One of Nova Scotia’s largest cranberry growers has dismissed a new study that shows cranberry capsules don’t appear to reduce urinary tract infections among older women.
Dietary supplements like capsules are no substitute for the real thing, Blake Johnston, president of Bezanson & Chase Cranberry Co. in Aylesford, said Thursday 27 October.
“The problem with that is, it’s an unregulated industry so you just don’t know what you're getting,” Johnston, Canada’s largest marketer of fresh cranberries, told Local Xpress.
“If you buy a bag of fresh cranberries, guess what? You can see what you’re getting and we have plenty of evidence that cranberry juice ... has a very positive effect on urinary tract infections and there’s been multiple studies proving that.”
Testing one cranberry extract — proanthocyanidin — isn’t a fair comparison to the real thing, said Johnston, chair of the Canadian Cranberry Growers Coalition.
The Yale University School of Medicine study, published online Thursday by the Journal of the American Medical Association, involved 185 women with an average age of 86 living in 21 nursing homes around New Haven, Conn.
Half of the participants were given two oral cranberry capsules daily, each containing 36 milligrams of the active ingredient proanthocyanidin, which researchers dubbed the equivalent of drinking about 20 ounces of cranberry juice. The rest got a placebo.
The double-blind study was aimed at determining whether taking cranberry capsules reduces the presence of bacteriuria plus pyuria — the presence of white blood cells — in their urine.
“Among older women residing in nursing homes, administration of cranberry capsules versus placebo resulted in no significant difference in presence of bacteriuria plus pyuria over one year,” the new study concludes.
While there has been research to the contrary, an editorial accompanying the study in JAMA indicates the evidence is convincing in this new study that cranberry products should not be recommended as a medical intervention for the prevention of urinary tract infections.
“A person may, of course, choose to use cranberry juice or capsules for whatever reason she or he wishes. However, clinicians should not be promoting cranberry use by suggesting that there is proven, or even possible, benefit. Clinicians who encourage such use are doing their patients a disservice,” says the editorial, penned by Dr. Lindsay E. Nicolle, who teaches in the department of internal medicine and medical microbiology at the University of Manitoba.
