Caution With Cranberries
Welcome! This site can be easily viewed with a PDA or a mobile phone. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Cranberries are probably most well known by being served at Christmas with Turkey, however because they are tart, even if sweetened they provide a great compliment to pork and poultry.
Cranberries contain bioflavonoids which help in the fight against cancer and heart disease and stomach ulcers. They are also a good source of vitamin C. and fibre. Often called the bounce berry, Cranberries are at their best when they can be literally bounced.
Cranberries have however some unique qualities and drawbacks. They contain a natural antibiotic which helps to prevent or alleviate cystitis and urinary tract infections. The natural antibiotic makes the bladder wall resistant to the organisms that cause urinary tract infections. People with bladder infections are often advised by their urologists or gynaecologists to drink two 200 ml glasses of cranberry juice daily to help prevent infection. In the bladder this helps prevent the bacteria forming colonies and instead the bacteria is washed out of the body in the urine.
Because Cranberries are tart, cranberry juice usually has added sugar. This makes cranberry juice unsuitable for a diabetic and is also not advised for people taking warfarin as Cranberries can raise blood levels of warfarin dangerously high to potentially fatal levels.
So overall eating Cranberries or drinking cranberry juice should be treated with caution especially if you are a potential diabetic.
Tags: cranberries, alleviate cystitis, diabetic, urinary tract infections
Other related posts:
January 21st, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Great info on on cranberries and its sugar content–a must read for diabetics inflicted with UTI. While cranberries work to prevent UTIs, it can’t do so much in the case of recurring infections. A therapeutic combination of herbal remedies with natural antibacterial and gut enhancing properties would work to clear the symptoms and prevent UTI from coming back.
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:06 am
Hi Mark,
Still great, like everything you do.
Thanks for all your job and advices.
Best Regards,
Jean-Pierre
January 26th, 2008 at 7:22 am
hi
great information about cranberries and on your blog in general as the matter of fact.
And thank you so much for using one of my photos to illustrate it
however, don’t mean to be picky, but those are cherries 
I can try to get a picture of fresh cranberries for you, I think there are still available here in Germany 
let me know!
January 26th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Hi LSantos.
HaHa. So they are! You know I never noticed!
Thanks for pointing that out. I used a plugin
which searched on Yahoo for the image, and as I
was searching for an image of cranberries, I never
paid it that much attention.
Yes, please. I will replace the photograph
accordingly. Thank you for your time and
your kind comments.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Hi Mark. Great infos on cranberries. A question though.
I bought my mom a 21st century cranberry juice for her UTI which has been bothering her for quite sometime. It is 100% Pure Cranberry juice, undiluted and unsweetened, so it says. UTI lessened but no luck with her diabetic. She now has to turn to insulin injection for her diabetic. I wonder if the “CRANBERRY JUICE I BOUGHT” is the reason.
Any reason for that?
Info: Cranberry is very very very rare here. Dont know much about it.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Hi TnY.
It’s unlikely it had anything to do with it as long as the juice was unsweetened as stated. A lot of the commercial varieties of juice are sweetened however. That would make a difference.
Warfarin is a drug used to reduce the risk of blood clots by lowering the clotting process. Cranberry juice can affect the concentration in the blood of the drug to such an extent as to lead to a fatality, but this is a separate issue to diabetes.
Mark