Grapefruit Is a Fabulous Food for Weight Loss

Grapefruit has multiple benefits for you and your body. The wonderful food for weight loss contains only 78 calories, and you can easily satisfy your stomach with just a fraction of grapefruit. It contains liminoids and lycopene to help fight off cancer cells. It contains several compounds that can actually reduce atherosclerosis, or the hardening of your arteries. Red grapefruit even helps lower triglycerides, protecting your body from lethal heart disease. In other words, you should include grapefruit in your daily diet to promote weight loss, as well as good health in general. Just don't mix it with the wrong medication.

Decades ago, the Grapefruit Diet became a popular health fad for American women trying to lose belly fat. You may know the diet as the Hollywood Diet, if not the Mayo Clinic Diet. It entailed eating half of a grapefruit with every meal. If not, you could simply drink a glass of grapefruit juice to fill yourself up. The end result should be a loss of 800 or so calories a day to get skinny in no time. However, the Grapefruit Diet never seemed to work for more than a couple of weeks at a time. Unfortunately, the fad diet is not free from dangerous side effects.

Commonly farmed in Florida, some men and women like to sweeten their grapefruit with some honey, as well as white or brown sugar. For fun, you can always add some cinnamon to the fruit. Throw some grapefruit over a green salad, or mix it into a pudding. Grapefruit can be used to create vinegar and sweet tasting soft drinks, as well as wine. It's even in marmalade and syrups in some parts of the world, like Australia. Even the pulp can be used to treat urinary disorders.

Eating and drinking grapefruit may have a bad effect on one or more of your prescription medications. The natural food's chemicals often interact with medicines. Meanwhile, it doesn't help that grapefruit and its juice are usually consumed at breakfast, the time that most individuals prefer to take their pills.
The juice from grapefruit obstructs an enzyme in your intestine. As a direct result, many medications, such as Lipitor, are blocked from effectively getting absorbed into your system. Therefore, grapefruit actually increases the amount of drugs in your body. In other words, the medications do even get evenly dispersed, causing your blood levels to shoot up. The end result can often be toxic, as the interaction can become fickle and even dangerous.

Doctors believe that grapefruits' negative interaction with medications is caused by compounds known as furanocoumarins. They block the enzymes from your body that are needed to break down a handful of popular medications, such as drugs to lower high cholesterol levels. When taking any one of these medications, grapefruit could block their productive entry in your system for an entire day. You don't even have to indulge in grapefruit or its juice at the same time as taking your meds to experience the bad reaction in your system. As long as you are not mixing it with the wrong medications, grapefruit can be considered a marvelous food for weight loss.