NY TIMES: Grapefruit Juice is Not Innocuous

Bottom-line of article to me:

Grapefruit juice oughtabe prudently
avoided as pill chaser.

I take mine (including generic plendil) usually with unsugared coffeee
and diet sodas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/health/21grap.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Experts Reveal the Secret Powers of Grapefruit Juice

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By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: March 21, 2006
In 1989, a group of Canadian researchers studying a blood pressure drug
were astonished to discover that drinking a glass of grapefruit juice
dangerously increased the drug's potency.

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Refreshing but Risky They were testing the effects of drinking alcohol
on a medicine called Plendil. The scientists needed something that
would hide the taste of alcohol so that subjects would know only that
they were taking the drug and not know whether they were drinking
alcohol with it.

"One Saturday night, my wife and I tested everything in the
refrigerator," said David G. Bailey, a research scientist at the London
Health Sciences Center in London, Ontario, and the lead author on the
study. "The only thing that covered the taste was grapefruit juice."

So they used it in their experiment, expecting the grapefruit juice to
be irrelevant to their results. But blood levels of the drug went up
significantly in the control group that drank just grapefruit juice,
without alcohol.

"People didn't believe us," Dr. Bailey said. "They thought it was a
joke. We had trouble getting it published in a major medical journal."

Eventually the paper was accepted and published by Lancet, in February
1991.

Finding why juice had that effect ...

.