The New Complete Book of Food
Storing This Food
Protect the nutrients in beets by storing the vegetables in a cool place, such as the vegetable
crisper in your refrigerator. When stored, the beet root converts its starch into sugars; the
longer it is stored, the sweeter it becomes.
Remove the green tops from beets before storing and store the beet greens like other
leafy vegetables, in plastic bags in the refrigerator to keep them from drying out and losing
vitamins (also see greens).
Use both beets and beet greens within a week.Preparing This Food
Scrub the globes with a vegetable brush under cold running water. You can cook them whole
or slice them. Peel before (or after) cooking.What Happens When You Cook This Food
Betacyamin and betaxanthin, the red betalain pigments in beets, are water-soluble. (That’s
why borscht is a scarlet soup.) Betacyanins and betaxanthins turn more intensely red when
you add acids; think of scarlet sweet-and-sour beets in lemon juice or vinegar with sugar.
They turn slightly blue in a basic (alkaline) solution such as baking soda and water.
Like carrots, beets have such stiff cell walls that it is hard for the human digestive tract
to extract the nutrients inside. Cooking will not soften the cellulose in the beet’s cell walls,
but it will dissolve enough hemicellulose so that digestive juices are able to penetrate. Cook-
ing also activates flavor molecules in beets, making them taste better.How Other Kinds of Processing Affect This Food
Canning. Beets lose neither their color nor their texture in canning.Medical Uses and/or Benefits
Lower risk of some birth defects. As many as two of every 1,000 babies born in the United
States each year may have cleft palate or a neural tube (spinal cord) defect due to their moth-
ers’ not having gotten adequate amounts of folate during pregnancy. The RDA for folate is
400 mcg for healthy adult men and women, 600 mcg for pregnant women, and 500 mcg for
women who are nursing. Taking folate supplements before becoming pregnant and continu-
ing through the first two months of pregnancy reduces the risk of cleft palate; taking folate
through the entire pregnancy reduces the risk of neural tube defects.
Possible lower risk of heart attack. In the spring of 1998, an analysis of data from the records
of more than 80,000 women enrolled in the long-running Nurses’ Health Study at Harvard