Dr. Nathan Bryan

And there was a benefit of the nitric oxide being produced that could explain the improvement in athletic performance.

The problem is these athletes were drinking liters and liters of beetroot juice and causing a lot of gastric discomfort, causing diarrhea.

Their urine and their feces would turn red, and a lot of people misinterpreted that as gastric bleeds or urinary bleeds.

And then when I started looking at the products on the market, most of the beet products, the desiccated beet powders, provided zero nitric oxide benefits.

They didn't contain any nitrate, no nitrite.

They were just, we called them dead beets.

They're a dead beet product.

And so I thought if consumers are out there looking for beets because they've been shown to enhance their performance, but that enhancement in performance was dependent upon the beet's ability to improve nitric oxide production in the body, then the non-scientist out there wouldn't know what to look for, right?

They're buying products that aren't providing any benefit to them.

And so years ago, we would do randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials, and we would take some of these commercial bead products that you can go to your local nutrition store or pharmacy, buy off the shelf, and we would use those as placebos in our clinical trials because it's the perfect placebo.

So what I tried to do in that book is educate, okay, what is it about beets that are so important?

What's the mechanism and what is necessary in those beets that can improve nitric oxide production?

So again, everything I do is intended to educate and inform the consumer so that they know how to make informed, educated choices on the products they're taking or the foods they're eating or their oral hygienic practices.

Yeah, that may be in the Beat the Odds.

I thought it was in this book.

But if you go back to historical times and you look at the hieroglyphics on caves of the ancient cavemen,

You know, people thought they were drinking wine because they would have these red stuff in this before battle.

But what these ancient Egyptians were doing was they were drinking beet juice to improve their performance before they went into battle so that they were ready, they were energized, they improved their circulation.

So that's the historical study on beets.

And obviously, these were beets grown at a time when there were no herbicides, pesticides, and the soil was probably fertile.