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A stranger at a diner counter in Pennsylvania told me, last spring, why he had been quiet about something for two years. I went home that night and realized I had been quiet about the same thing. I'm fifty-eight. My name is Tom. I live outside Harrisburg with my wife, Linda. We have three kids, all grown — a daughter in Pittsburgh, a son in Baltimore, a son still in college in Ohio. I run a small commercial flooring business that I started with my younger brother twenty-nine years ago. He passed seven years ago, and I have been running the business on my own since. I'm telling you that because, on paper, the last seven years have been the best of my career. The business is doing well. We took on three new accounts last year. I have eleven full-time employees and good people running the day-to-day. I have more time for Linda. More time for the kids. More time for the boat we have on the Susquehanna that we hardly used for the first twenty-five years. On paper, this is what working hard for thirty years is supposed to get you. I want to tell you about the gap I have been quietly living in for the last two years. The gap between the chart says you're fine and the body you live in doesn't feel fine. I have, at fifty-eight, no medical conditions. My annual physical is clean. My bloodwork is in the ranges my doctor likes. My blood pressure is good. My cholesterol is in range. My weight is what it has been for fifteen years. I take no prescriptions. I drink less than I used to. I sleep about seven hours a night most nights. I eat the way someone whose wife reads cookbooks for fun eats. Which is to say I eat better than I would on my own. There is no chart-level problem to fix here. There has just been, for about two years, a quiet daily sense that the body I have been doing all of this with is not quite delivering the way it used to. Let me try to tell you what off actually felt like. Because the words fatigue and low energy don't quite get at it. It felt like waking up at six on a Tuesday morning, well-rested by every objective measure, and lying in bed for another fifteen minutes before I could convince myself to swing my legs out. It felt like coming home from a jobsite at five-thirty — not even from a hard day — and finding myself sitting in the truck in the driveway for ten minutes before I could go inside and be a husband. It felt like Linda telling me about something at dinner and me laughing a beat too late because the second wind I used to have at dinner wasn't quite there. It felt like the boat on the river sitting at the marina because the effort of getting it out for a Saturday was a little more effort than I had been able to summon for the last two summers. It felt like the slow, quiet awareness that the man at the head of our table on Sunday afternoons was not quite the same man my family had grown up with. None of it was alarming on its own. Each of these things, taken on its own, is what every fifty-eight-year-old in America is dealing with quietly. I knew that. I waved it off. I waved it off for two years. The thing I want to tell you about happened in May. About a year ago. I was on a four-day trip up to Scranton for a contract on a hospital renovation. I had been making this drive once or twice a month for about eight months. There is a small diner I had been stopping at on the way back, off Route 81, where the coffee is good and the cook makes a Reuben I have not been able to find anywhere else. I stopped on a Wednesday afternoon. I was tired in a way I do not associate with the drive home — the drive home is usually when I unwind. I was, frankly, glad to sit down on the counter stool and not be moving for half an hour. There was a man at the next stool when I sat down. I would guess he was in his mid-sixties. He was wearing the kind of work shirt men in their sixties wear when they have been doing physical work for a long time. And he had the kind of forearms that go with that. He had finished his lunch and was working on coffee. We exchanged the small nods men exchange at diner counters and didn't talk for the first few minutes. What started the conversation was that the waitress brought me my coffee and called me by name, because I had been coming in often enough that she knew it. The man at the next stool looked over and said, Tom? It was a man named Walter who had been the foreman on the very first commercial flooring contract my brother and I ever bid on, twenty-eight years ago. I had not seen him in probably eighteen years. He had retired around the time we were getting big. We caught up for about twenty minutes the way men in their fifties and sixties catch up. Which is mostly about the children and grandchildren and the small ordinary things. Then he asked me how I was doing. Not the way people usually ask. He asked it the way someone asks who has known you in a different chapter of your life and is curious whether you are still that person. I told him the business was doing well. I told him about Linda and the kids. I told him about the boat. He nodded. He was quiet for a moment. He said, that's not what I asked you. I sat with that for a minute. I took a long pull of coffee. I told him, more honestly than I would have told anyone who hadn't known me when I was thirty, that I had been doing well in every measurable way. And that I had not been feeling, for about two years, like the man I had been when he and I had worked together. He nodded. He didn't interrupt. When I was done, he said: I had the same thing happen to me at fifty-six. I didn't say anything to anybody about it for almost two years. It is a peculiar thing to live with. I asked him what he meant. He said: Numbers were fine. Doctor said I was fine. I felt like somebody had quietly let half the air out of the tire and I didn't know how to bring it up because there was nothing to point at. I asked him what he had done. He said he had finally said something to his wife. He said his wife had told him to talk to his doctor, which he had done. He said his doctor had told him the same thing his last doctor had told him. Which was that he was fine. Then he said something I have been thinking about since. He said, and I want to be careful here because he was being careful: Somewhere around month four of being told I was fine, I added one small thing to my mornings. I do not want to overstate anything. But I have been doing it for three years now and I have been quieter about that quiet feeling for most of those three years. He told me he was on no prescriptions. And that he had called his pharmacist before adding it. He told me the small thing he had added was a beetroot capsule. He told me he had picked a brand called Rosabella because they cold-pressed the beetroot at low temperatures rather than processing it with heat. And that the small decision the company had made about the cold-press had told him something about who he was dealing with. He said it casually. He wasn't selling me anything. He was a man finishing his coffee, telling me what he had been doing, the way men that age tell you things — without performance, just the facts of a life. We talked about the kids for another fifteen minutes and he got up to leave. He paid for both of our coffees. He shook my hand the way he used to shake my hand at the end of a long day on a jobsite twenty-eight years ago. Which is to say firmly and briefly and with the kind of eye contact that means take care of yourself. I drove the rest of the way home thinking about Walter at the diner counter. I drove the next two days thinking about Walter at the diner counter. By the weekend, I was thinking about what I was going to do. I am, by nature, a careful man. I run a business. I have been responsible for eleven people's paychecks for a long time. I do not buy things I have not researched. And I do not add things to my body without understanding what I am adding. I went home and I started reading. I read for almost three weeks. I read about beetroot. I read about the deep crimson pigment — it is called betalain, the color that stains your cutting board for three days. I read about the long, patient relationship the research community has had with this vegetable for decades. In the context of supporting healthy circulation, cardiovascular wellness, and the body's own cellular energy. 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. I read about cold-pressing, the chemistry of why it mattered, and the small decision Rosabella had made. 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 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. At fifty-eight I have come to pay attention to the small decisions companies make when no one is watching. Because those decisions tell you everything. The other thing I liked was the simplicity. Two capsules in the morning with a glass of water. I am fifty-eight. I run a business. I have a wife and three grown kids and a boat I want to use more. 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 called my pharmacist. His name is Dale. He is the pharmacist at the small independent pharmacy in our town. I have been filling things there occasionally for the better part of twenty years. I called him for a specific reason. I take no prescriptions. I am, at fifty-eight, on nothing. I called anyway. I called because I am a careful person. 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 keep doing what I was doing. 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 patients made the call I had just made. I want to say something now that I am going to say several times in this letter. 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 flooring contractor in Pennsylvania wrote in a letter you read on the internet. The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether what you are adding is safe. I was adding something to nothing and I still made the call. The two minutes it takes to ask 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 what Walter had told me 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 and to be honest with myself about the result. What I noticed, I noticed slowly, in pieces I didn't connect at the time. The first thing I noticed, around week four, was the morning truck. I have, for the better part of two years, been sitting in my truck for ten minutes after I got home before going inside. Not because there was anything wrong. Just because I needed the ten minutes. Around week four, I came home on a Wednesday evening, parked the truck, got out, and went inside. I didn't realize until I was halfway through dinner that I had not sat in the driveway. I didn't say anything to Linda about it. I made a quiet note. The second thing I noticed, in week six or seven, was a Saturday morning at the boat. I had not had the boat out, except for two short afternoons, in two summers. That Saturday, I got up at seven, got the cooler ready, drove the trailer down to the marina, got the boat out on the river by nine, and stayed out until two. I did not feel, when I got home, like I had spent the day collapsing into myself. Linda asked me how it had been. I told her it had been good. She asked me whether I wanted to do it again the following Saturday. I said yes. We went out again. We went out three Saturdays in a row. The third thing I noticed was at a Sunday dinner with my older two kids and their families, in early summer. I was at the head of the table the way I usually am. Somewhere in the middle of dinner my daughter — the one who lives in Pittsburgh and who notices things — looked across at me and said: Dad, you seem like yourself. I asked her what she meant. She said: I don't know. You just do. We talked about something else. I have been thinking about that sentence ever since. She had not said it the previous summer, or the summer before that, or the summer before that. She said it that Sunday. 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. I had finally said something to Linda about how I had been feeling. That alone was a change I had been avoiding for two years. I had started walking again — not far, just half an hour after dinner — which I had stopped doing. I had started getting to bed at the same time most nights instead of letting the evening drift. I had been making a point of getting the boat out, which was itself a change. There were several things changing at once, the way there are when a person decides, finally, to pay attention to something they had been waving off. All I am telling you is that I added one thing to a long list of things I was already doing. I 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 the end of the summer. 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 someone — a man or a woman, anywhere in your fifties or sixties — and you have been living, the way I had been living, in the quiet gap between the chart says you're fine and the body you live in doesn't feel fine, I want to say a few things to you carefully. I do not know you. I do not know your bloodwork, or your situation, 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. 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 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. I called Dale before adding it to nothing. You should make the call too, whether you are on something or on nothing. Especially if you are on any prescription medication for blood pressure, cholesterol, or anything cardiovascular. In that case, the call is non-negotiable. The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether it makes sense for you. I am a flooring contractor in Pennsylvania. 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. Which means 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. — Tom 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, 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 counter next to the coffee. Linda keeps the coffee pot full. That is the rhythm of our morning at fifty-eight and at fifty-six. And we have earned a simple one. 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 anything for blood pressure or cholesterol 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 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 thing Walter said to me at the diner counter has been with me for a year now. I felt like somebody had quietly let half the air out of the tire and I didn't know how to bring it up because there was nothing to point at. He said it because he had been carrying it for two years before he finally said it to anybody. I had been carrying it for two years too. Men our age don't talk about this kind of thing. We talk about the kids, and the business, and the weather, and the price of beef. We don't talk about the quiet feeling that something is not quite the same inside us as it used to be. I am writing you this letter because Walter said it to me at a diner counter. And because saying it broke something open in me that needed to be broken open. I hope someone says something like that to you. If they don't, I hope this letter does. I hope you find your way through the quiet gap. I hope, in a year from now, somebody at your own table says you seem like yourself. And you know they are right. I hope that for you. That is the whole reason I wrote this. — T. 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