Beets are typically recognized by their cultivated forms, like the beetroot, the spinach beet, the leaf vegetable chard, and sugar beet. While beets also have medicinal purposes, like the treatment of ailments primarily in folk medicine, their use for food is their primary identity. As a food, beets have a diverse use. They can be consumed as a mere pot herb as the spinach beet, but in the case of Swiss chard, its midribs are ingested boiled while its leaf blades are consumed as spinach beet. On the whole, adding beets is a healthy way of improving your diet.

Dietary Fiber

Eat some beets as part of your diet--whether alone as a main dish or an ingredient in a bigger dish--and you'll be adding some much-needed dietary fiber to your food. In just one serving of 3.5 ounces of beets, you already get a helping of 2.8 grams of dietary fiber. Fiber is important to your health, so it is also an important part of your diet. Adding bulk to your diet, fiber essentially works in two main beneficial ways for your body. One, it ensures that your bowel movements are very efficient and that you stand less of a chance of suffering from constipation. Because of this first benefit of better bowel movements, you also stand to benefit from dietary fiber's second main advantage, which relates to lowering your chances of contracting colon cancer. Because of fiber's ability and tendency to clean out waste from your colon, carcinogenic elements have a less likely chance of staying there and causing problems for your body.

Low in Fat

Another nutritional benefit of eating beets is it's low fat content. Fat is responsible for adding to your chances of morbidity in the form of diseases like cardiovascular disease. It also makes your waistline a lot less attractive by swelling its size. For those of you who desire to eat foods which will be kind to your waistline, you should take heart in the fact that a 3.5 ounce serving of beets equals a quite negligible amount of only 0.17 grams of fat. If you eat more beets in your diet, you can at least rest easy knowing that you can do a little less exercise every day, because you are not ingesting as much fat as with other foods.

Source of Protein

Beets are also a decent source of protein. A 3.5 ounce helping of beets provides you with 1.61 grams of protein. Normally found heavily in foods like meat, protein is important to your body as it relates to your muscles. Protein can help you build up your muscles as well as act as a fuel to you if you engage in a lot of physical exercise. It also is a source of essential amino acids.