At any age, the standard treatment for a UTI is to drink an obscene amount of cranberry juice. Kind of like fighting a cold with chicken soup. While chicken soup is well known to be helpful for fighting a cold, it’s more of a folk remedy than a cure. After all, viruses are notoriously hard to treat. But UTI’s are bacterial, which can be more easily treated. But cranberry juice isn’t exactly an official prescription.

UTI’s are especially common in adult women. And in the women that get one UTI, they often recur. Although standard wisdom says to drink cranberry juice once you have a UTI and women that frequently get UTIs often keep a bottle around, cranberry juice is actually more effective if it is used as a preventive measure.

Originally, researchers thought that the quinic, malic, and citric acids in cranberry juice were the reason that UTIs are kept at bay with consumption. But people probably don’t drink enough for the acidity of cranberry juice to make much of a difference. Further studies showed that cranberry juice is probably a good preventative measure because it contains compounds that prevent some of the bacteria that cause UTIs from sticking to the tract’s walls. And these compounds may also alter the nature of the infection so that it eventually gets flushed out with the urine flow.

Although the research remains uncertain, unclear and inconclusive about why cranberry juice is good for UTIs, one thing is clear is that cranberry juice works much better as a preventive measure. If you already have a UTI and then start drinking cranberry juice, it is much less likely to be effective.

It also matters what kind of cranberry juice you drink — the cocktails and usual popular brand names found at the usual market chains don’t contain enough compound-rich cranberries to be effective — because they use other juices to dilute the tartness of the cranberry. And the natural health food store stuff is so crazy tart that you still can’t drink enough.

The solution could be in the cranberry supplements that you can find — and take preventatively. Otherwise, just keep your doctor on speed dial and follow good urinary tract hygiene, like wiping front to back, drinking plenty of liquids, avoiding sprays and scented feminine products, and, possibly most importantly, pee after sex.

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