A viewer asks: “I have been following a mostly raw fruit and vegetable diet for about 6 weeks now (per the Medical Medium book) and though my blood pressure is mostly in the healthy range there are frequent spikes for no apparent reason. Also, my cholesterol level has barely lowered. My doctor wants me to go on cholesterol meds. What can or should I do for this issue?”

While we cannot give specific medical advice, we can tell you that a six-week change of diet is not long enough to truly see the long-term benefits, in most cases, where diet optimization is a useful strategy. You have spent many, many years building the body and inner workings to this point, so making changes that can shift things in a better direction within will take some more time yet to bear fruit. Many spikes in blood pressure are simply reactions to inner stress and not representing a dangerous departure from the normal range for enough time to be a health concern. Similarly, you can look into more contemporary data about the cholesterol issue as a way of gaining some perspective on the relative merits of attacking this as a would-be problem. Doctors are typically behind the curve, so it is often of benefit to obtain second opinions and even do some research on one’s own, if that is within your capabilities, as it can lead to useful questions to ask and give food for thought about the relative merits of the medical recommendations currently being given. Many are out of date at any one point in time. This is simply the way of things, that ideas get well-entrenched even when they were faulty or misguided to begin with but are embraced and believed, and then promoted for a whole generation of physicians and only discarded when that generation passes on and the new younger doctors receive different training because of intervening research shedding new light on old concerns.