How a Food and Drug Interaction Happens
Foods nourish your body. Medicines cure (or relieve) what ails you. You’d think the two would work together in perfect harmony to protect your body. Sometimes they do. Occasionally, however, foods and drugs square off like boxers slugging it out in the ring.
The drug keeps your body from absorbing or using the nutrients in food, or the food (or nutrient) prevents you from getting the benefits of certain medicines. The medical phrase for this sad state of affairs is adverse interaction. This article describes several adverse interactions and lays out some simple strategies that enable you to short-circuit them.
When you eat, food moves from your mouth to your stomach to your small intestine, where the nutrients that keep you strong and healthy are absorbed into your bloodstream and distributed throughout your body.
Take medicine by mouth, and it follows pretty much the same path from your mouth to your stomach, where it’s dissolved and passed along to the small intestine for absorption. Nothing is unusual about that.
The problem, however, arises when a food or drug brings the process to a screeching halt by behaving in a way that stops your body from using either the drug or the food. Many possibilities exist:
Some drugs or foods change the natural acidity of your digestive tract so that you absorb nutrients less efficiently. For example, your body absorbs iron best when your stomach is acidic. Taking antacids reduces stomach acidity — and iron absorption. Some drugs or foods change the rate at which food moves through your digestive tract, which means that you absorb more (or less) of a particular nutrient or drug. For example, eating prunes (a laxative food) or taking a laxative drug speeds things up so that foods (and drugs) move more quickly through your body and you have less time to absorb medicine or nutrients. Some drugs and nutrients bond (link up with each other) to form insoluble compounds...Popular
