Cut From Steel

Broke at sixty-two, dying at sixty-three, and he still finished the book

Ulysses S. Grant lost everything on 6 May 1884. The investment firm carrying his name, Grant & Ward, collapsed as a fraud run by his son's partner, and a former president of the United States was left with eighty dollars in cash.

Grant felt a sore throat that summer at Long Branch, from a bite of peach. He learned in late October 1884 that it was cancer of the throat and tongue. By then he had no money, a wife to provide for, and a stack of blank paper.

Grant wrote it anyway. He produced roughly 366,000 words in under a year, in pain, often unable to speak, dictating while he still could and writing longhand when he could not. Mark Twain's publishing house offered him a seventy percent royalty, which was unheard of at the time, and Twain was betting the firm on a dying man delivering.

Grant finished the manuscript in the third week of July 1885, on or about the eighteenth. He died on 23 July at sixty-three. Personal Memoirs sold around 350,000 two-volume sets by subscription and paid Julia Grant roughly $450,000 over three years, a fortune then and millions now.

You are not writing your memoirs this week. Grant is here because a wrecked body and an empty bank account did not stop him asking what he could still produce. He had one year left, and he spent it building something.

You have been buying food for the wrong mouth

You bought the probiotic because the bloating had become predictable and the label had a friendly graphic on it. Three months later the bottle is still in the cupboard, and not much changed. I do not think you were careless. My read is that you were sold the wrong end of the problem.

You have a population living in your colon that eats whatever you send down. When it gets fermentable fibre, it makes short-chain fatty acids, and one of those is butyrate. Cleveland Clinic says butyrate provides the main energy source for your colon cells, meeting about seventy percent of their needs, and supports the gut barrier that keeps microbes out of your blood. In other words, the lining of your gut is fed by bacteria that you have to feed first.

Three numbers about fibre that should annoy you

So how much of this are you actually sending down there? I have three numbers, and the first one is the insult.

01 / You Are Eating About Half of It

You need roughly 28 grams a day from fifty-one onward, and 31 grams in your forties, by the Dietary Guidelines table. The Institute of Medicine's adequate intake for adult men is 38 grams. Americans average something like 15 to 17 grams, and Cleveland Clinic reports that only about five percent of adults hit their target. So this is not a marginal shortfall.

02 / The Outcome Data Is Not Small

You get a great deal for a cheap fix. The Lancet published a review in 2019 covering 185 observational studies and 58 clinical trials, and it reported 15 to 30 percent lower all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in the highest fibre eaters against the lowest, with 16 to 24 percent lower incidence of coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and colorectal cancer. Each extra 8 grams a day tracked with reductions of 5 to 27 percent across those outcomes.

03 / Food Won the Trial. Pills Were Not Even In It.

You should know what happened at Stanford in 2021. Thirty-six adults ate either a high-fibre diet or a fermented-food diet for ten weeks. The fermented-food group went from almost nothing to about six servings a day, and their microbial diversity rose while nineteen inflammatory proteins came down. Meanwhile the high-fibre group went from 21 grams to 45 and saw responses that varied by individual rather than one uniform effect. Neither group took a supplement.

Feed them starting tonight

You can add about five grams of fibre a week and no faster. Mayo Clinic warns that too much too quickly brings gas, cramping, and loose stools, and that fibre needs water alongside it to work properly. Beans, oats, barley, a pear with the skin left on, and a handful of almonds will get you there without any powder.

You should also put one fermented food on the table every day. Plain kefir, real yoghurt, kimchi, or sauerkraut from the chilled section all count, and the NIH is straight that most of those do not reliably contain proven probiotic strains, so buy them for the outcome rather than the label. If you still want the pills, the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements says there are currently no formal recommendations for or against probiotics in healthy people, and that effects are strain-specific.

One last thing. Nobody supplements their way past a week of white bread. Feed the tenants and they do the rest.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits that keep the right tenants fed:

You didn't put in 45 years to settle for beige.

01 / Steel · Wüsthof Classic 8-Inch Chef’s Knife

Wüsthof forges this in Solingen, Germany, from a single blank of X50CrMoV15 stainless, with a full tang, three rivets, and a bolster that keeps your fingers off the edge. It runs about $170, which is one dinner out. A sharp eight-inch knife is the difference between eating vegetables and thinking about eating vegetables. Learn to hone it weekly and it will outlast the kitchen it lives in.

02 / Truck · Toyota Land Cruiser

Toyota starts the 2026 Land Cruiser at $57,200 before the dealer adds anything to the sheet. The line began in 1951, reached the United States in 1958, and passed ten million units worldwide by 2019 across roughly 170 countries. Toyota’s own note on durability is that 40 Series trucks built fifty years earlier were still in active use when they wrote it. Nobody buys this one for the badge.

03 / Trip · A Month in Tokyo

You get ninety days visa-free on a US or EU passport, so a month is comfortable. A furnished monthly apartment in an outer ward runs about ¥125,000 to ¥160,000, roughly half what a mid-range hotel costs for the same thirty nights. Add flights near $900 and living costs around $1,000, and $3,000 to $4,500 covers it. The 2026 Michelin guide starred 160 restaurants in that city, and the best thing you eat will be a ¥1,200 bowl at a counter with six seats.