Cran-Max™ + Mannose Drink - GymBeam

Cran-Max™ + Mannose Drink from GymBeam is a powder for preparing a drink with three active ingredients. One serving weighs 3.5 grams and contains 2,000 mg of mannose, 880 mg of inulin and 500 mg of patented Cran-Max™ cranberry extract.

Do the maths: 3,380 mg out of 3,500 mg. That leaves 120 milligrams for natural flavouring and sweetener, or 3.4% of the serving. For powdered drinks, this figure is the best indicator available to you. Many products in this category consist mostly of fillers, flavourings, acids and sweeteners, with the active ingredient making up only a fraction of the contents. Here, the opposite is true, and you can verify it directly from the nutrition table: simply subtract the sum of the ingredients from the serving weight.

Labels for cranberry extracts may show three pieces of information, each of which means something different. Most products provide none of them, or simply state “cranberry extract” without further specification.

Cranberries were used to treat urinary problems long before anyone understood why. The first explanation sounded logical: cranberry juice is acidic, so it acidifies the urine and makes it harder for bacteria to thrive. This theory persisted for decades. It was wrong. The amount of acid that actually reaches the urine is too small to make any difference.

The real explanation came much later and is more interesting. Bacteria cannot simply float in the urine; they have to attach to something, or the body will flush them out. They have tiny projections that allow them to adhere to the bladder wall. And proanthocyanidins interfere with this ability to attach. They do not kill bacteria. They simply make it harder for them to stay in place.

Here is a detail that most people do not know. Proanthocyanidins are found in many fruits, including blueberries, grapes, apples and cocoa. However, they are not the same molecules. There are two types of bonds by which these molecules form chains. Most fruits contain one type. Cranberries contain the other, and it is precisely this different bond that is the reason they work the way they do in preventing bacteria from attaching. That is why, in this area, cranberries cannot be replaced by just anything else, even if the packaging features the same word, “proanthocyanidins”.

Cochrane has been studying cranberries since 1998 and has updated its review three times since then. What is particularly interesting is that you can see how the evidence has accumulated.

Cochrane is one of the most trusted sources in medicine. Its review of cranberries has been published since 1998, and the latest version, from late 2023, drew on fifty randomized studies involving nearly nine thousand participants. The conclusion is cautiously favorable and applies to specific groups of people, not everyone. More interesting, however, is a sentence the authors included almost in passing: there is still no consensus on how many proanthocyanidins a product should contain. Each study used a different preparation and a different amount, and some did not specify the amount at all. That is why the findings in this area are so inconsistent. This is precisely the gap our standardization addresses. While most manufacturers put “cranberry extract” on the label, we provide an exact figure.¹