You Can't Beet This!

Which vegetable did the Obamas say not to plant in their White House garden? Which vegetable produces most of the candy your kids are eating? And which vegetable can help you lower your blood pressure, lose weight, and even feel like you're in love? Are you stumped? Really? Well today on the Grow Your Self podcast, you're going to get all the answers to these important questions as we dive into a fantastic vegetable that you, my friend, can grow yourself. It's going to be such a fun episode together. I cannot wait to dive in. Let's do it! 

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Today's Episode Brought to You by Gardenary Garden Consultants

Today's episode is brought to you by the Gardenary consultants. After I started my own business, Rooted Garden, in Houston, Texas -- which by the way is doing tons of gardens right now, so if you're in Houston, give us a call. I started training gardeners all over the place, 400 plus to date, to start their own garden consulting businesses. They are all set up and trained and certified by me and the Gardenary system to help you set up your own kitchen garden, right where you are. This is an incredible service and you can find a Gardenary certified garden consultant on the Gardenary website, Gardenary.com/businesses. Go check it out, check out the map, and see if there is a Gardenary consultant near you. They can help you grow this vegetable that we are about to learn all about. Let's learn about this vegetable that makes candy and that president Obama does not like. Let's do it! I'll see you inside. 

How Much Do You Really Know About Beets?

Welcome back to the Grow Your Self podcast. My name's Nicole Johnsey Burke. I am the author of Kitchen Garden Revival. Have you read the book yet? It's so good and it's the perfect holiday gift. If you're looking for something fun to give your friends and family to inspire them to get in the garden, to start growing in 2021. Get yourself over to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local bookstore and buy Kitchen Garden Revival, wrap it up with some pretty herbs or something, and pass it along. Help me bring back the kitchen garden where you are living with your friends and family.  

Inside Kitchen Garden Revival, I tried to get you guys to start growing more of your own food. One of the things I love to do here on the podcast is dive deep into certain plants that we can grow ourselves and also dive into some of the surprising stories and things you might not know about this food that you actually might be consuming way more of than you realized. Let's do it! 

Turnip the Beet

Are you feeling up-beet today? How are you feeling? Are you feeling more like a dead-beet? Do you got the beet? Have you been dropping any good beets lately? Lettuce turnip the beet. You’ve got a clue now what we're going to talk about? All my bad vegetable puns. Gardeners have the worst puns. Seriously! But, I just have to do it. Let's talk about the wonderful, the fantastic vegetable, the beets, or some people call it beetroot and you'll find out why today.  

The first thing I want to talk about about beets is how good they are for you. I want to start this way because I want to interest you in eating more beets, growing more beets, buying more beets from your local farmers. We've got eight benefits of eating beets. Are you ready? 

• Number one is they are so low in calories, but high in vitamins. Sometimes you'll have things that are low in calories and low in nutrients too, but that's not the case for the beets. They're low in calories and high in nutrients, a very, very good combo there. 
• Number two, they have been shown to lower blood pressure. Studies have shown that people who eat beets have lowered blood pressure by up to four to 10 mmHg over a period of only a few hours. I don't know what mmHg is, but if you're studying your blood pressure, I'm guessing you do. Basically, people eat beets and then boom! A couple of hours later, their blood pressure goes down. If you're having a stressful day, I think you're going to need to come home and have some beets.  
• Number three is that you can actually have better performance. I did a hiit run this morning. I was crying by the end. If you're feeling a little stretched when you're stretching, then having some beets before you're going to have a big run, a big swim, a big bike, or whatever you're going after, you might want to have some beets. Studies have shown that there are nitrates in beets that can affect physical performance by improving -- Are you ready? I'm getting scientific here -- the efficiency of mitochondria, which are responsible for producing energy in your cells. If you're about to run a 5k or go on a long bike ride or big hike, or maybe if you're going to work in your garden, moving some compost around, you might want to have some beet juice before that.
• Number four, beets have betalains. I think I'm saying that right. And these actually have a number of anti-inflammatory properties. If you've done any nutritional study, you know that inflammation in our body is bu hao. That's Mandarin for not good. I don't know why I went to my Mandarin there, but it just felt right. Can you guys tell them excited today? I don't know why. I just woke up with more energy. Maybe it was that hiit run I did. Anyway, betalains. This is known to reduce inflammation, the bad stuff. Now, most of the studies have been done not in people, but in rats. But my husband is a scientist and he tells me we can definitely draw some good conclusions when we see things happen in rats. When rats are given beetroot juice and extract, then kidney inflammation has gone down and toxic chemicals are also going down in rats. They did do a study with humans with osteoarthritis and when they had beetroot extract, they said they had reduced pain and discomfort. Let's get rid of that inflammation and drink some beet juice.  

• Number five is fiber. Fiber fiber fiber. You guys know you're supposed to have more fiber in your diet and it's hard to get a lot of fiber in our diet these days because everything's carbs and cheese. Beets definitely add tons of fiber. One cup of beetroot contains 3.4 grams of fiber. You know what fiber does, right? It helps you cleanse your body and helps you go number two. 
• Number six, brain function. What? Yes, studies have shown that beets actually make you think better. They have done studies where having beets, and then later people actually have improved blood flow to the frontal lobe of the brain, which is where you do your high level thinking like decision-making and working memory. They even did a study in two diabetics that looked at the effect of beets on reaction time, which is basically cognitive function, so how fast you respond. And those who had had beets were 4% faster, if they just have 8.5 ounces of beetroot juice daily for two weeks compared to those who didn't. You're going to have to have a lot of beetroot juice. You have to drink beetroot juice every day for two weeks, and then you're going to have 4% faster response time. I'm impressed.  
• Number seven, anti-cancer. We are all working. That's what my husband's work is completely dedicated to, and I've just lost too many friends to cancer. It's just something that we should all be vigilant against and they have shown that within testing that beetroot extract is shown to reduce the division and growth of tumor cells in animals.
• Number eight is weight loss. It's not like you're going to eat a beet and then boom, you lose five pounds. It's not like one of those things that you hear on the commercials, the radio commercials of how you're going to lose five pounds in a week, but basically beets do things for you that are associated with losing weight. Like I said at the beginning, they're low in calories. They're high in water. The more beets that you consume, you're going to get all these nutrients. You're going to feel really full because you have fiber in your diet. And hopefully you're going to eat less junk food and that's going to help you get nice and trim for the holidays. Those are eight reasons why you should be eating beets. I would say don't overdo it, but you should definitely have beets as a normal staple part of your diet. 

The Origin of Beets

That's why beets are good for you. Now, let's talk about the history of beets. Where did these guys come from and why do we even have them in our grocery store these days? Like a lot of the foods that we talk about here on the Grow Your Self podcast, beets are thought to have started in prehistoric North Africa. So much of our foods really originate around that Mediterranean, North African and Middle Eastern area. You realize we owe them a lot in terms of our culinary history and current day, the things we enjoy. I think it started there and honestly, the studies I saw that were basically at the beginning, most of the eating was of the leaves, not the root. We'll talk about this in a second, but, beets are in the same family. They're in the amaranthaceae family. You'll learn about that in my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, which includes Swiss chard and spinach. Now, Swiss, chard and spinach, we eat those for the greens and that's actually how beets were eaten at the beginning too, just for the greens. It wasn't until later that they started to cultivate them for the roots. Beets were so well-regarded in ancient Rome and Greece, that methods were developed for producing them during the hot summer months. They liked them so much that they were like, “Ooh, let's have more of this,” because as you'll learn in a second as we talk about growing, they do prefer cooler weather. 

As I said, they were mostly using the leaves. Every now and then, at the beginning, say back in North Africa or as they started to move up to Europe, they did use the roots for medicinal properties. They'd use it to make up a little concoction or something and maybe they saw some benefits. That would make sense based on what we just talked about, about how good they are for you. Studies have shown that basically the route wasn't really cultivated for use until the mid 1500s and pictures and diagrams and drawings and stuff show that originally the root wasn't very wide. It looked more like a parsnip or a carrot, just much more narrow, straight, almost more like a taproot. I don't know about you, but I've definitely grown some beets that look more like that, where I think, “Hello! You don't look like the grocery store stuff,” and that's really what it looked like at the beginning. Less bulbous and more like a tap root. The really nice round ones really didn't start appearing until the end of the 1500s. 

Beets really didn't take off until more like the 1700s and this is when North Eastern Europe really started to love their beets and they became really valued mostly because it could last through the winter. We'll talk about this in a second with growing but basically it's one of those, you know, rare things that's good for you, delicious, sweet and can last through cooler weather, just a really rare find in terms of the garden and cultivation. That's why they took off with it in Europe.  

Germany. This is when the beet travels to Germany. And in 1747, Andreas Sigismund Marggarf. He's a chemist, like my husband, from Berlin. He discovered a way to produce sucrose or sugar from beets. He had a student, Franz Achard, who perfected his method for extracting sugar and this led to using beets to make beet beer, tobacco, molasses, and lots of other products. This is the beginning of the sugar beet, which we are going to find out more about. There are crazy, surprising facts about the sugar beet. Then that eventually moved from Germany to the King of Prussia. He eventually subsidized an entire sugar beet industry and created the first ever sugar beet plant or factory, which was in what's now, Western Poland. As you'll see in a second, it turned out to be a really good idea to do that. 

That's where the beets began. That's how the beet got started. North Africa up to Europe, moved around Germany, what we now know as Poland, and then it eventually came with European settlers into North America. At least from what I could study, the indigenous population here in North America were not growing beets before European settlers came. They brought the beets with them. Obviously, everybody loves to comment on Thomas Jefferson. He has great records of growing beets in his kitchen garden in Monticello. But we do have some different presidents who don't like beets. Jefferson loved them, but president Obama said, “no thank you.” In fact, him and Michelle both made it clear that in their White House garden, they didn't want any beets. Not a single one. Bummer, but they are beautiful. As you've heard already, they're so good for you and they’re something that I'd love to interest you in buying from your farmer's market, buying locally and also growing. They are in the amaranthaceae family as I mentioned, along with Swiss chard and spinach.

Beets Today - A Sweeter Deal Than You May Think 

Let's talk about where they're grown now in the U.S. You heard where they started, mostly North Africa up to Europe. From 2010 to 2020, nearly 1.2 million acres of sugar beets were planted in the U.S. that produced more than 32 million tons of sugar beets. If you're thinking about beets and you know, they grow in cooler temperatures, where would you think most of the sugar beets are grown in the U.S.? Think, think, think. If you're thinking cooler places you're thinking right. A lot are grown along the Oregon-Idaho state line, Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, Northern Minnesota, Northeastern Michigan, Western Nebraska, and because they grow all the rest of our food, Southern California. The studies I saw showed that minor production takes place in Eastern Washington and South Dakota. As you can see, we're talking Northwest, Midwest, that's where most of the beets are grown in the United States. If you live in those areas, you should be filling up on the good stuff. You should be buying beets all the time from farmers and obviously you should be growing some yourself because you live in a climate that is perfect for it.   

The seed production actually, even though most of the plants are grown in the Midwest and Northwest, seed production happens mostly in California. It was interesting. I read all these studies about how seed production is such a difficulty for beets because they're often grown near Swiss chard and spinach. There's a lot of cross pollination happening and, you're going to find out in a second some weird stuff about the beets that make our sugar. Nearly all the sugar beets that are grown in the U.S. are intended just for sugar production. Even though beets are so good for us, beets by themselves, cooked beets, whatever, just the beet, most of the beets in the U.S. aren't grown for us to eat them as a vegetable. They're grown for us to enjoy them as sugar. Sugar beets produce a super high amount of sucrose that can be processed efficiently into sugar and the U.S. is actually one of the world's largest sugar beet producers. Actually, we're one of the largest sugar producers. Big surprise there. You could just look at my four kids and know that we like a lot of sugar here. Sugar cane, surprisingly only accounts for 45% of the U.S. produced sugar and sugar beets beat it at 55%. Did you realize that?  

Sugar expansion started right when I was a kid growing up with MTV, NET and My Little Pony, we started having a lot more sugar in the U.S. in the 1980s, going from 6 million short tons, raw value to 8.1 million short tons raw value in the 2000s. This increase is due to new equipment, new technology, including biotech seeds -- we'll talk more about that -- and improved crop varieties. We have this little tension here. Beets are so good for us, we just heard about all the ways it's going to help us, and yet most of the beets in the U.S. are grown to make sugar and most of that sugar is not going into things that are good for us. 

If You Can’t Beet Em, Join Em!

Here are some fun stories about beets. 

• Number one is what we are starting to talk about, sugar. Today around 20% of the world's sugar comes from sugar beets. Beet sugar production requires -- now this is actually cool -- four times less water than sugar cane production which makes it a really attractive crop in places that get less rain. And that is a cool part, that it's a more sustainable way to get sugar. The sugar from sugar beets and sugar cane, at least according to the studies I read, is identical. And here's something to think about, whether grown using organic, conventional or biotech methods, they say that the nutritional value composition wholesomeness is basically the same. 
• The candy industry, surprise surprise, is one of the largest domestic buyers of U.S. sugar. But if you're buying “organic sugar” from the grocery store or organic candy, pay attention. There is actually no such thing in the U.S. as organic beet sugar. Nearly all sugar beets grown in the U.S. come from seeds that have been genetically engineered from biotechnology. Biotechnology provides seed varieties that help farmers manage the challenges of weed control. Do you know what that means? That means that the seeds that they use to grow beets have basically been implanted with an herbicide. They have tech in them that puts off a chemical or whatever that doesn't allow other greens to grow around it. I hate to say the word Roundup but it's like having Roundup inside the seed. That's a bummer. While an organic sugar market does exist, it has to come from sugar cane and in smaller amounts. It could also come from maple syrup, fruit, agave. Basically, 55% of our U.S. sugar is created from beets and none of that is organic because of the biotechnology and the seeds. It's just wild to think that most of the sugar that our kids are eating comes from beets and all those seeds have been treated so that no weeds can grow around them. 
• Another fun story about beets on a brighter side is beets can be used for makeup. Back in the 1900s or 1800s maybe, fashionable women everywhere in Europe, maybe in the U.S. too, maybe all over the world, used beets for lipstick and blush and they called it a lip stain. This is where that little saying came from, “as red as a beet.” When someone looks embarrassed or something, they'll say, “Oh my gosh, you’re red as a beet.” That came from making makeup out of beets. If you ever run out of your Glossier or whatever brand of makeup you're using, some Drunk Elephant, just grab some beets from the fridge and make your lips rosy. Maybe we'll try that. Maybe that can be a fun little challenge.  
• Third fun fact about beets. I mentioned this in the beginning, that it is a love potion. Get this, beets are actually a source of tryptophan. You guys know tryptophan right? We're going to get sleepy from it if you eat Turkey during Thanksgiving. I've always heard the joke in my family of ‘tryptophan-ing’ and everybody falls asleep because they feel so good after all that turkey. I don't get it. Anyway, it is a natural source of tryptophan and betalain or betine and these are actually both substances that have been proven to promote this overall feeling of well-being. They also contain high amounts of boron, which is a trace mineral that actually increases the level of sex hormones in the human body. What? I think you might want to eat some beets tonight. In Greek mythology, Aphrodite the goddess of love, actually ate beets to enhance her appeal and ancient Romans really believed that beets and their juice would make you fall in love. Frescoes of beets even decorate the walls of brothels and Pompei. Wow, who knew who knew beets could do this?



Those are some fun facts. The sugar you're eating most likely in the candy your kids are eating are made from beets. You could have makeup made from beets if you would like. And finally, if you want to feel more in love, you should eat more beets.  

Grow Some Beets

Now let's talk about how to grow beets and enjoy them. We already touched on the fact that beets are in the same family as Swiss chard and spinach, the amaranthaceae family. They do prefer the cool season. So when temps are ranging from just above freezing up to say 65-75 degrees Fahrenheit, beets really should be planted from seed directly into the garden. I like to grow about nine per square foot. And, if you've been through my Gardenary courses or you have a Gardenary consultant working with you, we call these the medium-sized plants. These are plants that when they grow in, they take up about a medium size in the garden. You want to plant them directly from seed. I do have a friend, Meg, from Seed to Fork. She was on the podcast this summer talking about beans and, and she actually starts beets indoors, which I think is amazing. She's one of the few gardeners I've seen do this successfully, but I usually always start the beets directly in the garden. 

Beet seeds, when you get them in your hand, you're going to realize they're pretty hard and believe it or not, each beet seat is actually a little cluster of several seeds. This is going to require a second step. What you do is plant them into the garden, you're going to give them time to soften and start to germinate, and then, probably seven to 10 days after planting, you're going to want to come back and thin them out to just one so that you have basically nine per square feet that they have enough space for each of those seeds to grow into a full round root. When you plant those seeds, you want to make sure the soil is staying consistently moist. If the soil dries out, that increases the likelihood that your seeds are not going to germinate. You can put some burlap or some cover over your soil to let them come to full growth and generally you should start to see germination, like I said, between seven to 10 days. Then you want to thin them out.  

I've also found that my beets do better once they germinate and the leaves start to come up, if I take a little bit of extra compost and just make a small little hill right around the base of the plant, the seedling, so that root is completely covered and has an extra little blanket of nutrition and support around it. Beets do like having full sun. I've found more success when they do have at least six hours of full sun. And like I said, they definitely want consistent water before the seeds germinate. And then once they do, you want to make sure that depending on your evaporation rate, your seeds are getting about one inch of water a week. 

Beets are a great thing to grow on the arc. If you've learned my arc of the seasons, we talk about the fact that we've got these sides of our hottest time of year in the garden, and those are generally the times when beets grow best. In general, that's going to be spring and fall. You can actually put beet seeds in before, you've passed your last frost date. So during your cool season, is what we would call it with Gardenary, before you enter the warm season in the spring. And then as temperatures start to drop again in fall, that's a great time to put beets in again, and they'll actually hang on in freezing weather and you can even cover them and keep them alive and going well into the end of the year, even into January, if you've got frost cloth or cold frame. Lots of possibilities. This is why Europeans love the beets because it just can't be beat. Because they could grow them for so much of the year, which meant lots of nutrition and not as difficult to keep alive when the weather got tough.

Food Fight: Beets vs. Radishes

We're going to close this episode up with a food fight. If you've listened to a lot of my surprising story episodes with foods, I love to finish off with a food fight where we compare one food to another that probably would grow similarly or grow during a same time in the season, or might be considered, “Oh, am I choosing this or that?” In this food fight, we're going to do beets against radishes. Which one do you think will come out on top? It's going to be hard to choose. I'm choosing beets and radishes because both grow underground, they're both root vegetables, you can eat the greens on both, and they both grow during the same time. They both grow during the cooler parts of the year and the cool season.  

Let's talk about sugars. I'm sure you can guess which one has more sugars? It's beets. This is with a daily serving, 100 grams of this particular vegetable. And with a hundred grams, you're going to get 6.76 grams of sugar in the beets and 1.86 grams of sugar for the radish. Beets are definitely on top in terms of sugars. If you're trying to avoid sugars, you're going to go with the radish. In terms of magnesium, you've got 23 milligrams of magnesium for beets and 10 for radishes. So more magnesium, if that's what you're looking for, you're definitely going for the beets. Fiber, we have 2.8 for beets and 1.6 for radishes, so almost double. Potassium, we've got 325 milligrams for beets and 233 for radishes. Again, beets are on top. But with vitamin C, we have radishes on top with 14.8 milligrams of vitamin C and only 4.9 grams milligrams of vitamin C for the beet. Looking at just the vitamins, we have beets winning out in terms of magnesium, fiber and potassium and then we have radishes winning out when we're trying to lower our sugar intake and we're trying to increase our vitamin C.  

In general, when we're looking at our mineral comparison, beets pretty much can beat radishes about 3 to 1. They have more iron, more potassium, more magnesium, more copper, more zinc, more phosphorus, but radishes have more calcium and less sodium. Interesting. When it comes to more vitamins beyond vitamin C, beetroots win with A, E, B1, and B3 and folate, but when it comes to vitamin C and vitamin K, radishes way outweigh the beets with 200% more vitamin C and 550% more vitamin K. If you want a vegetable that's lower in sugar, you're going to go for radishes. Lower in sodium, radishes. Lower in saturated fat, beets. Although I have to say, probably neither one of them are big with saturated fat. Lower in price, that's going to be radishes. Lower in glycemic index, so that sugar in your body, that's going to be radishes. Rich in minerals? That's going to be the beets.  

Let's talk about ease of growing. I have to say from my experience, I've had a lot more success growing radishes than I have with growing beets. Even though beets do win out in terms of a lot of the minerals and vitamins and all the stuff that's good for you, I have found in the garden that I've often been more successful growing radishes than beets. They're often finished a lot earlier, you don't have to do the thinning as much because you don't have that complication of two or three seeds actually being inside of just one seed, and I've just found I get more luck with that bulb forming with a radish over a beet, but you get to decide. In fact, if you've never grown either, then I think you should try both and just see which one wins the food fight for you. 

Get Inspired by the Beet 

That about wraps up our episode here on beets. What do you think? Can you beat the beet? Are you jamming to this beet or what? I really think that you guys should just beet, drink and be merry because you can't beet this. You know what I mean? Thank you so much for hanging out with me here today on the Grow Your Self podcast. I hope you feel inspired to get out there, to go find the beets that are grown near you, buy them up, and drink your beet juice, make some beets salad, roast some beets. That's one of the easiest things to do for me with eating beets. I love cooking beets that way. And I would think you should make it a goal all winter long to eat at least one meal of beets a week. Do you think you can beat that? You heard all the ways that beets will benefit you and I really think that we should all be having more. We need to be telling our farmers, our food producers in the U.S. that we want the beets more than we want the sugar because right now I think they're getting the message that we want the sugar more than we want the beets. Let's change the world together by eating more beets, drinking more beet juice and buying all the beets that the farmers grow for us. Thank you so much for listening to the Grow Your Self podcast. I'll see you next week when we dive into another fun, surprising story in the garden and learn to grow yourself in a new way. I'll see you there. 

Thanks so much for listening to the Grow Your Self podcast. It was so fun to dive deep into the vegetable, this incredible kitchen garden vegetable of beets. I hope you feel inspired to fill yourself up with the good stuff and to support local farmers and growers near you and buy all the beets up this winter. This is a great time. Listen, we are in a place where we need to be taking care of our bodies more than ever so make sure that you eat some beets every single week. 

Don't forget that we can help you at Gardenary to grow yourself in your own kitchen garden. There are loads of Gardenary consultants trained and ready to help you this winter to get ready for spring. Don't wait until March to decide that that's going to be the year for you to have a garden. This is a great time to ask your family and friends and say, “Hey, don't send me any slippers or sweaters or any of that stuff. All I want in 2021 is a garden-centered life. Just give me some money so I can get my garden set up.” Tell everybody you know that that's all you want for Christmas. All you want for the holidays. Whatever holiday you're celebrating, all you want is a garden for 2021 and I think we can make it happen together. Check out the Gardenary consultants who can help you at gardenary.com/businesses. I'll see you next week on the Grow Your Self podcast. Thanks so much for listening.