Cranberry Juice Stave off Urinary Infection

The benefits of cranberry juice and other cranberry products in staving off urinary tract infections have been debatable topics for quite some time. Despite knowing that cranberry juice and capsules are affective antidotes in treating bacterial infections, the researchers had some setback in the regard with the same.

But the researchers from the National Taiwan University Hospital claim that, regular intake of cranberry juice or cranberry capsules reduce the occurrence of urinary tract infection. This is more beneficial for women who had trouble with recent UTIs.

Dr. Deborah Wing, a researcher of urinary tract infections at the University of California, Irvine, told Reuters Health that, "What this is doing is solidifying what has been folklore for quite some time. Finally, the science is catching up to what our mothers have been telling us for so many decades."

This new report was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The study that was led by Dr. Chih-Hung Wang of the department of emergency medicine at National Taiwan University Hospital intends to elucidate the contradictory data.

This new analysis focused on previous 10 studies that had nearly 1500 people in it, which consisted mostly of women who consumed wither cranberry products or cranberry free placebos. It was noticed that women who had regular intake of cranberry had just3 percent less urinary tract infection. Women with a history of multiple infections saw their risk of infection drop 47 percent.

Bill Gurley, a pharmaceutical researcher who has studied dietary interventions at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock said, "Is cranberry the natural cure-all for urinary tract infections? Of course not. For individuals that do have problems with recurrent UTIs, incorporating a little cranberry juice in your diet certainly can't hurt. We still don't know exactly what the correct dose should be, or what the correct form should be."

According to researchers a particular set of women are predisposed to UTIs because they are born with a malformed urinary tract. The occurrence of UTI in such people is high.

Despite all this, there is no relevant data on what kind of cranberries is most effective for preventing and treating UTIs.

This definitely is a natural cure for UTIs but one should also be aware of the that extreme dose of cranberry products cause stomach aches and the sugar in juice might be a problem for people with diabetes.