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Food and drugs interaction

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Clinical researches reported that some medicine can affect the nutritional condition, changing the results of biochemical tests or even leading on occasions to clinical under nutrition, over nutrition, or malnutrition.
Clinical trials have shown that nutrients, foods, and drugs can interact in some ways:

Some foods can influence on medicines. For example, by affecting absorption, an acute effect of single meals. Grapefruit juice inhibits one of the cytochrome P450s that metabolises drugs such as calcium-channel blockers, statins, carbamazepine, and terfenadine.

Nutrition can change effect of medicines. The nutritional state can affect drug metabolism and hence dosage and toxicity, for example, in Kwashiorkor.

Particular medicines can affect the nutritional state. Appetite, absorption, metabolism, and concentration of nutrients can be affected, positively or negatively, by different drugs.

Drugs can cause unpleasant reactions to minor components in some foods whose metabolism we normally take for granted— for example, hypertension from tyramine in cheese in patients taking monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

A few drugs are used as drinks, as part of the usual diet: alcoholic drinks, coffee, tea, and carbonated cola beverages.
Some nutrients are used as drugs. The nutrients are all obtainable in pure form. They may, in doses above the nutrient requirement, sometimes have a useful pharmacological action— for example, nicotinic acid for hyperlipidaemia.

What is the best way to take drugs- before or after meals?

Most drugs are best taken with or just after meals, because this is the easiest way to remember to take any drug and some are gastric irritants. Absorption of several drugs is a little delayed but this is unimportant and a few are better absorbed when taken with meals—for example, griseofulvin, metoprolol, and labetalol.

Plenty of water should be taken with uricosurics (to prevent renal precipitation) and with cholestyramine and bulk formers like methyl cellulose.

A few drugs should be taken half an hour before meals: antibiotics which are labile in acid—ampicillin, benzylpenicillin, cloxacillin, erythromycin, lincomycin, tetracycline, rifampicin, and isoniazid. So should one of the antidiabetic agents— glipizide—and, of course, appetite suppressant drugs.