Why does beetroot colour my urine? Other red foodstuffs such as tomatoes and raspberries do not. So what is in beetroot that has this effect?
• Edible plants carry three very different types of reddish pigment: anthocyanins, betacyanins and carotenoids, which are responsible for the colour of raspberries, beetroots and tomatoes, respectively.
People vary in the proportion of ingested betacyanins that they excrete, with roughly 10 per cent of us passing noticeably red urine after eating 100 grams of beetroot. Even in such individuals, most of the betacyanin is destroyed within the body, and rarely does more than 0.6 per cent…
