dear asking for a friend,i am noticing that many prescription drugs share one food interaction — grapefruit. what is it about this bitter fruit that affects medication?signed, love citrus dear love citrus,tangy and delicious grapefruit contains natural chemicals called furanocoumarins that can impact your digestion. these compounds have health-promoting anti-oxidative and anti-inflammatory properties, but they also interact with an enzyme in our gut known as cyp3a4, which helps to metabolize — or break down — medications that are taken orally for all kinds of conditions. cyp3a4 is actually an evolutionary mechanism developed in our ancestors to guard against toxins in plants that were once part of our foraging diet.
making side effects more serious
here’s the danger: eating a grapefruit or consuming its juices with your prescription pills can mean that instead of being metabolized, more of the drug enters your bloodstream and stays in your body longer, making potential side effects far more serious. in fact, the interaction between the bitter fruit and certain medications could lead to gastrointestinal bleeding, kidney failure, breathing difficulty and sudden death, according to a
paper in the canadian medical association journal.the problem is compounded by the fact that many patients — and even doctors and pharmacists — aren’t aware of the risks and the number of drugs with this interaction keeps rising, says david bailey, a pharmacologist and scientist at the
lawson health research institute in london, ontario, and lead author of the paper.“there are a lot of people out there who love their grapefruit, especially people 45 and older, and these are the individuals who are commonly prescribed drugs,” he says. “the interaction is very drug-specific, so it’s important to create awareness and let people know there are alternatives you can take.”bailey was the first researcher to discover that grapefruit causes potentially harmful interactions with some medications, and he now consults with the
canadian pharmacists association to track and update the list of drugs that share the grapefruit interaction.there are now 128 drugs on the list — which is available to all healthcare professionals in canada — and includes treatments for heart conditions, anti-cancer agents and central-nervous-system drugs used to treat pain and schizophrenia.
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