Urinary tract infections are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics and when that happens there seems to be little you can do except to hope that your body’s natural defenses can fight off the infection. But what most people don’t think of are natural remedies for UTI’s.

That’s unfortunate for them, because there are some natural cures with real science backing them up and the grapefruit seed is one of those cures.

It is mostly women who get urinary tract infections, but a small fraction of men get the disease too. The disease can turn serious rather quickly if antibiotics aren’t working and can progress to full-blown kidney failure.

This is especially troubling for women that are pregnant because the changes that the urinary tract infection effects can lead to delivering before the end-of-term.

One of the disadvantages that antibiotics have when curing a disease is that they aren’t discriminatory. They will kill both the good and the bad bacteria. Natural cures are much easier on the body and it is one of the reasons why they are becoming so popular.

UTI and Grapefruit Seed Research

There have actually been extremely significant results when studies attempted to prove whether grapefruit seeds had any effect on urinary tract infections.

One study, published as recently as 2005, stated that in the research they conducted, grapefruit seeds were “highly effective” when it came to killing the bacteria causing the urinary tract infections, even when antibiotics had failed. The same study also suggested that an extract of grapefruit seeds was able to inhibit bacterial growth.

How does it Work?

Only recently have we been able to determine why the grapefruit seed works, and more importantly, how it works.  Researchers first confirmed that the grapefruit seed extract was effective against many different bacterial organisms at doses that were safe to the person consuming the extract.

It was only last decade, with the scanning transmission electron microscope, that scientists were able to determine how exactly the extract worked.

The grapefruit seed extract gets through the bacterial membrane and releases the cytoplasmic internal content very quickly – within 15 minutes even in very small doses and dilutions. The extract also inhibited the growth of gram-positive bacteria and somewhat on gram-negative.

What this shows is that the grapefruit seed extract works incredibly fast, and incredibly well, even compared to traditional antibiotics. Also, grapefruit seed extract is very potent as an antifungal medicine, which gives it another advantage over the antibiotics. You just need to consume grapefruit seed extract every day for two weeks, or to consume grapefruit everyday, that’s all.

The Natural Alternative

The bottom line is that even if the antibiotics to treat these bacterial infections were safe and always effective, grapefruit seed extract would still be a superior treatment.

However, they are not always effective and in some cases unsafe. Also, antibiotics are expensive and grapefruit seed extract costs almost nothing.

It is amazing and humbling what Mother Nature can create to cure disease. We humans pat ourselves on the back for our cleverness when it comes to medicine, but in this case, we can only make a shallow imitation of that cure.

Sources:
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/grapefruit-seeds-treat-antibiotic-resistant-utis
http://www.webmd.com/women/ss/slideshow-urinary-tract-infection-overview
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapefruit_seed_extract