Cut From Steel

He started his racing life at 47. The last big win came at 70.

Paul Newman learned to drive fast for a movie. He trained at a racing school for the 1969 film Winning, and the track took hold of him. Newman said later that driving was the first thing he had ever found he had any grace in. He was already in his forties when he found it.

Newman entered his first professional season in 1972 with Bob Sharp Racing. He was 47 years old. Men that age were buying a sensible sedan and calling the chapter closed. He signed his entries P. L. Newman, because he wanted the timing sheets to judge the driving rather than the face.

Le Mans came seven years after that. He finished second overall there in 1979, sharing a Porsche 935 with Dick Barbour and Rolf Stommelen. Newman was 54 that weekend. Four national championships in SCCA road racing came his way over those years, won against drivers young enough to be his sons.

Newman won his class at the 24 Hours of Daytona in February 1995, days after he turned seventy. The car carried the number 70 in honor of his age. That run made him the oldest driver to be part of a winning team in a major sanctioned race. Away from the track he had started Newman's Own in 1982 and given away every penny of the profit, more than $600 million so far.

Newman understood something every racer understands. You do not judge a car by the paint on the body. The gauges tell you what the engine is actually doing. Yours came back with your last blood panel.

The gut is not the whole story

You have been keeping score with your belt. The waistline is the number a man watches, because the mirror hands it to him every morning. Inside you, in an organ the size of a football, a second number has been moving. Doctors now call the condition metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, or MASLD. Until recently they called it non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

You may be carrying it right now. Cleveland Clinic puts the worldwide figure above 30% of people, and says a man can have it without a single symptom. Mayo Clinic lists the early signs as fatigue and some discomfort under the right ribs, which most men at 55 blame on the week they just had. I will tell you where this usually shows first. The NIH says doctors often begin to suspect the condition when routine blood work comes back with raised liver enzymes, ALT and AST. Those two lines sat on your last panel. Nobody called you about them.

Your liver did not age. These three fed it.

You want to know why an organ that ran clean for fifty years starts storing fat. I will give you three reasons. All three are things you do, and all three can be undone.

01 / The sugar that arrives all day

You eat, and the liver sorts out what arrives. When more sugar and refined starch arrive than the body needs, the surplus gets stored as fat inside the liver's own cells. Insulin resistance pushes that along, and Mayo Clinic lists it beside type 2 diabetes and belly-heavy weight as a main risk factor. It is arithmetic that ran one way for twenty years.

02 / The drinks you call moderate

You noticed the old name carried the word non-alcoholic. Alcohol still lands on the same organ. AASLD guidance says heavy drinking speeds up liver injury and should be avoided, and that men with significant scarring should stop completely. Two beers on a Tuesday will not finish you. The same two landing on a liver that already stores fat give it a second job.

03 / The hours you spend seated

You do not have to run a marathon to move this. AASLD guidance points to about 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise, and makes one point worth reading twice… exercise carries benefit for the liver independent of weight loss. Working muscle pulls sugar out of the blood before your liver files it away. A walk after dinner is a real intervention.

Take it back this week

You can start on Thursday, and the first move is free. Ask your doctor for ALT and AST on your next blood draw, then ask what they read a year ago. Normal enzymes do not rule the condition out, so if you carry weight around the middle, ask whether an ultrasound is worth doing.

You do not have to become a different man. AASLD guidance says losing 3% to 5% of body weight may improve the fat itself, while more than 10% is generally needed to improve inflammation and scarring. For a man at 220 pounds, the first step is seven to eleven pounds. That is a target you can hit by Christmas.

One last thing. Cleveland Clinic says treatment can reverse this condition unless cirrhosis has already set in. The fat you cannot see is also the fat that gives ground first. Go and take it.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits that take the load off your liver:

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

01 / Style · Barbour Waxed Jacket

John Barbour started this company in South Shields in 1894, selling oilcloth to men who worked outdoors in weather that did not negotiate. The waxed cotton jacket that followed holds royal warrants from three monarchs, and Steve McQueen wore the Barbour International version riding the International Six Days Trial. Buy the Classic Bedale, which starts around $425 on Barbour's own US site. Barbour repairs and re-waxes more than 60,000 jackets a year, which tells you what kind of purchase this is. You are not buying a season.

02 / Drink · A Perfect Cold Beer, Pilsner Urquell

Josef Groll brewed the first batch in Plzen on October 5, 1842, and the world had never seen a pale lager before that day. Every pilsner on every shelf is a copy of this one. Saaz hops and soft Bohemian water give it the bitter finish the imitators sand off, at 4.4% alcohol. Drink one, cold, poured properly, and enjoy it. Read reason 02 above before you pour the second.

03 / Home · A Turntable Setup, Rega Planar 3

Rega builds this deck in England, with a hand-assembled RB330 tonearm and a 12mm polished glass platter. Vinyl asks something of you that a playlist never will… you choose one record, you sit down, and you listen to the whole side. The current RS edition lists around $1,799 and the standard Planar 3 sits below it. Put it where your chair is, not where the television is.