Seriously, it's quite a puzzle!
And this is actually worth understanding, because the answer reveals something fundamental about biochemistry.
The plant side:
Beets accumulate nitrate when they're taking up nitrogen faster than they can incorporate it into proteins. This happens under stress—low light, temperature swings, nutrient imbalance. The nitrate just sits there as stored, oxidized nitrogen.
Plants use this nitrate for basic housekeeping: balancing pH, maintaining osmotic pressure, storing nitrogen for later use. It's not particularly special. It's just chemistry sitting in storage.
The human side:
When you eat nitrate-rich foods, bacteria in your mouth reduce some of that nitrate to nitrite. You swallow the nitrite, it enters your bloodstream, and under low-oxygen conditions—exactly when tissues need more blood flow—it gets reduced further to nitric oxide (NO).
Nitric oxide does something very specific in mammals: it relaxes smooth muscle in blood vessel walls. Blood vessels dilate. More blood reaches tissues. Oxygen delivery improves. Mitochondria work more efficiently under load.
This matters most when you're exercising, at altitude, or otherwise oxygen-limited—the exact conditions where tissues are hypoxic enough to reduce nitrite to NO.
Just like how PureClean Beet works >>>
So why does it work across kingdoms?
Not because plants and humans are solving the "same problem." They're not.
It works because mammals don't just eat meat, they also can eat plants. Our metabolism developed pathways to use compounds that were consistently present in our diet. The nitrate→nitrite→NO pathway exists in mammals because dietary nitrate was always available from vegetables.
This isn't cosmic resonance. It's evolutionary scavenging. Our ancestors who could extract benefit from plant compounds had an advantage, so we kept it up so to speak.
The broader pattern:
Many plant compounds do affect human physiology—polyphenols, fiber, various phytochemicals. Not because plants "intended" this, but because:
Plants make these compounds for their own purposes (defense, stress response, signaling)
Humans needed to or liked to plants
Our metabolism adapted or solved rather to use, tolerate, or benefit from some of these compounds
The ones that helped us survive got baked into our biology
The chronic disease angle:
Many modern diseases represent normal adaptive responses that never turn off. Your body responds to chronic stress, inflammation, or metabolic overload the same way it would respond to acute threats—but the response becomes the problem when it never resolves.
This isn't about missing some mystical plant connection. It's about mismatched environments. We evolved in contexts with:
Regular fasting periods
High clean nutrient intake
Variable activity levels
Natural light/dark cycles
Acute stressors, not chronic ones
When you remove those inputs or replace them with constant food availability, artificial light, and unrelenting low-grade stress, systems that evolved to be flexible get stuck in damage control mode.
What this actually means:
Eat vegetables. Eat beets!
Not because they carry ancient wisdom, but because your metabolism expects them. The pathways that process plant compounds are part of your normal physiology, built over millions of years of eating plants.
The "mind-bending" part isn't mystical. It's just that your body doesn't respect the boundaries we draw between organisms. If a compound was consistently available and using it provided an advantage, we found a way to use it to solve similar physiological problems.
Which to us, is actually magic!
That's it.