Why can beets cause poisoning in babies?

To ensure the health and prevent poisoning in young children, parents should note that beetroot juice should not be given to children under 6 months old.

Many mothers give beetroot juice to their children, believing it helps improve blood circulation. This is extremely dangerous, especially for children under 4-5 months old, as it can cause poisoning.

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

For example, Children's Hospital 2 in Ho Chi Minh City once treated a child who showed signs of respiratory arrest due to respiratory failure, with the entire body turning dark blue. It took more than two days of intensive care before doctors were fortunate enough to save the child. The cause was determined to be a component in beetroot that caused oxygen deficiency in the blood. The child's mother said that she heard people say beetroot, being red in color, would improve blood health, so when she saw her child looking pale, she bought beetroot, boiled it into a liquid, and mixed it with her child's milk.

To ensure the health and prevent poisoning in young children, parents should note that children under 6 months old should absolutely not be given beetroot juice or other foods.

Believing that eating a lot of beetroot would "restore blood," after her son, H., cut his hand and lost a lot of blood, Ms. U. in Long An forced her 1-year-old son to eat a lot of boiled beetroot and drink beetroot juice. As a result, after four consecutive days of eating various dishes made from beetroot, her son, H., had to be admitted to Children's Hospital 1 in a cyanotic state with an irregular heartbeat. Doctors diagnosed the cause as beetroot poisoning.

Beets are a vegetable that contains a lot of nitrates and nitrites. Children under 6 months old have some physiological characteristics that differ from older children and adults, including incomplete metabolism of substances, especially toxins.

If infants under 6 months old are fed milk mixed with beetroot juice, they will ingest a large amount of nitrates and nitrites. Nitrates alone will be converted into nitrites by bacteria in the digestive tract, and these nitrites, along with existing nitrites, will be distributed throughout the infant's bloodstream.

Nitrites oxidize hemoglobin (the substance that gives red blood cells their red color), transforming it into methemoglobin. Because methemoglobin cannot fixate on and carry oxygen or carbon dioxide like hemoglobin, children poisoned by nitrite, even with sufficient air to breathe normally, will experience difficulty breathing, cyanosis, and respiratory failure.

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

According to VOV