Is Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice Good For You? (Hint: There's One Kind You Should Avoid)

Dietitians and other health practitioners will tell you how important fruits are for your diet. Most fruits and vegetables are great sources of fiber and provide vitamin C and other nutrients to maintain your health. Juices somewhat fit into this category, even though they don't have the fiber you'll find in the whole fruit. However, getting your daily servings of fruit from juices could be problematic for people with type 2 diabetes because juices tend to be high in sugar.

While cold-pressed juices can be healthy because they lack added sugar and preservatives, Ocean Spray's cranberry juices tend to have few added ingredients. Ocean Spray's Unsweetened Pure Cranberry has just water and cranberry juice made from concentrate. Even though it's unsweetened, this cranberry juice still has 9 grams of sugar from the cranberries. It also has 180 milligrams of potassium and just 15 milligrams of sodium.

Ocean Spray's Light 50 cranberry juice still retains many of the key flavonoids, phenolic acids, and proanthocyanidins, and a 2015 article in Food Chemistry used this juice to see how well these nutrients are available in the bodies of older adults. These beneficial antioxidants were found to be absorbed by their bodies, indicating that this cranberry juice is good for you. However, you might want to avoid Ocean Spray's Cranberry Juice Cocktail because of its added sugar.

If you've had cranberries, you might notice they're quite sour. Cranberry sauce recipes usually add sugar to bring down the sourness. It's the same with cranberry juice. Ocean Spray's Unsweetened Pure Cranberry might be the purest cranberry juice you'll find on the shelf, but other cranberry juices are often "cocktails." That means they have added sugar or other juices to make them sweet.

Ocean Spray's Original Cranberry Juice Cocktail has 110 calories in an 8-ounce serving and 25 grams of added sugar. That reaches the American Heart Association's daily limit of added sugar for women and almost 70% of the recommended limit for men. 

Ocean Spray also offers a 100% Juice Blend Cranberry that has 100 calories and no added sugar. However, the 23 grams of sugar come from apple, grape, and pear juice. In other words, you won't get the full benefits of pure cranberry juice from this drink.

Ocean Spray Light 50 Cranberry has just 50 calories, but there are 7 grams of added sugar. You'll also get the artificial sweetener sucralose. It also contains grape juice for that extra sweetness. 

Ocean Spray's Diet Cranberry and Zero Sugar juices both have the benefit of no added sugar and 5 calories. However, you'll find a ton of other ingredients such as sodium citrate, fumaric acid, and artificial sugars.

Cranberry juice is often known for its effect on your urinary health. If you suffer from frequent urinary tract infections (UTIs), a 2017 review in the Journal of Nutrition found that cranberry (juices and supplements) can reduce the risk of another UTI by 26%. Because a UTI is a bacterial infection, cranberry juice can't treat a UTI.

Ocean Spray's lower-calorie cranberry juice was used in a 2015 study in The Journal of Nutrition to see how it might reduce conditions related to metabolic syndrome. For eight weeks, one group drank two glasses of cranberry juice every day while another group drank a placebo drink. The cranberry juice drinkers lowered their triglycerides, inflammation markers, blood sugar levels, and diastolic blood pressure. Cranberry juice also lowered insulin resistance in people with previously higher levels of insulin resistance.

The antioxidants in cranberry juice might help people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), according to a 2019 study in Nutrition. Ocean Spray's low-calorie cranberry was also used in this study, where one group of women drank two glasses a day for 90 days. Compared to the control group, the women who drank cranberry juice had lower levels of some of the markers of RA.