“Ask me what I stopped doing.”

Two winters ago I watched a 79-year-old man carry a cast iron bath up a flight of stairs.

I was standing at the bottom holding the other end of it, and I am twenty-two years younger than him.

We were stripping out a bathroom in a terrace in Reading. Freezing morning, no heating in the house, the kind of cold that gets into your hands by nine o'clock. His name was Ray. Semi-retired, which for men like Ray means he only works four days a week now.

I had been on the tools thirty years myself. I was fifty-seven and I had had a check-up eight months before where the doctor said the phrase every man my age eventually hears. Nothing wrong. Just keep an eye on things.

So I had been keeping an eye on things.

And by keeping an eye on things I mean I had been buying bottles.

We got the bath out to the skip and Ray leaned on the van and got his flask out, and I asked him the question I think everybody asks him.

I said, Ray, how are you still doing this at seventy-nine?

He said, wrong question.

I said, what is the right one?

I thought he was going to say drinking. Or smoking. Or nights.

He said, I stopped buying bottles.

Then he told me about his kitchen.

He said, when I turned sixty I had a drawer with eleven bottles in it. Eleven. Fish oil, because a bloke at work said. Cod liver oil as well, which I later found out is the same thing. Garlic tablets. Turmeric. Two different magnesiums at different strengths because I could not remember which one I had bought. A beetroot thing my daughter got me. CoQ10. Something for circulation I never opened.

He said, I bought every one of those bottles for a good reason. Every single one was a sensible response to something I had read or something somebody told me. And I took them for about a fortnight each and then I did not.

And I said, so what, you gave up on all of it?

And he said, no. I gave up on the drawer.

The bit I have thought about most since

He said, the thing nobody tells you is that a drawer like that is not a health routine. It is a record of every time you got worried.

Every bottle in there is a Tuesday when somebody's brother had a stent and you got frightened and you did something about it. And doing something felt better than doing nothing, so you did something eleven separate times, months apart, and you never once stood back and asked whether the eleven things added up to anything together.

He said, they do not. They are not designed to. Nobody designed that drawer. It accumulated.

What he does now

One thing, he said. Properly. Every day.

He said, I take one stack that has got everything in it that I was trying to cover with eleven bottles, and I take it every morning with my tea, and I have done that for nineteen years, and that is the whole answer.

And then he did something I did not expect. He talked me out of getting excited.

He said, look. I cannot hand you a study. I am not a doctor and I am not going to stand in the street and argue with the internet. I am seventy-nine and I carried a bath up a staircase this morning and half the men I trained with are sat down. Make of that what you want.

He said, and do not expect fireworks. It is not a painkiller. You will not take it on Monday and feel different on Tuesday. If somebody tells you that, they are selling you the wrong thing.

The drive home

I was sat at the lights on the ring road and I found myself doing the maths. Nine bottles in my kitchen. I knew it was nine because I had counted them the week before, looking for the ibuprofen.

Two of them were the same ingredient at different strengths. One had been in there since a Christmas. One I had never opened, and I could not tell you today what was in it.

Ray had not been telling me a story about himself. He had been describing my kitchen, and I had been nodding along like it was about somebody else.

What I did about it

I stopped buying bottles.

I got one thing with everything in it. Ten actives in one daily stack. Beetroot in it, because that is the one I had been sold twice already and I still believed in it. But also L-Citrulline at a thousand milligrams, which is the one that actually gets dosed properly, and L-Arginine, and CoQ10, and Ginkgo, and six others. All of it printed on the label with the milligrams next to it, so I could actually read what I was taking for the first time in about four years.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Go and look at the back of a supplement bottle in your house right now and find the words proprietary blend. That means one number for six ingredients and they will never tell you the split. It is completely legal. It is everywhere. And it is the reason a drawer like mine costs a fortune and does very little.

So here is why I am telling you

If you have got the drawer, you already know. You knew before you got to this line.

And if you have not got it yet, if you are forty-eight and you have two bottles and it feels under control, then hear Ray's maths. Nobody plans that drawer. It arrives one worried Tuesday at a time, over about nine years, and every single bottle in it makes perfect sense on its own.

It is called Nuvent. Ten actives, built on beetroot and backed by nine more, every dose printed on the label because a blend is just a way of not telling you. It supports healthy circulation. That is what it does and that is all we will say it does, because you have been sold to before by people who said more than that.

Four capsules a day. A hundred and twenty in a bottle, so a bottle is a month.

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