Drink a shot of beetroot juice, then chew a piece of Hubba Bubba for the next several hours, and your blood pressure drops slightly more than if you had chewed sugar-free gum instead. That is the finding of a small randomized crossover trial from King's College London and the University of Reading, published in June in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.
The effect was modest, close to 3 mmHg systolic and 2 mmHg diastolic compared with sugar-free gum. The mechanism is the interesting part, and it runs against what most of the existing literature predicted. The researchers are unusually blunt that nobody should take this as advice.
