To me it’s interesting that grapefruit juice is listed as a “no no” while taking antidepressants/anti-anxiety medication.
I’ve looked into it and I still don’t understand. Can someone explain why you aren’t supposed to mix them? I’m only asking because I like a good Ruby Grapefruit White Claw once and a while…
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Your liver is responsible for chemically neutralizing poisons, including some medicines. It does that using specific enzymes for specific types of poisons. If you eat something that needs to be destroyed by a particular liver enzyme, it’ll share that enzyme with anything else you’ve eaten that also needs it, which causes both poisons to break down slower than they would if you’d only eaten one.
Grapefruits contain small amounts of mildly toxic chemicals called furanocoumarins. The amounts are small enough and the toxicity is mild enough that your liver can neutralize them before they cause any problems. But the liver enzyme that neutralizes grapefruit furanocoumarins is shared with some medicines. That means eating grapefruit causes those medicines to build up in your body instead of being destroyed over time. You end up with too much medicine in your body, just like if you’d overdosed.
If you’ve ever been told not to mix Tylenol and alcohol, that’s another pair that shares a liver enzyme. Drinking alcohol can cause you to get Tylenol poisoning without taking too many Tylenol pills.
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