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I am fifty-two years old and I am not sick. I am not declining. I am not in any way unwell. I have just been, for about a year, running with less. I don't quite know how to start this except to say that nothing is wrong with me, and that has been the strange and frustrating part of the last year. My name is Daniel. I'm fifty-two years old. I live outside Burlington, Vermont, with my wife and our youngest daughter, who is a junior in high school and has been making it her project to remind us, with some regularity, that she is leaving in a year and a half. My older son is twenty-three and works for a small architecture firm in Boston. I'm a project manager for a regional construction company — commercial buildings, mostly, the kind of work that has me on jobsites three days a week and at a desk the other two. I have done this job, in one form or another, for almost twenty-six years. I am good at it. I like it. I expect to be doing it for another fifteen years, at least. That last sentence is the one that brought me to the place that this letter is about. About a year ago, I started noticing — not all at once, but in the slow accumulating way these things tend to happen — that the body I have been relying on for those twenty-six years was no longer quite delivering what it used to deliver. Let me try to describe it the way it actually felt, because the words fatigue and low energy don't quite get at it. I have been tired before. Everyone has been tired before. This was something quieter and steadier than tired. It was the way I'd come home on a Wednesday — not even from a hard day, just a regular jobsite day — and find that the small things I used to do automatically in the evening had become things I had to negotiate with myself about. Making dinner. Helping my daughter with whatever she needed help with for school. Going down to the basement to put the laundry through. Each of those things was still possible. They had just stopped being free. There was now a small tax on every one of them, and the tax was not exhaustion exactly. It was something I started thinking of as the cells being a little dimmer than they used to be. It was the way I'd get up on a Saturday after a full week and find that the morning — which used to be the time when I got the garage cleaned out or the lawn done or the small things on the list addressed — was now the time when I sat on the couch with my coffee for a long time before I could get vertical. Not the whole day. By noon I'd be fine. But a noticeable stretch of the morning that I had not been losing a year earlier. It was the way I'd be on a jobsite and find myself sitting in the truck at lunch a little longer than I used to, eating slower, taking a few extra minutes before I went back out. My job is not a young man's job in the strict physical sense — I'm not swinging hammers anymore, I haven't in years — but it's a moving job. On your feet, walking job to job and trailer to trailer. And the moving had started costing me a little more than it had been costing me even a year before. It was the way I'd recover from a head cold over six days now instead of three. The way a glass of wine on a weeknight, which used to be a normal thing, was now something I felt the next morning. The way the gym, which I had been good about until about eighteen months ago and which I had quietly stopped going to, now felt like a much bigger ask than it had felt the last time I'd been good about it. None of this was alarming on its own. Each of these things, taken alone, is what every fifty-two-year-old in America is dealing with quietly. I knew that. My wife knew that. My older brother, who is fifty-six and a school principal in New Hampshire, knew that. None of us were sick. None of us were declining in any clinical sense. We were just, in the small invisible way that is hard to talk about without sounding self-pitying, running with less. I have, at fifty-two, no medical conditions. My annual physical is clean. My bloodwork is in the ranges my doctor likes. 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 who is married to a registered dietitian 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 a year, a quiet daily awareness that the body's reserves are not what they were even a few years ago. I want to tell you the small thing that pushed me, finally, to actually look into this rather than continue to just notice it. It was a Saturday in March. I had finished my long coffee on the couch and gotten through enough of the morning to head out and do the things on the list. I was at the hardware store getting two boxes of screws and a particular kind of caulk my wife had asked for. There was a man in the aisle next to me whom I recognized vaguely — a contractor I had worked with on a small project about ten years ago. A man who would have been in his mid-fifties then and so would be in his mid-sixties now. His name is Walter. He was buying a bag of fertilizer and a roll of garden mesh. He looked exactly like he looked ten years ago. He still moved like a man who worked outside. We caught up briefly. He told me about a small project he had just finished for his daughter's house, which had involved him personally laying a flagstone path over a long weekend. He said it took him most of two days. He was sore on Monday but fine by Wednesday. I drove home thinking about Walter laying a flagstone path over a long weekend at sixty-six and being fine by Wednesday. I thought about my own previous weekend, which had involved exactly one task — cleaning out the gutters on the front of the house — and had wiped me out for most of Sunday. I am fourteen years younger than Walter and I had been put on the couch by my own gutters. That was the moment I decided to start paying attention. I am not, by nature, a man who chases the next thing. I have watched people I respect spend their fifties pouring money into protocols and powders and weekend retreats, and most of those people are not, as far as I can tell, in noticeably better shape than the rest of us. I lean conservative on this kind of thing. If anything I lean too conservative — my wife has been telling me for two years that I should think about supplementing more proactively given my age and family history, and I have been waving her off the way men wave their wives off. But Walter laying flagstone at sixty-six, and me on the couch after gutters at fifty-two, was the kind of small contrast that landed harder than it would have a year earlier. So I went home and I started reading. I read for almost a month. I am the kind of person who reads contracts before he signs them and reads owner's manuals before he assembles things. I was not going to add anything to my body without understanding what I was adding. I read about cellular energy. I read about the small, slow, invisible decline in the body's machinery that starts somewhere in the mid-forties for most people and accelerates, in small increments, through the fifties and sixties. I read about beetroot specifically — about the deep crimson pigment called betalain, the color that stains your cutting board for three days, and about the dietary nitrates that are naturally present in the root. I read about the decades of careful, patient research on this vegetable in the context of supporting healthy circulation, cardiovascular wellness, and the body's own cellular energy. None of what I read promised to give me my forty-two-year-old body back. None of it promised that the gutters would stop wiping out my Sunday. The careful version of what I was reading — the version that did not sound like an infomercial — was that beetroot is something the body uses, that it has been quietly studied in the context of supporting healthy circulation and the body's own cellular energy, and that the research community has been doing this work for a long time without making outlandish claims about it. I picked one of the brands I had read about. A small company called Rosabella. I picked it for one specific reason. The betalain pigment is heat-sensitive. That's the chemistry. 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. At my age — at any age, really — I have started 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 that it was one bottle. Two capsules in the morning with a glass of water. I have a job and a marriage and a teenager and a son in Boston and a house with gutters. I am not interested in a protocol that requires its own shelf. Now — and this is the most important paragraph in this letter, so I am going to slow down. Before I started taking it, I called my pharmacist. I want to explain why, because it matters for anyone reading this who is in a different position than I am. I take no prescription medications. None. I am fifty-two, I am healthy, I have nothing on my chart that anything I might add would interact with. I called my pharmacist anyway. His name is Ron and I have been going to the same independent pharmacy in our town for nineteen years. I called him because I wanted to be absolutely sure that adding even a beetroot supplement to nothing was the right call at my age and given my history. I asked him plainly. He pulled up my profile, confirmed what was on file, told me he had no concerns about adding a beetroot supplement in capsule form, and reminded me that if I ever did start a prescription medication in the future, I should call him again to make sure the supplement still made sense alongside it. He told me to keep doing what I was doing. If you are reading this letter and you are on any prescription medication at all — anything for blood pressure, anything for cholesterol, anything cardiovascular, anything for any condition you see your doctor about — please do not skip this call. 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 basis of what some project manager in Vermont wrote in a letter you found on the internet. The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether it makes sense for you to add anything new. 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 to what I was already doing. Not changing anything else. I started on a Monday. The first two weeks I felt nothing in particular, which is what I had been bracing myself for. I had read enough to know that bodies are different — some people notice something within the first week or two, some people take much longer, and some people don't notice much at all — and I had told my wife, in advance, that I was prepared for any of those outcomes. What I noticed, I noticed in pieces I did not connect at the time. The first thing I noticed was a Saturday in late April when I cleaned out the garage. The whole garage. I had been putting that off for the better part of a year. I started at nine in the morning, I finished a little after one, I had a sandwich at the kitchen counter, and then I went out and did a small bookshelf repair for my daughter's room that I had also been putting off for months. I did not, that day, sit on the couch. That night at dinner my wife asked me if I had taken something. I told her I had taken the same beetroot capsule I had taken every morning for the past couple of months. She said: no, I mean during the day. You did things today. I told her I knew I had done things. We talked about it for a few minutes and let it go. Neither of us made a big deal of it. The second thing I noticed was a Wednesday evening sometime in May when I came home from a jobsite, helped my daughter with a paper on a book she did not particularly want to be reading, made dinner with my wife, and then went out for a half-hour walk after dinner with no particular goal other than that the evening was nice and I wanted to. I had not gone for a walk after dinner in two years. The third thing I noticed was harder to name. The Saturday-morning couch session, which had been a fixture of my last year, started getting shorter. Not gone. I'm not going to tell you it was gone. But sometime in the second month, my long coffee on the couch was an hour, not two. A couple of months in, it was the length of a normal coffee, and then I'd get up and do whatever I was going to do. I gave myself back a couple of hours of Saturday morning that I had been losing every week for a year, and I started, in small ways, using them. I want to be careful with what I'm 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. The same March I started reading carefully, my wife had been after me — gently but consistently — about going back to the gym, and I had started going twice a week. I had been making a point of getting to bed at the same time each night instead of letting the evening drift. I had been eating cleaner because my wife had been quietly steering the household menu in a particular direction. There were several things changing at once, the way there are when a person finally decides to start paying attention. All I am telling you is that I added one thing to a long list of things I was already doing, kept everything else exactly the same, 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 trust anyone who gave you a cleaner one. I went into my regular annual physical about five months after I started, 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's the whole story. There is no dramatic chapter. I did not run a marathon. I did not lose twenty pounds. I did not start a podcast about wellness. I am still fifty-two, I still have the same job, I still live in the same house outside Burlington with the same wife and the same teenager who is reminding me she's leaving in a year and a half. The difference is that the body I have been doing all of this with has gone back to giving me a full week instead of five days and a long Saturday, and I am grateful for that in the quiet way you are grateful for things that you almost did not notice you had lost. If you are in your fifties or your sixties and you are noticing the kind of slow daily awareness I have been describing — the small tax on the things that used to be free, the long Saturday morning, the cold that takes six days, the gym that has become a bigger ask — I want to say a few things to you carefully, because I am aware that a letter like this one can be read in a hurry. I do not know you. I do not know your bloodwork or what you are taking 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 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 am not saying that because somebody told me to. I am saying it because I called my own pharmacist before I added it to nothing, and that two-minute call is the part of this story I would most want you to copy. If you are on any prescription medication at all — anything for blood pressure, cholesterol, anything cardiovascular, anything you take regularly — this is non-negotiable. The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether it makes sense for you to add. I am a project manager in Vermont. 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. — Daniel P.S. I want to come back to the cold-press for a second, because I rushed past it. The betalain pigment — the deep red, the part the research community keeps circling back to — is heat-sensitive. 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. That choice costs them money and time. They made it anyway. At fifty-two, I have started to pay attention to the small decisions companies make when no one is watching, because 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. I have a full enough morning as it is. I appreciated being given a simple addition to it. P.P.P.S. I am going to say it one more time, because I have to. 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 and it is 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 image of Walter laying flagstone at sixty-six and being fine by Wednesday has stayed with me for almost a year now. He had no idea, when he was telling me about that long weekend in his daughter's backyard, that he was the small contrast that finally got me to do something. He probably still has no idea. I see him at the hardware store twice a year. We say hello and we talk about work for two minutes and we go back to our weekends. I do not know what the equivalent of Walter is in your life. But I hope you find it, and I hope it gets you to start paying attention, and I hope, in a year from now, you find yourself doing something that you would not have been able to do a year earlier without it costing you the whole next day. I hope that for you. That is the whole reason I wrote this letter. — D. https://track.tryrosabella.com/feb71eaf-4594-4b50-b39e-f5e5eeea7537 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.