problems announce themselves.
The mouthwash mistake
This one is easy to get wrong and it wipes out the whole effect.
Because the bacteria on your tongue do the nitrate to nitrite conversion, killing them kills the benefit. When volunteers rinsed with an antibacterial mouthwash before a nitrate load, the salivary conversion was abolished and the rise in plasma nitrite was sharply blunted (Govoni, 2008). Webb's team saw the same thing when they blocked the step: no nitrite rise, no blood pressure drop (Webb, 2008).
If you use antiseptic mouthwash daily, you may be paying for beetroot and then rinsing the results down the sink. Keep the two apart.
Side effects and who should be careful
The trial doses were well tolerated. In the four-week hypertension study, daily beetroot juice caused no tolerability problems (Kapil, 2015).
The one thing that surprises people is beeturia. Beets can turn your urine and stool pink or red for a day. It looks alarming the first time and it is harmless.
Two groups should be careful. If you already run low blood pressure, adding something that reliably drops systolic pressure a few more points is not a good idea. And if you take blood pressure medication, the effects can add up, so bring it up with your prescriber before you start rather than after.
Powder, juice, or just eat the beets
Concentrated juice is what the trials used, and the shots are labeled with their nitrate content, which is the whole point. Powder is cheaper and easier to travel with, and it works if it is standardized for nitrate. Whole beets and leafy greens like rocket and spinach are legitimately nitrate rich and cheaper still, but you do not know your dose, which matters when the effective dose is a specific number.
Any of the three is fine. The rule is the same: know your nitrate dose, load daily for several days rather than taking one shot and expecting magic, and take it two to three hours before a session if you are using it for training.
The verdict
Beetroot powder is one of the more honest products on the supplement shelf, as long as you buy it for the right reason.
Buy it for blood pressure and vascular function, where a four-week randomized trial in people with hypertension found a durable 7 to 8 mmHg drop in systolic pressure along with better endothelial function. Buy it for endurance and repeated hard efforts, where the benefit is real but small and shows up most if you are not already highly trained. Do not buy it to lift more, because a proper dose-response study in trained men found nothing. Do not buy it as a bedroom product, because that trial has not been run.
Aim at 8 mmol of nitrate a day, check that the label states the nitrate content, take it two to three hours before you train, and stop rinsing with antiseptic mouthwash on the same days. More of the ingredients that hold up under this kind of scrutiny are covered in our supplement verdicts.
References
- Webb AJ, Patel N, Loukogeorgakis S, et al. Acute blood pressure lowering, vasoprotective, and antiplatelet properties of dietary nitrate via bioconversion to nitrite. Hypertension. 2008. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18250365/
- Kapil V, Khambata RS, Robertson A, Caulfield MJ, Ahluwalia A. Dietary nitrate provides sustained blood pressure lowering in hypertensive patients: a randomized, phase 2, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. Hypertension. 2015. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25421976/
- Siervo M, Lara J, Ogbonmwan I, Mathers JC. Inorganic nitrate and beetroot juice supplementation reduces blood pressure in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis. J Nutr. 2013. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23596162/
- Wylie LJ, Kelly J, Bailey SJ, et al. Beetroot juice and exercise: pharmacodynamic and dose-response relationships. J Appl Physiol (1985). 2013. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23640589/
- Hoon MW, Johnson NA, Chapman PG, Burke LM. The effect of nitrate supplementation on exercise performance in healthy individuals: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab. 2013. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23580439/
- Thompson C, Vanhatalo A, Jell H, et al. Dietary nitrate supplementation improves sprint and high-intensity intermittent running performance. Nitric Oxide. 2016. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27777094/
- Tan R, Lincoln IG, Paniagua KK, et al. The effect of dietary nitrate supplementation on resistance exercise performance: A dose-response investigation. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2025. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40274664/
- Kelly J, Fulford J, Vanhatalo A, et al. Effects of short-term dietary nitrate supplementation on blood pressure, O2 uptake kinetics, and muscle and cognitive function in older adults. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol. 2013. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23174856/
- Govoni M, Jansson EA, Weitzberg E, Lundberg JO. The increase in plasma nitrite after a dietary nitrate load is markedly attenuated by an antibacterial mouthwash. Nitric Oxide. 2008. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18793740/
Common questions
Does beetroot powder lower blood pressure?
Beetroot powder can lower blood pressure modestly, judging by trials of nitrate-rich beetroot juice. In a four-week randomized trial in 68 people with hypertension, 250 mL of nitrate-rich beetroot juice daily lowered clinic blood pressure by 7.7/2.4 mmHg and 24-hour ambulatory pressure by 7.7/5.2 mmHg, with better endothelial function and no fade over the month (Kapil, 2015). Across 16 pooled crossover trials the average systolic drop was smaller, about 4.4 mmHg (Siervo, 2013). It is not a replacement for medication, and if you take blood pressure drugs you should talk to your prescriber first.
How much beetroot powder should a man take?
Dose by nitrate, not by grams of powder. In a dose-response study, 4.2 mmol of nitrate did nothing, 8.4 mmol cut the oxygen cost of exercise and extended time to exhaustion by 14 percent, and tripling to 16.8 mmol added no further benefit (Wylie, 2013). About 8 mmol, roughly 500 mg of nitrate, is the working dose. If the label does not state nitrate content, you cannot know what you are taking.
When should you take beetroot powder before a workout?
Two to three hours before, not right before. Plasma nitrite peaks around two to three hours after ingestion (Wylie, 2013). Loading daily for several days also works better than a single dose (Hoon, 2013).
Does beetroot powder help you lift heavier?
Beetroot powder does not help you lift heavier. Eighteen resistance-trained men took beetroot juice at roughly 6, 12, or 24 mmol of nitrate and performed countermovement jumps, back squats and bench press at 50 and 75 percent of one-rep max. Nothing differed from placebo at any dose (Tan, 2025). The benefit shows up in endurance and repeated high-intensity efforts, not in heavy sets.
Does beetroot powder help with erections?
There is no solid randomized trial showing it does. The mechanism is plausible because erections depend on nitric oxide signaling, and nitrate does improve endothelial function and arterial stiffness in people with high blood pressure (Kapil, 2015). Treat it as support for general vascular health, not a fix. A noticeable change in erections is worth taking to a doctor.
Does mouthwash stop beetroot from working?
Antibacterial mouthwash can stop beetroot from working. Bacteria on your tongue convert nitrate to nitrite, which is the step that produces nitric oxide. Rinsing with an antibacterial mouthwash before a nitrate load abolished that conversion in saliva and sharply blunted the rise in plasma nitrite (Govoni, 2008). Blocking the same step also erased the blood pressure drop entirely (Webb, 2008).
What are the side effects of beetroot powder?
Trial doses were well tolerated (Kapil, 2015). The common surprise is beeturia, where beets turn urine or stool pink or red for a day, which is harmless. Men who already run low blood pressure, and anyone on blood pressure medication, should check with a doctor first because the effects can add up.
