7 Things I’d Tell You About Your Arteries When Your Doctor Says “Fine for Your Age”

Nothing hurt. I slept fine. On a good day I'd have passed for fifty.

What changes first is quiet. The hill on the walk costs a bit more than it used to. You're slower to get going in the morning. You're a bit longer getting your breath back than you'd admit to.

None of it is a problem on its own. It's just the first thing "for your age" means.

So I did the list. Cut the salt. Walked after dinner. Stopped the second glass on weeknights. Lost nine pounds, found four of them again.

It helped. I felt better. I still had no idea what was going on underneath, and neither, as far as I could tell, did anyone who'd ever had twelve minutes with me.

I wasn't lazy and I wasn't careless. I'd just run out of things to cut.

I stopped thinking about the next twenty years. Too big, too vague.

What I wanted was smaller. Walk in next year a little better than this year. Keep hearing "fine" without the two words after it.

That's a ninety-day job, done four times. It's the only timescale I could actually do anything about.

A friend who's a doctor explained it over dinner, in about four minutes.

Arteries are lined with living cells that relax and tighten with every beat. While that lining is supple, the heart has less to push against. As it stiffens with age, the heart works harder for the same result, and that is most of what "for your age" means.

Those cells run on a molecule called NAD+. It's what they use to repair themselves and to do the relaxing. And NAD+ falls up to 50% by your 50s.

So my list had been right. It had also been half the job. Less salt takes load off the vessel. It does nothing for the lining.

Two things get studied for that lining. NMN, which the body turns into NAD+, and resveratrol, from grape skins.

Then I read the labels. The resveratrol studies that show anything use hundreds of milligrams a day. The heart-health bottle I'd been taking had 100mg in it and a picture of a vineyard.

And an independent lab had tested 15 NMN products. Three had no NMN in them at all.

After that I only looked at three things on a label. How much NMN. How much resveratrol. Who tested it.

I read the reviews before I bought. There are more than 1,500 of them.

Energy came up first, by a long way. Steady energy, not a buzz. Then clearer thinking. Then sleep.

I felt the energy inside a month. The hill took a few more weeks. I didn't make my mind up about any of it until day 90.

OMRE's formula was built by Dr. Pedram Kordrostami, M.D., an emergency physician, because he couldn't find one he'd recommend to his own patients.

500mg NMN. 500mg micronised resveratrol, which is more than most of the studies used, not less. Every batch tested twice by an outside lab.

I take it alongside everything my doctor told me to do, not instead of it. I told him I was taking it. He wrote it down.

About $2.30 a day.

Thirty days to decide, refunded even on an opened bottle. I marked day 25 on the calendar and never needed it.