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She told me one thing before she got up to leave that I had been quietly waiting two years to hear. My name is Donna. I am sixty-four. I live outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with my husband, in a small house we have been in for thirty-one years. We have two grown daughters, both within an hour of us. I retired three years ago after twenty-eight years of working in administration at our county school board. My husband retired the year after I did, from his work at the post office. We are, on paper, comfortable. We are doing the small things that two people in their mid-sixties should be doing. I have been on a low-dose blood pressure medication for eight years. My doctor — Dr. Kim, a careful woman in her late forties whom I have been seeing for sixteen years — put me on it when I was fifty-six. My numbers had been creeping for two or three years after menopause. She and I had been talking about it for those two or three years. The afternoon she finally suggested we start something, she did not have to suggest it twice. I started the medication that week. My numbers have been in the ranges Dr. Kim wants them in ever since. Not borderline. Not perfect. In the ranges. I have been on the same low-dose for eight years. It has done exactly what she said it would do. I want to say that plainly, because the story I am about to tell you is not a story about my medication failing me. It is not a story about my blood pressure being uncontrolled. It is not a story about my doctor and me having a difficult conversation. None of those things has happened. My medication is doing its job. Dr. Kim is doing her job. I am doing my job. The story is about the quiet question I had been carrying alongside all of that for almost two years. Which was whether, on top of the medication, on top of the lifestyle work, on top of the careful annual monitoring, there was one small additional thing I could add to my mornings. Something general. Modest. Additive. Structure-function. Something that supported what my body was already doing, alongside what my medication was already doing. Without claiming to fix anything. For almost two years, I had not found anything I trusted. I had read carefully — I am a careful reader — and most of what I had read had disqualified itself. I am sixty-four. I have spent a lifetime being suspicious of things that sound too neat. I am hard to sell. None of what I had read had felt like the right shape. The Wednesday in May was an ordinary Wednesday. I had been going to the arboretum on Wednesday afternoons for about four years, since I retired. The arboretum is a small one, attached to the university. It has a rose garden, a bench overlooking the rose garden, and quiet most weekday afternoons. I had been sitting on that bench, with a book, for about a year and a half. Most weeks I was the only person on the bench. That Wednesday I was not. A woman sat down at the other end of the bench about ten minutes after I had settled in. She nodded at me. I nodded at her. She was, I would guess, about my age. Perhaps a few years older. She was wearing a light jacket and walking shoes. She had a small canvas tote bag with a paperback book and a thermos in it. She set the bag down between us on the bench and she did not say anything for a long time. We sat on the bench together for almost forty-five minutes. She read her book. I read mine. The rose garden was just starting to bloom. There was a small wind moving the smaller branches of the trees behind us. After about forty-five minutes, she closed her book. She poured herself a cup of something from her thermos. She offered me a cup. I had my own thermos, but I told her thank you. She said: the first week of May at this arboretum is the best week of the year. I have been coming to this bench on Wednesday afternoons for nine years. I said: I have been coming for four. I have never seen you here. She said: I have been coming earlier in the day. I changed my time about a year ago. She told me her name was Marion. She told me she had retired ten years ago from teaching middle school music for thirty-four years. She told me she lived in a small house with her husband about twenty minutes from the arboretum. I told her about myself. About the school board, about my daughters, about the fact that my husband and I had been on the bench-on-Wednesdays kind of life for three years and that mostly we liked it. We talked for about an hour after that, the way two women in their mid-sixties talk when they have ended up on the same bench at the same arboretum on the same Wednesday afternoon and have decided they are not going to pretend not to be there together. It was not a deep conversation. It was the kind of conversation two strangers have who recognize, without saying it, that they are at a similar place in their lives. About halfway through, Marion took something out of her tote bag and took it with her thermos. It was a small pill organizer, the kind that has the days of the week on it. I had one just like it in my own purse. She caught me looking and smiled. She said: the indignities of getting older. I asked her, in the way you ask another woman in her sixties about something you are managing yourself, what she was on. She said she had been on a low-dose blood pressure medication for twelve years. She said the same thing I would have said if she had asked me. Numbers had crept post-menopause. Her doctor had started her on something small. It had done what it was supposed to do. She had been on it ever since. I told her I had been on the same kind of medication for eight years. We talked about it for a few minutes the way women that age talk about their medications. Which is briefly and without performance. Then she said something that has stayed with me. She said: About five years ago, I added one small thing to my mornings, alongside the medication. I cleared it with my doctor before I added it. I have been doing it ever since. I asked her what she had added. She said: a beetroot capsule. There is a small company that cold-presses the beetroot at low temperatures rather than processing it with heat. The brand is called Rosabella. She told me she had picked it because her doctor had told her that how the beetroot was processed mattered for what made it from the field into the capsule, and that the cold-press had been the reason that brand had stood out to her when she was reading. She told me she had not changed anything else about what she was doing. Same medication, same dose. Same walking. Same eating. Same Wednesday afternoons at the arboretum. She told me she had simply added the one small thing. She told me she had not been pushing it on anyone. She told me her own two daughters did not know she took it. She told me she had told one woman in her book club, and that was all. She told me, almost apologetically, that she was telling me because we had been talking about the medications and it would have felt dishonest not to mention it. We sat for another twenty minutes after that, talking about other things. Around four o'clock she stood up to leave. She put her thermos away. She put her book back in her tote bag. She shook my hand at the end of the bench. She said: I hope you come back to this bench. I hope you read carefully if you decide to look into it. Please call your pharmacist before you add anything. She walked away across the lawn. I have not seen her again. I sat on the bench for another hour after she left. I went home and I started reading. I read for almost three weeks. I am a careful person. I do not add things to my body without understanding what I am adding. I read about beetroot. I read about the deep crimson pigment in the root. It is called betalain. It is the color that stains your cutting board for three days. It is also, according to a long and patient body of research the cardiovascular community has been quietly building for decades, one of the more potent antioxidants in the food supply. I read about the long, slowly built relationship the structure-function research has had with this vegetable. In the context of supporting healthy circulation. Supporting cardiovascular wellness. Supporting the body's own cellular energy. 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. It was a vegetable that has been quietly studied for a long time by careful people who were not making outlandish claims. The language being used in the careful, structure-function corner of the conversation was the language I had been quietly hoping to find. Supports healthy circulation. Supports cardiovascular wellness. Supports the body's own cellular energy. Not lowers blood pressure. Not fixes anything. Not replaces what Dr. Kim had me on. That was the language I had been waiting two years to find. I read about the cold-press, too. The chemistry is straightforward. The betalain pigment is heat-sensitive. If you process beetroot the standard way, with heat, you lose some of the compound to the heat. Rosabella cold-presses at low temperatures because they want 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. At sixty-four, after a lifetime of paying attention to who is doing what and how carefully, I have come to believe that the small decisions companies make when no one is watching tell you everything. The other thing I liked was the simplicity. Two capsules in the morning with a glass of water. I have a husband. I have a small house I am trying to keep up. I have a life I am trying to enjoy at sixty-four. I am not interested in a protocol that requires its own shelf. Now I want to tell you the most important part of this letter. Before I added it to anything I was already taking, I called my pharmacist. His name is Andrew. He has been the pharmacist at the small independent pharmacy in our town for fourteen years. I have been filling my prescriptions there for over twenty. I called him for a specific reason. Beetroot supplements and blood pressure medications can interact. The interaction is not necessarily dangerous. It is not necessarily anything. But it depends on the specific medication, the specific dose, what else you are taking, and what your prescribing physician would want for you. That is exactly the kind of small, specific, individualized question that a pharmacist or doctor can answer in two minutes. It is not a question I, as a careful patient, was going to answer on my own. I called Andrew. I told him what I was thinking about adding. I told him the brand, the dosage, the protocol. He pulled up my profile. He looked at my prescription, my dose, my history. He told me he had no concerns about adding it. He told me to take it in the morning, with my medication, the way the bottle suggested. He told me to come back to him if anything changed — if Dr. Kim adjusted my prescription, if she added anything new, or if I had any symptoms I wanted to ask about. He told me, before we got off the phone, that he wished more of his patients made the call I had just made. I want to say something now, plainly, to every reader of this letter. If you are on a blood pressure medication. If you are on any cardiovascular medication. If you are on any prescription medication at all. Please make the call. Do not change your prescription on your own. Not based on what you read in a letter from a sixty-four-year-old woman in Virginia. Not based on what you read anywhere. Do not add a supplement to a cardiovascular prescription without asking the pharmacist or doctor who knows your chart whether it is safe for you. The two minutes the call takes is the most important two minutes of your engagement with any supplement you might consider adding. I called Andrew. I would not have added anything to my prescription without that call. Neither should you. I was adding the supplement to my medication. Not stopping it. Not adjusting the dose. Not changing anything else. The medication continued, exactly as Dr. Kim had it set, throughout everything that follows in this letter. I started on a Monday. The first two weeks I felt nothing in particular. I had read enough alongside what Marion had told me to know that bodies are different. Some women 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 garden. I have a small vegetable garden in the back corner of our yard. Tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and a few rows of beans. I had been keeping it for about eighteen years. For the last two years, I had been working in the garden in twenty-minute stretches. I would weed for twenty minutes, come inside for a long rest on the couch, go back out for twenty minutes, come inside again. A morning in the garden had become a four-stretch project. The first Saturday in June, around week five, I went out at nine in the morning to plant the tomatoes. I planted ten plants. I staked them. I watered them in. I weeded the row behind them. When I came inside, the kitchen clock said eleven. I had been outside for two hours. I had not come in. I had not needed to come in. I made myself a glass of iced tea and I sat on the porch and I drank it and I did not feel like I had to lie down. I made a quiet note. I had read enough not to make a thing of one observation. The second thing I noticed, around week eight, was the stairs at the grocery store. There is a small flight of cement stairs at the side entrance of our grocery store, eight or nine steps, going down from the upper parking lot to the store. For about a year I had been holding the railing the whole way down. Not because I was afraid of falling. Because the descent had become something I did not want to do without something to hold. A Saturday morning in August, around week eight, I came out of the store with two bags and walked down those stairs without putting my hand on the railing. I did not realize I had done it until I was at the bottom. I went home and I did not say anything to my husband about it. I made a quiet note. I kept paying attention. The third thing I noticed was my Sunday call with my sister. My sister lives in Texas. We have been calling each other on Sunday afternoons for almost twenty years. For the last two years, I had been keeping our calls to twenty or twenty-five minutes. I would tell her I had to get to something, and we would say goodbye, and I would sit at the kitchen table for a few minutes feeling like the call had been the right length for me. It had not been the right length for me. It had been the length I had been able to manage. Around week twelve, on a Sunday afternoon in September, I was on the phone with her in my kitchen and I looked up at the kitchen clock and we had been talking for fifty-three minutes. We were laughing about something our father used to do that neither of us had thought about in twenty years. We talked for another fifteen minutes before either of us said anything about needing to get on with the rest of our Sunday. After we hung up, I sat at the kitchen table for a while. I had not had a Sunday call with my sister that long in two years. I had not realized I had been missing them until that one happened. I want to be careful with what I am telling you. I am not telling you Rosabella did any of those things on its own. My medication continued to do exactly what it had been doing for eight years. I had been walking. I had been eating the way someone with my numbers should eat. I had been sleeping seven hours most nights. I had been doing the careful lifestyle things Dr. Kim and I had agreed on the day she started me on the medication. I had been doing all of that more deliberately in the weeks after the bench at the arboretum. There were several things changing at once, the way there are when a person finally decides to pay attention to something they had been quietly carrying. All I am telling you is that I added one small thing to a long list of things I was already doing. I kept everything else exactly the same — including the medication my doctor has me on. And a stretch of months followed that was qualitatively different from the year that had preceded it. That is the honest version. I would not give you a cleaner one. I went into Dr. Kim's office for my regular six-month check-in about four months after I started. She took my blood pressure. She ran the bloodwork she runs. The numbers were where she wanted them, in the same ranges they had been the visit before. Not borderline. Not perfect. In the ranges. She told me to keep doing what I was doing. I told her about the beetroot. She nodded. She had no concerns about my continuing it. She told me Andrew had it in my chart already and that we were all in agreement. She told me to come back in six months. That is the whole story. If you are someone who is on a blood pressure medication that is working — and doing the careful prudent lifestyle things alongside it — and you have been quietly looking for one small additional thing to add to your mornings, the way I had been looking for two years, I want to say a few things to you carefully. I do not know you. I do not know your medication, your dose, your history, or what your doctor has said. Bodies are different. Some women notice something within the first week or two of adding something like this. Some women take much longer. Some women don't notice much at all. That is the honest version. 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 a blood pressure medication. 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, alongside everything else. Please call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add it. If you are on a blood pressure medication, or any cardiovascular medication, this is non-negotiable. I called Andrew. I would not have added anything to a prescription without that call. Neither should you. The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether the supplement is safe for you to add, given what you are already taking. I am a sixty-four-year-old retired school board administrator in Virginia. 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 blood pressure. 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. And I hope, somewhere today, Marion is sitting on her end of our bench at the arboretum, reading her book, having a quiet good afternoon. — Donna P.S. I want to come back to the cold-press for a second. The betalain pigment — the deep crimson, the part the research community keeps circling back to — 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 chose the slow way. Cold-press. Low temperatures. More of the compound through to the capsule. It costs them money. It costs them time. They made the choice anyway. At sixty-four, I have come to pay attention to the small decisions 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 blood pressure medication. I take both at the same time, in the morning, with my coffee. That has been the rhythm of my morning for almost ten months. My husband makes the coffee. We have earned a simple morning at our age. P.P.P.S. I am going to say it one more time, because I have to. 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 a blood pressure medication, a cholesterol medication, or anything cardiovascular. They have your 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. 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 thing Marion said to me before she stood up from the bench — I hope you read carefully if you decide to look into it. Please call your pharmacist before you add anything — has been with me for ten months. She said it without performance. She said it the way one woman in her sixties says something to another woman in her sixties who she has just spent two hours with on a bench at an arboretum on a Wednesday afternoon. I do not know what your equivalent of Marion is. I do not know whether you have one. Maybe it is a woman on a bench at an arboretum. Maybe it is a woman at your book club. Maybe it is a woman at the next chair at the hairdresser's. I do not know whether you have one. But if you do, and she says something quiet to you about what she has been doing for a long time, I hope you listen. And I hope you go home and read about it carefully. And I hope you make the call before you add anything. And I hope, in a year from now, you are sitting at a kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon, on a phone call with someone you love, and you look up at the clock and an hour has gone by without you noticing. I hope that for you. That is the whole reason I wrote this. — D. https://track.tryrosabella.com/feb71eaf-4594-4b50-b39e-f5e5eeea7537 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.