How do you deal with friends and family who just want a quick opinion, such as the aunt who says my blood sugar was high at my last blood test? What do you think I should do?

Chris Kresser:  Again, no standard answer here. It depends on who’s asking, how much help they really want, how far they’re willing to go, and where you’re at and what your approach to that is. Like for me, I do treat a lot of friends and family. I have several in my practice right now and I’ve done everything from just hop on a phone call with my uncle who got some cholesterol results back and wanted to talk to me a little bit about it, and he asked me what I thought and I told them, well, this is how I would look at it and this is what I would do if you want, and here’s some dietary recommendations and I’m happy to look at your labs after you switched to this diet. And we can retest and in that case, it was relatively straightforward. He made some dietary changes, we retested and the numbers dropped, and he was happy and that was it. In other cases I’ve helped I’ve done full case reviews on some family members and then I’ve done kind of everything in between. So it really depends on like I said, who’s asking and how open and interested they are and then what you feel like you want to take on.