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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Before you pour yourself a glass of grapefruit juice or slice open a grapefruit at breakfast, consider how this tart fruit might affect the medicines you take. Both grapefruits and their juice are known to interact with dozens of medicines, including birth control pills. If you’re on the pill, should you consider switching to a different breakfast fruit?Birth control pills contain man-made forms of the female hormones estrogen and progestin. Normally, a rise in estrogen levels in the middle of a woman’s menstrual cycle causes her ovaries to release a mature egg. This process is called ovulation. The egg is then ready to be fertilized by a man’s sperm. Once the egg is fertilized, it attaches to the wall of the mother’s uterus, where it can grow into a baby. The hormones in birth control pills interrupt a woman’s natural cycle and prevent the egg from being released. These hormones also thicken cervical mucus, making it harder for sperm to swim up through the cervix to reach the egg. Birth control also changes the uterine lining to make it harder for an egg that has been fertilized to attach and grow.When used correctly, birth control pills are 91 to 99 percent effective. That means for every 100 women who take the pill, one to nine of them could get pregnant during any given year. Women who do get pregnant while on the pill often conceive because they skipped pills or didn’t take them correctly.Chemicals in grapefruit interfere with an enzyme in the intestines called CYP3A4, which affects how your body breaks down and absorbs certain medicines. When you eat grapefruit or drink grapefruit juice, you can either absorb too much or not enough of these medicines. This means you might develop more side effects from the drug, or the drug may not work as well as it should.In the case of birth control, grapefruit and grapefruit juice decrease the breakdown of estrogen in the body. This increases the amount of the hormone in your system. Although the increase in estrogen shouldn’t make the pill less effective, it could potentially increase the risk of side effects like blood clots and breast cancer. It’s worth noting that this hasn’t been proven.Grapefruit and its juice can interact with more than 80 different medicines, including:fexofenadine (Allegra), which is used to treat allergiesbuspirone (Buspar) and sertraline (Zoloft), which are used to treat depression and anxiety
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