I took the Lady Soma Cranberry Pills full dose each day for about a week, I felt less inflammation in my gut and food felt easier to digest. It’s been a couple weeks now, and I’m feeling overall less fatigued and having fewer headaches. Meanwhile, I haven’t changed anything else in my daily routine.

The bacteria that are involved in UTIs need to bind to the bladder walls in order to cause infection, and do so by binding to the mannose sugars that are present on the surfaces of the cell membranes of the bladder cells.

By drinking cranberry juice, one can raise the level of mannose excreted in the urine to a sufficient level to tie up most of the binding sites in bacterial receptors, rendering them unable to attach to the bladder walls. They then get peed out the bladder when you urinate and flushed away harmlessly.

This reveals why store-bought “cranberry” juice (often a mixture of diluted concentrates, and sometimes “cranberry flavored”) — all of which contain too much sucrose (not mannose) is not as effective — and why people search for “real”/pure cranberry juice.

But (assuming the above is accurate), a little thought reveals that you can “cut to the chase”: Drink an aqueous mixture of mannose sugar to do the job.

My wife drinks a powdered form of mannose + dried cranberry solids mixed with water. I can say after 7 years that when followed it is 100% effective in prevention (but it’s not curative!).

Similarly, skipping a daily does is much like skipping The Pill: One morning you may start experiencing the beginning symptoms of an unwanted condition…

Scientific? Well, for this one “test subject”, 7 years of use (and occasional “I forgot!”) have established a VERY repeatable set of results. YMMV. Google for mannose/cranberry products…

That may have worked for you or it could have been a coincidence. There is no evidence that cranberry juice or concentrate would be sufficient to actually wipe out an infection. As discussed in this post, it might be true that cranberry juice (of an unknown quantity) regularly consumed would help a person from getting an infection. Basically, if you like juice and cranberry juice is on your list of favored juices, there is no harm in drinking it regularly (as opposed to some other juice) and there may be a benefit. The key point here is this: Despite hyperskepticism saying that the evidence says that cranberry juice simply has no effect, the meta-studies seem to show that it MIGHT have an effect. But extending this to using it to fight an existing infection is actually probably a bit dangerous. But, I’m sure that if you have more severe symptoms of an infection you’ll see a doctor.

… I may try this.

It’s really hard to find, though, and when it is available it’s generally quite expensive. It’s pretty damn sour, but it is drinkable. Especially if one has the opposite of a sweet tooth.

In other words: it does too taste good!

Stark
45mL vodka
90mL club soda
90mL pure cranberry juice, no sugar added
2-3 ice cubes
Serve in a highball glass (8 ounce)
– tastes extremely dry, the opposite of a sweet drink.

Martian Stark
45mL vodka
90mL club soda
90mL pure cranberry juice, no sugar added
50g dry ice (frozen CO2)
– tastes extremely dry, but with a hard-edged chemical sourness from the oversaturation by carbonic acid and the unavoidable inhalation of CO2 at much higher than typical atmospheric partial pressure.
Recommended: place the dry ice inside a “tea ball” before dropping into the drink, to help avoid accidental ingestion of any solid dry ice chips.

Cranberries are very sour so most of the juice in “cranberry juice” is apple.