Your Thursday Three Things for July 23, 2026
Cellular energy is like money. The more you've got, the more choices you have.
Dr. Catharine Arnston says one food can replace the whole cabinet of pills and powders, and I spent half the episode quietly fact-checking her.
One food. That’s the claim. One food that covers the multivitamin, the fish oil, the pre-workout, the greens powder, all of it. NASA has called it a complete food for space. The United Nations called it one of the great answers to human nutrition. There are, she says, 100,000 studies.
My honest first reaction to a stack of claims that big is to reach for the door.
Then you find out who’s making it. Dr. Catharine Arnston walked away from a 25-year corporate career, went back to school in her 50s, and built a company around algae because her baby sister got breast cancer and the oncologist said “eat alkaline” and never explained why. “Love will propel you to do a lot of things,” she told us. She’s turning 70 in 2 months. Got her PhD last year. Walks 2 miles a day in a weighted vest. Takes no medication.
So I did the thing I do now when something sounds too big to be true. About halfway through the episode I went quiet and started typing on my phone off to the side...
Energy is optionality
Here’s the line of Catharine’s I keep coming back to. She said cellular energy is like money. When you have more of it, you can do more things, and you have more choices. When you’re running low, your options shrink whether you notice it or not.
The engine for all of it is the mitochondria. Will has a clean way of putting it: the power plant inside every cell. Catharine’s claim is that most of what we file under “getting older” is those power plants getting damaged and dying off faster than we replace them. She points to an antioxidant your body makes called SOD, superoxide dismutase, that mops up the wreckage inside the mitochondria. Your body produces plenty of it until about 30, then less after 40, then less after 50. Layer on processed food, bad sleep, too much stress, and the plants take on damage they can’t keep up with.
Her bigger point landed harder than the biochemistry did. We treat the downhill after 40 as a fixed thing, she said, “because that’s all we’re seeing right now.” That’s the part worth sitting with. Not that decline is impossible, but that most of us have only ever watched the default version and assumed it was the only version.
I’m almost 49. I think about fuel more than I used to, and I’ve got an analogy I reach for with the guys I coach: your body is a jet engine, not an Audi, and it matters what you put in the tank. Sleep, food, how you handle stress, whether you move. You have to be well to lead well. You can’t stay steady under pressure, you can’t respond instead of react, when the tank’s empty and the lights in the power plant are flickering. Attention is your KPI, sure. But attention runs on cellular energy. Everything does.
I’m not a doctor, by the way
Let me be straight about the other half of my brain during this conversation.
Some of what Catharine says checks out. That thing I was typing on my phone? I was asking whether algae and nitric oxide actually work together, because we had Dr. Nathan Bryan on a couple months back on exactly that. The answer came back clean: spirulina is high in the raw material your body uses to make nitric oxide, and its antioxidants help protect what you’ve already got. I read it out loud. She confirmed it. Good moment.
And then there are the absolutes. “You will never have a hangover. Ever.” “Normalizes blood pressure in a few days.” When a claim leaves no room for the exception, that’s the exact spot where my skepticism wakes up. Catharine clearly knows her stuff, and she’s sincere as they come. She’s also the founder of the company that sells the tablets, and the format rewards certainty. So I do 3 things with any health pitch, hers included. Does she explain the mechanism in plain language, or hide behind jargon. Does she promise an absolute. And who profits if I believe it.
She passes the first one easily. The plain-language teaching is strong. The absolutes are where I pump the brakes.
And yet. I’ve taken the stuff. Both Will and I have. I keep a bottle around. So much for my hard-nosed skepticism. Reply and tell me the health thing you fell for, the supplement or the protocol you swore by that turned out to be nothing. I’m collecting them, no judgment, because I’ve got my own.
Where it started was a sick sister
Strip away the tablets and the studies and here’s what’s underneath the whole thing. A woman’s little sister got cancer, and she couldn’t not do something about it. So she torched a career she’d spent 25 years building and pointed the rest of her life at the problem. Underneath all of it, that’s a love story that happens to involve algae.
I know that move from the inside. Mine started in a much darker room. After Operation Red Wings and the survivor’s guilt that followed, I was self-medicating and in a very bad place, and a counselor pointed me toward mindfulness and meditation. I credit those practices with quite literally saving my life. So now it feels like a duty to pay it forward. I don’t harp on it. I just know the shape of what Catharine did, because I did a version of it too.
Pain has a way of pointing at the work you’re supposed to do. Hers pointed at nutrition nobody was translating for regular people. Mine pointed at a bunch of men who’d rather eat glass than say they’re struggling. Different rooms. Same door out...
What to do about it
Take our free Awareness Self-Assessment before you buy a single thing. Most of us reach for a supplement before we’ve actually measured where we’re running low, on energy, on sleep, on our relationship with stress. Get the baseline first. It takes about 5 minutes: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 1 turns this into a full inputs audit.
Run the free levers before the paid ones. Before any powder, tablet, or stack, the cheapest energy on earth is sleep, morning sunlight, protein, and a walk. Pick the one you’ve been ignoring and give it 2 weeks. If you still want to add algae or anything else on top of a solid base, fine. Foundation first.
Pressure-test every health claim with 3 questions. Does the person explain how it works in plain language? Do they promise an absolute with no exceptions? And who makes money if you believe them? Run it on Catharine, run it on me, run it on the last guy who sold you a protocol. Reply with a claim you’re not sure about and I’ll give you my honest read.
Name the age your energy changed, and what you did about it. Hit reply with the number and the move. 41 and started lifting. 47 and finally fixed my sleep. I want to build a future edition around what actually worked for real men in this community, straight from you.
Do one thing today, not just plan it. Knowing you’re running down changes nothing. Drink the water, take the walk, close the laptop 30 minutes earlier tonight. One rep so small you can’t fall off of it. Then do it again tomorrow.
This week on Men Talking Mindfulness
Dr. Catharine Arnston is the founder of EnergyBits and has spent 16 years on a mission to get two algae, spirulina and chlorella, into the hands of regular people. She’s got an MBA in international business and walked away from a 25-year corporate career after her sister’s breast-cancer diagnosis sent her down the nutrition rabbit hole. She went back for a health-coaching certificate, taught plant-based nutrition in hospitals and corporations, and earned her PhD last year. Her book, Love Your Health to Bits with Algae, comes out in January. At nearly 70, on no medication, she’s her own best case study.
