Cranberry industry looks to scientific research in hopes of a better future

BOSTON – The cranberry industry wants people thinking about the tart, red fruit as more than just food.

For struggling cranberry growers, the future could lie in makeup, medicine and more.

Industry and government have poured billions of dollars into researching alternative uses for crops such as potatoes and corn. But the cranberry industry, composed of only a few thousand growers nationwide, never has had that kind of muscle – especially lately, with prices depressed and the industry struggling to break even.

Still, growers hope science will give them a better future.

“The growers are not going to last forever breaking even or losing money,” said John Decas, president of Decas Cranberry Products in Wareham, who processes berries for about 160 growers. “They’ll give up. It’s our job to demonstrate to them that we can make money for them.”

In November, Decas received a $240,000 federal matching grant to explore alternative uses. He has hired a physician to run a small research operation and they’re looking into everything from recycling leaves from the crop to extracting oil from cranberry seeds and selling it to the cosmetics industry.

“We were putting them in compost,” Decas said of the seeds. “It finally dawned on us there might be some value here.”

But the real focus is pitching cranberries’ health benefits to doctors and the nutritional supplements industry.

The best news the cranberry business ever got came from a series of studies in the 1990s, giving credibility to claims cranberry juice prevented urinary tract infections.

How it worked remained a mystery until 1998, when Rutgers University researchers pinned the effect on chemicals called proanthocyanidins. An ingredient in the berries’ tannin, they don’t kill bacteria but prevent germs from latching onto human cells, causing the germs to wash harmlessly out of the body.

The mechanism could make cranberries a way around the problem of germs that have built up resistance to antibiotics.

“The bacteria remain alive, they just can’t do their thing. It’s a very elegant way to prevent disease,” said Amy Howell, a research scientist at Rutgers’ Marucci Center for Blueberry/Cranberry Research at Chatsworth, N.J.

Now, the industry’s relatively small research program is hoping those properties will prove effective against other bacterial infections that strike the mouth and cause stomach ulcers. Early results are promising, Howell said, though they are largely industry-funded and only have been tried in laboratories.

Researchers also are exploring cranberries’ antioxidant properties, which are related to the body’s aging process, as well as potential uses treating diabetes and heart disease.