This entry was posted 10 years, 10 months ago.
For over a century, grapefruits and grapefruit juice have been highly valued, extensively studied and used as a natural remedy for a variety of health conditions. High in great amounts of essential nutrients and micro-elements, grapefruits have won a place among the most nutritious and useful fruits on the planet. Grapefruit and grapefruit juice benefits include speeding up metabolism, stimulating fat burning and boosting weight loss (provided a low calorie healthy diet is consumed). The grapefruit diet is a very well known and effective diet plan involving consuming 3-4 glasses of grapefruit juice every day, this way assisting in putting off up to 10-12 pounds in 2 weeks. Grapefruits are excellent choice to improve skin quality and speed up detoxification. Grapefruit juice is an amazing cleanser and tonic which can be used in moderate amounts by everyone. It has very good anti-inflammatory and appetite stimulant properties. Besides, it was recently found out that grapefruit juice benefits also include cardiovascular properties: this natural product can lower hypertension and stroke risks in women.
The fact that grapefruits can influence and alter the effectiveness of medications gave scientists an idea to look closer at this interesting property of these refreshing fruits. According to the recent findings of an expert team at the University of Chicago, published a few days earlier in Clinical Cancer Research, using grapefruit juice as one of supportive natural cancer treatments can be a very good idea as grapefruit juice can substantially increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy. Combining grapefruit juice with chemotherapy can allow decreasing the doses of chemo without any loss in the effects, this way decreasing the risks of unwanted side effects and making this kind of cancer treatment a little safer for cancer patients. 
Thus, grapefruit juice benefits embrace not only biological effects and powerful therapeutic properties of this natural product, but also financial factors: grapefruit juice can help patients with cancer reduce the costs for their treatment.
The effects of grapefruit juice were tested on sirolimus, a quite common type of cancer treatment. 138 participants with incurable cancer were invited to take part in the experiment. By adding some amounts of grapefruit juice to regular sirolimus treatment of the patients with cancer, scientists managed to receive much higher concentrations of the medicine in patients’ blood, making the treatment potentially much more effective. A closer study has shown that grapefruit juice as one of supportive natural cancer treatments assists in inhibiting certain enzymes that break down cancer treatments like sirolimus. The same effects grapefruit juice has on calcium channel blockers to treat cholesterol-lowering statins, hypertension, and other health conditions. Chicago University scientists consider reducing the risks of unwanted side effects and making cancer treatment safer to be the main advantage of using grapefruit juice as a part of cancer treatment therapy.
“This is the first cancer study to harness this drug-food interaction,” Dr. Ezra Cohen, one of the study leaders and the report author, wrote. He noted that all the participants of the experiment demonstrated certain slow down in their disease development. In addition, the scientists found out that various types of grapefruit juice have different potency, and it is supposed that the effectiveness of the juice can depend on the levels of one of its compounds, furanocoumarin. The scientists underline that the found grapefruit juice benefits could work great for a large number of cancer patients since the juice is nontoxic and overdose risk free. It is also interesting that for the experiments, experts used the samples of grapefruit juice supplied by the Florida Department of Citrus. For more information about the findings of this study and the effects of grapefruit juice as one of supplementary natural cancer treatments, go to here.
Author Info: Hi! My name is Carla and I am a 5th year medical student at HYMS. I am interested in alternative medicine and I have done months researching the topic of herbal medicine. Besides, I like interviewing people and learning more about their experiences with one or another type of herbal treatments. I am willing to contribute to this site with my knowledge, and I would be happy to help you out to the best of my ability with any specific questions or problems related to alternative medicine.
0 read user's comments
