 Beat urea. Pink pee after beet consumption is totally harmless. You're just peeing out some of the pigment, but it can be used to remind us of an important fact. When we eat plant foods, many of these wonderful antioxidant pigments, like opine, beta-carotene, phytonutrients, are actually absorbed into our bloodstream and bathe the organs, tissues, and cells of our bodies. There's no direct connection between our gut and our bladder. The only way these beet pigments are finding their way into our urine is by being absorbed through our gut into our bloodstream and then circulating throughout our entire body before eventually being filtered out by the kidneys. Our blood, for a time, is a little pinker, too. When we have garlic breath, it's not just garlic residue in our mouths. It's the fact that those wonderful health-promoting garlic compounds got absorbed into our bloodstream and are actually being excreted straight out of our lungs. If we just had a garlic enema, we'd still get garlic breath. So when you see studies investigating the antibacterial effects of garlic, and you're thinking, who cares what garlic does in a Petri dish outside the body? That's why we care, because it does circulate throughout our body. That's why garlic has been found useful as an adjunct treatment for pneumonia in critical cases. It's excreted from our lungs to get that garlic breath and can wipe out bacteria on the way out. Other than pink pea and red stools, which gives a whole new meaning to the term toilet bowl flushing, any other side effects to beet consumption? One more. Should you get run over while you're out biking on beets on autopsy, you might amuse your pathologist. The case of the purple colon. Purple discoloration of the large bowel related to beet root ingestion.