Anyone who's suffered a urinary tract infection will attest that it's not something you want to repeat, so when stories about drinking cranberry juice to prevent them come up, it's only natural you'd pay attention.
It seems like such a simple solution to an uncomfortable problem, and with a new randomised controlled trial suggesting that drinking 240ml of cranberry juice per day reduced recurrent UTIs by nearly 40 percent, women across the world probably started harbouring hoards of the pink drink.
But before you get too excited about the findings, it's worth noting that it was funded by Ocean Spray who make cranberry juice.
Dr Audrey Wang, urologist and spokesperson for the Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand, told Coach that a Cochrane Review in 2012 which sums up outcomes of 24 studies found that results of cranberry consumption weren't significant.
"All the studies have different concentrations and different volumes, so it's really hard to know what is the right amount to drink," she says.
Dr Wang says that the mechanism of cranberry juice working makes sense, but it's proven difficult to determine the right dose, or whether any dose works at all.
"In the setting of prevention of infection, the proposed mechanism is that it prevents bacteria from sticking to the bladder wall," she says.
"They stop fimbriae or thread-like structures on the bacteria from adhering to the bladder lining, which is the first step of infection."
There's no suggestion that cranberry juice could treat an existing infection either – Dr Wang says you need antibiotics for that – and until the research is more conclusive, Dr Wang says she wouldn't be putting too much hope on it as a preventative.
"If you look at the urological guidelines, cranberry has actually been taken off the guidelines as a form of prevention," she says.
One reason urinary tract infections are recurrent may be due to an abnormality of the urinary tract that enables traces of the bacteria to remain.
"Antibiotics can improve UTI symptoms and stop bacteria from growing but once you stop, because there is still an abnormality there, the bacteria remains inside the bladder and then symptoms return," Dr Wang explains.
In other cases, recurrent UTIs are a result of rapid reinfections where faecal bacteria make their way from the bowel up the urinary tract.
Dr Wang acknowledges that everybody is different, and if she had a patient who swore that cranberry juice worked for her, then she wouldn't suggest they stop drinking it.
"But if someone asked me for my recommendation, I would not recommend cranberry juice," she says.
Read more at http://coach.nine.com.au/2016/07/29/14/39/cranberry-juice-and-utis#VFcyeLck64jrMR4p.99