Grapefruit juice, felodipine don’t mix

I take felodipine for high blood pressure. I know I can’t take it with grapefruit juice. I recently read that orange and apple juice also may affect medications.

Is there a fruit juice I could use for taking my felodipine? How about pineapple juice? It’s getting so you just don’t know what is safe to eat or drink.

Drug-food interactions are incredibly complicated. Grapefruit juice increases blood levels of nearly 50 medications, including felodipine. Apple and orange juice have the opposite effect for certain drugs. This might reduce effectiveness for medicines, such as the antihistamine fexofenadine (Allegra) or antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin and levofloxacin.

We could find no evidence that pineapple juice interacts with felodipine, but it can affect dozens of other drugs, including pain relievers and antidepressants.

I experienced leg cramps that started in my toes and went up almost to my diaphragm. I tried sublingual homeopathic tablets without success. My son told me professional handball players use pickle juice for cramps. I tried it, and it worked almost instantaneously. I now keep a bottle of it in my refrigerator at all times in case of an emergency.

Many doctors find such anecdotes silly and hard to believe, but there are no Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs for easing leg cramps.

Home remedies are rarely tested, but scientists at Brigham Young University performed an experiment with 10 college students. The young athletes exercised and then had a mild electrical current applied to induce a muscle cramp. The volunteers were given water or pickle juice. Pickle juice relieved the cramps about 40% faster than water, according to results published in May in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.

Joe Graedon is a pharmacologist, and Teresa Graedon is an expert in medical anthropology and nutrition. https://www.peoplespharmacy.com.