Uti Bugs Love Cranberry! Why?
Scott Schofield
If you are a long term sufferer from UTI and Cystitis, you'll probably already recall how cranberry juice - when you first tried it - appeared as a savior, the answer to all your prayers. Then, sadly, just as things were beginning to improve - your UTI attacks or Cystitis attacks began to return - and much worse than before!
Now why is that? What's going on. How do you avoid that happening again and again?
Well, e-coli (that notorious cause of most Cystitis / UTI and Bladder Infections) is known in medical circles as an adaptive bacterium, meaning that it is capable of adapting its nutritional requirements to its immediate environment. Then, because Cranberry makes urine acidic (rather than the normal neutral kind), you are effectively nourishing your e-coli whenever you drink Cranberry.
Approximately 5 years ago I began to take daily cranberry juice, believing that it would reduce or stamp out my frequent Cystitis attacks. I improved at first, but then I realized that I was still having as many infections as previously.
Only when I began to do my own research did I realize that I had been wasting my time and money. I was foolishly following a widely-dispersed myth instead of searching out something that really worked (I did in the end though).
So why is cranberry so popular? Why do so many "experts" claim it works in reducing or curing UTI? Is its reputation wholly underserved, or only partly so? Here is a very basic version of the information I gleaned:
It is well-known (in scientific circles anyway) that the e-coli bug sticks like crazy to the walls of the urinary tract, where it sets up home and multiplies. It is also well known that Cranberry juice has a mildly anti-adhesive property. From these two unrelated facts everyone seems to have decided that if bacteria sticks and cranberry un-sticks, then cranberry must be particularly good for cystitis sufferers and UTI sufferers.
However, if you balance the benefits of being an anti-adhesion agent against the damage done by producing and acidic urine in which e-coli thrives, the benefits just don't outweigh the bads, and cranberry fails miserably.
Another problem - cranberry can stop many antibiotics working effectively. Antibiotics work by damaging the bacteria's cell walls. Adding cranberry-created hippuric acid to the urine just encourages the bacteria to grow a thicker skin, making a future use of antibiotics much less likely to succeed.
This is why some UTI-sufferers who have taken cranberry for years may find that their physician's standard course of antibiotics no longer works and their infections quickly return. This problem is compounded by the modern physician's desire to prescribe smaller than the usual courses of antibiotics, when actually a longer course is needed.
"BUT IT SEEMED TO WORK SO WELL - AT FIRST!"
Yes, it often does! Drinking cranberry results in your urine becoming more acidic, and that will - at first - attack and kill many of those bacterial cells.
So you'll feel better at first, and soon believe that cranberry is a miracle cure. But that is usually only a temporary respite. Things inevitably get worse later.
The remaining e-coli cells, (the stronger tougher ones), very soon get used to their new environment and begin to reproduce and breed ever-stronger clones of themselves. Your next attack will then be worse than any attack you had before you embarked on that cranberry-juice course (or do I mean cranberry juice curse)?
Now, all that I've said above does not happen to every cystitis or UTI-sufferer, but it certainly happened to me! After 20 years of occasional episodes, I discovered cranberry. I hated the juice, but taking cranberry tablets every day gave me four years of relief.
Then, right out of nowhere, I had a really terrible attack. So I increased my cranberry intake - but as it turned out - to no avail. I had to visit my physician and get a prescription for antibiotics. Then, just a few months later, I had another even more painful UTI, much worse than every before (I'll spare you the gruesome details). It was only then that I accepted that cranberry no longer the cured for my UTI that I had believed.
I began to look for another option. It took a while, but I eventually located a natural remedy for UTI which is staggering in its simplicity. No known side-effects, no reaction to other drugs, isn't actually absorbed by the body at all! And it can be used as a uti-preventative or as a highly effective UTI treatment.
It's called Mannose, or D-Mannose, or Waterfall D Mannose (no, I don't know why). It comes from trees (just like the humble aspirin), and seems to offer hope to many people for whom regular UTI's are part of life. If you want to learn more, just follow the links in my final paragraph
Dr Scott Scofield is a therapist who writes on mainstream and alternative medicine. To learn more on how to http://healthneo.com ) effectively treat cystitis and UTI, or if you want to learn about http://healthneo.com/uti ) bladder infection symptoms, visit his blog now.
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