Food Affects How Drugs Work
Acidic meals can alter how medications enter your body.
“Do I have to worry about stomach acid?” asked Daryl during our session. Daryl started most days with a can of Mountain Dew to wash down his ADHD stimulant medication, Concerta. He had been reading on Reddit how acidic foods or drinks could interfere with the absorption of stimulants. But he hadn’t noticed much difference between his mornings with or without the Dew.
Daryl and I discussed that what people eat and drink can change the degree of stomach acidity. We reviewed how acid can affect how readily medications enter and leave the body. Therefore it has the potential to alter how much of a drug is present to engage in chemical interactions with a human.
In some cases, the acidity of food can have a major impact on medication levels. For Daryl, acidity didn’t seem to strongly influence the levels of Concerta in his body. Rather than the acidity of his Mountain Dew, its sugar content probably posed a bigger risk to Daryl’s overall long term physical health.
Understanding how the balance between acids and bases can affect how our bodies process drugs is useful information for anyone who takes medications. But there are often more important factors determining medication levels in our bodies. A number of different attributes…
