The grapefruit (Citrus × paradisi) is a subtropical citrus tree known for its Okay Taste fruit, an 18th-century hybrid first bred in Barbados. When found, it was named the "forbidden fruit"; and it has also been misidentified with the pomelo or shaddock (C. maxima), one of the parents of this hybrid, the other being sweet orange (C. × sinensis).
These evergreen trees usually grow to around 5 - 6 meters (16–20 ft) tall, although they can reach 13 -15 meters (43 - 49 ft). The leaves are dark green, long (up to 150 mm, 6 inches) and thin. It produces 5 cm (2 in) white four-petaled flowers. The fruit is yellow-orange skinned and largely an oblate spheroid; it ranges in diameter from 10–15 cm. The flesh is segmented and acidic, varying in color depending on the cultivars, which include white, pink and red pulps of varying sweetness (generally, the redder varieties are sweeter). The 1929 US Ruby Red (of the Redblush variety) has the first grapefruit patent.
One ancestor of the grapefruit was the Jamaican sweet orange (Citrus sinensis), itself an ancient hybrid of Asian origin; the other was the Indonesian pomelo (C. maxima). One story of the fruit's origins is that a certain "Captain Shaddock" brought pomelo seeds to Jamaica and bred the first fruit. However, it probably originated as a naturally occurring hybrid.
FORBIDDEN-FRUIT-TREE
The Trunk, Leaves, and Flowers of this Tree, very much resemble those of the Orange-tree.
The Fruit, when ripe, is something longer and larger than the largest Orange; and exceeds, in the Delicacy of its Taste, the Fruit of every Tree in this or any of our neighbouring Islands. It hath somewhat of the Taste of a Shaddock; but far exceeds that, as well as the best Orange, in its delicious Taste and Flavour.
Description from Hughes' 1750 Natural History of Barbados.
The hybrid fruit, then called "the forbidden fruit", was first documented in 1750 by a Welshman, Rev. Griffith Hughes, who described specimens from Barbados in The Natural History of Barbados. Currently, the grapefruit is said to be one of the "Seven Wonders of Barbados."
The grapefruit was brought to Florida by Count Odet Philippe in 1823 in what is now known as Safety Harbor. Further crosses have produced the tangelo (1905), the Minneola tangelo (1931), and the oroblanco (1984).
The grapefruit was known as the shaddock or shattuck until the 19th century. Its current name alludes to clusters of the fruit on the tree, which often appear similar to grapes. Botanically, it was not distinguished from the pomelo until the 1830s, when it was given the name Citrus paradisi. Its true origins were not determined until the 1940s. This led to the official name being altered to Citrus × paradisi, the "×" identifying its hybrid origin.
Kimball Chase Atwood
An early pioneer in the American citrus industry was Kimball Chase Atwood, a wealthy entrepreneur who founded the Atwood Grapefruit Co. in the late 19th century. The Atwood Grove became the largest grapefruit grove in the world, with a yearly output of 80,000 boxes of fruit. It was there that pink grapefruit was first discovered in 1906.
Advantage of Grapefruit
Grapefruit Helps in Losing Weight
Grapefruit is high in enzymes that burn fats, has high water content and has less sodium. A combination of these three characteristics make grapefruit a perfect food for increasing your body’s metabolism. Try eating grapefruit or drinking grapefruit juice every day and you will notice how quickly you lose those extra pounds.
Prevents Arthritis and Works as an Antiseptic
Grapefruit contains salicylic acid that helps break down the body’s inorganic calcium, which builds up in the cartilage of joints and may lead to arthritis. If you have arthritis, try drinking grapefruit juice with apple cider vinegar. You will notice a reduction in your arthritis symptoms.
The salicylic acid in grapefruit also works as a powerful antiseptic. In addition, grapefruit seed extracts can be added to water to make an antiseptic spray for treating bacterial and fungal infections.
Grapefruit Helps in Cancer Prevention
Lycopene is a carotenoid pigment that is responsible for the red color of grapefruit. It is a powerful agent against tumors and cancers as it acts as a scavenger of cancer-causing free radicals. Lycopene works best with vitamins A and C, which are also found in grapefruit.
An antioxidant compound, called naringenin, is also found in grapefruit. Naringenin helps repair damaged DNA in prostate cancer cells. DNA repair contributes to cancer prevention as it impedes the reproduction of cancer cells.
Grapefruit Helps Lower Cholesterol Levels
The antioxidants found in grapefruit are effective in reducing cholesterol levels. However, if you are on prescription drugs, do not eat grapefruit or drink grapefruit juice. Grapefruit has a negative reaction against many prescription drugs such as those used in treating depression, allergies, high blood pressure, seizures, impotence, heart palpitations and even HIV. Inform your physician if you want to use grapefruit as a regular form of treatment.
Grapefruit Treats Common Ailments
Eating grapefruit or drinking its juice helps treat common cold and fever, dissolve gallstones, boost liver function and enhance immunity against infections. As grapefruit contains a dietary fiber called pectin, it thus promotes better digestion. In addition, if you want to have a healthy and smooth skin, try including grapefruit in your diet.
You can get many other benefits from grapefruit because it also contains essential elements such as iron, calcium, potassium, manganese, magnesium, phosphorus, folic acid and B vitamins (thiamine, riboflavin and niacin). You can even extract oil from grapefruit peel for use in aromatherapy.
Disadvantage of Grapefruit
The grapefruit diet promises weight loss, which is given credibility by a 2009 University of Ontario Study led by Murray Huff and a book that came out in the 1990s entitled "Foods that Cause You to Lose Weight: the Negative Calorie Effect." However, there are many disadvantages of the grapefruit diet, the most important being that if you are taking medications, grapefruit can become dangerous to your health.
Side Effects
Any drug that enters your bloodstream is supposed to be metabolized by your CYP3A4 enzyme. However, if you are consuming grapefruit as part of the grapefruit diet, your CYP34A enzyme won't be able to properly perform its job. Grapefruit stops your CYP34A enzyme from metabolizing drugs that enter your body. This can be very dangerous, because it can elevate the levels of drugs in your body to the extreme. If your drugs aren't being metabolized and broken down, they stay in your body, and if you keep taking your medication every day and it doesn't leave your body, you will be taking a dose that is dangerously higher than the dose you were prescribed. This can make any possible side effects of your medication much more likely and much more severe.
Birth Control Pills
If you are a woman thinking about trying the grapefruit diet to lose weight, there is a high chance you are taking birth control pills and if you are, this makes the grapefruit diet extremely dangerous. Since birth control pills have been among the top two birth control methods used by women in the United Stats since 1982, there is a large number of women who need to know the risks of combining grapefruit and the Pill, as they are monumental. Eating or drinking grapefruit juice as part of the grapefruit diet can lead to blood clots, gangrene, strokes, heart attacks and death if combined with contraceptive birth control pills.
Reasoning
The reason birth control pills can become so dangerous when grapefruit is in your system is because of the estrogen they contain. The low-level of estrogen in birth control pills carries only a minimal risk of giving you blood clots. But if you have grapefruit in your system, your estrogen levels can become incredibly high due to your body's inability to break down your birth control pills. This makes your risk of developing blood clots much more likely, and this elevates your risk of developing gangrene, a heart attack or stroke.
Disadvantages
Other medications known to react negatively with grapefruit include statin drugs for cholesterol and anti-inflammatories and sedatives. The list is fairly vast, so before trying the grapefruit diet, it is critical that you first consult your doctor if you are taking any drugs. If you are not taking any medications, another disadvantage of the grapefruit diet, according to Murray Huff, who researched the weight-loss properties of grapefruit, is that you might have to drink between six and eight glasses of grapefruit juice each day to see any weight loss effects. Huff, who discovered a flavonoid in grapefruit that caused weight loss in mice in a 2009 University of Ontario Study, says that perhaps someday a pill will exist that will make it easy to get enough of the grapefruit flavonoid without having to consume up to eight glasses of grapefruit daily. But as of 2011, that is a disadvantage.
Grapefruit Juice
More prescription drugs are on the market that can interact with grapefruit juice with potentially serious effects including sudden death, Canadian doctors warn.
David Bailey, a clinical pharmacologist at the Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ont., discovered the interaction between grapefruit and certain medications more than 20 years ago. Since then, he said, the number of drugs with the potential to interact has jumped to more than 85.
Grapefruit juice is known to interact with some types of medications, leading to an overdose hazard.
Bailey reviews new product monographs and prescribing information for the Canadian Pharmacists Association, and keeps a close eye on those with the potential to produce serious adverse reactions.
Taking one tablet of some medications with a glass of grapefruit juice can be like taking 20 tablets, says David Bailey. Taking one tablet of some medications with a glass of grapefruit juice can be like taking 20 tablets, says David Bailey. (iStock)
Many of the drugs are common, such as some cholesterol-lowering statins, antibiotics and calcium channel blockers used to treat high blood pressure. Others include agents used to fight cancer or suppress the immune system in people who have received an organ transplant.
People older than 45 buy the most grapefruit and take the most prescription drugs, making this group the most likely to face interactions, researchers said in an article published in Monday's issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, titled "Grapefruit-medication interactions: forbidden fruit or avoidable consequences?"
Older adults also tend to be less able to compensate when faced with excessive concentrations of drugs compared with young and middle-aged people — another reason that those over 45 seem to be particularly vulnerable, they added.
"Taking one tablet with a glass of grapefruit juice is like taking 20 tablets with a glass of water," Bailey said. "This is unintentional overdosing. So it's not surprising that these levels go from what we call therapeutic to toxic."
Of the 85 known drugs that interact with grapefruit, 43 can have serious side-effects, including sudden death, acute kidney failure, respiratory failure, gastrointestinal bleeding and bone marrow suppression in people with weakened immune systems.
The authors noted that all sources of grapefruit — the whole fruit or 200 mL of grapefruit juice — and other citrus fruit such as Seville oranges (often used in marmalade), limes and pomelos can lead to drug interactions.
Researchers advised that the affected drugs should not be consumed with those fruits. They also suggested noninteracting alternatives that could be prescribed.
But the authors can't say how big a problem the interactions are because of a lack of awareness. Health-care professionals might not be aware of the possibility to check into it and patients may not volunteer the information, Bailey said.
David Bailey originally tested for an interaction between grapefruit juice and a medication in himself. David Bailey originally tested for an interaction between grapefruit juice and a medication in himself. (CBC)
The researchers want to get the word out that the interaction can occur even if someone eats grapefruit or drinks the juice hours before taking a drug, such as downing the drink at breakfast and taking the medication after dinner.
Previously published reports showed that drinking a 200-mL glass of grapefruit juice once a day for three days produced a 330 per cent increase in the concentration of simvastatin, a commonly used statin, in the bloodstream compared with taking the medication with water.
The paper's authors said that the interaction doesn't apply to classes of drugs but to particular medications with three key characteristics:
The drugs are taken orally.
The percentage of the drugs absorbed or "bioavailable" is very low to intermediate.
The drug is metabolized by an enzyme called cytochrome P450 3A4.
Patients can look for the criteria in the product monograph or prescribing information for a drug under "clinical pharmacology."
In theory, the batch, storage conditions and white versus pink type of grapefruit might influence the size of the interaction but the researchers said that hasn't been studied in detail.
Citrus fruits that interact contain active ingredients called furanocoumarins that irreversibly block the drug metabolizing enzyme.
A search of Health Canada's adverse drug reaction database listed 30 reactions under "grapefruit" between Jan. 1, 1992, and June 30, 2012. The department cautioned that the data was voluntarily reported and should not be used to determine the incidence because the total number of reactions and patients exposed is unknown and other factors could be contributing.
A study published in the July 2007 edition of the British Journal of Cancer reported that eating grapefruit every day could raise the risk of developing breast cancer by almost a third. The study found that in the test subjects, 50,000 post-menopausal women, eating just a quarter of a grapefruit daily raised the risk by up to 30%. It is believed that the fruit boosts the levels of estrogen, which in turn increases the risk of developing the disease. However, a 2008 study has shown that grapefruit consumption does not increase breast cancer risk and has found a significant decrease in breast cancer risk with greater intake of grapefruit in women who never used hormone therapy.
In 2009, a third study conducted by European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) observed 114,504 women and their dietary intake of grapefruit. This study concluded that there was no association between grapefruit intake and estradiol or estrone among postmenopausal women. Researchers found no evidence of an association between grapefruit intake and risk of breast cancer.
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