Grapefruit Interactions with Drugs

Many people would think that a diet which allows you to eat various foods with the only restriction that you have to eat half fruit after each meal is a healthy one, and that it is safe to lose weight this way. Those would be diets that work without triggering health-related consequences.

At first sight, this weight loss method really sounds healthy, and if we think that the grapefruit diet dates back from the 1930s, then we may think that it has to be something good about it.

What you may not know is that the real reason why the grapefruit diet works is not the magic compound in the grapefruits which helps the body burn fat, but the restriction of the daily calories consumption to about 800, which is lower than the average need of an adult person.

Recently, scientists discovered that actually the grapefruit juice interacts with a series of drugs, thus causing troubles to the patients who ingested such drugs on daily basis, due to their chronic diseases.

This is a list of drugs which are known to interact with the grapefruit juice, leading to unpredictable effects:

• Antihistamines (anti allergy medication): Ebastine, Seldane (terfenadine, taken off the U.S. market)
• Anti-HIV medication : saquinavir (Invirase)
• Antiarrhythmics (anti heart arrhythmia): amiodarone (Cordarone)
• Calcium Channel Blockers (Blood Pressure Decreasing Drugs): nimodipine (Nimotop), Felodipine (Nitrendipine, Plendil), Pranidipine, nisoldipine (Sular), nicardipine (Cardene), verapamil (Verelan)
• Statins (Cholesterol Reduction Drugs): lovastatin (Mevacor), atorvastatin (Lipitor), Simvastatin (Zocor), simvastatin/ezetimibe (Vytorin)
• Impotence Drug (erectile dysfunction): sildenafil (Viagra)
• Immune Suppressants: cyclosporine (Neoral), (tacrolimus) Prograf
• Pain Medications: Methadone
• Psychiatric Medications: buspirone (Buspar), triazolam (Halcion), carbamazepine (Tegretol), diazepam (Valium), midazolam (Versed), sertraline (Zoloft)

(Source: MedicineNet.com)

As you can see, there are a lot of classes of drugs which interfere with the grapefruit juice, and they treat serious ailments, so you shouldn't ignore them if you think to try the grapefruit diet to lose a few pounds.

To give you only one example, there's been this study, where people in a tests group were given grapefruit juice in combination with felodipine (Plendil), while the control groups received orange juice and FC-free grapefruit juice.
FC stands for furanocoumarins, which were believed to be the culprit in grapefruit juice, causing higher concentrations of felodipine in the blood, thus leading to severely low blood pressure. To confirm this suspicion, the scientists created FC-free grapefruit juice, and this one proven to be harmless, in the above mentioned study.

Have you ever thought that you could actually kill someone with grapefruit juice?