About Grapefruit
Thought I’d start the week off with some fun facts about grapefruit!
First off, where does the name grapefruit come from? For the answer, let’s go to John Ciardi. He’s dead, but you can find his “On Words” series on itunes as a podcast, from NPR, or at this link here:
John, if I may call him John, hypothesizes that the word grapefruit comes from the genus/species name for the grapefruit common in the Americas. Grapefruit is indigenous to the Far East. The type of grapefruit we’re most familiar with is Citrus grande. Translated from Latin, this means “great fruit.” Great fruit sounds an awful lot like grape fruit.
John talks about how people have come up with all kinds of other, silly reasons people have for why it’s called grapefruit. He says all those reasons are wrong. Even Wikipedia talks about grapefruits being named so because they grow in clusters like grapes. If John were here, he’d put Wikipedia in its place.
My second bit of exciting grapefruit info? A study (Live Science link) has shown that the smell of pink grapefruit may cause men to perceive women to be about six years younger than they are. The researchers used other smells, like broccoli and lavender, but those had no effect. I do not know why they chose broccoli. That’s kinda freaky to me.
I got myself some grapefruit-scented lotion yesterday at the Galleria. I’ll keep you posted.
Finally, grapefruit can totally mess with certain medications (here’s a link that’s a bit dense, but with good info). Like, people have died. Maybe something you wanna look into, if you take lots of pills. The enzymes found in grapefruit can change the levels of medication in the blood. It seems that benzos (benzodiazepines) don’t play nice with grapefruit. I’ve never let that stop me, but perhaps I should reconsider, as the effects from having had grapefruit con benzos can last for three days.
grapefruit, etymology, smell, younger, medication, interaction
June 12th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Ha! One of my favorite lotions is a grapefruit-scented one, but I didn’t realize it had age-defying properties as well! I just thought it smelled nice.