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I was sitting in a Denny's parking lot in Bowling Green, Kentucky at 7:14 in the morning when my phone rang and my sister told me she was alive but she didn't know how. That's the sentence I keep coming back to. She didn't say I'm in the hospital. She didn't say I had a stroke. She said I'm alive but I don't know how, and the way she said it, with this thin reedy quality I'd never heard come out of her before, is the reason I'm writing this 11 months later instead of going about my Tuesday. My name is Lorraine. I'm 61 years old. I live in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, about 45 minutes south of Louisville. I taught third grade for 32 years at the same elementary school. I retired in May. My husband Phil drives a route truck for a uniform company and is gone 4 days a week. My sister Brenda is 4 years younger than me. She lives outside Indianapolis with her husband Dean. She works as an office manager for a dental practice. She's the kind of person who keeps the family birthdays in a paper book even though she has a phone. She's the one who organizes Thanksgiving and remembers what kind of pie our father liked and calls me on Sunday afternoons just to talk about nothing. She was 57 the morning she called me from that hospital bed. I want to be clear about something before I go any further. Brenda is not a person who has ever taken her health for granted. She walks. She doesn't smoke. She gave up sweet tea in 2013. She does the things you're supposed to do. What she had was high blood pressure. That's all. She had been managing it with a pill her doctor prescribed when she was 51. That was the whole story. She had been to the ER once before, the year prior, for what they called a "spell." Lightheaded. Pressure was through the roof. They adjusted her medication, sent her home, told her to monitor it. She did monitor it. She bought one of those little arm cuffs from CVS and she'd take her reading every morning before her coffee and write it down in a spiral notebook. The numbers were never quite where they should be. She'd tell me sometimes on those Sunday calls. She'd say, "It was 158 over 94 this morning, Reenie." She had been calling me Reenie since she could talk. I'd say, "Are you taking your pill?" She'd say, "Of course I'm taking my pill." And we'd talk about the grandbabies. The morning she called me from the hospital was a Tuesday in March. I had gotten in the car early to meet a friend named Patty for breakfast on her way through town. We were going to eat at the Denny's off the interstate because that's where you eat breakfast when you're 61 and your friend is driving from Nashville to Cincinnati to see her son and you both want a booth and bottomless coffee and nobody bothering you for two hours. I was sitting in the parking lot with my engine off, watching the sun come up over the gas station next door, waiting for Patty's truck to pull in. My phone rang. The caller was Brenda's husband Dean, which was wrong, because Dean does not call me. Dean is one of those men who lets his wife handle all the relationships. If Dean was calling me at 7:14 on a Tuesday morning, something had happened. I answered and Dean said, "She's okay, Lorraine. She's okay, but I'm putting her on." Then Brenda was on the phone, and her voice did that thin reedy thing. She said the right side of her face went numb in the bathroom mirror. Her arm felt heavy when she tried to brush her teeth. Dean heard her drop the toothbrush on the tile and came running. By the time the ambulance got there she had slurred two sentences trying to tell the paramedics her own name. The pressure reading they took at the ER was 198 over 116. They told her it was a TIA. A mini stroke. She got her speech back in the ambulance. She got the feeling back in her face by the time they had her in a bed. A nurse who took the reading said the words "you got lucky" out loud. Brenda said it through the phone twice. "I got lucky, Reenie. I got lucky." I sat in that Denny's parking lot and I watched the sun come over the gas station and I felt something shift in my body that I had been ignoring for probably 4 years. Because here's the thing nobody knew until I sat in that parking lot. I was Brenda. I was Brenda in slow motion. I had been Brenda for years. My pressure had been creeping up since I was 55. My doctor had me on a low dose of something called amlodipine and told me to watch my salt and gave me a pamphlet. The same pamphlet they gave Brenda. I had been taking the pill. I had been watching my salt. My morning numbers were not where they were supposed to be either, and I had been doing what people do when they're afraid, which is just not looking at the numbers very hard. I had a cuff from CVS too. Same brand as Brenda's. I'd take a reading and if it was bad I'd take another reading 5 minutes later and tell myself the second one was the real one. I had been telling myself things. That the headaches behind my eyes in the afternoons were because I was looking at screens too much. That the cold in my fingertips at night was just what 61 felt like in March. That my heart pounding when I bent over to tie my shoes was normal because I was, and I want to use the polite word here, a soft 61 year old woman who needed to lose some weight. None of those things are normal. I knew none of those things were normal. I just didn't want to be Brenda. And then Brenda was on the phone telling me her face had gone numb in the bathroom mirror. I drove home that morning instead of having breakfast with Patty. I texted her in the parking lot and said family emergency. I drove the 16 miles back to my house and I walked in the front door and I sat at my kitchen table and I did not move for almost an hour. Then I got up and I called my doctor's office and I asked them what else there was. The receptionist put me through to a nurse practitioner named Sheila who I had been seeing for years. Sheila and I had a long history. She had walked me through perimenopause and she had walked me through my mother's diagnosis and she was the kind of medical person who actually talked to you like a human being. I told her what had happened to Brenda and I told her my numbers had been bad too and I told her I needed to know what else there was beyond what I was already doing. Sheila said something I didn't expect. She said, "Lorraine, the medication you're on, it's a tool. It's not the whole story. The reason your numbers haven't moved is because we're treating the pressure, but we're not talking to the switch." I said, what switch. She said, "The switch on the inside of your blood vessels. The one that's supposed to tell them to relax." And then she explained something to me at the kitchen table over the phone for about 20 minutes that I had never had explained to me by any doctor in my entire life. The inside of your blood vessels has a living lining, and on that lining there are receptors. Tiny switches. One of them is called TRPV1. When that switch gets activated, it tells the lining to release a molecule called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is the signal that tells your blood vessels to relax and open up. When the switch is firing the way it's supposed to, your vessels stay flexible. Blood flows freely. Pressure stays where it should. The problem, Sheila said, is that for most people on blood pressure medication, that switch isn't firing anymore. It's gotten quiet. The lining gets tired. The signal weakens. The vessels stay tight. Blood has to push harder to get through. The pressure goes up. The blood pressure pill, she said, forces the vessels to relax through a different mechanism. It bypasses the switch entirely. It opens the vessels using a different door. Which is fine. It works. It moves your numbers. But it doesn't do anything to wake the switch back up. Which means underneath the medication, the switch keeps getting quieter. The lining keeps getting tireder. And that's why so many people on blood pressure medication have to keep adjusting their dose upward as the years go on. Not because the medication stops working. Because the switch keeps fading. She said this very plainly and not in a sales way and in fact she said she wasn't recommending I stop my medication, just that I should be thinking about the switch too. I said, what activates the switch. And she said, well, that's where it gets interesting. She told me about a pepper. I'm going to admit something. When she said the words "cayenne pepper" on the phone that morning, I almost laughed. Not because I thought she was lying. Because I had spent 4 years on a prescription medication for high blood pressure and the most basic conversation about the actual mechanism of my disease was happening with a nurse practitioner because of a phone call from a hospital bed in Indianapolis. I almost laughed and then I almost cried. Sheila said the active compound was called capsaicin. She said it was the heat compound in cayenne, the thing that makes a pepper burn. She said capsaicin was the most studied natural activator of the TRPV1 switch in the human body. She said the research suggested that consistent activation of TRPV1 supported the lining's ability to produce nitric oxide. Which meant, in plain English, that the switch could come back on. The vessels could remember how to relax on their own. I told her I had heard of cayenne. I told her I had even bought a bottle of cayenne capsules from the drugstore once, years ago, and the heartburn was so bad I threw the rest away on day three. Sheila said yes, she had heard the same thing from a dozen patients. She said the standard cayenne capsules had two problems. The first was the burn, which most people couldn't get past. The second was absorption. Most cayenne products on the shelf were poorly absorbed by the body. The capsaicin barely made it into the bloodstream where it needed to go. Which meant the switch never actually got activated, no matter how many capsules you took. She told me she took something called Aurivita Capsaicin Power, that she'd tried 2 other cayenne products first and not noticed much, and that this one had been different for her. She said it was a softgel rather than a capsule, which protected the stomach lining. She said it was standardized to 3mg of capsaicin per serving, which was the dosage range used in the actual clinical research. And she said it had a black pepper extract called bioperine added to it, which increased absorption of the capsaicin substantially. She said the difference between a poorly absorbed cayenne capsule and Aurivita was the difference between a switch that almost gets touched and a switch that actually fires. I wrote the name down on the back of a grocery receipt that was sitting on my kitchen table. I still have that receipt. I keep it in the drawer with my batteries because I don't know where else to put it. I'd love to tell you I ordered it that day. I didn't. I sat with the information for about 6 days. I went and saw Brenda the following weekend. I drove up to Indianapolis on Friday afternoon and I sat with her in her living room and I held her hand and we cried a little and then we did what sisters do, which is talk about everything except the thing we'd just cried about. She told me a lot of things that weekend. She told me she had been afraid to call me sometimes because she didn't want to worry me. She told me she had been having headaches like mine. She told me she had also been ignoring the cold in her fingertips. She told me she had a moment, the second before her face went numb in the mirror, where she thought, oh, this is what it feels like. She said it just like that. She said, "I thought, oh, this is what it feels like." I drove home Sunday night down 65 with that sentence in my head the entire way and I pulled into my driveway around 11 and I sat in my car and I ordered Aurivita Capsaicin Power on my phone in the dark before I even went inside. It came on Wednesday. I started taking 3 softgels every morning with my breakfast. Phil noticed the bottle on the counter and asked what it was. I told him. He said, "Whatever you say, Reenie." Phil is curious about lawnmower engines and the Cincinnati Reds and that's about it. He let me do my thing. The first 14 days, my numbers didn't really move. I want to be honest about that. My morning reading was still high. I want to say this because I think the dishonest version of these stories is when somebody says they tried something for 3 days and everything was perfect. That's not what happened. What happened in the first 14 days was something smaller. The cold in my fingertips at night got better. Not gone. Better. I noticed it the fourth night. I was lying in bed and I realized my hands were warm under the covers in a way they hadn't been in years. I had been sleeping with socks on since October. I rolled over and went to sleep without thinking too hard about it. By day 21, my hands were warm without the socks. My feet too. By day 30, the headaches behind my eyes were happening less. Maybe twice a week instead of every afternoon. By day 45, my morning reading was 142 over 88. Which is still not where it's supposed to be, but it was the lowest morning reading I had taken in over 2 years. I took it twice to be sure. Both readings were the same. By day 60, the headaches had stopped. The bag was almost empty. I ordered another one without thinking about it. I had been walking faster on my morning loop around the cul-de-sac without my heart pounding when I got back. Phil came home that Friday and asked if I'd lost weight and I said no, and he said, "Well something's different." By day 75, I called Brenda and I told her everything I'd been doing. I told her about Sheila. I told her about the switch. I told her about TRPV1 and the nitric oxide and the capsaicin and the bottle on my counter. I told her if she wanted to try it, I'd send her one. She said send it. She had been doing some reading too. Her doctor in Indianapolis hadn't said anything about a switch. I sent it that afternoon. By day 90, my morning reading was 134 over 84. By day 120, when I went in for my follow up with Sheila, my pressure in the office was 128 over 80. Sheila looked at the screen and looked at me and she didn't say anything for a second. Then she said, "Tell me what you've been doing." I told her. She wrote in my chart and we talked about the next 90 days. I drove home crying with my hands on the wheel and the radio off. I want to address some things directly because I know what you're thinking when you read something like this. You're thinking, this lady doesn't know if it was the capsaicin or the placebo effect or just paying more attention to her health. I'd say, you might be right. I'm not a doctor. I'm a retired third grade teacher. I cannot prove to you in a rigorous way that the softgels in the bottle on my counter are the reason my hands are warm or the reason my morning numbers dropped 24 points. What I can tell you is that I am 61 years old and I have lived in this body for the entire time and I know the difference between what I usually feel like and what I have felt like for the last 9 months, and the difference is not subtle and it is not in my head. You're also thinking, if this works the way I'm describing, your doctor would have told you about it. I'd say, my doctor didn't tell me. A nurse practitioner who I have known for 17 years told me. And she only told me because I called her in a moment of fear after my sister's face went numb in a bathroom mirror and I said I needed to know what else there was. None of the doctors I have seen in my life ever opened a conversation about the switch on the lining of my blood vessels. They opened conversations about a number on a chart and a pill that moves the number. That's what they're trained to do and I don't think most of them are bad people. I just think the conversation has been narrow for a very long time, and the people having broader conversations are not always the ones with MD after their name. You're thinking, a pepper. How could a pepper do anything. I'd say, I had the same thought. The first time Sheila said the words cayenne pepper I almost laughed. Then I read the actual research, and the actual research is not about the pepper. It's about a specific compound, capsaicin, that activates a specific receptor, TRPV1, that has been studied in real clinical trials with real protocols. The pepper is the delivery vehicle. The compound is the thing. And the reason most cayenne products don't work is they aren't dosed for the research and they aren't absorbed properly. The one I take is. That's the difference. Brenda has been on Aurivita for 7 months now. Her last reading was 138 over 86 and her doctor in Indianapolis has reduced her medication and is talking about reducing it further. She walks 2 miles every morning. She told me last Sunday she feels like she did in her 40s. We talk every Sunday. She still calls me Reenie. I think about that morning in the Denny's parking lot a lot. I think about what it would have been if Dean hadn't been home. I think about how the switch on the lining of her blood vessels had been getting quieter for years and nobody had ever said the word switch to her. I think about how close it got. If you have been quietly watching your own numbers creep up year after year, or you've been watching it happen to someone you love, and the only conversation you've ever had about it is the one about the medication and the salt and the pamphlet, I would say what Sheila said to me. The pill is a tool. It is not the whole story. There is a switch, and the switch can be woken up, and the body is not as broken as it looks from the outside. Aurivita Capsaicin Power is what I take. The bag has 180 softgels in it, which is 60 days of mornings, and the company offers a 120 day money back guarantee, which means you can take the entire bag and a second one and still send them back if nothing changes for you. That window of time is the same window that mattered for me. My numbers didn't really move until day 45. The headaches didn't stop until day 60. The reading I cried about in the parking lot of Sheila's office didn't happen until day 120. That's the part that mattered to me when I was deciding. There was no risk. There was just a chance. I'm 61 years old. I took the chance. My hands have been warm for 9 months. 👉 https://aurivita.co/products/cayenne-pepper-softgels P.S. Brenda asked me to mention that her doctor in Indianapolis, the one reducing her medication, did not know what she was taking when he reduced it. He just looked at her numbers. She told him after. He didn't say much. She thinks he was a little annoyed. She doesn't care. P.P.S. The 120 day guarantee is what made me try it. I want to say that plainly. I am a careful person with my money. I do not buy things off the internet on faith. The fact that I could try it for 4 months and send it back if nothing happened is the reason I clicked the button in my driveway that Sunday night. If the company didn't stand behind it, I wouldn't have. They do, so I did. P.P.P.S. Sheila is still my nurse practitioner. She still takes the Aurivita every morning. She told me to be honest and not to oversell anything, which is why I have tried not to oversell anything in this post. The softgels are not magic. They are something that, in my body and in my sister's body, appears to be doing something the medication couldn't. That's all. I hope this helps somebody. 👉 https://aurivita.co/products/cayenne-pepper-softgels

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aurivita.co

One sentence. That's all it took.

Support strong circulation today with our powerful cayenne pepper formula. 180 softgels and 60 servings per bag.