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My father wrote his chili recipe on an index card in 1981 and I found him crying over it last fall. He wasn't crying about the recipe. He was crying because he couldn't open the cumin jar. My name is Linda. I'm 56. I live in a yellow farmhouse outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania with my husband Ron and a beagle named Ozzie who is too old and too fat and too loved for anyone to do anything about it. My dad's name is Walter. Everyone calls him Walt. He's 81 years old and until last September, he was the kind of 81 year old you forgot was 81. He still drove. He still fixed his own gutters. He still went to the diner on Lincoln Highway every Tuesday for the Reuben and a black coffee. And he still made his chili. That chili was his thing. The recipe lives on a yellowed index card in a wooden recipe box my mother gave him for their fifth anniversary in 1979. His handwriting on that card is neat block print, the way they taught penmanship at the public school in Reading where he grew up. Two pounds ground chuck. One can crushed tomato. One can kidney beans. One can pinto beans. Two yellow onions, diced fine. Four cloves garlic, minced. One green bell pepper. Two tablespoons chili powder. One tablespoon cumin. A pinch of cinnamon. Salt and pepper. There's a brown smudge on the card from 1987 that's a single drop of his chili that he caught with his thumb and never wiped off because, in his words, "the card is the recipe and the recipe is the card." He made that chili for every family gathering for 44 years. Super Bowl Sunday. New Year's Day. The Saturday after Thanksgiving when leftovers got tired and people wanted something with heat. Birthdays. Funerals. The Tuesday I came home from the hospital with my daughter Hannah in 1994. When my mother died in 2011, my dad made chili for the wake and served it in styrofoam bowls to 60 people in the basement of First Lutheran on Orange Street. He didn't say much that day. He just kept ladling. People came back for seconds and thirds and he kept ladling. The chili was how he showed up. The chili was how he said the things he couldn't say. Last August, I noticed his hands shaking when he poured my coffee. It was a small shake. A tremor. The mug had maybe a quarter inch of coffee tremble in it before he set it down on the table. I didn't say anything. He didn't either. But a week later I watched him struggle to button the cuff of his Sunday shirt before church and I knew. His hands. The hands that had held my mother's hand through cancer. The hands that had taught me to bait a hook on the dock at Conestoga Lake when I was 7. The hands that had built the railing on his porch with a hand saw and a level and a stubborn kind of patience. Those hands weren't working right anymore. I asked him about it on a Sunday after church. We were in his kitchen and I was washing the cups from coffee hour, which he'd brought home in a Tupperware because he hated wasting good ceramic. I said, "Dad, your hands." He didn't look at me. He just kept drying a fork. "They're fine." "Dad." He put the fork down. "Linda, they're not fine. But there's no point making a thing of it." He told me he'd been to the doctor. Twice. The first doctor said it was probably essential tremor and gave him a pill that made him feel like he was underwater. The second doctor said it was probably peripheral neuropathy from a long career running a hardware store on his feet, and gave him a different pill that made his stomach hurt. He stopped taking both. He said his fingers were tingling. Sometimes burning. Sometimes numb in patches. He'd dropped a coffee mug in June and it had shattered on the kitchen floor and he'd stood there for a full minute looking at the pieces because he hadn't felt the handle slip out of his fingers. He'd just watched it fall. "My hands feel like they belong to somebody else," he said. "And the somebody else isn't taking very good care of them." I drove home that day in a kind of fog. Ron was in the garage when I pulled in. He took one look at my face and he didn't ask. He just hugged me by the bumper of my Honda for a long time, the way Ron hugs me when there isn't anything to say, just standing. I cried into his denim jacket and Ozzie sat on the driveway watching us like he was supposed to be in charge of the situation. That was August. September was the cumin jar. It was the Saturday after Labor Day. I'd driven over to my dad's house because he'd called me Friday night and said he was going to make a small batch of chili for the two of us and would I come over and bring some cornbread. I knew what that meant. He hadn't made chili in a year. The shaking had gotten worse. For him to call me and say he was making chili was him trying to tell me something without saying it. I brought cornbread. I let myself in the front door with my key. I called out, "Dad?" He didn't answer. I walked into the kitchen and the chili meat was in a stainless steel pan on the stove, half browned, the burner still on low. The onion was diced on the cutting board. The cans of beans and tomatoes were lined up next to the can opener. The recipe card was propped against the napkin holder where he always propped it, even though he hadn't actually looked at the card in 30 years. He was standing at the counter with both hands wrapped around the cumin jar. He was crying. Not loud crying. The kind of crying men of his generation do when they think no one is watching. Tight jaw. Wet eyes. Shoulders pulled in. The lid wouldn't come off the cumin jar. I stood in the doorway and I watched him for maybe 4 seconds before he saw me, and in those 4 seconds I saw my whole childhood. The man who used to open every jar in the house. The man who'd lift me onto his shoulders to reach the cookies my mother hid on top of the refrigerator. The man whose hands had been my hands. The first hands I trusted. Those hands couldn't open a spice jar. I crossed the kitchen and I took the cumin out of his hands and I twisted the lid off with one easy turn and I set it on the counter without looking at him. I said, "Walt. Sit down. I'll finish this." He sat. He cried. I finished the chili. We ate it in the dining room with the cornbread, with the same blue and white speckled bowls my mother had bought at a craft fair in 1989, and he didn't say much. But at the end, he reached across the table and he covered my hand with his and he said, "Linny, I don't want to be the kind of grandfather who can't make chili." He hadn't called me Linny since I was 12. I went home that night and I did what I always do when I'm scared. I started reading. I sat at my kitchen table with my laptop and Ozzie snoring at my feet and I went down a rabbit hole that lasted four nights. I read about peripheral neuropathy. I read about diabetic neuropathy even though my dad isn't diabetic. I read about idiopathic neuropathy, which means doctors don't know what's causing it but here's a name for it anyway. I read about B12 and alpha lipoic acid and benfotiamine and capsaicin cream and gabapentin and amitriptyline and every other prescription the message boards were arguing about. Most of it was the same conversation in different costumes. The pills numbed the pain but didn't address why the nerves were misfiring in the first place. They blunted the signal without doing anything about the source. That bothered me. Not because I'm anti medication, but because Ron's mother was on gabapentin for 12 years and at the end of those 12 years her hands worked worse than at the start, and the only thing the gabapentin had reliably done was make her sleep through her own birthday party. I kept reading. I wanted to know what was happening inside a nerve cell when it stopped working right. Not the diagnosis. The mechanism. Because I figured if I could understand what was actually breaking, I could think about what might actually help. What I found was simpler than I expected, and harder to believe. Nerve cells, especially the ones way out at the ends of your fingers and toes, are some of the most energy hungry cells in the entire body. They have to maintain a protective coating called myelin, which is what lets them transmit signals fast and clean. They have to fire and reset and fire again, thousands of times a minute, every time you touch something or move a finger or feel a temperature change on your skin. To do all of that, they need an enormous amount of cellular energy. Cellular energy comes from tiny structures inside every cell called mitochondria. You learned about them in 7th grade biology and forgot about them five minutes later. The textbook called them the powerhouse of the cell. That's not just a slogan. That's the literal job. Your mitochondria make the energy your cells use to function. And mitochondria can get worn down. By aging. By processed food. By stress. By environmental toxins. By the medications people end up on for decades. By a lifetime of just being a person in a modern world. When mitochondria wear down, every cell in your body gets less energy. But the cells that get hit hardest, that show it first, are the ones that need the most energy to do their job. Nerve cells. Specifically, the nerve cells in your hands and feet, the ones farthest from your spine, the ones that have to send signals the longest distance. When those cells start running on a depleted battery, the protective coating starts to thin. Signals get noisy. The nerve fires when it shouldn't. Doesn't fire when it should. You get tingling. Burning. Numbness. Pins and needles. Patches of skin that feel like they belong to somebody else. Sound familiar? It sounded like my father. I went deeper. I started reading about something called AMPK. It's an enzyme, a kind of switch, that sits inside your cells. When AMPK is active, your mitochondria work better. They produce more energy. The cells around them get more of what they need to do their jobs. When AMPK gets quiet, mitochondria get sluggish, and the cells that depend on them, especially the energy hungry ones, suffer first. So the question became, what supports AMPK? That's where I came across amla. I'd never heard the word. I had to look up how to pronounce it. Am-luh. Indian gooseberry. A small green fruit that grows on a tree native to India and has been used in traditional Ayurvedic medicine for over a thousand years. Researchers have looked at amla extract closely over the last 15 years. What they keep finding, in study after study, is that amla appears to influence AMPK activity. Which means it supports the pathway your body already uses to keep mitochondria running. And on top of that, amla has one of the highest measured antioxidant profiles of any food on the planet. Antioxidants matter here because mitochondria are also damaged by something called oxidative stress. Free radicals. The chemical exhaust of being alive. When your antioxidant defenses are overwhelmed, mitochondria take the hit. The more oxidative damage piles up on a mitochondrion, the worse it gets at making energy. So you have a fruit that helps activate the pathway that supports mitochondria, AND helps protect those mitochondria from the damage that wears them down. That was the first thing in four nights of reading that made me sit back in my chair and put my hands flat on the table. Because if mitochondria were the problem, then supporting them might actually help. Not numb the symptom. Support the underlying machinery. It wasn't a cure. I'm not saying that. I'm telling you what made me hopeful for the first time since the cumin jar. I want to stop and talk to you the way I'd talk to my sister, because I know what you might be thinking. "I've tried supplements before. They don't work." I know. I had a whole shelf of fish oil and turmeric in my pantry that hadn't done a thing for my own knees. I was skeptical going in. But amla isn't fish oil. It's not trying to do the same job as fish oil. It's working on a totally different mechanism, the energy production pathway your cells use to keep nerves alive. It's not the same conversation. "If this worked, my doctor would have told me." Maybe. But my dad's two doctors gave him two different pills and one diagnosis they admitted was a guess. The first doctor had 11 minutes. The second had 14. Neither of them sat down with him and explained mitochondrial function because that's not what the 11 minute appointment is for. That's what your kid with a laptop and four nights of insomnia is for. "A berry? How could a berry do anything?" I asked myself the same thing. Until I remembered that aspirin came from willow bark and metformin came from a flower called French lilac and digitalis, the heart medication, came from foxglove. The most powerful pharmaceuticals in history started as plants. Just because a thing grows on a tree doesn't mean it isn't doing something real. "My dad is 81. Isn't it too late?" That's the one that broke my heart the most. Because the unspoken assumption is, once you're old, you're done. You take your meds. You sit in your chair. You wait. That's the script. I wasn't ready to give my dad to that script. I ordered him a bottle of Alevia Amla on a Thursday night in October. I picked Alevia because I went down another rabbit hole about how amla supplements vary wildly in quality. Cheap powders versus standardized extracts. Alevia uses a concentrated standardized extract, made in the USA, two capsules a day, 30 servings a bottle. And they have a 90 day money back guarantee, which mattered to me, because I wanted to be able to send it back if my dad hated it or if it did nothing. The bottle arrived on a Monday. I drove over after work and put it on his counter next to his blood pressure cuff and his vitamin D. He looked at the bottle. He looked at me. He said, "Linny, what is this?" I told him. I didn't oversell it. I didn't promise anything. I told him what I'd read about mitochondria and energy and the fact that the nerve cells in his fingers and toes were screaming for support and that this might help and might not. I told him about the money back guarantee. I told him if 90 days went by and he didn't notice a single thing, I'd send it back myself. He picked up the bottle and turned it over in his hands like he was reading a paint can. He said, "Two pills a day." I said, "Two pills a day." He said, "I'll take 'em." Week 1, nothing. He told me he felt the same. Week 2, also nothing, but he said he'd slept through the night three times that week without getting up, which had not happened for him in two years. Week 4, he texted me a photo. It was a button on his shirt cuff. The text said "got it on the first try." I sat at my desk at work and I cried for the second time in two months. Week 6, the tingling in his left hand was less. Not gone. Less. Week 8, he made eggs for himself for the first time in 8 months. Cracked them one handed into a hot pan. Didn't drop the shell. Didn't burn himself. Week 11, Ron drove over on a Saturday afternoon and the two of them rebuilt the gate on the back fence that had been hanging on one hinge for two years. My dad held the screwdriver. His hand didn't shake. Week 12 was the Saturday before Christmas. I drove over with cornbread. My dad was at the kitchen counter. The meat was browned. The onions were diced fine, the way he likes them, not chunky. The cans of tomatoes and beans were open on the counter. The recipe card was propped against the napkin holder where it always is. He held up the cumin jar and looked at me and grinned. He twisted the lid off with one hand. He said, "Linny. I made you chili." We ate it at the dining room table with my mother's blue and white speckled bowls, with the cornbread I'd brought, with Ron and Hannah and my brother Tom who'd driven down from Allentown. It was the best chili of his life. Better than 1989. Better than the wake. Better than every Super Bowl Sunday I can remember. I think I knew it was the best because he made it. He's been on Alevia Amla for 7 months now. He's on his sixth bottle. He keeps two in his cabinet because, in his words, "I'm not running out of this stuff." His hands aren't perfect. They tremble a little when he's tired. He still drops things sometimes. But the burning is mostly gone. The patches of numbness are smaller. He sleeps through the night four or five times a week. He's making chili once a month. He's fixing things again. He's holding Hannah's baby, my grandson, who was born in February, with both hands and a steadiness I wasn't sure he'd ever have back. If you're reading this and you know a Walt, somebody whose hands have been letting them down, somebody who's been told it's just neuropathy and here's a pill, somebody whose tingling or burning or numbness is quietly shrinking their life into a smaller version of itself, here's what I'd say. Look up Alevia Amla. Read about it. Read about what it does and what it doesn't do. Read the research on amla and nerve cell function. Read the research on mitochondria and AMPK and oxidative stress. You don't have to take my word for it. The 90 day money back guarantee means you don't have to take anybody's word for it. You try it for 3 months and if nothing changes, you send the bottle back and you get every penny refunded. What's 3 months when the alternative is watching the person you love quietly disappear? The cumin jar is on my dad's counter right now. His hands are working. I want that for somebody else's father. Somebody else's husband. Somebody else's grandmother. Somebody else's Walt. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33 P.S. My dad keeps the bottle of Alevia next to his recipe card now. He calls it his "second recipe." He said one keeps the chili alive and the other keeps the hands alive that make it. He's not a sentimental man. That's the most sentimental thing I've heard him say since my mother died. P.P.S. The 90 day money back guarantee is the whole reason I let myself order it for him in the first place. I'd watched my mother in law throw money at supplements for a decade with no recourse. Alevia is different. If it doesn't do what they say it does, you send the bottle back and they refund you. The system that put my dad on two prescriptions with two different side effect profiles never offered him a refund when those pills failed. Alevia does. That tells you everything about who actually stands behind what they make. P.P.P.S. They're a small operation and they go in and out of stock. I keep two bottles in my own house now because I'm 56 and Ron is 58 and I have no interest in waiting until something cracks. If you have someone in your life whose hands or feet are quietly betraying them, get on it. Not next month. Now. Every Saturday my dad couldn't open the cumin jar was a Saturday he didn't get back. Don't wait for your own cumin jar moment to tell you what you already know. P.P.P.P.S. Don't forget about the 90 day money back guarantee. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33