The Blood Pressure Journal

Why two years of beetroot never moved my 146/92

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In two years my doctor said the same six words to me twice. My reading was 146/92 both times, and I was drinking beetroot powder that tasted like dirt every single morning because... The real number was 146/92, and every morning I swallowed four different supplements that were supposed to fix it, right before I sat down and... ...watched the cuff tell me the same thing it told me the day before. My name is Dale. I'm 58, I live in Lima, Ohio, and I ran a flooring crew for 31 years. This went on for two years. It started at a routine physical. The nurse took my pressure, frowned, and took it again on the other arm. 146/92. My dad had his stroke at 61. I sat on that paper-covered table doing the math. I didn't want to end up on three prescriptions like he was, so I did what a lot of guys do. I went to the supplement aisle. First it was beetroot powder. It stained the counter pink and tasted like dirt. I drank it every morning anyway. Three months later the cuff said 146/92. So I added garlic capsules. Jan said she could smell me from the other side of the bed. Then magnesium at night, because a guy at work swore by it. Then fish oil, the big ones, the kind that come back up on you around ten in the morning. Four bottles lined up next to the coffee maker. $94 a month. I kept the receipts in a drawer so Jan wouldn't add it up. I bought a home cuff and took a reading at 6:10 every morning at the kitchen table before she got up. Some days the top number dipped a little. Some days it climbed. But it always came back to the same place, like a dog coming home. 146/92. I went back to my doctor twice in those two years. The first time he looked at the screen, not at me, and said, "Let's keep an eye on it." I told him about the beetroot and the garlic. He said, "Can't hurt." The second time I got seven minutes. He said, "Let's keep an eye on it," the same six words, and then, "At your age this is pretty common." I asked the pharmacist at the drugstore which of my four bottles was actually doing something. She said, "They're all good for circulation." Nobody asked why none of it was working. Nobody had the time to. Then Jan started checking my notebook. She had been through this with her own mother and she wanted to see my number written down every day. So I wrote down numbers. 128/82. 131/84. Numbers I made up while the real one was still on the screen. The morning I'm not proud of, I had carried six bags of mulch from the truck to the backyard and I could hear my own pulse in my ears. I went into the bathroom and locked the door so she wouldn't hear the cuff inflate. I took it three times. I sat on the edge of the tub in between, trying to breathe slower, trying to get a better number. Then I walked out and wrote 129/83 in the notebook. I was 58 years old, three years younger than my dad was, lying to my wife in ballpoint pen. A few weeks later I ran into Ray in the hardware store parking lot. Ray and I coached Little League together when our boys were small. He's 63 and he sells nothing. He was loading deck screws into his pickup. I asked how he was and he said his pressure was finally behaving. I must have made a face, because he put the box down. I told him all of it. The four bottles. The two years. 146/92. He said, "Dale, you've been working on the wrong thing. The number isn't the problem. The number is the gauge." Here's how he explained it, leaning on the bed of his truck. Every artery you have is lined on the inside with a layer one cell thick. That lining is what tells the artery to loosen up and open when blood comes through. Loosening up is work. Those cells need energy to do it. And the fuel they run on, a molecule called NAD+, is something your body makes less of every year you get older. So the lining gets tired. The arteries stay tight. The pressure goes up. "Think of a phone with a dead battery," Ray said. "You can send it every text you want. It isn't going to answer." That's when my four bottles finally made sense. They were all texts. Beetroot gives your body the raw material for the signal that tells the lining to relax. It can't reach the battery. Garlic pushes that same signal by another road. Same dead phone. Magnesium works on the muscle wrapped around the outside of the artery. It never touches the lining on the inside. Fish oil works on what's flowing through the pipe. It does nothing for the wall of the pipe. None of them were bad. Not one of them could reach the problem. Ray had spent months reading labels before he bought anything, and he gave me his list. I wrote it on the back of my receipt. If you're shopping for anything in this category, check these first. One. NAD+ has to be the lead ingredient. Not another beetroot blend with a new label. The fuel itself. Two. It has to be liposomal. Plain NAD+ gets torn up in your stomach before it reaches your blood. A liposomal form is wrapped in a layer of fat that carries it through. Three. It should still include something for the signal, like L-citrulline. Charge the battery and send the text. You want both. Four. Look for CoQ10 next to it, because that's what the energy plants inside your cells run on. Five. It should replace bottles, not add a fifth one to the counter. Six. The guarantee has to be long enough for you to watch your own cuff. Thirty days isn't. And it should be made in the USA in a GMP-certified facility. Ray was taking the only one he'd found that ticked all six. It's called Boostiva. Liposomal NAD+ up front, at 13.6 times the absorption of the plain kind. L-citrulline and CoQ10 in the same capsule, 14 ingredients in all. Two capsules in the morning. Made in the USA, GMP certified. I ordered it that night, and I'll tell you exactly what happened, because it wasn't a miracle. Week one, nothing. 146/92. I almost quit. Week two, I noticed I wasn't falling asleep in the recliner at three in the afternoon. Week three, the cuff read 141/89. I took it again because I didn't believe it. Week five, Jan looked at me over dinner and said, "You haven't napped once this week. What's going on with you?" I hadn't said a word to her about any of it. Week six, 134/86. Week eight, 129/83. The same number I had faked in the notebook the morning I locked the bathroom door. This time it was on the screen. I showed Jan the notebook that night, the fake pages too. That wasn't a fun conversation. It was a good one. I threw out the four bottles. I had been spending $94 a month on them. Boostiva runs about a dollar a day. And you get 60 days to try it. If your own cuff doesn't tell you a different story, you send it back and get your money back. All the risk is on them. Boostiva is not a big company. It's a small team that makes it in short runs at one facility here in the States, 4,200 bottles at a time. That's also why it runs out. When a run is gone, the next one takes about 19 days, and Ray told me he'd been caught without it twice. And it's why you won't find it at the drugstore or on the shelf at the big box stores. A chain wants tens of thousands of bottles sitting in a warehouse for months, and liposomal NAD+ doesn't like sitting. So they sell it straight from their own site. Nobody told me for two years that the number is the gauge and the lining is the problem. Ray did, in a parking lot. This is the one he sent me to: https://boostiva.com/products/boostiva-nad-mens-complex-bp?variant=49285551095991 Dale K. Lima, Ohio P.S. I still have that notebook. Eleven months of numbers in my own handwriting that never happened. If you've ever rounded your reading down for somebody who loves you, you know exactly what's in it. P.P.S. My dad was 61. I turn 59 in March, and the cuff on my kitchen table said 129/83 this morning.