Cranberry/Buchu

Cranberry/Buchu Concentrate has been available since early May 1995. Both cranberry and buchu have been used individually for years, and now you can get them together for their combined effect on urinary tract infection (UTI).

Cranberry

The cranberry is an all-American fruit. Known to the white man since the earliest New England colonies, the cranberry is believed to have been on the menu of the first Thanksgiving meal. For a long time, the cranberry was used as nothing more than a food source in the areas where it grew.

Eating cranberries really didn’t catch on until the Civil War when, during the Thanksgiving of 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant ordered that it be served to the troops at the siege of Petersburg. General Grant considered cranberry sauce to be a necessary part of Thanksgiving, and apparently his troops agreed. We have been eating them with our Thanksgiving turkeys ever since.

New England sailors had long discovered that if they ate cranberries, they would not contract scurvy. Except for scurvy prevention, nothing was known about the health benefits of the cranberry until the 1840s. German researchers then discovered that the cranberry caused people to pass hippuric acid in their urine. Hippuric acid supposedly killed bacteria along the urinary tract.

Later, at the turn of the century, American researchers thought that cranberry acidified the urine and might possibly prevent UTI. In the 1960s they changed their minds, believing that cranberries did not acidify the urine enough to make a difference. By then it was too late. Cranberries already worked their way into the American conciseness and were there to stay.

Fortunately, naysayers of the past have not stopped research into cranberries. In fact, a recent study showed that most subjects showed significant improvement in urinary bacterial counts after drinking 300 ml of cranberry juice cocktail a day. Unlike past studies, the researchers in this study believe that the benefits of the cranberry are caused by an ill-explained chemical that has the ability to keep bacteria from sticking to the wall of the bladder.

Buchu

Buchu’s main use and glory is as a diuretic. It has been used in this capacity since the first Europeans settled South Africa. Because of its rue-like smell, the native Hottentots use buchu as a perfume.

Buchu was introduced to Britain in 1821 and has since moved to the United States. Most of the plants are still grown in South Africa where the government exercises strict control over the gathering of the leaves in order to prevent destruction of the wild plants.

Cranberry/ Buchu

Now cranberry and buchu are together, and you can receive benefits from both at the same time: the bacteria protection of cranberry and the diuretic flushing of buchu. Cranberry/Buchu should be used to prevent infection in individuals that are already predisposed to UTI.

 Cranberry/Buchu also has the advantage of containing no refined sugar to interfere with its positive effects.

Dosage: Take one to two Cranberry/Buchu capsules with a glass of water three times a day.

 

Sources

“Reduction of Bacteriuria and Pyuria After Ingestion of Cranberry Juice” by Jerry Avorn, MD; Mark Monane, MD, MS; Jerry H. Gurwitz, MD; Robert J. Glynn, Ph.D.; Igor Choodnovskiy; Lewis A. Lipsitz, MD, Journal of the American Medical Association, (March 1994).

Mark Pedersen, Nutritional Herbology: A Reference Guide (Warsaw, Indiana: Wendell W. Whitman Company, 1994).

A Modern Herbal by Mrs. M. Grieve, F.R.H.S., Volume 1 (New York, New York: Dover Publications, Inc.).

“Pytotherapy Review & Commentary,” by Donald J. Brown, N.D., Townsend Letter for Doctors (July 1994).