Cranberry and Buchu (Concentrate)

Benefits
• Nutritionally supports the health of the urinary tract.
• Helps deodorize urine.

Cranberry is an all-American fruit. Known by the white man since the earliest New England colonies, cranberries are said to have been on the menu of the first Thanksgiving meal. For a long time the cranberry was used as nothing more than food in the areas where it grew. As time went on, New England sailors found that if they ate cranberries they didn't get scurvy.

Eating cranberries really didn't catch on until the Civil War. 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; apparently his troops agreed. We have been eating them with our Thanksgiving turkeys ever since.

Except for scurvy prevention nothing was known about cranberry's health benefits until the 1840s. German researchers discovered that cranberry caused people to pass hippuric acid in their urine. Hippuric acid supposedly killed bacteria along the urinary tract.

A study showed that most subjects showed significant improvement in urinary bacterial counts after drinking 300 ml of cranberry Juice cocktail a day. Unlike past researchers, the researchers in this study think that the benefits of the cranberry are caused by an ill explained chemical with the ability to keep bacteria from sticking to the wall of the bladder. Another study was done showing cranberry juice works against bacteria within 8 hours.

Buchu
Buchu's main use and glory is as a diuretic. It has been used for this 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 US. Most of the plants are still grown in South Africa where the government exercises strict control over the gathering of the leaves to prevent destruction of the wild plants.

Cranberry/ Buchu
Now cranberry and buchu are together and you can get both of their benefits 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.

Recommended Use
Adults: Take one or two capsules with a meal three times daily. Drink 8 ounces of water with the capsules. Use every day to help maintain a healthy urinary tract system.

Children: Take one capsule with a meal twice daily.

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.).
• "Phytotherapy Review & Commentary," by Donald J. Brown, N.D., Townsend Letter for Doctors (July 1994).