"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

  What a small supplement shop taught me about grapefruit, blood pressure pills, and the quiet conversations happening in every 60-year-old's kitchen   He came in for memory and energy. He left with a question instead. 1. The Man Who Came in for Ginkgo He was maybe 62. A retired engineer, the kind who reads the back of every label. He came into my small health supplement shop in Seoul on a Tuesday afternoon, holding a bottle of ginkgo biloba and a bottle of red ginseng. "For memory," he said. "And energy. My wife says I'm slowing down." I asked him, the way I always do now, what medications he was on. He listed them like a grocery list. Amlodipine for blood pressure. Atorvastatin for cholesterol. A baby aspirin every morning. And, he added almost as an afterthought, "I eat half a grapefruit every morning. It's good for me, right?" I asked him if I could share something I had only learned myself a few years ago. 2. What I Used to Not Know For th...

  The Quietest Thing Diabetes Took From Me — Four Years Without Feeling the Ground  A Twenties Lived on Dirt Every morning, these feet lift me out of bed. My twenties were lived on dirt. Ballpark dirt. Dirt jammed into my cleats. Dirt that ended up in my mouth after a slide into second base. After every game, when I peeled off my socks in the locker room, my feet were either red or black or both. I lost toenails more times than I can count. Blisters were a daily condition. Back then, I thought sore feet were just how it was. A baseball player's feet were supposed to hurt. That's what I told myself. Looking back, I never once thanked my feet during those years. They carried me to first base, to second, to home. And I never said sorry to them either.   For thirty years, my feet lived inside these. Thirty Years Inside Dress Shoes When I left baseball, I joined a company. From that day, for the next thirty years, my feet lived inside dress shoes. I put them on before dawn and...

A man my age came into the shop last Tuesday. He stood in front of the protein powders for a long time, then walked over to where I keep the creatine. He picked up a jar, turned it over, put it back down. Then he asked me a question I have been asked maybe four hundred times in the past four years. "Is this stuff safe for someone our age?" He was sixty-two. Retired engineer. Lost some weight last year, said his doctor told him he had lost muscle along with the fat and needed to do something about it. His son had told him to try creatine. He did not trust his son. He was standing in my shop because he wanted a man closer to his own age to tell him the truth. I am going to tell you what I told him. But first I have to tell you something else. I was wrong about creatine for thirty years. I dismissed it for thirty years. The 2025 research made me open the jar. Why I Was Wrong for Thirty Years I played professional baseball in the 1980s and into the 1990s. In that wo...