Cut From Steel

This week's hero is the man reading this right now

You are the hero this week, and I mean the particular man holding this on a Monday morning in September.

You have opened thirty of these letters. Nobody made you do it. Your doctor did not ring to check, and no one stood over you with the laptop open.

I want to tell you what I know about you after thirty issues. You sit somewhere between 45 and 65. Somebody once told you that what you were feeling was ordinary for your age, and you decided that was not a good enough answer.

Thirty letters covers six weeks of working days. In that time you may have booked a blood test you would have skipped, moved a thermostat, or put a kettlebell in the corner of the garage. You may have asked a doctor something you used to swallow.

I will not pretend all thirty landed. Some you skimmed on a train. One or two annoyed you enough that you nearly unsubscribed, and then you did not. That is roughly the correct hit rate for anything honest.

George Foreman was 45 and losing on every card. Miles Davis was 55 and had not touched a horn in five years. Neither man found a trick. Men who change at 55 are the ones who kept opening the envelope. You have opened thirty of them. Open tomorrow's.

You are eating a third of what your body runs on

You had something at breakfast that called itself high in fibre, a sandwich at your desk, and a dinner with chicken in it. Overall you would guess you do reasonably well on this.

I want to show you the arithmetic. Harvard Health puts the daily target at 38 grams for a man up to 50, and 30 grams for a man over 50. American adults average 10 to 15 grams a day.

You are not slightly short of the mark. That is roughly a third of what a man your age needs.

It's not age. It's these three.

I will give you three things about fibre that never make it onto the front of the box.

01 / The Size Of The Gap

Harvard Health reports the recommendation as 38 grams a day for men up to 50 and 30 grams after 50, against an actual American average of 10 to 15 grams. Closing a gap that size is not a supplement problem. It is three more real plants a day, every day, for the rest of your life.

02 / What The Evidence Shows

Harvard reported on an analysis of nearly 250 studies. People eating the most fibre had a 16 to 24 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes or colon cancer than people eating the least. The largest reductions showed up between 25 and 29 grams a day, and every additional 8 grams was linked to a further 5 to 27 percent reduction.

03 / Your Bacteria Do The Work

You do not digest most fibre yourself. The bacteria in your colon ferment it, and what they produce is part of why this turns up in mortality figures rather than only in your bathroom. These are observational studies, so the arrow cannot be proven to point one way, and men who eat 30 grams of fibre tend to do other things well too. The direction has held across a very large body of work regardless.

Take it back today

I owe you a warning about pace. Doubling your fibre inside a week will make you poor company, and the standard advice is to add it gradually and drink more water while you do.

You can close most of the gap without setting foot in a health food shop. Beans in the chilli, oats instead of the cereal, the skin left on the potato, a handful of nuts where the biscuit used to be.

I want you to read one label today. Find the fibre line on whatever you eat for breakfast and write the number down on paper. Most men are genuinely startled by how small it is, and that startle is the whole exercise.

You have been running a third short on something your body was built around. Count the grams for one day and the gap will make the argument for me. Start with breakfast tomorrow.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits that close the fibre gap:

Thirty letters in, you have earned a look at the good stuff.

01 / Watch · Tudor Ranger

Tudor traces the Ranger to the watches issued on the 1952 British North Greenland Expedition, and the current one is a 39mm steel case with an in-house movement and around 70 hours of reserve. It is the anti-status watch... legible, tough, and priced where a working man can reach it. Nobody will compliment you on it. You will still look at it every day for twenty years.

02 / Steel · A carbon-steel pan

A de Buyer Mineral B or anything like it seasons the way cast iron does and weighs about half as much, which matters more at 55 than it did at 30. You season it once, you never put soap near it, and it turns black and slick over a couple of years of use. It will outlive every non-stick pan you have ever thrown away, and it costs less than two of them.

03 / Book · Endurance, Alfred Lansing

Lansing's 1959 account of Shackleton's 1914 expedition is the best book about leadership ever written by a man who never used the word. The ship is crushed, the plan is finished by page 60, and every one of the twenty-eight men comes home. Read it in winter. It recalibrates what you think of as a difficult week.