It's funny you ask this because I just asked my mom about the benefits of cranberry juice yesterday. (She's been a nurse for over 30 years.) She told me it raises good cholesterol silghtly and helps decrease the risk of UTI's. I've never heard of cranberry juice helping menstration though. After I talked to my mom about it I decided to do a little research of my own. Here's the site I liked the best. I also posted the link in the source box.
Cranberry Juice
...Cranberries and apples make a great combination juice that’s full of important nutrients... Cranberries are very high in vitamin C and fiber. Commercial cranberry drinks usually contain a lot of sugar, so you can make your own cranberry juice at home very easily with your own juicer. If you find the juice to be too sour, you can sweeten the juice with apple juice. Cranberries and apples make a great combination juice that’s full of important nutrients.
There are two kinds of cranberries produced in North America. There’s the familiar red cranberry that matures in October and the white cranberry that matures earlier.
When choosing your cranberries, you should look for ones that are bright red in color, hard, and plump. Try to stay away from soft, dull, or wrinkled berries. Cranberries will keep up to two months refrigerated, or you can seal them in plastic bags or a container and freeze them. They will keep in the freezer for up to one year!
Fresh cranberry juice is much more nutritional then the commercial variety. The vitamins have not evaporated or boiled off from the pasteurization process.
Drink fresh cranberry juice to fight infections. This would include sore throats and colds. It is a good drink for kidney, bladder problems and urinary tract infections. Use it in conjunction with flushing out a kidney stone.
Benefits of Cranberry Juice
Cranberries are a natural way to protect yourself from the flu and colds. One of the benefits of owning a juicer is the ability to make real, genuine cranberry juice: a powerful weapon in fighting colds and the flu. Cranberries are rich in antioxidants and the chemical quinine.
A study was recently done, which included 153 elderly women who drank 300ml of cranberry juice per day to see the effect that cranberry juice had on the urinary tract. Some of the women were given 100% real cranberry juice, while the others were given a placebo drink, which only looked and tasted the same as real cranberry juice. After six months of this, women drinking the real cranberry juice had 58% less urinary infections, than the women drinking the placebo drink.
In the past, cranberry juice was believed to have increased the acidity of the urine. However, in this study, there were no signs of the acidity actually being increased. Drinking cranberry juice actually stops certain bacteria from being able to grow in the bladder and the along the walls of the uterus.
Cranberry juice does contain amounts of a compound called “hippuric acid”, which has some natural antibiotic activity. Researchers have also had great results using cranberry concentrate capsules (1,000 mg), especially in preventing re-occurring urinary tract infections and cystitis problems. The concentrate form is easier to manage, and it contains no sweeteners or added sugars.
Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association proves the strongly beneficial effect that cranberry juice has on cystitis and urinary infections.
Today, many women who use natural remedies rely on unsweetened cranberry juice or even a powdered cranberry extract formed into a caplet for treatment for their urinary tract infections.
Drinking one glass of cranberry juice a day has proven to significantly reduce the risk of infections and help prevent cystitis. What better way to keep yourself healthy then to enjoy a fresh glass of cranberry juice made using your own juicer?
Cranberry Growing
Cranberry growing is a fragile art, needing four years to produce the first crop. Making it even more difficult, the timing of the harvest is inconsistent from year to year, depending of the climatic environment. Cranberries are one of the few crops that can survive in acidic peat soil, and they need plenty of water. Once a vine is planted it will continue to produce for many years. Some vines between 75 and 100 years old are still producing a crop!
Harvesting starts in October and goes straight through until November. Sometimes the farmers will wait until the cranberries have reached their deepest color before they will harvest them. If the cranberries are too light, they will not sell in the market. The riper they are, the more tart they are, and the juicier taste that they have, the better they sell. Cranberries are either wet or dry when they are harvested. The fresh cranberries that you find in your local grocery store are always dry harvested. Cranberry juice or sauce is generally made from wet harvested cranberries. In wet harvesting, the night before the harvest, the bogs that they are grown in are flooded. The next day mechanical water reels knock the berries off the vines, and the floating cranberries are corralled and collected.
Cranberry History and Production
The juicy, plump, cranberries have been native to North America for many years. Native Americans used to cook crushed cranberries with ground meat and fat. They had called this Pemmican, and used it as a survival food. The cranberries carry benzoic acid, which acts as a preservative to the meat.
Cranberries are grown naturally in bogs from Nova Scotia to North Carolina, in New Jersey, Michigan, and on the west coasts of Washington and Oregon. Native Americans cultivated the bogs, hand weeding and harvesting them. Early settlers had called them crane-berries because throughout one stage of development the cranberry bud hooks downward similar to a crane's head. Soon after the name was abbreviated from crane-berry to cranberry.
Practical tribes discovered that cranberries were not only valuable for food, but could make use of as medicine and for preparation of household substances. Medicine men had used the berries to treat arrow wounds by making a poultice. The women had used the juice from the cranberries to make fabric dyes for clothing, blankets, and rugs. Cranberries were commonly used as a symbol of peace, especially at tribal feasts.
Cranberries were widely used in the northern part of the country before the new settles had arrived. They were harvested from September straight through till December. It's likely that the early Americans found them indicative of the larger species native to Europe. The refined assortments we grow today are much larger than those harvested by the natives.
In the early 1800s it was revealed that when the wind blew sand over the bogs, the cranberries grew more dynamically. Commercial farming began as swampy lowlands were emptied and bogs were formed with layers of peat and sand. The sand helped to soak up a lot of the water and moisture from the cranberries and also protected them when temperatures were freezing. Even though cranberries must have a cool production season, they are vulnerable to the frost when it freezes over. Today, cranberry growers use sprinkler systems to keep their berries from freezing.
While we don't regularly start thinking about cranberries until October, the bogs are filled with millions of pink blossoms in late May. Then in June, the farmers bring in beekeepers to bring hives to the crops so that the flowers of the cranberries can be pollinated. Cranberry crops used to be pollinated by bumblebees until the bumblebee population decreased and the crops increased. So, they started using honeybees from the beekeepers. These bees work much slower and are easily taken by other plants in the area. By the time August comes, the berries have grown to a full, plump size and are starting to turn red, and by September, they are a deep red, beautiful autumn color, and getting ready to be harvested.
Cranberries have a rich tradition of symbolism and long-recognized benefits. We think it's easy to see why you'd like to take part in that kind of tradition! Join in today by buying one of the best juicers on the market, from Kitchen's Best.
2007-03-01 04:19:54
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answer #1
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answered by Anonymous
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