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By Sixty-Four It Was Taking Me a Full Minute to Get From the Edge of the Bed to the Bathroom Door. I Had Stopped Mentioning It to Anyone, Including Myself. I want to start this letter on a Tuesday morning in late April. I was in the bed at the back of our garden, the one I had planted with cosmos and zinnias and an old reliable patch of bee balm. I had been on my knees for about fifteen minutes pulling early weeds out from around the bee balm. The morning was still cool. The light was just starting to clear the maple. The dog was on the back porch watching me. I went to stand up. I could not stand up. That is not exactly right. I could stand up. I just could not stand up the way a person stands up. I put my right hand on the cedar bench next to me. I shifted my weight forward over my knees. I pushed up with my hand on the bench until my legs were under me. I steadied myself with my hand on the bench for another moment. Then I let go. That whole sequence took maybe thirty seconds. It used to take me half a second. I was sixty-four years old, in a garden I had been kneeling in for nineteen years, and I had just used a cedar bench to stand up from a flower bed. I went inside and made coffee. I did not tell my husband Dale about it. I had not been telling him about it for almost two years. I want to tell you a few things about myself, briefly, so that you know who is writing this letter. I am sixty-four. I live in Bloomington, Indiana, in a small ranch house we have lived in for thirty-one years. I worked for thirty-two years as a horticulturalist at the Bloomington Botanical Garden. I retired three years ago. I have been gardening every day of my life that the weather would let me since I was eleven. I have been married to Dale for forty-one years. We have two grown children and three grandchildren. I am not on any prescription medication. My annual bloodwork is in the ranges my doctor — Dr. Park, a careful, quiet woman I have been seeing for the last fourteen years — wants it in. I walk our neighborhood with Dale most mornings. I swim two mornings a week at the community pool. I am, by every measure that anyone has ever measured me by, a sixty-four-year-old woman in fine shape. That is the part I want you to hold while you read this. The other part I want you to hold is the bottle in our medicine cabinet. It was an over-the-counter pain reliever. I am not going to name the brand. I had been buying it at the grocery store, on the same trip as the eggs and the milk, on a quiet rotation that had become part of my life. I had been reaching for it two to three mornings a week. For a year, it had been one morning a week. For the year before that, it had been one morning every two weeks. Two years before that, the bottle had been in the cabinet because Dale's father had stayed with us during a recovery from his hip and had needed it. We had kept the bottle when he left. I had moved, slowly, over four years, from the bottle being a thing Dale's father had needed once, to the bottle being a thing I reached for two or three mornings a week. I had not told Dale. I had not told my daughter. I had not told Dr. Park, because Dr. Park had not asked, and the bloodwork had been fine, and I had not wanted to bring it up. I had also not been telling myself, in the way you do not tell yourself something you do not want to look at. I will try to describe what the mornings had been like. I would wake up. I would sit on the edge of the bed for a long minute before I would put my feet on the floor. I would put my feet on the floor and I would not stand up right away. I would stand up and I would not walk to the bathroom right away. I would walk to the bathroom in a careful, narrow way I had not walked in my forties. By the time the coffee was made — which, in our house, was at about six twenty in the morning — my body had usually opened up enough to do most of what I wanted it to do. But the mornings I had to be out in the garden early, or the mornings I had to be at the pool by seven, or the mornings the dog needed to go out before my joints had unfolded the way they needed to unfold — those mornings the bottle came down from the cabinet. I did not call any of that a problem. I called it being sixty-four. I called it forty years of working on my knees in flower beds. I called it the way a body does the small daily math of getting older. It was all those things. It was also something else. I want to be honest, here, about the day I decided to do something about it. It was a Tuesday morning at the pool, about three weeks after the morning in the garden with the bench. I had been doing my laps. I had gotten out of the pool. I was standing at the foot of the ladder, holding the rail. A woman I had seen at the pool a few times — maybe my age, maybe a year or two older — got out of the pool at the ladder next to mine. She did not hold the rail. She got out of the pool the way a person gets out of a pool. She walked to her chair. She picked up her towel. She walked to her car. She moved the way I had moved for the first fifty-eight years of my life. I stood at the foot of the ladder holding the rail and watching her drive away. I sat in the locker room for half an hour after that. I did not cry. I have never cried in a locker room. I sat there and I did the slow honest math, in my head, of the woman I had been at the pool five years ago and the woman I was at the pool that morning. I drove home. I made coffee. I sat at the kitchen table. And I said, out loud, to the dog, who has heard me say a lot of important things over the years: "I'd like to feel like myself again." That was the morning I started reading. I read for about three weeks. I am a careful reader. Thirty-two years of horticulture trains you to be suspicious of any claim about what supports a plant's growth that does not have careful research underneath it. The same suspicion applies, I have found, to claims about what supports a human body. What I was reading for, specifically, was something that might support the way a body handles the small daily inflammation that the medical research community has come to talk about, in careful structure-function language, in the context of healthy aging. I am going to be careful with my language here, because I am not a doctor. The research conversation I found was not a conversation about treating any condition. It was a conversation about supporting what the body is already trying to do. The active compound I kept reading about was a family of pigments called betalains. Betalains are one of the more potent antioxidants in the food supply. The careful research community I found was studying them in the context of supporting the body's natural antioxidant balance. Supporting the body's natural inflammatory response in healthy aging. Supporting healthy circulation. And supporting cellular wellness. In people whose numbers are in the range their doctors want them in. The careful language. Not "fixes." Not "treats." Not "reverses." Not anything about pain or disease or joints by name. Just supports. The most concentrated dietary source of betalains is beetroot. The deep red kind. The kind my grandmother used to pickle. I read about the chemistry of the betalain pigment, which is heat-sensitive. The pigment breaks down under the high temperatures that conventional processing uses, which is the cheaper and faster way to make a beetroot powder. A small company called Rosabella was cold-pressing their beetroot at low temperatures. It cost them more. It took longer. They were doing it anyway because more of the active compound survives the processing. After thirty-two years at a small botanical garden, watching small careful institutions make small careful decisions when no one was watching them, I have come to believe that the way an organization handles the slow expensive parts of its work tells you everything about whether the work is real. The other thing I liked was the simplicity. Two capsules in the morning with a glass of water. That is the entire protocol. I am sixty-four. I am not interested in another routine. Before I added anything to my mornings, I made a phone call. I have been buying a generic over-the-counter pain reliever from the small pharmacy two blocks from our house for almost a decade. I called the pharmacy on a Wednesday morning and asked the pharmacist on duty whether a beetroot supplement at the dosage on the Rosabella label would be sensible to add to my routine. Given that I was occasionally taking the OTC pain reliever I had been taking. And that I was not on any other medication. She asked me a few questions about my OTC use and how often. She told me there were no concerns at the supplement dosage on the label, given what I had described. She told me to take the capsules in the morning with food and water. I also called Dr. Park's office that afternoon and left a message with the nurse. She called me back the next morning to tell me Dr. Park had no concerns and to mention it at my next annual. Both calls together took me less than ten minutes. I want to say something now, plainly, to every reader of this letter. If you are on any prescription medication, please make the call to your pharmacist before you add anything new to your routine. If you are not on any prescription medication but you have been taking an over-the-counter pain reliever regularly, please call your pharmacist anyway. Over-the-counter pain relievers have their own profiles. Your pharmacist will tell you in two minutes whether adding a supplement to what you have been taking is sensible. I am a retired horticulturalist. I am not the person to ask. Your pharmacist is. I started on a Monday in mid-May. I put the bottle on the counter next to the coffee maker. I took the two capsules with my first sip of coffee. The first two weeks I felt nothing in particular. I had read enough, by then, to know I should not expect to. A supplement is not a drug. It does not switch on the way a drug switches on. It is something the body uses, slowly, in the work the body is already doing. I kept paying attention. I kept reaching, on the harder mornings, for the bottle in the cabinet. What I noticed, I noticed in two specific places. The first was the garden. It was a Tuesday morning in late June, about six weeks after I had started. I was in the bee balm bed again. I had been on my knees for about twenty minutes. I went to stand up. I put my hand on the cedar bench, the way I had been putting my hand on the cedar bench for two years. And then I noticed, halfway up, that my hand was not actually carrying any weight. My hand was on the bench because my hand had been on the bench every morning for two years. My legs were doing the work. I stood up. I looked at the bench. I tried it again, kneeling back down, getting back up without touching the bench at all. It was not effortless. I was not pretending I was forty. But I stood up from a flower bed, in a garden, at sixty-four, the way a person stands up from a flower bed. I sat on the bench for a long minute after that. The dog watched me from the porch. I did not say anything to Dale about it that morning. I needed to see if it would happen again the next day. It happened again the next day. It happened again the day after that. By the middle of July, I had stopped putting my hand on the bench. I had stopped thinking about putting my hand on the bench. The bench was just a bench in my garden again, where it had been for nineteen years, where I had been quietly using it as a piece of physical therapy equipment for two years without admitting it. The second thing I noticed was the bottle in the cabinet. I had been reaching for it two to three mornings a week. Over the months after I started the supplement, the mornings I reached for it got quieter and further apart. Not all at once. Not on a schedule. Not in a way I could have pointed to on a calendar. Just over time. I still reach for the bottle some mornings. There are mornings my body wants what is in that bottle and I do not see any reason not to give it to my body. The mornings I do reach for it have just gotten further apart than they were two springs ago. I am not telling you the supplement is the reason for that. I have been doing several things differently for a year. I have been moving more deliberately. I have been honest with my body in a way I had not been honest with my body for two years. I have been telling my husband when a morning is hard, which means a morning being hard does not have to live alone inside my head anymore, which is its own kind of medicine. The bottle is still in the cabinet. I expect it always will be. I just do not stand in front of the cabinet most mornings the way I used to. I want to be careful about what I am saying here. I am not telling you that Rosabella unfolded my mornings. I had been doing other things since the pool. I had been honest with myself about my body in a way I had not been honest with myself for two years. I had been moving more deliberately. I had been doing some slow stretching after my morning coffee. I had been telling Dale, finally, on quiet evenings, what the last two years had actually felt like. Something had unlocked in me at the pool that had nothing to do with a capsule on the counter. There were several things changing at once, the way there are when a careful woman finally watches another woman her age walk to her car without holding a rail. What I can tell you is that I added one small thing to a list of small things I was newly doing. I kept everything else exactly the same. And the months that followed were qualitatively different from the two years that preceded them. I went into Dr. Park's office in October for my annual. She did the bloodwork the week before. She reviewed the results with me. She did the rest of the physical. She said: "Your numbers are in the same good place they've been for years. You are moving more easily through the exam than you did last year. I do not know what you have been doing. Whatever it is, please continue." I told her about the woman at the pool. I told her about the garden bench. I told her about the bottle in the cabinet and how the mornings I reached for it had gotten further apart over the last several months. I told her about the beetroot. She nodded. She said: "The research on antioxidant support for the body's inflammatory balance is well-established. That was a sensible thing to add. Keep doing it. Come back in a year." She did not write me a prescription. She did not put anything new in my chart. She wrote down the brand name on a piece of paper for her own reference and put it in her white coat pocket. I am telling you all of this because I think you might be a woman where I was two springs ago. In a quiet two years. Reaching for a bottle in a medicine cabinet a little more often than you want to be. Putting your hand on a bench, on a counter, on a wall, on the back of a chair, when you stand up. Watching the small daily things your body used to do without thinking about them quietly become things your body has to think about. Your bloodwork fine. Your doctor kind. Your husband — if you have one — watching you, the way husbands watch, without saying anything about what he is seeing. If that has been your two years, I want to say a few things plainly. I am not telling you that beetroot will do for you what something has done for me. I don't know you. I don't know your body. I don't know what you have been taking, prescribed or otherwise. Bodies are different. Some women notice something within the first month of adding something like this. Some women take much longer. Some women don't notice much at all. What I am telling you is that there is a careful, slow, structure-function corner of the research conversation that talks about beetroot in the language I had been waiting for. Not fixes. Not treats. Just supports. In the body's natural antioxidant balance. In the body's natural inflammatory response in healthy aging. In healthy circulation. In cellular wellness. In people whose numbers are already in the range their doctors want them in. If that shape of language interests you, please make the call before you add anything. Call your pharmacist. Call your doctor's office. If you have been taking any over-the-counter pain reliever regularly — even occasionally — please tell your pharmacist what you have been taking when you call. Those medications have their own profiles, and the pharmacist who fills your prescriptions is the right person to confirm whether a supplement is sensible to add to what you have already been doing. I am a retired horticulturalist. I am not the person to ask. Your pharmacist is. The brand I added to my morning is Rosabella. 1,300 milligrams of organic beetroot per serving. Cold-pressed at low temperatures. Grown by a small farming community in Lancaster County. Two capsules with a glass of water in the morning. That is the entire protocol. It is not a fix for anything. It is not a substitute for any prescription medication, any over-the-counter remedy, or any other treatment a doctor might recommend. It is not a treatment for the small daily aches a body can have between sixty and sixty-five. It is one small thing some women add to the long list of things they are already doing for themselves, alongside everything else. P.S. Rosabella has a ninety-day satisfaction guarantee. Any reason at all. If you tried it and you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied. They refund you. That is the whole policy. I appreciated that kind of policy at sixty-four. P.P.S. They're a small operation working with a farming community in Lancaster County. The cold-pressing process takes longer than the conventional methods, so they sometimes run out between harvests. I keep an extra bottle in our cupboard now. P.P.P.S. I went back to the pool last Tuesday morning. The woman I had watched a year and a half ago was not there. I have not seen her at the pool in several months. I do not know where she went or what her life has been doing in the meantime. I did not hold the ladder rail when I got out. I walked to my chair, picked up my towel, and walked to my car. I sat in the car for a minute before I started the engine. I thought about telling her, if she ever comes back, what watching her walk to her car had done for me on a Tuesday morning in April when I was sixty-four years old and a bottle in my medicine cabinet was getting opened more often than I wanted to admit. I think, if she comes back, I will tell her. She is the closest thing to a stranger-as-mirror that I have had in my life. She does not know what she did for me. She would probably tell me, if I told her, that she does not deserve any credit. That she was just getting out of the pool. That she did not even see me. I would tell her she is wrong, and that she will have to take my word for it, because at sixty-four I have learned that some of the most important strangers in your life are the ones who never knew they were there. https://track.tryrosabella.com/cdc16426-3e48-40a7-9fad-21098084f6cf 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.