A Friend From Book Club Told Me About This Over Coffee. I'm Glad I Listened. I want to share what I started doing. Because my sister-in-law asked me about it at Easter and I realized I'd never written it down anywhere. I'm 61. I went through menopause at 53. The hot flashes faded after a couple of years. The sleep got mostly normal again. And for a while I thought that was the end of it. That I'd come out the other side and could just get on with my life the way I'd known it. That isn't quite how it went. It wasn't anything dramatic. Just a slow drift. My energy at four in the afternoon stopped being what it used to be. My blood pressure at my annual checkup ticked up a few points one year, and a few more the next. My cholesterol numbers — which had been fine my entire life — started looking like numbers my doctor wanted to talk about. She wasn't worried. She was clear about that. She said the same thing she'd said the year before. "Linda, your numbers are still in a reasonable range. But this is the time of life when we start paying a little more attention. After menopause, the heart benefits from a little more support from us than it needed before." She didn't recommend medication that visit. She said: "Let's see what we can do with the basics first." So I did the basics. I started walking forty minutes most mornings, before it got hot. I cut back on the cheese I love. I added more fish. I stopped pouring olive oil on everything like it was free of calories. I got better about sleep — phone out of the bedroom, lights down by 9:30. Some of it worked. Some of it didn't. The blood pressure came down a little. The energy was still a little off. The numbers on the next panel didn't move much in either direction. It wasn't bad. It just felt like I was running uphill on a treadmill that kept getting steeper. A friend from book club mentioned beetroot to me over coffee one afternoon. She said her husband had started taking a beetroot supplement a few months back. She'd watched a small shift in him. Nothing dramatic. Just a man who seemed a little more himself. She'd started taking it too, on a whim. She wasn't a salesperson. She wasn't running a multi-level anything. She was a sixty-two-year-old woman telling me about something she'd tried. I asked her what brand. She said Vitalivv. I wrote it down on the back of a receipt. I went home and read about beetroot for a couple of hours that night. The thing that struck me wasn't anything exotic. Beetroot has been studied for decades for things related to cardiovascular wellness. It isn't new. It isn't a miracle. It's a vegetable humans have been eating for a long time, that happens to be one of the richest natural sources of dietary nitrates. And those nitrates are what your body converts into nitric oxide — the molecule that tells your blood vessels to relax and open, so blood flows more freely. That was enough to make me curious. I wasn't looking for a miracle. I was looking for one more reasonable thing to add to what I was already doing. I looked at Vitalivv's site. What I noticed was that they cold-extract their beets at low temperatures. The reason that mattered to me, after the reading I'd done, is that the nitrates in beetroot are sensitive to heat — most supplements destroy them in processing before the bottle is ever sealed. Vitalivv chose the slower way. Cold-extracted at low temperatures to preserve the nitrates. And every serving third-party lab tested, so the exact nitrate content is verified to be in there. Two capsules with water in the morning. Before I ordered anything, I called my doctor's office. I told the nurse what it was. I asked her to check with the doctor whether it was a sensible thing to add to what I was already doing — the walks, the diet, the multivitamin and the low-dose fish oil I was already on. She called me back the next afternoon. She said the doctor thought it was reasonable. She said: "It's a food-based supplement, and there's good research on dietary nitrates for cardiovascular wellness. Go ahead and add it. Tell us at your next visit." That was October. I started the bottle the next morning. I'm not going to tell you something dramatic happened. I don't think things work that way, and I'd be lying if I claimed I felt a switch flip. I didn't. What I noticed was a slow softening. Some of what I noticed may have nothing to do with the beetroot. I want to be honest about that. I added it to a routine that already included walks and better food and more sleep. Bodies are complicated. Causes are hard to pin down. But here's what I noticed. After about a week, my mornings felt a little easier. I wasn't sitting on the edge of the bed for two minutes negotiating with my back. I was just standing up. After two weeks, my four o'clock crash wasn't quite as steep. I was still tired in the late afternoon — I'm 61, that's just the math — but it wasn't the same wall I'd been hitting. Around the three-week mark, my husband mentioned that I seemed to be sleeping more peacefully. I hadn't told him I'd started the beetroot. He noticed something before I'd said anything. My morning walk crept from forty minutes to fifty. Not because I forced it. Just because at the forty-minute mark, the turnaround point I'd been making for a year, I didn't feel like turning around. I had my next checkup in February. My doctor looked at the numbers. She said they were in better shape than they'd been the previous year. She didn't say it like a miracle had happened. She said it the way a doctor says it when she's been quietly watching a patient and sees the patient's choices showing up on a page. We talked about what I'd done. I told her about the walks, the diet, the beetroot. She said: "Whatever combination of things you're doing, keep doing it. Let's check again in six months." That's where I am. I'm not done with the rest of it. I still walk most mornings. I still watch the cheese. I still sleep with my phone in the kitchen. The beetroot didn't replace any of that. It got added to it. I'm not going to tell you it's magic. I'm not a doctor. I'm not in healthcare. I'm one person — one 61-year-old woman who hit menopause at 53 and decided a few years later to start paying closer attention to her heart — who tried one thing and is sharing what happened, the way I'd tell a friend over coffee about a recipe that worked for me. If something I've said sounds like it might be worth a look, here's the only thing I'd encourage you to do first. Call your doctor's office. Tell the nurse what it is and ask whether it's a sensible thing to add to what you're already doing. Mine said yes. Yours might say something different. Either way, you'll have an answer that's actually about you, not about a stranger on the internet. If they say yes, you have a place to start. If they say no, you have a piece of information about your own body you didn't have before. That's worth something too. ~ Linda M. P.S. — A few notes I'd add, for anyone who wants them. Vitalivv has a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you're not satisfied for any reason, every penny back. That's a reasonable policy for a supplement. It gives you actual time to see whether it helps. I'd give it at least a month before deciding anything. Bodies are slow. Anything that promises you a switch-flip in 48 hours is probably promising you more than it can deliver. P.P.S. — Two friends have asked me about it since I started. One of them mentioned it at her own checkup last month. Her doctor said the same thing mine said — sensible, food-based, fine to add. She just started. I'm not collecting data on people. I'm just telling you that the two women who asked me are women I'd known for years. Women who hadn't asked me about a supplement before. Who noticed something different about the way I was showing up at the things we go to together. That's all I can say honestly. P.P.P.S. — Vitalivv is a small operation. They cold-extract in small batches on their own schedule, and I had to wait nine days for my second bottle because they were between bottlings. I keep an extra one in the cupboard now. If you decide to try it, that's something to know. P.P.P.P.S. — One more thing. I think a lot of us, as we move into our late 50s and 60s, get a quiet message that the part of life where we paid attention to ourselves is behind us. And now we're supposed to be paying attention to everyone else. Husbands. Children. Grandchildren. Aging parents. I think that's a small mistake. The reason I started paying closer attention to my heart wasn't fear. It was that I want to be here for the next twenty-five years. I want to walk a granddaughter down a hallway at her wedding someday. I want to hold a great-grandchild. I want to keep showing up to book club, and to my Tuesday morning coffee, and to the slow Saturday breakfasts my husband and I have made into our second life since the kids moved out. The beetroot is a small thing. It's two capsules and a glass of water in the morning. It's two minutes of attention. But it's two minutes of attention I'm giving to me. And after a lifetime of giving most of my minutes to other people, I think I've earned two of them. That's the actual reason I take it. The rest is just the doctor visit. https://info.vitalivv.com/beetroot-capsules 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.
