Why beetroot is poisonous to babies?

To ensure health and prevent poisoning for young children, parents should note not to give children under 6 months old beetroot juice.

Many mothers often give beetroot juice to their children because they think it is good for the blood. This is extremely dangerous, especially for children under 4-5 months old, because it can cause poisoning.

Severe cases can lead to rapid death if not treated promptly.

As in the case of Children's Hospital 2, Ho Chi Minh City, treating a child with signs of respiratory arrest due to respiratory failure, with his whole body turning purple and black. It took more than two days of intensive care for the doctors to be able to save the child. The cause was determined to be the ingredients in beets causing a lack of oxygen in the blood. The child's mother said that she had heard rumors that red beets would enrich the blood, so when she saw her child was pale, she bought this root, boiled it into water, and used the water to mix with milk for her child.

To ensure health and prevent poisoning for young children, parents should note that they should absolutely not let children under 6 months old eat or drink beetroot juice.

Thinking that eating a lot of beets will “recover blood”, after her child cut his hand and lost a lot of blood, Ms. U. in Long An also forced her 1-year-old son to eat a lot of boiled beets and drink beet juice. As a result, after 4 consecutive days of eating all kinds of dishes made from beets, her son H. had to be admitted to Children’s Hospital 1 in a state of cyanosis and heart arrhythmia. According to the doctors’ diagnosis, the cause was beet poisoning.

Beetroot is a vegetable that contains a lot of nitrates and nitrites. Children under 6 months of age have some physiological characteristics that are different from older children and adults, in which the metabolism of substances, especially toxins, is not complete.

If a child under 6 months of age is fed milk mixed with beetroot juice, the child will ingest a large amount of nitrate and nitrite. Nitrate alone will be converted into nitrite by bacteria in the digestive tract, which will then be dispersed throughout the child's blood.

Nitrite has the effect of oxidizing hemoglobin contained in red blood cells (hemoglobin or hemoglobin is the substance that makes red blood cells red), turning hemoglobin into methemoglobin. Because methemoglobin cannot perform the task of fixing and transporting oxygen or carbon dioxide like hemoglobin, children with nitrite poisoning, although still have enough air to breathe normally, will have difficulty breathing, cyanosis, and respiratory failure.

In older children and adults, the body has a better ability to metabolize and detoxify, reducing methemoglobin back to hemoglobin, while in children under 6 months old, this detoxification is much slower and more difficult./.

According to VOV