Q. 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 may also 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.
A. 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 like 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.
