I don’t see how this is legal, but people on Tik Tok peddling miracle “medicine” are becoming more common every day. No FDA approval, no research. Just their marketing hype and false promises. This one, lady is showing some sort of probiotic and claiming it can help people suffering from severe acid reflux and gastrointestinal reflux disease or GERD, replacing medicine that has been tested for decades.
The important takeaway from this is that “supplements” have 0 oversight. The CBD, probiotics, vitamin d, etc that you buy could just be capsules of vegetable oil that does nothing at all. Or they could be asbestos and cyanide for all you know (that probably would lead to an investigation though). There’s also no safety regarding packing and handling, so it might literally be a guy with unwashed hands who just picked his butt loading your gelcaps in a dirty bathroom that someone just took a massive shit in. No one checks and verifies any of this and that’s why shills and hucksters jump onto this shit, it’s a completely unregulated market where can cut corners everywhere and say whatever you want as long as you include *not intended to treat any diseases and not evaluated by the fda
A $1200 thing you buy on instagram that sends “good waves” to your brain? Supplement. The cbd you buy at the gas station? Supplement. Doterra oils? Supplement. No regulation, no oversight, just robbing people based on their desperation to fix chronic pain and mental illness
So the CBD thing really bugs me, in particular.
One of my medications has one of those warnings about how you can’t have grapefruit while taking this medication. That’s because grapefruit is metabolized on a certain enzyme pathway that gets interrupted. That enzyme pathway is CYP3A4.
You know what else takes that enzyme pathway? Fucking CBD. It also blocks the enzyme pathway, making any drugs administered less effective because they can’t bind to where they need to because the CBD molecule is already there, taking up space.
So like, for me, these are life saving medications so fucking around with this is really stupid but literally no doctor told me this. I accidentally figured this out while doing research on CBD. It seems like its becoming more publicized now, but the bottom line is this:
If you have medication that warns you that you should not eat grapefruit with this medication (about 60% of medications, I believe), that medication needs the same warning about CBD.
https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/cannabidiol-presents-conundrums
It only makes prodrugs that first need to be metabolized by CYP3A4 to be active less effective. This is a pretty small minority of drugs. It makes drugs that are inactivated by CYP3A4 more effective, which is the majority of them. It also only competitively inhibits the enzyme while the drug is in your system, it’s not permanently inhibiting the enzyme like a suicide inhibitor.
so grapefruit can either increase or decrease your metabolism rate of some drugs. It doesn’t just block it entirely.