What my girlfriend made me this week.

Beet, carrot and tomato soup from the Gjlelina cookbook, AND it was her birthday! 

Here in California, beets are always in season, which makes me happy because there are a lot of really good benefits to eating beets and the greens too.  For one, I like to think of them as a bottlebrush for your digestive system.  If you ever want to get things moving, beets will help do the trick.  

Even more interesting though, in the 2012 Summer Olympic games, a number of the British athletes, including Mohamed Farah, who won the mens 5km and 10km races, drank beet juice rather than Gatorade for it's performance enhancing qualities.  Studies have shown that when consumed in it's natural form, beet juice can reduce the amount of oxygen required by your muscles during exercise.  In the study, when asked to run on a treadmill until exhaustion, healthy volunteers who drank beet juice were able to exercise 15% longer than those given a placebo drink.  Similar results were also seen in sedentary people, showing that those who drank beet juice required 12% less effort to walk a given distance than those who drank the placebo.