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Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

Being a little pedantic, the drug interactions part of the article applies to bitter citrus specifically: not just grapefruit (despite the title!), but not all citrus either. Typically “orange” is used to refer to sweet oranges, not sour oranges.

As to soda, I struggle to imagine a soda that has any amount of juice worth taking into account…

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Fresca is right on the line, with a can shown to increase serum concentrations of some drugs by 50%--- not enough to matter in most cases.

> As to soda, I struggle to imagine a soda that has any amount of juice worth taking into account…

It's not just the juice. The acidity level of your stomach affects absorption of many drugs - some are absorbed faster in an acidic environment and some are absorbed slower, which means drinking even Coca Cola (pH: 2.5) with your medication could potentially have the effect of negating your medication or increasing the effective dosage substantially, depending on the drug.

Your stomach is already much more acidic than Coca Cola

Indeed. It’s typically a pH of 1.

And your body is really good at buffering acids and bases. Once your stomach empties into your small intestine, bicarbonate is released which raises the pH to around 5.5 I believe which is necessary for digestive enzymes to work.

Think you'd be surprised. Coke pH is 2.5, and it seems that ideal human stomach pH is 1.5 to 2.5. Fun fact: you can use Coke to clean your toilets.

Orangina?

Sodas often contain significant amounts of ciric or phosphoric acid.

Per the article, the drug-interaction problem comes from furanocoumarins depleting your cytochrome P450. There's nothing in there to suggest that refined acid (as opposed to unprocessed juice) would include furanocoumarins.

Indeed, "citric" acid produced today comes from mold cultures that A) don't produce significant quantities of FCs, and B) even remove FCs from their environment by adsorption.

Sure of course, I was just replying to the question about fruit juice and sodas.

I once read that CocaCola is the largest consumer of lemon oil in the world. So I am sure their syrup has plenty of it.

I don't think this logic tracks - there are so many Cokes produced annually that even if every can had only 0.1 mL of lemon oil they'd still probably be the largest consumer.

Not too mention that the Coca-Cola company also own a staggering amount of more or less known brands, the bigger of which of course being Sprite and Fanta, which are likely large consumers of lemon oil.

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