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A woman I had been nodding at on Sunday afternoons for almost a year sat down across from me last spring. She said: I can't sit in this room by myself again today. Do you mind if I join you? I said I didn't mind. An hour later, when she stood up to leave, she had said one sentence to me that I have thought about almost every day since. I am writing this letter because for a year and a half before that afternoon, I had been quietly frightened of my own body. My name is Eleanor. I live in a small town outside Rochester with my husband, Frank. We have been married for thirty-four years. I retired five years ago after almost three decades keeping the books for a family dental practice. We have two daughters and a grandson who is four and thinks I am the most interesting person alive, a position I intend to hold for as long as I possibly can. My mother, Ruth, is eighty-four. She had a stroke two years ago, in her own kitchen, on an ordinary Tuesday. She recovered the way a woman in her eighties recovers from a stroke, which is to say partway. She has been at a small assisted living place called Marden House since then. I visit on Sundays. I bring her the butterscotch candies she has kept in a dish since I was a girl. She remembers some things and forgets others, and the gap between the two is the thing I have been quietly grieving. Here is the part I did not tell anyone for a long time. My whole life, my blood pressure was the one number I never had to think about. One hundred and ten over seventy, every checkup, for fifty years. Then somewhere in the middle of menopause, it started to climb. One thirty over eighty-five. One forty over ninety. My doctor, a careful man I have seen for eighteen years, told me at my last two visits that we were getting close to the point where he would want to start me on a low-dose blood pressure pill. I asked him for a few months to work on it myself first. He gave me the months. That was the clinical version. The version I was actually living with was harder to say out loud. It was the home blood pressure cuff on the bathroom shelf that I started to dread, because my stomach dropped before I even saw the number. It was the vegetable garden I had kept for twenty years, going to weeds because I could not find the energy for it. It was the evening walk Frank and I had taken for most of our marriage, shrinking from two miles to the end of the street. It was lying awake at two in the morning, soaked through from a hot flash, doing the math on my mother's stroke and my grandmother's stroke and wondering if I was next in a line I could see very clearly. I had been telling myself it was just menopause. I had been telling myself it was sixty. I had been telling myself a lot of things. That Sunday last spring, my mother had been moved to the care wing for a few days with a small infection. Nothing serious. I was sitting in the visitors' room waiting for the nurse to tell me I could go back. I was on my second cup of bad coffee and I was not in a good way. The woman I had been nodding at in the hallway for almost a year sat down at the table next to mine. Silver hair, cut short. A tote bag with a paperback in it. She put her face in her hands for a moment, then looked up and asked if she could sit with me. Her name was Marla. She had been visiting her father for two years. I told her I had been visiting my mother for two. We sat there for almost two hours. I am not going to give you the whole conversation. It is the one two women have when they have both been quietly doing the same hard thing alone for too long, and finally find someone who understands it without being told. About an hour in, Marla said something almost offhand. She said she was tired in a way that had started to worry her, because her blood pressure had done the same thing mine had, right in the thick of menopause, out of nowhere, after a lifetime of good numbers. I told her about my cuff on the shelf. About the garden. About the two-in-the-morning math. She listened. She nodded. And then she said the sentence I have been thinking about ever since. She said: Your doctor is keeping an eye on your number. Nobody is keeping an eye on you. So you are going to have to be the one who takes this seriously, because they are not going to be as scared as you are, and this is your body, not theirs. I had been waiting two years for a doctor to be as frightened as I was. It had not once occurred to me that the job was mine. Then, the way a woman tells another woman what she has been doing rather than the way someone sells you something, Marla told me she had added one small thing to her mornings about a year and a half earlier. She said she had read for weeks before she added it. She said she had called her pharmacist and her doctor before she added it. She wanted to be careful with me, she said, because she is one woman and I am one woman and bodies are different. But she said her numbers had settled into a range her doctor was happy with, and the hot flashes that used to wreck her sleep had quieted, and she felt more like herself than she had in years. She said she did not want to tell me a fireworks story. She was telling me what had happened in her house, alongside everything else she was doing. I asked her what it was. She said it was pumpkin seed oil. She said the brand was Bloom and Bond. She said she had chosen it because it was cold-pressed, and because it was the one she could find that had actually been studied in women our age, after menopause, and not just borrowed from some other use. She was not selling me anything. She was just telling me. I drove home thinking about Marla. I drove most of that week thinking about her. By the weekend I knew I was going to do the thing I always do, which is read until I understand something. I read for almost three weeks. I am, by temperament, a careful person. I do not add things to my body without knowing what I am adding. I read about pumpkin seed oil. Not the version on the front of a bottle. The quiet version, in the careful corner of the research where nobody is making outlandish claims. What I found was a plant oil rich in compounds the body actually uses, including plant estrogens, the phytoestrogens, that are the reason it keeps turning up in studies on women in menopause specifically. The idea, as far as I could follow it, is this. Estrogen helped keep my blood vessels relaxed and flexible for fifty years. When menopause took the estrogen, the vessels lost some of that, and the pressure crept up. The plant compounds in pumpkin seed oil are studied for supporting the body's own ability to keep those vessels relaxed. For helping the arteries do a little of what my estrogen used to do. The language in that careful corner was the language I had been hoping to find. Supports healthy blood pressure. Supports healthy circulation. In women whose numbers are already in the range their doctor wants them in. Not lowers blood pressure. Not fixes anything. Not a replacement for the pill my doctor had been talking about. That was the right shape. That was the shape an honest thing is. I read about the cold-press, too, because Marla had mentioned it. The good compounds in the oil are delicate. Heat degrades them. If you process the seed the fast, cheap, hot way, you lose some of what you were paying for. Bloom and Bond cold-presses at low temperature so more of it survives from the seed into the softgel. That is slower and it costs them more. At sixty, after watching what two years did to my mother and very nearly to me, I have come to pay attention to the small choices a company makes when nobody is watching. Those choices tell you everything. The other thing I liked was how simple it was. Two softgels in the morning with a glass of water. That is the whole thing. I have a mother forty minutes away and a garden I am trying to get back and a grandson to keep up with. I am not interested in a protocol that needs its own shelf. Now I need to tell you the most important part of this letter. Before I added anything, I called my pharmacist. His name is Dev. I have filled my prescriptions at the same small pharmacy in town for twenty years. I called him even though I am not on a blood pressure medication yet, because I am a careful person and I wanted someone who could see my whole chart to tell me that adding pumpkin seed oil was a sensible thing to do at my age. He pulled up my profile. He told me there were no concerns at the dose on the label. He told me to take it in the morning the way the bottle said. And he told me to call him the day my doctor ever started me on an actual blood pressure prescription, because that conversation would be a different one. I called my doctor's office that same week and told the nurse what I was thinking of adding, the brand and the dose. She spoke to him and called me back. He said it was a sensible thing to add, no concerns at the label dose, and to tell him how I was doing at my next visit. I want to say this plainly to every woman reading this letter. If you are on any prescription medication, and especially anything for blood pressure, cholesterol, or your heart, please make the call before you add anything new. The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether it is safe to add given what you already take. Those two minutes are the most important two minutes of your whole decision. I made the calls with nothing on my chart. I would have made them twice as fast if I had been on a heart medication. So should you. I started on a Monday. I set two softgels on a saucer next to my coffee and took them with my first sip, and I did not make a ceremony of it. The first couple of weeks, I felt nothing in particular. I had read enough, alongside what Marla told me, to know that bodies are different. Some women notice something in the first week or two. Some take much longer. Some do not notice much at all. I was prepared to be honest with myself about whichever one I turned out to be. What I noticed, I noticed slowly. The first thing, somewhere around week six, was that I slept through the night without waking up soaked. Not every night. But enough nights that I stopped bracing for it. The second thing, a few weeks after that, was the cuff. I took my blood pressure one morning and realized my stomach had not dropped first. I just took it. The number was better than it had been. I wrote it in my little log and I did not make a thing of it, because I had read enough not to make a thing of one reading. The third thing was the garden. One Saturday in June I was out there at eight in the morning with dirt on my knees, and Frank brought me a coffee and asked what had gotten into me. I did not have a tidy answer. I just had more of myself back than I'd had in a while. I saw my doctor for my checkup about seven months in. Bloodwork and readings the week before. He looked at everything and he looked at me and he said my numbers were in better shape than they had been in two years, and to keep doing what I was doing. He did not bring up the pill. He had not brought it up in two visits now. I sat in the car in the parking lot afterward and I cried the way you cry when something you were sure was leaving quietly turns around and comes back. I want to be careful with you now, because I am writing to a woman I have never met. I am not telling you the pumpkin seed oil did all of that on its own. I had also started walking again. I was eating the way a woman with my numbers ought to eat. Something had unlocked in me the afternoon I met Marla that had nothing to do with a softgel on a saucer, the particular thing that unlocks when you finally stop carrying something alone. All I am telling you honestly is that I added one small thing to a longer list of things I was newly doing for myself, I kept everything else the same, and the months that followed were a different kind of months than the year and a half before them. That is the honest version. I would not give you a cleaner one. Anyone who offers you a cleaner one is selling you harder than I am. I am telling you all of this because I think you might be where I was that Sunday last spring. Maybe you did everything right your whole life. Stayed active, ate well, never smoked. And your blood pressure started climbing anyway, right when the hot flashes and the bad sleep and everything else arrived, and it feels like a betrayal because you cannot point to a single thing you did to cause it. Maybe your doctor keeps telling you it is not that high while you watch it climb. I want you to hear this from another woman: You are not imagining it, and it is not your fault. Your body did not fail you. It lost something it used to have, and there may be a small, honest way to help give a little of it back. Here is how I think about Bloom and Bond now, in the words I would actually use. It is pumpkin seed oil the body uses. The careful research talks about it in the context of supporting healthy blood pressure and healthy circulation, in women whose numbers are already in the range their doctor wants them in, and it is one of the few studied in women our age specifically. It is not a fix. It is not a substitute for anything your doctor has you on. It is one small thing you add to the long list of things you are already doing for yourself. Please call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add it. If you are on any blood pressure medication, any cholesterol medication, or anything for your heart, this part is not optional. I called Dev. I called my doctor. I would not have added a thing to a prescription without those calls, and neither should you. I am a sixty-year-old woman in upstate New York with a mother in assisted living and a grandson I intend to keep up with for a very long time. I am not the person to ask whether this is right for you. Your pharmacist or your doctor is. But I hope, a year from now, you are out in your own garden on a Saturday morning with dirt on your knees and more of yourself back than you have had in a while. That is the whole reason I wrote this. — Eleanor P.S. About the cold-press, one more time, because it is the reason I trust them. The good compounds in pumpkin seed oil are fragile and heat degrades them. Bloom and Bond presses cold, at low temperature, so more of it makes it from the seed into the softgel. It is slower and it costs them more, and they do it anyway. The small choices a company makes when no one is looking tell you everything. P.P.S. Two softgels. In the morning. With a glass of water. That is the entire routine. No powder to mix, no afternoon dose to forget, no schedule taped inside the cupboard. The bottle lives next to my coffee maker and I take them with my first sip. We have earned a simple one at our age. P.P.P.S. There is a ninety-day guarantee. Any reason at all, including simply changing your mind. It is not tied to your bloodwork or to proving anything to anyone. If you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied, and they send the money back. P.P.P.P.S. The seed is cold-pressed in small batches, so there are stretches when it is in stock and stretches when it is not. I mention it only so that if you go to the site and it is sold out, you know why. Please do not let anyone rush you into a decision about your body. 👉 https://trybloomandbond.com/pages/bnb-your-blood-pressure