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With the new year upon us, many people are setting new goals for themselves related to improving their health or focusing on career-related goals. If establishing better exercise and nutrition habits are part of your quest to attain optimal health and productivity in 2018, you are not alone. New gym memberships are likely to rise in the coming months, and some may try nutritional products such as fruit and vegetable juice concoctions touted to enhance performance and overall health. The global juicing industry has gained a lot of traction in the last several years due to a wider health awareness among consumers. Emerging evidence suggests that casting beets in the starring role of your juice habit—along with aerobic exercise—may be one potential route to improving your cardiovascular health, and more recently shown, brain health.

Beets are a good source of antioxidants, minerals and nitrates. The nitrate-rich properties of beets have caught the attention of researchers, particularly those in the field of vascular medicine. Nitrates in food are converted to nitric oxide in the body. Nitric oxide relaxes the walls of the arteries, lowering blood pressure and increasing blood flow to muscles. That is one of the reasons why the nitrates in beetroot juice have been shown to enhance exercise performance in high-performing athletes, as well as in less elite exercisers.

In addition to the cardiovascular and performance benefits of consuming beets, recent studies suggest that the root vegetable may also be linked to brain health. One study found that older adults who performed aerobic exercise for six weeks and drank beetroot juice daily had greater improvements in brain activity related to movement than the participants who exercised without drinking beetroot juice. The brain networks of the juicing group more closely resembled the brains of younger adults, suggesting that when combined with exercise, beets can enhance the brain’s ability to make new connections between brain cells. Another study showed that young adults who drank a single dose of beetroot juice had increased blood flow to the area of the brain involved in higher-order thinking. The study participants also fared better in cognitive tasks such as basic math.

So, before you lace up your running shoes or settle back into your office chair, consider topping off with a dose of beetroot to keep the juices flowing.

Yasina Somani, MS, is a PhD student in the Cardiovascular Aging and Exercise Lab at Penn State. She is interested in studying the effects of novel exercise and nutritional therapies on cardiovascular outcomes in both healthy and clinical populations.