12.31.06
Cranberry juice as superfood
Cranberry juice as sold in the supermarket—heavily sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup—is pretty awful stuff. But you can readily find (at Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and health-food stores) pure cranberry juice or extract. Diluted with water with perhaps a squeeze of lime or lemon juice, it’s quite tasty. And good for you:
Drinking cranberry juice three times a day over the course of a month increased all the volunteers’ blood concentration of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol—the so-called good cholesterol—by 10 percent. The juice didn’t affect low-density lipoprotein (LDL) or triglycerides, which are other fatty substances in the blood. However, epidemiological studies by others have correlated HDL-cholesterol increases of this magnitude with about a 40 percent drop in heart-disease risk, Vinson notes.
More at the link. Worth clicking. And tomorrow I’m picking up some pure cranberry juice (no sweetening) to make a pomegranate-cranberry drink.
