Drinking loads of cranberry juice will not prevent or cure your UTI. Of that, we can now be pretty darn certain.

We've all been there - filling yourself up with the sweet, tangy drink, in a bid to relieve the symptoms of cystitis. But now we can tell you, this was a pretty pointless endeavour. 

But where did this myth come from?

There are a couple of well-touted studies, regularly parroted out as evidence that cranberry juice is your key to a burn-free pee experience. 

But, as Vox reports, many, many of these so-called independent studies are actually funded by the food and drinks companies that benefit from the results.

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Cranberry juice will not cure your UTI

One of the most recent cranberry-related studies, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, was seemingly funded by Ocean Spray - one of the world's biggest cranberry juice-drink retailers. 

In fact, it wasn't just funded by Ocean Spray, it was co-authored by them too, indicating that they had a part to play in every step of the process, even up to publication.

The idea is that cranberries contain compounds that are thought to prevent bacteria from sticking to the cells that line the bladder.

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During the Ocean Spray study, to test this, they assessed the results doing something called 'clustering', according to Jonathan Craig, a clinical epidemiology professor at the University of Sydney. Which basically means they put ten women in groups of two, one group drank cranberry juice, one didn't. 

Instead of counting how many women treated UTIs with the juice, they recorded how many women had episodes of cystitis. 

 Most cranberry juice is predominantly made up of water, syrup and sugar, meaning there are low and potentially negligible cranberry compounds that make it through to your urinary tract. 

An outside study published by the Cochrane Library, resulted in the following: 

•Compared with placebo, water or no treatment, cranberry products do not significantly reduce the occurrence of a UTI overall 

•Cranberry products had no 'active' ingredients

It turns out, we're not even better off eating cranberries –  the fruit isn't potent enough, so you'd have to be eating a lot of cranberries, all day, for a very long  time.

The truth hurts.