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For three winters, my husband had been filling the bird feeders in two trips when he used to do it in one. My name is Margaret. People have called me Maggie since I was eight years old. I am sixty-four. I live in a small farmhouse outside Stillwater, Minnesota, with my husband, David. David is sixty-seven. He was a tool and die maker for thirty-eight years at a plant on the east side of St. Paul that made parts for agricultural equipment. He retired four years ago. He retired the spring his hands had begun to ache in the morning in a way they had not ached before, which was about two years after he had started waking up tired in a way he had not been tired before. We have three grown sons. One is in Madison, one is in Minneapolis, one is in Bismarck. I retired three years ago, after twenty-six years as a school nurse at the elementary school two miles from our house. We were, on paper, where two careful people from a small Midwestern town in their sixties hope to be. I want to tell you something about David that I want you to hold while you read this. David has never been a man with the kind of hands that hold warmth. He started at the plant when he was twenty-two, and he spent four decades around metal and cold concrete floors and the kind of machine oil that strips the natural warmth out of a man's hands by the time he is forty. His hands have never been the soft warm hands of a man who works inside a desk. They have always been the hands of a man who worked with metal in a building that the management never bothered to heat properly in the winter. I knew that before I married him. It came with the man. I am telling you that because what follows is not a story about a man who was always warm and who suddenly was not. It is a story about a man whose hands had been a certain temperature for forty years and that, somewhere in the last three winters, became a quieter version of themselves. About a man whose bloodwork had always been the kind of bloodwork his doctor smiled at, and whose numbers had started, very slowly, to do something they had not done before. For the last three winters, my husband — sixty-seven years old, retired, in fair shape for a man who spent forty years standing on a concrete floor — has been quietly different in a way I had been having trouble naming. I am going to tell you what I mean. It looked like this. It looked like the bird feeders. We keep four bird feeders in the yard. David fills them every morning in winter from a metal can in the garage. The walk is about thirty paces in each direction. He has done it every morning for nineteen winters. For the last three winters, he had been doing it in two trips instead of one. He had been wearing the wool-lined work gloves he used to only wear on the coldest days of the year. He had been coming back into the kitchen and standing in front of the heat vent for a full minute before he took his coat off. I had been pretending not to notice him standing at the vent. I had been pretending not to count the trips. It looked like the bloodwork. David goes to Dr. Hennessy every October for his annual. Dr. Hennessy has been his doctor for nineteen years. She is a careful woman, slow to medicate, and she has known David long enough to know what his baseline looks like. For nineteen years, his numbers had been the numbers she wanted them to be. Two Octobers ago, his A1C came back at 5.8. Dr. Hennessy had circled it in pen on the printout and said: David, this is the first time this number has been above where I'd like it. It is not a problem yet. We will watch it. Come back in a year. In the meantime, walk a little more, watch the sweets, you know the drill. His LDL had crept up too. From 118 the year before to 134. David had said: alright. He had told me about it in the truck on the way home. He had said it the way he always said things he was not going to dwell on. Hennessy said the numbers are a little up. Said to watch it. I am going to watch it. Last October, the numbers had moved again. A1C 6.1. LDL 152. Dr. Hennessy had said the same thing, with slightly more care in her voice. We will watch it. Come back in a year. Try to walk a little more. David had said: alright. He had not said anything else. I want to tell you what I saw in the truck on the way home from that second appointment. I saw a sixty-seven-year-old man with his hands on the steering wheel of the truck he had driven for nine years. I saw the hands of a man who had been quietly cold for two winters. I saw a man whose numbers had been creeping for two years. I saw a man who had been falling asleep in his recliner at seven-thirty at night for half a year. I saw a man who was, by every measure that fit on a printout, still fine. I saw, also, the man I had been married to for forty-one years. A wife knows. It looked like the recliner. David had been a man who watched the evening news on his feet, going in and out of the kitchen, getting things done in the half hour after dinner. For the last three winters, he had been a man who sat down in his recliner at six-thirty and was asleep by seven-thirty with the television still on. I had been turning the television off for him for three winters. I had been pulling the wool throw up over his shoulders for three winters. I had not said anything to him about it. It looked like the garage. David has a small woodworking shop in the second bay of our garage. It is heated. He had spent half of every weekend out there for twenty years, building cabinets for our sons and small pieces of furniture for the grandchildren. For the last two winters, the garage had been quiet. He had told me once, in October, that he just had not felt up to it lately. He had not been out there since. It looked like the bed. David had been a man who pulled the covers off himself in the night because he ran warm. For the last two winters, he had been a man who pulled the covers up. I had been giving him the heavier wool blanket from the top of the closet because he had asked for it. I had not told him I had moved my own side of the bed closer to him in the nights since. None of it was alarming. He had been to Dr. Hennessy. His numbers were a little up but they were not, in her words, a problem yet. No medications. No flags. No conversation about anything beyond watching it. David was, by every measure anyone could see on his chart, a sixty-seven-year-old retired tool and die maker whose numbers had drifted slightly and whose doctor wanted to keep an eye on them. But the man I had been married to for forty-one years had been getting quietly colder, quieter, and more tired in our own house for three winters. I knew it. He knew it. We had not said it to each other. I have been going to a small Methodist church on the east side of Stillwater since I was twenty-six years old. We have a women's group on Wednesday mornings from nine to ten-thirty. About fourteen women. We have coffee and a devotional and we talk about the week. Most of us have been going for over twenty years. One of the women in the group is named Helen. Helen is seventy-one. Her husband Walter is seventy-four. Walter had been the postmaster of Stillwater for thirty-one years before he retired. Helen and I had been in the same Wednesday group for fourteen years without being particularly close. That kind of friendship is its own thing. You can sit across from another woman in the same wooden folding chairs for fourteen years and know what she takes in her coffee and not know very much about what she goes home to. The Wednesday in late November was a Wednesday like every other Wednesday, except colder than most. It was nine degrees with the wind chill. Helen and I had ended up next to each other at the table after the devotional, with our coffee mugs warming our hands. The group was breaking up. Most of the women had already left to get to the grocery store before noon. Helen turned to me. She said: Maggie, can I ask you something. It is going to sound like prying. It is not meant to. I said: go ahead, Helen. She said: How is David doing. I said: he is alright. He has been to Hennessy. His numbers are a little up. We are watching it. Helen was quiet for a moment. Then she said: I was going to ask because I had been watching him at the church Thanksgiving dinner last week. He had been sitting with his hands wrapped around his coffee cup the whole meal. Walter used to do that. I did not know what to say. Helen said: Maggie, I am not trying to alarm you. I am asking because I had been holding Walter's cold hands for four winters. I had been telling myself that was sixty-eight. It turned out it was something quieter than that. I sat with that for a long minute. I looked at my coffee. I said: he is asleep in his recliner by seven-thirty. He stopped using the garage two winters ago. He stands at the heat vent in the kitchen after he fills the bird feeders. His numbers have been creeping for two years. His doctor is watching it. I have been watching it. Neither of us has said it out loud to the other. Helen said: that is exactly what I had been doing about Walter. She did not say anything more for a moment. Then she said: about three years ago, I added one small thing to Walter's mornings. I read for almost a month before I added it. I called his pharmacist before I added it. I want to be careful with you, because Walter is one man and you are looking at one man and bodies are different. But Walter has been more himself for the last three years than he had been for the four years before that. He has been doing the small daily things he had quietly stopped doing. He has been a man whose coffee cup he is no longer holding for the warmth. She said it without performance. She said it the way a woman says something at a Methodist women's group on a Wednesday morning in twenty-degree weather to another woman who has been sitting across from her for fourteen years. She wasn't selling me anything. She was just telling me. I asked her what she had added. She said it was a capsaicin softgel. She said the brand was called Aurivita. She said she had picked it because the small company that made it dissolved the capsaicin in cold-pressed avocado oil rather than putting it in a dry capsule, and because Walter's pharmacist had explained that how the supplement was processed mattered for whether the compound actually made it from the capsule into the bloodstream. The clock above the kitchen door read ten-thirty-eight. The Wednesday group had ended eight minutes ago. I thanked Helen. She put her hand on my arm before I left. She said: Maggie, promise me you will call David's pharmacist before you add anything. That is the only thing I am going to be insistent about. Promise me. I promised her. I went home. I drove the rest of that week thinking about Helen. I drove the next week thinking about Helen. I am, by temperament, a careful person. A school nurse for twenty-six years is, almost by definition, a careful person. I do not add things to my body or to my husband's body without understanding what I am adding. I went home and I started reading. I read for almost three weeks. I read about capsaicin. I read about the compound that is in chili peppers — the part that makes them spicy — and what the research community has been quietly building about it for several decades now. I read about a receptor in the body called TRPV1. The discovery of that receptor won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2021. I had not heard of it before. Most readers I know my age have not. I read about a molecule called nitric oxide that the inside lining of every blood vessel in the body makes on its own. The discovery of nitric oxide's role in vascular function won an earlier Nobel Prize in 1998. I read enough to understand that the two prizes connected. Capsaicin activates the receptor. The receptor signals the lining of the blood vessels to produce more of the molecule that keeps the vessels supple and flexible. I am not a scientist. I am a retired school nurse who reads carefully. I read enough to understand that this was not a fireworks story. It was a quiet story about a vegetable extract and a receptor and a slow biological process that some people had been writing about thoughtfully for a long time. The language being used in the careful corner of the conversation was the language I had been quietly looking for. Supports healthy circulation. Supports cardiovascular wellness. Supports the body's own cellular energy. In people whose numbers are already in the range their doctors want them in. Not improves. Not fixes. Not reverses. Not treats. Just supports. I read about the cold-press, too. The chemistry is straightforward. Capsaicin is fat-soluble. It does not absorb well as a dry powder. The dry capsules at the health food store lose most of the compound to the stomach before it ever reaches the bloodstream. Aurivita dissolves the capsaicin in cold-pressed avocado oil. The oil carrier protects the compound through digestion. More of the compound makes it through to where it can do what the research community has been writing about. That is a slower way to make a supplement. It costs them more. At sixty-four, after a long career of paying attention to small decisions careful people make when no one is watching them, I have come to pay close attention to that kind of choice. It tells you what kind of company is on the other end of the bottle. The other thing I liked was the simplicity. Three softgels in the morning with a glass of water. I have a husband. I have a small farmhouse outside Stillwater. I have Wednesday morning at the Methodist church. I am not looking for a protocol that requires its own shelf. Now I need to tell you the most important part of this letter. I made Helen a promise at the church. I kept it. Before I added anything to what David was already taking, I called his pharmacist. His name is Tom. He has been the pharmacist at the small independent pharmacy on Main Street for sixteen years. I have been filling our family's prescriptions there for the entire sixteen years. He filled my mother's prescriptions when she was living with us in her last years. I called him for a specific reason. David is on no prescription medications. He takes a multivitamin and a vitamin D in the morning and that is the whole of it. I called Tom anyway. I called because I am a careful person and because I wanted somebody who knew what was on David's record to confirm that adding a capsaicin softgel to a multivitamin was the right thing to do at his age and with his slightly drifting numbers. Tom pulled up David's file. He confirmed there were no concerns at the dosage on the label. He told me David could take it in the morning with his coffee the way the bottle suggested. He told me to call him back if Dr. Hennessy ever started David on any prescription medication in the future, because the conversation would be different at that point. He told me, before he got off the phone, that he wished more of his patients made the call I had just made. I also called Dr. Hennessy's office that week. I left a message with her nurse, with the same information. She called me back the next day to tell me Dr. Hennessy had no concerns about David adding it at the dosage on the label, that she had patients who took similar things, and that she would want to see him at his annual the same as always. I want to say something now, plainly, to every reader of this letter. If your husband — or your wife, or you yourself — is on any prescription medication, especially anything cardiovascular, please make the call before you add anything new. I made two calls. David was on nothing. I would have made three calls if he had been on a cardiovascular medication. So should you. The two minutes the call takes is the most important two minutes of your engagement with any supplement. I told David that night. I told him about the Wednesday group. About Helen. About what Helen had told me about Walter. About Tom. About Dr. Hennessy's nurse. I told him I wanted him to try it for me. He looked at the bottle. He looked at me. We have been married forty-one years. He knows when I am asking something that matters. He said: Tom said it was alright? I said: he said it was a sensible thing to add. Hennessy's office said the same. He nodded once. He said: alright. For you. In the morning I set three softgels on a saucer next to his coffee. He took them with his first sip. I did not say anything more about it. He started on a Monday in early December. The first two weeks he felt nothing in particular. I had read enough alongside what Helen had told me to know that bodies are different. Some people notice something within the first week or two. Some take much longer. Some don't notice much at all. I was prepared to land in any of those camps. I was prepared to be honest with myself about the result. What I noticed, I noticed slowly. The first thing I noticed, around week five, was the bird feeders. It was a Saturday morning in early January. It was eleven degrees outside. I was at the kitchen window with my coffee. David came out the back door with the metal can. He filled the first feeder, then the second, then the third, then the fourth. He carried the can back to the garage. He came back into the kitchen. He took his coat off. He hung it on the hook by the door. He poured himself a cup of coffee. He did not stand at the heat vent. I did not say anything about it. I did not want to make a thing of it. I had read enough not to make a thing of one observation. The second thing I noticed, around week eight, was the recliner. It was a Tuesday night in late January. I was reading at the kitchen table. The evening news was on in the living room. I looked up at the clock at nine-fifteen. David was still awake in the recliner. He had not fallen asleep at seven-thirty. He had not fallen asleep at eight. He was watching the news the way he had watched the news for thirty years. I did not say anything about it. I did not want to make a thing of it. The third thing I noticed was the garage. It was a Saturday morning in late February. Around month three. I came downstairs at seven. The light was on in the garage. I went to the kitchen window and I looked out. David was at his workbench. He had pulled down the small cabinet he had been building for our middle son two winters ago and then set aside. He was sanding the door panel. He was wearing his old work gloves and the heavy denim apron he had not put on in over a year. He worked out there for three hours. He came inside at ten and asked me if I wanted to drive into town for lunch. I said yes. In the truck on the way to town, I looked at his hands on the steering wheel. They were the hands of a man who had been a tool and die maker for thirty-eight years. They were also the hands of a man who had not been holding the steering wheel that way for two winters. I want to be careful with what I am telling you. I am not telling you Aurivita did any of those things on its own. David had been walking down to the mailbox a little more deliberately in the weeks after I told him about Helen. He had been going to bed twenty minutes earlier and getting up twenty minutes earlier in the weeks after he started. He had cut out the second helping at dinner without me asking. He had started, on his own, to drink a full glass of water before his coffee in the morning. There were several things changing at once. The way there are when a wife finally tells her husband what she had been pretending not to see for three winters. The way there are when a man whose numbers had drifted decides, quietly, that he is going to do the small things he had stopped doing. All I am telling you is that he added one small thing to a long list of small things he was newly doing. He kept everything else exactly the same. And a stretch of months followed that was qualitatively different from the three winters that had preceded it. That is the honest version. I would not give you a cleaner one. David went into Dr. Hennessy's office for his annual physical seven months after he started. Bloodwork the week before. Dr. Hennessy studied the results. She looked at David. She said: David, your numbers are in the range I want them in. Keep doing what you are doing. She did not use comparative language. She did not say much better or significantly improved. She said where they were. She said where she wanted them. She said keep doing what you are doing. David told her about the bird feeders. About the garage. About the capsaicin softgels. She said: that is a sensible thing to add at your age. There is good research on circulatory support. Keep doing what you are doing. Come back at the usual time. David called me from the parking lot. He didn't say anything at first. Then he said: Maggie. I think I might be alright. I was at the kitchen table. I sat for a long moment. I cried the way a woman cries when something she thought was leaving comes back to her instead. I see Helen most Wednesdays at the church. We sit next to each other now. She pours me coffee from the carafe before the devotional. I tell her small things about David and she tells me small things about Walter and the morning moves the way Wednesday mornings move. I owe her one for the rest of my life. She does not act like I do. I am telling you all of this because I think you might be where I was last November. Watching someone you love quietly become colder in his own house. Watching the small things he used to do quietly stop being things he does. Watching his doctor look at his chart, and tell you the numbers are a little up but not a problem yet, and tell you to watch it. If you have been telling yourself it is the winter, or the sixties, or just aging, maybe it is worth asking whether there is one small additive thing that might support what his body is already trying to do. Not as a replacement for anything his doctor has him on. Just as a question. A thing to add. A conversation to have at his next appointment. Here is how I think about Aurivita now, in the words I would actually use. It is something the body uses. The research community talks about it in the context of supporting healthy circulation, supporting cardiovascular wellness, and supporting the body's own cellular energy, in people whose numbers are already in the range their doctors want them in. It is not a fix for anything. It is not a substitute for a medication. It is not a treatment for cold hands. It is not a treatment for fading energy. It is not a treatment for a slightly elevated A1C, or a slightly elevated LDL, or any specific cardiovascular or metabolic condition. It is one small thing you add to the long list of things he is already doing for himself, alongside everything else. Please call his pharmacist or his doctor's office before you add it. If he is on any blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, blood sugar medication, or anything cardiovascular at all, this is non-negotiable. I called Tom. I called Dr. Hennessy's office. I would not have added anything without those calls. Neither should you. The people who know his chart will tell you in two minutes whether the supplement is safe to add given what he is already taking. I am a sixty-four-year-old retired school nurse in Minnesota. I am not the person to ask. His pharmacist or his doctor is. The company has a one-hundred-and-twenty-day satisfaction guarantee. That is four months. If you are not satisfied — for any reason at all, including just changing your mind — they refund you. It is not tied to anything you have to prove. If you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied. That is the whole policy. The capsaicin is produced on a small operation that processes on its own schedule. There are stretches when they are in stock and stretches when they are not. I mention that not to push you — please do not let anybody push you into a health decision — but so that if you go to the site and they are out, you know why. That is all I have. Thank you for reading this far. I hope something here was useful to you. I hope, somewhere this Wednesday, your own Helen is sitting across from you in a folding chair in a church basement, waiting for you to say the thing you have been not saying out loud for three winters. — Maggie P.S. I want to come back to the cold-press for a second. Capsaicin is fat-soluble. That is the chemistry of the molecule. Put it in a dry capsule and most of it never makes it from the stomach into the bloodstream. Put it in an oil — specifically a cold-pressed oil that has not been damaged by heat — and the body can actually use it. Aurivita chose the slower way. Cold-press. Low temperatures. Avocado oil. More of the compound through to where it can do what the research community has been writing about. It costs them money. It costs them time. They made the choice anyway. At sixty-four, after a long career of paying attention to careful people doing careful work, I have come to believe that the small decisions companies make when no one is watching tell you everything. P.P.S. Three softgels. In the morning. With a glass of water. That is the entire protocol. No powder to mix. No afternoon dose to remember. No schedule taped to the inside of the cupboard. David keeps the bottle on the counter next to the coffee maker. He takes the softgels with his first sip. He makes the coffee now. That has been the rhythm of our morning for almost a year. We have earned a simple morning. P.P.P.S. I am going to say it one more time, because I have to. Please. Call his pharmacist or his doctor's office before you add anything new to what he is already taking. Especially if he is on a blood pressure medication, a cholesterol medication, a blood sugar medication, or anything cardiovascular. They have his whole picture in front of them. I have written you a letter. There is a difference, and the difference matters. The two minutes it takes to ask are the most important two minutes of your engagement with any supplement. P.P.P.P.S. The guarantee, again, in case you skimmed. One hundred and twenty days. Any reason at all. You do not have to prove a single thing — not to them, not about his numbers, not about how he feels. If he tried it and you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied. They send the money back. That is the whole policy. A small-company policy. The kind of thing companies used to do when companies still answered the phone. P.P.P.P.P.S. The sentence Helen said to me at the table that Wednesday morning — I had been holding Walter's cold hands for four winters; I had been telling myself that was sixty-eight; it turned out it was something quieter than that — has been with me every day for almost a year. I had been doing that exact thing about David for three winters. I had not realized, until Helen said it, what I had been doing. I had been holding his hands. I had been telling myself it was the winter. I had been telling myself it was the sixties. I had been telling myself it was the plant. I had been telling myself a lot of things, the way wives do, to keep from saying out loud the small quiet thing that is happening to a man who has gotten quieter. If you are a woman standing at your kitchen window on a winter morning, watching the man you love come back from filling the bird feeders in two trips when he used to do it in one, you are not imagining the dimming. You are not being dramatic. You are reading the man. I hope you find your own Helen in your own church basement on your own Wednesday morning. I hope you let her see what you have been trying not to see. I hope you read carefully. I hope you make the call before you add anything. I hope, in a year from now, you are standing at your kitchen window on a Saturday morning, watching the man you love come back from the bird feeders in one trip, hang his coat on the hook by the door, and pour himself a cup of coffee at the temperature it is at. I hope that for you. That is the whole reason I wrote this. — M.A. aurivita.co/products/capsaicin-power-diabetes Individual experiences vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.