Fear of food interacting with medication

[Ultimatejourney]

Idk if this is the right forum because this overlaps with health anxiety, but I needed to get this out. These last few weeks have been really stressful due to school, and I have found myself becoming more anxious about food, in particular food interacting with my medication. Now, I'm on sertraline, and i know that really the only food product that interacts with it is grapefruit, but i feel like I have to make sure, which is really annoying. For example, today I freaked out over a product because it contained mangoes and a very tiny amount of green tea, and later I freaked out over pretzel bread because it tasted weird and had thiamin in it, despite the fact that I've had that bread before. This combined with my anxiety over my low vitamin D levels (afraid of supplements) and my recent thoughts about wanting to get off of medication, as i feel like changing or going up will do more harm than good, has been making me miserable. Meantime, I'm just going to keep reminding myself that food has never harmed me, and hope that this goes away soon.

[MyNameIsTerry]

Yes, this is all a very confusing area. Grapefruit is a well known one that interacts with many medications and it's because of their use of certain liver enzymes that become inhibited by something in grapefruit (which they haven't isolated yet).

The inhibition means you end up with more of the drug in your system hence it can bring unexpected effects. In antidepressants this might feel like a dosage increase which brings the potential for side effects but in other medications it could be more of a problem e.g. my blood pressure meds as the effect would be more than by body needs.

One way to think about this with antidepressants is that there are varying dosages and doctors are happy to increase them with little science behind the individuals need other than to see if they are responding (bare in mind my BP meds are based on understanding my levels and checking them to see the response is the required one) therefore would someone on the lowest dose who ate some grapefruit suddenly find themselves on a massive dose or would they just find themselves on an increase that doesn't advance past that of other patients on higher dosages?

So, perhaps we are worrying without understanding whether it would be a serious problem or just an unexpected jolt through side effects due to more than we expected? But those on the max doses would rightly have more concerns, as would those on higher dosages that are sub maximum.

And grapefruit is also about how much you consume. Over a certain level it can have quite a marked impact but under this it may not be as worrying.

I do all the interaction checking stuff as I try out various supplements and it is a confusing experience.