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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, 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.