Scientists Shoot Down Ocean Spray's Claims that Cranberry Juice Cures UTIs

If you want to play a quick and easy word association game, turn to your closest female friend and ask her what she thinks of when you say “Urinary Tract Infection.” First, she’ll probably scowl, and then there’s a pretty good chance that she’ll say, “cranberry juice.” That’s what we’ve heard since… forever: If we get a UTI, it’s time to start chugging anything and everything that has the words “Ocean Spray” on the label. Now, Ocean Spray is hoping to further make that connection in everyone’s minds, but science is saying “Yeah, but no.”

According to the Washington Post, the Massachusetts-based company has spent millions of dollars researching the connection between cranberries and UTIs, and wants to start advertising that women may get fewer of them if they chug cranberry juice (like, you know, the Ocean Spray kind). “We’ve got evidence over a long period of time that there’s a solution [to UTIs],” Clark Reinhard, Ocean Spray’s vice president of global innovation, told the Post. “And so we applied for [the label claim] because it was important for us to have that connection validated, and to show customers it was legitimate.”

Scientists, though, aren’t so quick to agree—and neither is the US Food and Drug Administration. In September, Ocean Spray submitted an official petition to the FDA, asking the agency “to authorize the use of health claim language that characterizes the well-supported relationship between the daily consumption of eligible cranberry-containing products and the reduced risk of recurrent [UTI] in healthy women.” In February, the FDA declined the request for “an authorized health claim,” which means that Ocean Spray couldn’t use any language suggesting that cranberry juice “may help prevent” UTIs.

According to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) cranberries have been used as a folk remedy for everyone’s least fave urethral irritation for almost 100 years. Doctors initially thought the berries prevented UTIs by making the urinary tract more acidic, but that has since been discounted. The current consensus is that a compound in cranberries called proanthocyanidins can prevent bacteria from attaching to the cells that line the urinary tract. (Yes, we’re cringing every time we have to type the words urinary tract).

There have been countless studies trying to determine the link between cranberries and UTIs, but they’ve had mixed results at best. In November 2016, JAMA published the results of a study in which 92 female nursing home residents were given cranberry capsules containing the equivalent of 20 ounces of juice every day for a full year. After 12 months, researchers found that there was “no significant difference” between those women and the 93 who weren’t downing cran-pills: 11 percent of the capsule group developed UTIs, as did 13 percent of the non-capsule group. “I was hoping it would work,” lead study author Dr. Manisha Juthani-Mehta, said.

After that research proved to be a berry big bust (sorry), one UTI expert wrote that doctors “should not be promoting cranberry use” or even suggest that they could cure or prevent UTIs. “It is time to move on from cranberries.”

If only Ocean Spray could do the same.