Cranberries May Improve Chemotherapy For Ovarian Cancer

ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2007) — Compounds in cranberries may help improve the effectiveness of platinum drugs that are used in chemotherapy to fight ovarian cancer, researchers have found in a laboratory study.

Read the story here, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070821143625.htm

truly amazing and you know who created the cranberry?? YUP!! Thank you God for this wonderful delight!!

American Indians introduced the earliest settlers to this small, hard, smooth-skinned, shiny red, round to oval-shaped wild berry that is also known by the names craneberry, bounceberry, bearberry, cowberry, or lingonberry.   The Indians used the cranberry as both a food and a medicine.   Sailors as well as settlers traveling westward used cranberries, full of Vitamin C, as a way to ward off scurvy.  On long sea voyages, to keep the cranberries fresh, the sailors would store the berries in barrels full of water.

Besides the Concord grape and blueberry, the cranberry is one of three fruits that are native to America.  It is the fruit of a small shrub with trailing vines from genus Vaccinium that likes cold climates.  It grows best in poor acid soil in flooded areas called bogs or on moors or mountainsides.  Although grown throughout the world, Northern Europe and North America are best known for the cranberry.   In North America, cultivated cranberries are grown mainly in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Washington and Oregon but can be found growing wild in bogs from Nova Scotia to North Carolina and westward to Michigan over to the west coasts of Oregon and Washington. 

Cultivating cranberries started in the early 1800s and it took many years of trial and error to discover the best techniques for cultivation.  Once painstakingly harvested by hand, machine methods were eventually developed to enable more cranberries to be grown with less effort.    Processing of the berries involved finding an efficient method for separating the good cranberries from the bad.  As good cranberries bounce and bad ones don't, a mechanical system was devised for sorting that incorporated this unusual characteristic. 

Before 1960 most cranberries were sold either fresh or canned.    It wasn't until the 1960s that the demand for cranberries started to exceed supply.   This is when Ocean Spray introduced a drink called cranberry juice cocktail.  Its instant success led to other cranberry-fruit combinations being developed like Cran-Raspberry, Cran-Grape, and Cran-Apple drinks.   In fact, so popular are cranberry drinks that most cranberries grown today are processed for use in fruit drinks.