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I'm fifty-eight, and for about two years I have been giving each day a little less than I used to give it. Last fall, a man eighteen years older than me showed me what I had been doing without showing me anything. I'm fifty-eight years old. My name is Greg. I run a custom-cabinetry business out of a shop in the small town outside Pittsburgh where my wife, Linda, and I have lived for thirty-one years. I started the business at thirty-five. I have nine people who work for me now. Most of them have been with me for more than ten years. Two of them have been with me for more than twenty. We make kitchens, mostly. Built-ins. Custom libraries. The kind of work where every piece is sized to a house and every piece has to fit. I am telling you that because the wood I use matters to me, and the place I buy the oak I use most often is a small Amish sawmill in Holmes County, Ohio, run by a family I have been buying from for twenty-three years. The man who runs the sawmill is named Samuel. Samuel is seventy-six. The story I want to tell you is about a Tuesday in September last fall, when I drove out to Samuel's mill for a load of oak, and I came home with a question I had been avoiding for almost two years. I want to back up. For about two years before that Tuesday, I had been quietly noticing that the body I had been running my cabinetry business with was not delivering the way it used to deliver. Not failing. Not declining in any clinical sense. Just less. I had been getting to the shop a little later. Six-thirty had become seven. Seven had become seven-fifteen on the days I didn't have an early install. I had been finishing the day a little earlier. Five had become four-thirty. Four-thirty had become whatever the guys can finish without me. The Saturday work I used to do — drawings, quotes, the small administrative catch-up — had quietly stopped happening. I was sitting on the couch with my coffee from nine until almost noon on Saturdays. The drawings sat in the truck. I had stopped going down into the basement on Sunday afternoons to work on small projects for the house. The deck rail had been waiting for me for a year. The trim around the basement windows had been waiting for two. I had been going to bed by nine-thirty. I had been a man who could read until eleven and get up at six and feel like myself. That stopped, in small pieces, over the course of the year I turned fifty-seven. I was not sick. I was not declining in any measurable way. My annual physical at fifty-seven was clean. My bloodwork was where my doctor wanted it. My blood pressure was good. My cholesterol was in range. My weight was where it had been for ten years. I take no prescription medications. There was no chart-level problem. There was just a man who had been giving the days a little less than he used to. I had been telling myself it was age. I had been telling myself it was twenty-three years of running a business. I had been telling myself it was the stress, the sleep, the long winter we had had two years in a row. I had not been telling myself the simpler thing, which was that I had been quietly accepting a level of less that I would have been embarrassed by at fifty. The Tuesday in September was a normal trip out to Samuel's. I drive out two or three times a year. The drive is about three and a half hours each way. I load the truck with quarter-sawn white oak boards I have ordered ahead, I have lunch with Samuel and his sons, I drive home. I have been doing this run since 2001. I have known Samuel since the year he turned fifty-three. That last Tuesday, I drove in around eleven. Samuel was at the back of the mill, helping his oldest son and one of his grandsons get a long board off the carriage. He was wearing the same kind of work shirt and work pants he has worn for twenty-three years. He looked, from across the yard, exactly like he had looked when I had first started buying from him. He saw me, walked over, shook my hand, and we went into the small office at the front of the mill to look at the bill of materials. After we were done with the paperwork, he asked me whether I wanted to walk back and see a piece of curly maple they had been holding for me. I said yes. We walked the length of the mill yard together. It is about a quarter mile from the office to the back lot where they were holding the maple. The yard is gravel. The day was cool. We walked at the pace Samuel was walking, which was, I noticed about halfway back, a pace I was working harder to keep than I should have been. I am fifty-eight. Samuel is seventy-six. I was working to keep his pace. We looked at the curly maple. Samuel and his son loaded it on the truck with the oak. Samuel and I went back to the small house behind the office where his wife had laid out lunch. I sat at the table across from Samuel. He ate the way he has eaten for twenty-three years, which is with the appetite of a man who has been working with his hands since he was twelve years old. I ate the way I had been eating for about a year, which was not much, because most days my afternoon energy had been running thin and I had been keeping lunches small. About halfway through the meal, Samuel — who is a quiet man and does not say much at lunch — looked at me across the table and said, in his careful English, Greg, you are not yourself today. I told him I had been tired. He said: for how long. I told him: for about a year. Maybe two. He chewed for a while. He is a man who does not rush a sentence. He said: what does your doctor say. I told him my bloodwork was good. My blood pressure was good. Everything was where my doctor wanted it. There was nothing to fix. He nodded. He took another bite. He chewed. He swallowed. He said one thing more, and then he changed the subject. He said: Greg, the body that gets you through a long day is the body you are paying attention to. If you have stopped paying attention to it, it will stop getting you through a long day. He ate the rest of his lunch. We talked about the maple, and about a chair he had been making for his grandson, and about the price of fuel. I drove the three and a half hours home thinking about Samuel walking the length of his mill yard at seventy-six. I drove the rest of that week thinking about it. By the weekend, I had started reading. I am the kind of man who has been ordering oak from the same sawmill for twenty-three years. I am not a man who jumps at the next thing. I read carefully, slowly, the way I read a set of plans for a kitchen that I am about to build. I read for almost three weeks. I read about cellular energy. I read about the slow, invisible decline in the body's machinery that starts somewhere in the mid-forties and accelerates, in small increments, through the fifties and sixties. I read about the long, patient relationship the cardiovascular research community has had with various plants and compounds, in the context of supporting healthy circulation and the body's own cellular energy. I read about beetroot specifically. I read about the deep crimson pigment called betalain — the color that stains your cutting board for three days. I read about the dietary nitrates that are naturally present in the root. I read about the decades of careful, patient research the cardiovascular community has been accumulating on this vegetable, in people whose numbers are already in the range their doctors want them in. None of what I read was a fireworks story. It was the opposite of one. The language being used in the careful corner of the research conversation was supports healthy circulation, supports cardiovascular wellness, supports the body's own cellular energy — in people whose numbers are already in range. Not fixes anything. Not replaces what your doctor has you on. Not gives you your forty-year-old body back. That was the language I had been looking for and had not been finding in the supplement aisle at the drugstore. I picked one of the brands I had read about, a small company called Rosabella, and I picked it for one specific reason. The betalain pigment is heat-sensitive. That is the chemistry of the molecule. If you process beetroot the standard way, with heat, you lose some of the compound to the heat. Rosabella decided to cold-press the root at low temperatures because they wanted as much of the compound as possible to make it from the field into the capsule. That is a slower way to make a supplement. It costs them more. I have been a cabinetmaker for twenty-three years. I have spent twenty-three years paying attention to the small decisions craftsmen make when no one is watching. The cold-press told me something about who was making the supplement. The other thing I liked was the simplicity. Two capsules in the morning with a glass of water. I am fifty-eight and I run a business. I am not interested in a protocol that requires its own shelf. Now I want to tell you about the call I made before I started taking it. I take no prescription medications. I am, at fifty-eight, on nothing. I called my pharmacist anyway. His name is Bill. He is the pharmacist at the small pharmacy in our town. I have been buying my multivitamin from him for fifteen years. I called him because I am a careful man and because I wanted somebody who knew what was on my chart to confirm that adding even a beetroot capsule to nothing was the right thing to do at my age. He pulled up my profile. Confirmed I was on nothing. Told me he had no concerns. Told me to call him back if I ever started 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 customers made the call I had just made. I want to say something now, plainly. If you are on any prescription medication at all — anything for blood pressure, anything for cholesterol, anything cardiovascular, anything you take regularly — please do not skip the call I am about to ask you to make. Call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add anything new to what you are already taking. Do not, under any circumstances, change a prescription on your own on the strength of what some cabinetmaker outside Pittsburgh wrote in a letter you read on the internet. The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether the supplement is safe for you. I called Bill. I was adding something to nothing and I still made the call. The two minutes are worth every second. I was adding it. I was not stopping anything. I was not adjusting anything. I had nothing to stop or adjust. I started on a Monday. The first two weeks I felt nothing in particular. I had read enough alongside Samuel's sentence about paying attention to know that bodies are different. Some people notice something within the first week or two. Some people take much longer. Some people don't notice much at all. I was prepared to land in any of those camps. What I noticed, I noticed slowly. The first thing I noticed, around week four, was the morning at the shop. I had been getting to the shop around seven for the last year. Around week four, I caught myself unlocking the shop door at six-thirty on a Tuesday and looking at my watch and realizing I had not been the first one in the door at six-thirty in over a year. I didn't make a thing of it. I had read enough not to make a thing of one observation. The next Tuesday, I was there at six-thirty again. The Tuesday after that, at six-twenty. The second thing I noticed, in week six or seven, was the Saturday drawings. I came down to the kitchen on a Saturday morning, had my coffee, finished it, and got up at eight to go out to the truck and bring in the folder of drawings that had been sitting there for nine months. I worked on them at the kitchen table from eight-thirty to about one. Linda walked through the kitchen sometime around ten and didn't say anything. She brought me a sandwich at noon and didn't say anything then either. She is a quiet woman and she notices things. That afternoon I finished two drawings I had been putting off and started a third. The third thing I noticed was the basement. In early November, about ten weeks in, I went down into the basement on a Sunday afternoon to look for a particular hand plane I had been meaning to use for a project at work. I found the hand plane, and then I noticed the trim around the basement windows that had been waiting for me for two years, and I noticed I had brought a sandwich and a cup of coffee down with me, and I noticed the radio was on in the corner the way it used to be when I worked down there on Sundays. I worked on the basement window trim for the rest of that afternoon. I worked on it again the following Sunday. By Christmas it was done. Linda noticed without saying anything. She is a quiet woman, as I said. The fourth thing I noticed was the next trip out to Samuel's. I drove out in February for another load. The drive was about three and a half hours, the same as it always is. When I got to the mill, Samuel was at the back of the yard with his sons. He saw me, walked over, shook my hand. We walked the length of the yard together to look at a new run of oak. I walked at his pace. I did not have to work to keep his pace. I noticed it about halfway back to the office and I did not make a thing of it. We sat down to lunch. Samuel ate the way he eats. I ate the way I had been eating before the year of the small lunches. About halfway through the meal he looked at me across the table and said, in his careful English, Greg, you are more yourself than you were last time. I told him I had been doing some of what he had told me to do, which was paying attention to the body that gets me through a long day. He nodded. He did not ask me what specifically I had been doing. He is not a man who needs the details. He said: the body responds when you pay attention to it. It also stops responding when you stop. Keep paying attention. We talked about the oak. I want to be careful with what I am telling you, because I am writing this to people I do not know and I do not want to overstate anything. I am not telling you Rosabella did any of those things on its own. I had been doing the walking around the shop the way I always do. I had been getting to bed earlier in the months after Samuel — I had been protecting my sleep more carefully, on the strength of Samuel's sentence about paying attention. I had been eating more carefully. Linda had noticed me reading the labels on a few things and had quietly adjusted what was in the refrigerator. I had been generally, in small ways, paying more attention. There were several things changing at once, the way there are when a man finally decides to stop avoiding the things he has been quietly avoiding. All I am telling you is that I added one small thing to a long list of things I was starting to do again, kept everything else exactly the same, and a stretch of months followed that was qualitatively different from the two years that had preceded it. That is the honest version. I would not trust anyone who gave you a cleaner one. I went into my regular annual physical at fifty-eight, about six months after I had started. My bloodwork was where my doctor wanted it, in the same ranges it had been the year before. She did not ask me whether I had changed anything. I told her anyway. She told me to keep doing what I was doing. That is the whole story. If you are a man or a woman, somewhere in your fifties or sixties, and you have been quietly accepting a level of less the way I had been quietly accepting it for two years, I want to say a few things to you carefully. I do not know you. I do not know your bloodwork or your medications or what your doctor has said. Bodies are different. Some people notice something within the first week or two of adding something like this. Some people take much longer. Some people don't notice much at all. That is the honest version, and anyone offering you a cleaner one is selling you harder than I am. Here is how I think about Rosabella 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, cardiovascular wellness, and 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 anything your doctor has you on. It is one small thing you add to the long list of things you are already doing for yourself. Please call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add it. If you are on any prescription medication for blood pressure, cholesterol, or anything cardiovascular at all, this is non-negotiable. I called Bill, and I was adding something to nothing. You should make the call too, whether you are on something or on nothing. The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether it makes sense for you. I am a cabinetmaker outside Pittsburgh. I am not the person to ask. Your pharmacist or your doctor is. The company has a ninety-day satisfaction guarantee. If you are not satisfied — for any reason at all, including just changing your mind — they refund you. It is not tied to your bloodwork. It is not tied to anything you have to prove to anybody. If you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied. That is the whole policy. The beets are grown on a small operation that harvests 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. — Greg P.S. I want to come back to the cold-press for a second. The betalain pigment — the deep red, the part the research community keeps circling back to — is heat-sensitive. Process beetroot the standard way, with heat, and you lose some of the compound to the heat. Rosabella chose the slow way. Cold-press, low temperatures, more of the compound through to the capsule. It costs them money and time. They made the choice anyway. At fifty-eight, after twenty-three years of running a custom-cabinetry shop, I pay attention to the small decisions craftsmen and companies make when no one is watching. Those decisions tell you everything. P.P.S. Two capsules. 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. I keep the bottle on the kitchen counter next to my coffee. Linda has the coffee waiting at six. The bottle is there. I take the two capsules. I am out the door by six-thirty. That is the rhythm of my morning at fifty-eight. We have earned a simple one. P.P.P.S. I am going to say it one more time. Please. Call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add anything new to what you are already taking. Especially if you are on anything for blood pressure or cholesterol or anything cardiovascular. They have your whole picture. I have written you a letter. There is a difference, and the difference matters. The two minutes it takes to ask are worth every second. P.P.P.P.S. The guarantee, again, in case you skimmed. Ninety days. Any reason at all. You do not have to prove a single thing — not to them, not about your numbers, not about how you feel. If you tried it and you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied, and 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 Samuel said to me at the table that Tuesday in September — the body that gets you through a long day is the body you are paying attention to — has been with me every day since. I am not a man who quotes other men. I am a cabinetmaker, not a writer of letters. But Samuel said that sentence over a meal his wife had laid out for us, after we had walked the length of his mill yard together at the pace of a seventy-six-year-old that I was working too hard to keep, and the sentence broke something open in me that needed to be broken open. I do not know what your equivalent of Samuel is. Maybe it is a man you buy lumber from. Maybe it is a woman you sit next to at a meeting. Maybe it is your own father. I hope you have one. I hope they say something quiet to you the way Samuel said it to me. And I hope, in a year from now, you find yourself walking the length of your own yard at a pace you would not have been able to hold a year earlier, and you know it when you are. I hope that for you. That is the whole reason I wrote this. — G. https://track.tryrosabella.com/14309c20-4d60-44e3-9565-5ba6bb358986 DISCLAIMER 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.