Juice and Meds Don’t Mix

Apples and oranges may be different, but they may both have a similar effect on some of the medications you take, an effect that can leave you in some trouble if you don’t take it into account.

In large part from work carried out by Dr. David Bailey from the University of Western Ontario, it’s been known for a few years now that grapefruit juice can interfere with the action of many important medications, including anti-cancer drugs, anti-rejection drugs, high blood pressure meds, cholesterol-lowering drugs, even several antibiotics.

And the curious thing about grapefruit juice is that the juice can increase the blood level of some kinds of drugs, while grapefruit juice lowers the blood levels of other kinds of medication.

Both of those situations, though, can lead to significant problems, if they’re not noticed or taken into account. For example, if too much of a particular medication gets into the blood stream, the chance of complications and side effects from that drug goes up significantly, while on the other hand, if too little of a specific drug gets to your tissues, then you can clearly have a dramatically lower impact from that particular medication.

And then there’s the really confusing scenario in which some people take their drugs with grapefruit juice on an intermittent basis only, which could clearly lead to widely differing blood test readings for that drug’s effect, and would thus confuse the hell out of a patient and physician trying to determine what the best approach is for a particular medical problem.

Thus, it’s long been standard policy to simply tell people to avoid taking any of their medications with grapefruit juice, and although there has long been a suspicion that the same caution should apply to other juices too, most specifically orange juice, studies have failed to turn up evidence that other juices might also interfere with the proper dosing of certain drugs.

Until now, that is. In an announcement released at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society, Dr. Bailey and associates claim they have studies showing that both orange juice and apple juice can affect blood levels of many medications, including allergy drugs, cancer drugs, and high blood pressure medications.

This is clearly work that requires replicating in larger studies, and with many different drugs, but until those follow-up studies are done, anyone taking any important medications would be well-advised to avoid grapefruit juice, orange juice, and apple juice when taking their meds.

In fact, to be safe, the best advice for now is to take your drugs with only a tall class of cool water  (except for specific exceptions such as those that must be taken with food) because water helps a drug get absorbed and cool water seems to work better than warm water at that task.

Dr. Art Hister