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To give a practical example, grapefruit juice contains some compounds that inhibit CYP3A4, a metabolic enzyme that influences the metabolism and absorption of many drugs, which is why many prescriptions tell you not to drink it while taking a given medication.

This interaction was not discovered until 1989, and not reported until two years after that. So before 1991, a simple dietary intervention that affected like half of all drugs and that could in principle have been noticed by patient who felt bad after drinking a common household beverage, was bro science.

Which is not to say "and therefore just do whatever", but just to point out that there's plausibly a lot of low-hanging fruit still left if you can figure out where to pick it.

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7e 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

The problem is you can't figure out where to pick it; it's lost in a sea of superstitious noise.

Even if you could find this fruit easily, "a food that cures cancer when eaten" does not exist. That would surface in epidemiological studies very quickly.

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lambdaphagy 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

I admire your optimism in epidemiology. In point of fact, though, we have a rough natural experiment in the form of a food that doesn't cure a disease, but rather makes half of all drugs worse. That's very valuable knowledge, and under ideal epistemic conditions it might have been discovered within a few years of organized drug discovery as such. Yet was not widely known until the 1990s. So that's a failed positive control, which suggests that our practical capabilities to detect these kinds of effects are limited. Understandably so, given that there is no general requirement for dietary logging in clinical trials.

That said, "a food that cures cancer when eaten" is not the bar for experimentation. More realistic might be something like "a dietary or behavioral protocol that, in some way, ameliorates this or that illness".

For organisms with our body plan, "a cure for cancer" is like talking about "a cure for defection". But clearly there's "stuff that is efficacious against particular instances of cancer", a lot of which we found through techniques like natural product screens, i.e. "just trying stuff", rather than via rational drug design.

	▲	pama 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		It is indeed somewhat surprizing why it took so long to figure out grapefruit juice (and it was by accident during the study of the effects of coffee on a drug). Some of the early drugs that interacted with grapefruit juice where short-term agents like antibiotics, and others like channel blockers didnt have obvious detrimental toxicity though they might have had effects that were above the range of typical human variability. Powerful statins became household items a bit later, and all the cancer drugs were invented after this association was already known.

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s1artibartfast 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think there is a lot of efficacy left on the table with modern studies, clinical trials, and drug development. Most of the work is looking for treatments that work for the majority of the population. If a treatment was effective than standard care for 10% of people, it would be discarded.

It is more economical to start over looking for something that works for 90% of people.

Drugs an treatments aren't evaluated and discarded when proven worthless. The bottleneck is the number of treatments in development, so they are discarded when something else has a better ROI.

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EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Is it juice specifically that should be avoided? What about grapefruit in solid form? Pomelo?

	▲	youngtaff 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		All grapefruit… my wife has clear instructions on this for her heart meds