"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...

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...

A customer walked into my shop last month. He was sixty-one, a retired schoolteacher, and he had lost fourteen kilograms in four months on Wegovy. He looked great in his clothes. He also looked tired in a way I recognized — the way men look right before their body sends them an invoice they did not expect. He asked me what supplement he should take to "support" the medication. I asked him a question instead. "How much of the fourteen kilograms was fat?" He paused. He did not know. His doctor had probably said something about it, but it had been wrapped in medical language and surrounded by congratulations, so it had not registered. He had a number on the scale that was lower than it had been in twenty years, and he had stopped asking what kind of number it was. That is the documented truth that nobody puts in an Ozempic commercial. And then, because I have been doing this for four years now and I am tired of watching men our age make the same mistake, I told...

   3 AM. Bathroom. 4:15 AM. Bathroom. 5:30 AM. Bathroom again. I know the exact layout of my apartment in complete darkness. Fourteen steps from bed to bathroom door. Sharp left to avoid the dresser corner. Two steps past the washing machine. I could do it blindfolded. I basically do, every single night. At my worst, I was getting up four times between midnight and 6 AM. Four times. That's not sleeping with bathroom breaks. That's bathroom breaks with naps in between. I didn't tell anyone for two years. Not my wife. Not my doctor. Not my friends. Because what kind of man talks about how often he pees? Korean men of my generation (한국 남자, hanguk namja) will discuss stock prices, golf handicaps, blood pressure, even erectile dysfunction after enough soju. But the prostate? The bathroom trips? The weak stream that takes forever to start? Silence. Complete silence. I finally mentioned it to a friend over dinner — carefully, casually, like it was no big deal. "Do you get up ...