Dietary nitrate and nitrate salts

About Dietary nitrate and nitrate salts

Inorganic nitrate, supplied either as concentrated beetroot juice or as sodium and potassium nitrate salts, taken to raise nitric oxide availability. The active species is nitrite, formed from nitrate by bacteria on the tongue.

Dietary nitrate is unusual in having a mechanism that depends on an organism other than the person taking it. Swallowed nitrate is concentrated in saliva, where bacteria on the back of the tongue reduce it to nitrite; the nitrite is swallowed again and converted to nitric oxide in the acidic and low-oxygen conditions of the stomach and working muscle. The consequence is testable and has been tested: antibacterial mouthwash abolishes the blood pressure and performance effects, which is one of the cleanest mechanistic demonstrations in sports nutrition. Performance benefits appear most reliably in recreationally trained people during moderate-to-severe intensity exercise, and shrink in elite endurance athletes who already have high nitric oxide capacity. Blood pressure reductions are modest and reasonably consistent.

Sold as

Beetroot juice concentrate shot, Beetroot powder, Sodium or potassium nitrate capsule, Chewable nitrate products

Standardised to

Millimoles of nitrate per serving, typically 6–8 mmol (roughly 400–500 mg); beetroot powders vary enormously and often do not state nitrate content — a product without this marker may not resemble what was studied.

Also known as

Beetroot juice concentrate, Sodium nitrate, Potassium nitrate, NO3 supplement

Regulation: Beetroot-based products are sold as dietary supplements with no pre-market efficacy review. Inorganic nitrate salts are regulated as food additives with acceptable daily intake limits set well below the doses used in sports research, which is a tension regulators have acknowledged.

What the research used

The amounts, forms and durations published trials of Dietary nitrate and nitrate salts actually administered.

When it was taken

Each window says whether a trial compared it against an alternative, or whether it is convention and pharmacology. Most timing advice is the second kind.

In the food catalogue

The whole-food form, where one exists. The evidence for a concentrated extract rarely transfers to the food, or the other way round — these are cross-links, not equivalents.