I should have saved that AccidentalWine.com link for this post, but oh well…

Remember “Drank”? It was the “slow-you down” answer to the “pick-you-up” energy drinks, borrowing its name and its grape flavor from a home-brew intoxicant made out of cough syrup favored among the hip-hop crowd. I, personally, would be a little chary about drinking anything that was supposed to remind people of cough syrup hooch, but not too long ago the brave souls at The Consumerist did a taste test. They consumed it straight and also mixed with vodka (the rationale being that Red Bull is often mixed with vodka), but decided it really didn’t taste any different than any other grape soda. As far as “slowing your roll”, the taste-tester couldn’t come to any positive conclusions, even though the drink does contain the natural sedatives valerian root and melatonin. If you really need a grape drink to make you sleepy, maybe you’d better go visit AccidentalWine.com after all.

Pepsi is bringing out a line of their SoBe drink sweetened with Stevia extract instead of HFCS or other popular sweeteners (artificial or otherwise). Stevia is a plant which produces an extract many times sweeter than cane sugar but is non-caloric. It’s very popular among the health food crowd as an alternative to sugar, but the FDA has been very reluctant to approve use of Stevia in food products due to intense pressure from the sugar industry, the corn industry, and the chemical companies who produce popular artificial sweeteners. They have, however, backed off more recently as counterpressure from soft drink manufacturers has grown stronger as public awareness of the obesity epidemic and the potential link to HFCS has increased. Not surprisingly, CocaCola is also rolling out some Stevia-sweetened products as well. Apparently its tougher to get a good-tasting cola syrup with the Stevia sweeteners, so no immediate plans to use it in the signature cola drinks.

Among thr varied and sundry medications I take every day, the medication I take for my high cholesterol, Lipitor, comes with an explicit warning not to consume grapefruit while taking the medication. Indeed, many of the statin drugs given for cholesterol advise patients to avoid grapefruit, and so do a number of other drugs. Not being a huge eater of grapefruit in the first place, it hasn’t been terribly hard to comply, but I had never really heard or read a thorough explanation of WHY grapefruit is contraindicated until I read this article. Grapefruit in particular, but other fruits and fruit juices as well (including the near-ubiquitous apple juice and orange juice) contain compounds that can increase the absorption of some drugs to the point of causing overdose even on a normal dose of the medications. And to complicate things even more, the same fruits and juices have other compounds which can DECREASE the absorption of entirely different medications, making them ineffective. As many as 50 commonly prescribed medications are susceptible to the “grapefruit effect” of unintentional overdose, but now more studies must be done to see how many meds are affected in the other extreme, too. Meanwhile, it sounds like a good idea to avoid grapefruits, apples and oranges all together if you are someone who takes daily medication for high cholesterol or hypertension, or if you are taking cancer-fighting drugs, anti-biotics, or even allergy medicine.