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Just in time for American Thanksgiving, here is a moderately scientific overview of the journey to greatness of the humble cranberry.
The cranberry — one of only a few commercial fruits native to North America — might have even sat beside a roast turkey at the first Thanksgiving feast.
But how did the tart cranberry become an industrial crop, with 800 million pounds grown annually, when other native fruits are so much sweeter? It wasn't just the health benefits, clever marketing, or Grandma's cranberry chutney — it was a happenstance of evolution. Cranberries float.
And they are delicious in milk. Bon appétit!
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Cranberries! The Benefits Of Being Bitter
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(Score: 3, Funny) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday November 21 2016, @08:17PM
I liked most of the article with its brief story of how cranberries evolved and diverged from blueberries. The whole thing about "floating" is interesting, though hardly a unique trait to cranberries. Apples float, and that fact is used to great advantage in processing apples (as well as at parties while "bobbing"). So do oranges and pomegranates. Lemons generally (though, interestingly, limes usually sink).
(Suddenly I'm having flashbacks to Letterman and "Will it float?")
Anyhow, the article's bit about evolution is interesting, but I don't really need the propaganda at the end. We're treated with statements like:
"Cranberries are able to prevent bacteria from attaching to the urinary tract, thus preventing urinary tract infections," said Terri Camesano, an associate professor in chemical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in central Massachusetts.
Umm, why am I supposed to listen to a chemical engineering professor about medical advice and UTIs? Also as we found out here several weeks ago [soylentnews.org] that supposed benefit has been largely debunked. Could it be because the professor is from Massachusetts, the home of the cranberry? I wouldn't complain except then we're treated to another quote about the magical medical effects
for a "whole range of medical problems" from a Jere Downing, who also happens to be "executive director of the Cranberry Institute in East Wareham, Mass., an industry group that sponsors cranberry research."
I love cranberries. Love homemade cranberry sauce. I like really tart foods and have even been known to sprinkle raw ones on salads. But like the more recent fads into pomegranate, blueberry, acai, etc. juices, cranberry juice just had stronger marketing earlier. And most of the "cocktail" that most people drink has only a tiny bit of cranberry and a lot of sugar (either added or in some other "more palatable" juice). It's good to eat a variety of foods, including berries... but none of these is some magical elixir for health.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:51AM
That note was added because sex sells, and the things from which piss emerges are usually the sexual organs.
Actually, I don't consider that propaganda at all. I was expecting to hear some wheatgrass treehugger bullshit about negative impact on the environment, demonizing my favorite fruit like they demonize cattle and almonds.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:53AM
I do recall an article debunking the UTI bit a while back, but I also know many people, myself included, who swear by cranberry juice to drastically shorten UTI durations.
Now you've got me curious, and so I went looking for info on the study, and found a recent one in about the right time frame, but it leaves much to be desired in terms of debunking. Major points that jump out:
1) They used "standardized, high-dose cranberry capsules — the equivalent of 20 ounces of juice daily", not juice, so there's no guarantee the active component wasn't removed or destroyed during the concentration process. At 3.5cups/day equivalent the dosage is also pretty low. Personally I probably consume at least 3x that, replacing most of my normal fluid intake. 3.5c isn't even two tall glasses worth.
2) They measured bacterial and white blood cell count in the urine every two months as an indicator - which would totally miss any shortening of infection durations.
3) The study was exclusively of nursing home patients, who are not at all typical of the population at large.
4) There were only 92 subjects studied, barely suitable for a preliminary study, utterly unsuitable for any sort of conclusive debunking
5) The primary effect being studied appears to be using cranberry juice as a preventative, rather than curative, agent, and the dosage and methodology reflects that
Now there's nothing inherently wrong with that study - they showed that what they hoped would be a convenient preventative treatment doesn't work. Good solid negative-result science. But there's far too little data to extrapolate from that to the general statement that cranberries aren't useful for preventing or curing UTIs. At best they've shown that cranberry consumption isn't an automatic magic bullet against UTIs.
Proving negatives is *extremely* painstaking work, and one failed attempt to prove a positive result does little more than indicate that further study may be warranted. Or not - there'd be profit to be had in selling ""standardized, high-dose cranberry capsules" if they had proven effective. Not much profit to be had in proving a widely accepted home remedy doesn't actually work, so what's the motive?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:23AM
You say that after you pointed out why the study was bunk. Like all other health and nutrition studies, it's complete crap.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday November 22 2016, @06:40AM
No, it's potentially quite valid, for the very limited thing that it tested. It's only one experiment with no independent replication, but I'd be wiling to accept that their specific formulation of cranberry concentrate capsules don't prevent UTIs.
The bunk comes from trying to extrapolate from that single experiment to a general conclusion, and such bunk is hardly limited to health and nutrition studies. It's rare a day goes by that I don't see a study claiming X, where the experiment actually tested Y in the presence of A, B, and C.
And then the media gets their incompetent sensationalist hands on it and start spouting off about how Q and W have been proven, and the implications are T, N and L.
But I'll admit that health-related studies do seem to be especially bad. Possibly related to the fact that medical professionals are trained primarily as diagnosticians / organic data-retrieval systems, and get even less training in how to do actual science than most grad students.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:25PM
I do recall an article debunking the UTI bit a while back, but I also know many people, myself included, who swear by cranberry juice to drastically shorten UTI durations.
You're swearing is what is known as an "anecdote". Anecdotes are not scientific evidence.
4) There were only 92 subjects studied, barely suitable for a preliminary study, utterly unsuitable for any sort of conclusive debunking
That's funny because most of the studies showing benefits are similarly of a very small study group. Strange how that's only bad when it goes against your wive's tale.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday November 22 2016, @10:00PM
Nope, it's utterly unsuitable on the "pro" side as well.
However, in this case the pro side also has an awful lot of anecdotal evidence supporting it, which despite your disparaging tone is a wellspring of informally accumulated wisdom, even if it is mixed in with a heaping triple helping of nonsense. A great number of our most potent medicines were discovered by investigating folk medicine.
I'm a scientifically minded individual prone to testing my assumptions and I can tell you with confidence that *in my case* urinary tract problems clear up in under half the time, on average, if I immediately start drinking cranberry juice in response. Whether it is the juice itself doing it, or perhaps a change in my fluid intake, or something more subtle, I haven't bothered to research yet. I do drink enough that it starts to become a little uncomfortable in its own right, so I'm definitely changing *something*, and the problem is infrequent enough that the price in attention and discomfort of further experimentation hasn't been worth it yet.
Of course, I'm also not completely certain that what I'm experiencing would fall under the official category of UTI in the first place - can't say I've ever been formally diagnosed, and it sounds like they're an uncommon problem for men to begin with. So the reality might also be that cranberry juice if an effective treatment for something that only resembles the symptoms of a UTI -in which case both their experimentation and mine may both contain valuable and non-contradictory medical information, once you get past the incorrect assumptions.
My first reaction though would still be that since they didn't actually test the assertion that cranberry juice cures UTIs *at all*, there is no cause to reject the folk wisdom that it does, though there are enough similarities to justify examining the question more directly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @11:30PM
I'm a scientifically minded individual prone to testing my assumptions and I can tell you with confidence that *in my case* urinary tract problems clear up in under half the time, on average, if I immediately start drinking cranberry juice in response.
Simply not true. Again even in the studies that show that cranberries can help prevent UTIs they show that taking it after having the infection does not do anything. So, again, your anecdote is basically meaningless.
From here [webmd.com]:
Before you rush out and buy cartons of cranberry juice, there are a few caveats you should know about.
...
Cranberries don't prevent bacteria from growing in the urinary tract -- they just make it harder for the bacteria to take hold. Cranberry juice also doesn't treat urinary tract infections once they've started.