[HN Gopher] Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet
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       Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet
        
       Author : jaredwiener
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2021-12-07 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
        
       | Markoff wrote:
       | Grapefruit has a high volume of compounds called furanocoumarins,
       | which are designed to protect the fruit from fungal infections.
       | When you ingest grapefruit, those furanocoumarins take your
       | cytochrome P450 enzymes offline. There's no coming back.
       | Grapefruit is powerful, and those cytochromes are donezo. So the
       | body, when it encounters grapefruit, basically sighs, throws up
       | its hands, and starts producing entirely new sets of cytochrome
       | P450s. This can take over 12 hours.
       | 
       | This rather suddenly takes away one of the body's main defense
       | mechanisms. If you have a drug with 10 percent bioavailability,
       | for example, the drugmakers, assuming you have intact cytochrome
       | P450s, will prescribe you 10 times the amount of the drug you
       | actually need, because so little will actually make it to your
       | bloodstream. But in the presence of grapefruit, without those
       | cytochrome P450s, you're not getting 10 percent of that drug.
       | You're getting 100 percent. You're overdosing.
       | 
       | And it does not take an excessive amount of grapefruit juice to
       | have this effect: Less than a single cup can be enough, and the
       | effect doesn't seem to change as long as you hit that minimum.
       | 
       | None of this is a mystery, at this point, and it's shockingly
       | common. Here's a brief and incomplete list of some of the
       | medications that research indicates get screwed up by grapefruit:
       | 
       | Benzodiazepines (Xanax, Klonopin, and Valium) Amphetamines
       | (Adderall and Ritalin) Anti-anxiety SSRIs (Zoloft and Paxil)
       | Cholesterol-lowering statins (Lipitor and Crestor) Erectile-
       | dysfunction drugs (Cialis and Viagra) Various over-the-counter
       | meds (Tylenol, Allegra, and Prilosec) And about a hundred others.
        
         | colanderman wrote:
         | To be clear, the above is a direct quote from the article.
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-07 23:03 UTC)