More on Cranberries
Why your body and your gut love cranberries
Last week, I sent a post to paid subscribers about cranberries, and how their polyphenols interact with our gut. A day or so later, a wonderful post on how rich cranberries are in health-promoting plant phytochemicals landed in my inbox from Cassandra Quave’s Substack Nature’s Pharmacy. Because of this synchronicity I thought it would be wonderful for all of you to get a new appreciation for this fruit that should be on our menu’s more than once a year.
In this post, Cassandra writes:
They are a rich source of Vitamin C, Vitamin E, and Vitamin K. These fruits are particularly abundant in polyphenols, including phenolic acids, anthocyanins, and flavonoids. Additionally, they are among the few fruits high in proanthocyanidins, a compound associated with numerous health benefits.
And then shares an impressive list (of which these are the headings) of cranberries effect on these maladies:
Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs):
Chronic Cystitis:
Radiation Cystitis in Prostate Cancer:
Antioxidant Properties:
Cardiovascular Diseases:
Anti-Inflammatory and Anticancer Effects:
Rheumatoid Arthritis and Dental Health:
To her list I’d like to share this excerpt of my post on why our guts love cranberries.
In a word polyphenol-rich foods of which cranberries are one. Cranberries are a distinctive source of flavonoids and phenolic acids and have been studied quite a bit, giving a *sometimes* nerd like me plenty to read. It is important to note many berries (especially red and blue ones), pomegranates, nuts, concord grapes, and green tea are all considered rich in these powerful antioxidants. There is a bacterium whose population is looked at as a marker of our health.
Here is a good overview of berry polyphenols and human health.
I’d like to introduce you to Akkermansia muciniphila, a member of team microbiome, who loves polyphenol-rich foods. Its presence, or more accurately abundance, is a marker of a healthy gut. When we see low populations of Akkermansia muciniphila we see gut inflammation and other metabolic issues like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and liver damage.
I met this microbe last spring. As some of you know, I have been monitoring my gut health for the last few years. Once a year I send off a stool sample for a snapshot of the who’s who working for or against me in my gut. This is done with blood work to get a more complete picture of how things look. From there, my healthcare practitioner and I can decide how to tweak anything that may be moving in the wrong direction. Despite years of ferments and a high-fiber, vegetable-rich, “healthy” diet when I started this my gut was not picture perfect—even though I thought I felt pretty good. The last time I checked in my gut health was as my practitioner put it “amazing, I wish all my patients’ panels looked like this. Unfortunately, there is still some yeast and one other area we should concentrate on.”
Yup, you guessed it – my population of Akkermansia muciniphila was low, despite that high-fiber diet. This hadn’t shown low on previous tests. She told me to start eating red fruit—especially cranberries. (And not just the juice, the berry with all its fiber and compounds.) This made me wonder, in trying to starve out yeast, I had quit eating fruit altogether. I know sugar feeds yeast ;-) but in doing I might have lost all the other benefits of the whole fruit.
I am now eating something red or blue most days as a “dietary intervention.” Because of its promising probiotic doings against obesity and diabetes, A. muciniphila has received attention for research and development. Several human and animal studies have shown that the abundance of A. muciniphila in the gut can be enhanced through dietary interventions, which is always the simplest way.
This paper examined 24 dietary intervention studies to look for evidence and strategies to increase gut health with A. muciniphila.
While it isn’t fully understood what the mechanics are behind A. muncinphila’s benefits we do know that it has a positive relationship with our gut barrier. It also feeds on the gut mucus and therefore has an effect on the gut mucus thickness and barrier integrity. Yes, you read that correctly, counterintuitive as it seems, research shows that despite this bacterium’s using the mucus as a source of nutrition, there is a positive relationship. How that works at this point still unknown.
Though we don’t understand much about how A. muncinphila’s does what it does we do know more about the mucus it works upon.The mucus is made by butyrate which is made from the fermentation in our gut of the dietary fiber. Again, we need to eat prebiotic fiber as well. If we are not getting enough fiber, there is no butyrate, and nothing to produce the important mucus, without that we also will have weak populations of A. muciniphila. It always comes back to fiber.
But as I learned it is more nuanced, we need both. This research points to what I experienced. we need fiber and antioxidants and the mix of both “appears to be a good strategy to elicit a broader spectrum of beneficial effects to modulate gut microbiota and local inflammation and thus to counteract metabolic endotoxemia.” And, interestingly, my panels also pointed to this. In the screenshot below you will see that my butyrate is low with in range, but not alarmingly low.
The takeaway, as it often is, is balance. In trying to obliterate yeast the balance was disrupted elsewhere. I have to laugh because I think my knowledge of using yeast to ferment is one of understanding sugar sources—of which so many things are—but I clearly threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Our microbiome is wonderfully complex. There is no one-size-fits-all—but I do feel I can safely say eating cranberries is good for us.
And extending their season of availability to us by fermentation is delicious. In case you deleted it, here is the post for Fermented Cranberries.