How can I treat a UTI at home?
Home remedies such as drinking enough water, cranberry juice and employing certain hygiene practices can often help to treat UTIs from home and reduce the need for antibiotics. Sufficient nutrients such as vitamin C and introducing friendly bacteria in the form of probiotics can also be important steps for the proper management of this condition.
6 ways to treat a UTI at home
Whilst being on the lookout for any 'red flag' symptoms including back pain, blood in your urine or any extreme or persistent pain, generally, it is becoming deemed more appropriate and achievable to manage UTIs from home without the need for medical interventions. (1) Here I run through 6 ways you can treat a UTI from home:
1. Water
Drinking enough water, preferably plain, still, water is one of the best tactics that you can implement fast, in order to flush out your urinary tract. By keeping your urinary tract flushing through, and by keeping your urine nicely dilute, you can hopefully help to prevent the bacteria from sticking to your delicate urinary tract cells, and instead flushing it out - essentially keeping everything moving along!
Conversely, stagnant or concentrated urine is a bit more of a favourable breeding ground for these bacteria.
As a nutritionist, I'm always trying to encourage people to drink more water! But this can in some cases be easier said than done, and there may be some barriers. Perhaps people don't like the taste, or they just find that they don't remember to drink enough, or they suspect that other drinks count towards their water intake.
I'm always reiterating that plain, still, water is the way to go. And especially with UTIs, there's lots of research around different sugars and sweeteners not being so suitable for urinary tract health, which I will go on to in my next point.
I tend to find having a large bottle handy and filling it at the start of the day can help. You can specific tracker bottles, or instead, if you know the capacity, you can just calculate how many you'd be required to drink per day to meet your quota.
So, try tracking your intake, adding perhaps a straw, ice, or warming it up; you can have cooled, boiled water if you prefer to sip out a mug; Fruit, herbs; literally any habits that work for you in order to help encourage yourself and remind yourself to drink a little bit more water.
Finally, try not to drink too much with your meals. Instead, try to separate your water from your meals, and that helps to protect your digestion, which we know has links with urinary tract health too.
2. Watch your juices
Why am I so passionate about educating people on juices? Well, people are quite often tempted to try and incorporate lots of juice as they feel this is the only way that they're going to get liquids in. And as much as possible, I want to stress how important that minimal intake of water is. So, any extras need to be out with that one and a half to two litres of water a day to really get the benefits from it.
When it comes to UTIs, there's unfortunately lots of research to suggest that sugars, especially refined sugars, plus, artificial sweeteners can be quite irritating and quite disruptive to your urinary tract, due to a variety of processes involving our blood sugar levels, and gut bacteria. (2)(3)(4) So, I would really just try and stick to your plain, still water and flavour it with your fruit or your herbs or anything fresh if you're keen to do that.
One of the exceptions when it comes to juices for managing UTIs is cranberry juice. However, even still, I don't recommend scrimping on the water at all, you still want that minimum water intake.
However, a good quality cranberry juice, such as Biotta Wild Mountain Cranberry juice, is often a good option. This is made with hand-picked wild cranberries; so, combining really good quality ingredients and crucially, with no added refined sugars in there. Only some natural, gentle sweeter elements combined (a touch of agave syrup and birch), so nothing remotely artificial. There's just some birch and agave syrup in there, really natural ingredients, which means the cranberry component is still the star of the show, crucially shown in research to help prevent the bacteria causing UTIs from sticking to your insides. (5)
My guidance would be to consume no more than 100mls a day. This makes it quite achievable to incorporate into your daily regime too.
Although, another option when it comes to cranberry is to get Cranberry tablets – this is especially useful if you're keen to get that cranberry component in but are just being cautious about your different juices. The cranberry tablets can be a nice way to get a high amount of those vital cranberry ingredients in there without any added extras at all. Because cranberry is quite a tart ingredient, so for example, usually with the juices, even when they're the best quality possible, there will usually be some sort of sweetness added there, so the tablets are one way to get around this issue completely.
3. Up your vitamin C
Now, research also exists around the benefits of vitamin C and urinary tract health. (6) See, vitamin C is an antioxidant, it's very protective and it's very healing, so it can help to protect and heal the cells of your urinary tract.
Vitamin C can be found in copious amounts in your lovely fresh fruit and vegetable options, particularly citrus fruits which you can also incorporate into your diet. Add some slices to your water, perhaps, that's definitely a nice tactic.
And then we have supplement options if you're keen to up your dose even higher, even more so, if you've had recent infections. Nature-C is made from whole food sources of vitamin C. The Acerola cherry for one, is one of the highest natural sources of Vitamin C. So, it's just a good way to up your levels as well as trying to incorporate those fresh ingredients into your diet, of course.
4. Support your gut bacteria
Supporting your gut bacteria, for me, is essential when it comes to supporting your urinary tract health and helping to protect against repeat infections. Also, I think a lot of these tips you can employ from home, and not just at the time of infection, but actually longer-term to help support your urinary tract, as well as your health more generally.
Interestingly, we know that our gut bacteria have direct links with our urinary tract health. (4) So, supporting your gut and your gut bacteria, will have a direct impact.
One of the best ways to do this from home is to ensure you incorporate a wide variety of vegetables and fresh ingredients into your diet. So, really try to get new ingredients into your diet daily or every week, including lovely vegetables, fruits and whole grains such as quinoa, millet, oats, plus beans and pulses. All these sources of complex carbs are also going to help feed your good gut bacteria. So, just try to mix it up and get a wide diversity in your diet, which will reflect in a greater diversity of gut bacteria.
Then to support this process further, you can introduce something like a prebiotic, such as your Molkosan. And this is rich in L (+) lactic acid, which is the very ingredient that your good bacteria produce themselves, handily assisting them in thriving and flourishing in the gut.
So, something like your Molkosan just helps to add in that acidity which your large intestine responds very well to and the bacteria that live there.
5. Introduce a home remedy
For the sake of this blog we're trying to stick to home remedies, so those that you can easily order online or get in health food stores.
So, next up, we have Uva-ursi & Echinacea Complex. As the name suggests, this is a complex combining Uva-ursi and Echinacea; two key herbal ingredients that can help to relieve minor urinary complaints associated with cystitis or UTIs.
So, this is definitely one remedy to introduce at the first sign of infection. You would only really take this during an infection, whereas the cranberry, Molkosan and many of the tips, as mentioned above can be more protective long-term.
You can take Uva-ursi & Echinacea up to five times daily. However, if symptoms don't improve after seven days, you should stop taking it, simply because it may not be working. There may be something else other than a UTI underlying, and this means it would be time to go back to your doctor just to investigate this further.
Uva-ursi & Echinacea Cystitis Oral Drops. Cystitis Treatment for Women
£12.99 (50ml) Get it tomorrow, 29th November.
6. Helpful practices
Certain habits would obviously be helpful at the time of infection, but actually day to day, these are useful practices to put into place anyway, just to help protect and retain optimal urinary tract health.
So, these would be tips would be like going to the toilet after sex, and also wiping front to back routinely as well. All these practices help to just ensure that bacteria aren't getting near the urethra.
This means we can help hinder the bacteria in their bid to navigate there and do us any harm. So, basically just trying to keep that urinary tract free of bad bacteria as much as possible.
