Can You Drink Lemonade With Cephalexin?

Hi Gret and thank you for reaching out to us.

Food interactions are sometimes present with antibiotics so I am always happy to make sure that we are avoiding drug interactions whenever possible. 

What Is Cephalexin?

First, cephalexin is a first generation cephalosporin. It is commonly used to treat a wide variety of bacterial infections, but most often used for skin or ear infections. The good news is that cephalexin is a drug that I usually don’t worry too much about when it comes to foods or drinks as there a few interactions there.

Safe With Lemonade?

There is not any known drug interaction between cephalexin and lemonade. The only known drug interaction with cephalexin and food is food that contains significant amounts of zinc.

Zinc seems to bind to and decrease the absorption of cephalexin. Lemons don’t really contain any significant amount of zinc.

There might be a fortified version of a lemonade that has added zinc, but I wasn’t able to find any. If you take a multivitamin that contains zinc, you might want to stop it for a few days until your course of cephalexin is finished.

Likewise, if you take zinc supplements or zinc cough drops, it might be a good idea to stop for a few days. However, unless you have a lemonade that is fortified with zinc, it seems like it would be safe to have a glass with your cephalexin.

Cephalexin is safe to take with or without food.

Food is thought to delay and slow the absorption, so drug concentrations might not reach quite as high as taken on an empty stomach, but this probably isn’t clinically relevant. The same amount of total drug is still absorbed.

Thanks for reaching out to us and I hope this helps.