Why You Shouldn’t Take Some Medicines With Grapefruit Juice

There’s a lot of fine print to read on your medicine labels, and among them is often the disclaimer to not take with grapefruit juice. What’s up with that? This video will tell you.

In an episode of SciShow, host Hank Green explains why some prescription medication includes the warning, “do not take with grapefruit juice.”

The short of it is that grapefruit juice messes with your body’s ability to properly metabolize the medicine. It blocks a crucial enzyme (CYP3A4) that controls how much of the medicine you receive. So drinking grapefruit juice basically throws off the safe dose.

A paper from the Canadian Medical Association explains:

The actions of drugs are terminated through several biological mechanisms. The most important is drug metabolism involving oxidation by enzymes belonging to the cytochrome P450 superfamily. Cytochrome P450 3A4 is particularly essential, because it is involved in the bioinactivation of about 50% of all drugs…[The drug] it is subject to a potentially dramatic increase in systemic exposure and associated higher risk of overdose with grapefruit as a result of diminished CYP3A4 activity, primarily in the small intestine rather than in the liver.

The video breaks it all down in an easy-to-understand manner, so check it out above, or head to the link below.

Why Shouldn’t You Take Medicine with Grapefruit Juice? | SciShow (YouTube)

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