It's May, and that means only one thing to all men and women of good will: National Beverage Day on the sixth of this month! We all love a refreshing beverage, but how much do we really know about them? If you're thirsty for knowledge, take a deep, satisfying swig of Jeopardy!'s Ken Jennings, who will be debunking drink-related disinformation all month. As Alexander Pope once said, "A little learning is a dangerous thing, / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring"!
The Debunker: Should You Drink Cranberry Juice for Urinary Tract Infection?
You should drink cranberry juice because it's delicious! But I'm sorry, ladies: it's not going to affect your peeing. Except in the normal way, that is. If you drink too much of it, you're going to need to pee in about an hour.
The use of cranberry juice as a home treatment for urinary tract infections pre-dates any actual research on the subject, so theories about how it might actually work are post hoc and tentative. Might cranberries lower the pH of urine, making it too acidic for E. coli bacteria? Could a class of cranberry nutrient called the proanthocyanidins actually change the bacteria in your body, or make the walls of the urinary tract to slippery for the little buggers to get a grip?
There was once some research suggesting that, whatever the hypothetical mechanism, a high-cranberry diet could reduce your chance of future urinary tract infections. But there's never been any evidence that cranberry juice can cure an existing UTI, and today most experts are skeptical that there's any beneficial effect to the stuff at all. In 2016, a Yale researcher gave high-dosage cranberry pills to 185 nursing-home women for a year, and found no drop in their rate of infection. A Canadian expert wrote in JAMA the same year, "Clinicians should not be promoting cranberry use by suggesting that there is proven, or even possible, benefit.” Big Cranberry doesn't want to hear it, but there may be no number of cosmo cocktails that could keep Carrie Bradshaw and company UTI-free.
Quick Quiz: The '90s rock band called The Cranberries hails from what city, which shares its name with a kind of poem?
Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.