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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Medications are dosed assuming a certain percentage of them flat out won’t work – your body will process some of them and kick them out prior to them entering the bloodstream. One of the ways it does this is with the use of certain enzymes. The problem is that grapefruit juice interacts with the enzyme, and if its tying up all the enzyme when you take a pill, it can’t intercept part of the medicine. Since the dosage is made assuming the enzyme will block some of it and it no longer does, you end up with a far higher dose than intended. For mental health medication, this is a REALLY big problem – these drugs tend to have a narrow effective range vs. the range where they start having too many negative effects, and even if they don’t, your doctor needs to know how much you are actually getting so they can adjust your dosage.
Weirdly enough, there are some other drugs where grapefruit juice has the *opposite* effect for other reasons. In these cases, the grapefruit juice is affecting proteins which transport the drug into your bloodstream. Disrupt those, and you end up with *not enough* drug.
Grapefruit juice is not the only food/drink that can cause these problems, but it’s certainly one of the more notable ones.
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