I eat thousands of different things every week and I don't ask questions about any of them weekly. Do you? And would you think it's realistic to question everything all the time?
I see no reason why prescription drugs shouldn't work the same way (which is, in fact, the way they work now). If you start taking a new prescription drug, find out what foods you can't eat and avoid them. There's no need to add a specific warning to every food that might interact with any given drug.
Dogs can eat garlic. You'd have to be feeding them multiple powdered garlic packets to cause harm, if its even possible.
So you've failed at risk management. This is why we have to have these dumbed down labels.
The American Kennel Club [1] and [2] the Pet Poison Help Line (among others) would disagree with your certainty, sir. In this case it is you who have "failed at risk management". You did not bother to consider the risks of posting false / incorrect information on a public forum. This is why we have to have these dumbed down labels. Because people cannot bother to do (literally) ten seconds of research on their favorite search engine before "speaking with authority" on public forums / social media about a topic which they are clearly not nearly as sure of as they believe themselves to be. That's how misinformation spreads so readily these days.
[1] https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/nutrition/can-dogs-eat-gar...
Studies have found it takes approximately 15 to 30 grams of garlic per kilograms of body weight to produce harmful changes in a dog’s blood. To put that into perspective, the average clove of supermarket garlic weighs between 3 and 7 grams, so your dog would have to eat a lot to get really sick. However, some dogs are more sensitive to garlic toxicity than others, and consumption of a toxic dose spread out over a few days could also cause problems.
This means that if your dog accidentally eats something containing a little garlic, they will probably be okay, but intentionally feeding it to your dog is a bad idea.
You wanna risk it with your dog, that's on you… Also, "Dogs can eat garlic." and then ridiculing the person who actually did research about what's safe for their dog, when this person couldn't be bothered to even do a ten second web search to determine if their harshness was even justifiable? And it's worth taking into account that dogs come in a pretty wide variety of sizes and body mass. Larger or more massive dog can obviously tolerate more of a toxic substance before it's a serious issue. Still shouldn't just take this person at their word and start feeding your dog garlic just because some Internet rando says "dogs can eat garlic".
Do you know that it is true? Pretty sure they read the same/similar info from a web search and determined that foods that contain a bit of garlic aren't a big danger to dogs. The context is important (although it's fair to point out that the quote can be taken out of context) -- the discussion was about food that incidentally contained garlic as ingredient (which realistically wouldn't contain a whole lot of it), not feeding whole cloves of garlic to dogs.
If you'd prefer, feel free to insert "grapes" instead. The point remains.
My burden taking a medication is on a percentage basis an edge case for the general "eating stuff" problem. So the onus is on me to resolve this edge case.
If you really desire some sort of campaign to stop this there are ways that don't impede on businesses and other's lives. You could run commercials about pharmaceutical pamphlets, you could fund a website where people could find their drug and learn quickly about interactions, you could make it a legal obligation of doctors and pharmacists to both tell you the necessary precautions with your medication. All of these would be better solutions than some safety theater like a warning label on an unambiguously safe product except to people taking certain medications. To exemplify this most diet soda contains a required notice "caution phenylketonurics: contains phenylalanine." Did you know this? Do you think the average person finds utility in this? If you are a phenylketonuric you most likely already know about the risks and what to avoid with your condition. Not only that it's incredibly rare on a population basis (~1/15,000). It's not the onus of a business to put this theater on their foods unless the chemical is dangerous to a majority (such as tar in tobacco).
Sure, you eat thousands of things. But surely you're consuming less prescribed medicine. The onus is on you to read the material given to you when prescribed potentially life threatening medication. It's prescribed and not over-the-counter for a reason. There's extra precaution placed on the medicine itself, and so you should pay attention to that and read up.
More seriously, it is easy to overlook the extreme spectrum of knowledge and ignorance in our society. There are other factors too, such as cognitive impairment, state of mind, etc. Ignorance may be a poor defence under law, but in a more ideal world, ignorance of grapefruits shouldn't result in capital punishment.
With the extreme liberalness we accept advertisements everywhere, it doesn't seem unreasonable to dedicate an extra amount of space here and there for friendly warnings.
Edit: I see several comments stating that such warnings are printed on labels. If so, discard my comment. Other than verbal warning, that's probably adequate for our imperfect world.
Maybe you eat thousands of things and some interact with each other. You don't know, you're just hoping it will be fine, because learning everything about everything is not feasible, which was my point.
My secondary point is that everyone on this thread is blaming the victim for not doing enough research, while at the same time everyone on this thread is only marginally better - maybe you do enough research in this specific topic, but surely not for everything in life.
Plus, knowing that grapefruit helps metabolize different things helpful and cheapens your bartab. You'll get drunk faster after eating a grapefruit or two. Animal derived fats help slow down the inebriation process, like butter and a really greasy beef patty.
Would you want grocery stores to label grapefruits in the produce section?
Where did I say that? We're in a topic about medicine interacting with grapefruit. I suggest putting the warning on the medicine is a reasonable approach for this issue.
>Maybe you eat thousands of things and some interact with each other.
Whats your point here? Should every food list every possible interaction with every other existing food and medicine? Will I need to a read a 1400 page book before I can buy an orange?