Cranberry Juice – The All Natural UTI Medicine
By: Robert Smichtz
It has been long known that cranberry juice can offer a variety of health benefits (when ingesting in the right form). Some of the most recent research involving cranberry juice examines how the juice is even effective at treating bladder infections. While most people with a bladder infection swiftly race to the doctor for antibiotic treatment, the infection causing bacteria are becoming resistant to our medicines, and something needs to be done. That something may be as simple as drinking cranberry juice.
Studies on cranberry juice’s ability to cure bladder infections have been performed before, but with mixed results. Some studies have shown that the cranberry juice did in fact clear up the infection, and at times even prevented future infections from occurring. Other studies, on the other hand, have shown no correlation between cranberry juice and the dissipation of a bladder infection.
Why the differing results in these studies? Some of the studies were using less-than pure cranberry juice – juice cocktails that were loaded with sugars and other ingredients. Namely, Ocean Spray’s cranberry juice. It is crucial that real cranberry juice be used when trying to clear up an infection for two reasons. Firstly, these cocktails are too diluted to be effective and offer any real benefits. Secondly, too much sugar can actually further irritate a bladder infection, giving the user the opposite results than desired.
Experts now advise drinking pure organic cranberry juice or a cranberry juice extract in order to get the full benefits of the juice. Doing so will help relieve and prevent infection.
Recently, scientists have been doing more studies on the juice’s useful properties, with an extra focus on children. Researcher from the University of British Columbia took a small group of 40 children who had experienced 2 or more urinary tract infections in the past year, and gave them each some cranberry juice. Each child was randomly chosen to drink either pure cranberry juice, the kind known to help prevent urinary tract infections, or another, ‘artificial’ cranberry juice. The beneficial cranberry juice has high levels of what’s known as PAC (proanthocyanidin), while other juices lacking in PAC offer little to no benefit.
The results were outstanding. Children drinking the pure cranberry juice had an almost 66% less infection recurrence rate than the children that were assigned the other juice to drink. The study helped show that real, true cranberry juice, not diluted sugar filled juice cocktails, greatly reduced the occurrence of urinary tract infections in all age groups, even children.
The findings were such a high indicator of the benefits of cranberry juice, that a skeptical doctor from Boston Children’s Hospital now prescribes his young patients cranberry juice and cranberry juice extracts for urinary tract infections. If that was enough to change a mainstream medical doctor’s treatment methods, it should be enough to convince everyone. Sometimes a natural substance beats our medicines, and cranberry juice is one of those natural substances.
