Mark Sullivan

The home office where all of this actually happens is a spare bedroom in a ranch-style house in Centennial, Colorado, with a west-facing window that catches the Front Range on a clear morning and a whiteboard that has tracked more supplement timelines and sleep scores than I'd like to admit. Hank, our golden retriever, has claimed the dog bed wedged under the corner of the desk, which means most nights of writing happen with fifty pounds of dog leaning against a shin.

Three years of dated composition notebooks are stacked on the shelf next to that whiteboard now, one for pretty much every experiment that made it onto this site and a few that never did. I'm 52, I work in logistics management, and none of this started as a career move. It started as a guy trying to figure out why some days felt fine and some days felt like wading through wet cement.

A phone note turned into a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet eventually turned into an actual testing system. My college buddy Ted Grabowski, who won't try so much as a new multivitamin without a peer-reviewed study behind it, is a big part of why half these posts include a source link instead of just a feeling.

How I test

Every supplement gets a real thirty-day run before it gets written about, tracked against one number: did the afternoon crash happen, and what was different on the days it didn't. Cheap wearable for sleep, worn most nights for going on two years now. Of the supplements that have gone through a full trial, most got binned before the bottle was empty. A couple stuck around for good. A couple got a fair shot and still weren't worth reordering.

My neighbor Gus benchmarks every change I report against his Saturday morning workout, and he's skeptical enough about supplements in general that when something actually impresses him, that tells me more than the label does. What I know is three years of self-tracking on one specific 52-year-old body, which is real information but not a substitute for bloodwork or an actual physical. Anything that needs a urology referral, specific diagnostic testing, or a prescription gets sent to an actual doctor instead of showing up here.

Posts by Mark Sullivan

Disclosure

Some links on this site earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. Everything recommended here got tested in this house first, and the ones that flopped are written up as flops instead of quietly disappearing.