Food intake exerts a complex influence on the bioavailability of drugs. It may interfere not only with tablet disintegration, drug dissolution and drug transit through the gastrointestinal tract, but may also affect the metabolic transformation of drugs in the gastrointestinal wall and in the liver. Different food components can have different effects, and food may interact in opposite ways, even with drugs that are chemically related. Therefore, the net effect of food on drug bioavailability can be predicted only by direct clinical studies of the drug in question. As judged mainly from single meal, single dose studies, food intake enhances the bioavailability of several different drugs, such as propranolol, metoprolol, hydrallazine, hydrochlorothiazide, canrenone (from spironolactone), nitrofurantoin, erythromycin (stearate), dicoumarol, phenytoin and carbamazepine, but reduces that of drugs such as isoniazid, rifampicin, tetracycline, penicillin and ampicillin, while having no consistent effect on the bioavailability of metronidazole, oxazepam, melperone, propylthiouracil, sulphasomidine and sulphonylureas. For some drugs such as digoxin and paracetamol, the rate but not the extent of absorption is reduced. Food may enhance bioavailability even though, or rather because, the rate of gastric emptying is reduced; this is apparently the case with hydrochlorothiazide and nitrofurantoin. The food induced enhancement of bioavailability of propranolol, metoprolol and hydrallazine is probably due to reduced first pass metabolism of these drugs, while food induced improvement of drug dissolution may explain the enhanced bioavailability of carbamazepine, canrenone, dicoumarol and phenytoin. An increased gastrointestinal pH may be in part the cause of the food induced reduction of the bioavailability of drugs such as isoniazid and tetracycline. In addition to single meal effects, repeated intake of protein-rich meals enhance, while carbohydrate-rich meals reduce, the rate of oxidation of antipyrine and theophylline. Moreover, intake of charcoal broiled meat markedly accelerates the oxidation of phenacetin and variably accelerates elimination of theophylline. Thus, food and its components and contaminants may have both short and long term effects on both the absorptive and biotransformation processes influencing systemic availability of drugs.