Is Chinese Food Bad For Gout?

Chinese food and gout is #89 in the series of top searches described in the Gout and You page.

As you’ll see below, Chinese food is not necessarily bad for gout. But it can be – and that is down to you.

If you’re a Gout Foodie, you will be choosing Chinese food randomly. So start GoutPal Plan for Gout Foodies to ensure that your Chinese food choices don’t make your gout worse. But ideally, you should aim to be a Gout Dieter. Then you can select those Chinese dishes that support your uric acid target.

So continue to read why it’s up to you if Chinese food is bad for gout. Or skip down to read more articles related to Chinese food and gout.

Chinese Food and Gout

It’s very difficult to know what people are looking for when they simply search for Chinese food. Some searches include a particular item of food, but this is too widespread for a single topic. There is absolutely no connection between food that includes Chinese in its name. Many names refer to historic sources that have little bearing on modern Chinese cuisine. Consider:

Chinese chestnuts from Nuts and Seeds food group
Chinese cabbage from Vegetables food group
Chinese noodles from Legumes or Pasta food groups
Chinese gooseberries from Fruit food group

As variety is very important to a healthy diet, looking at various Chinese foods might be interesting. However, it is largely meaningless. If you are concerned about specific foods, you should only look at them in the context of your total diet.

As these foods are not in the USDA Key Foods list, they are not included in my gout foods tables. If you want more information about these, or any other specific foods that are not in the tables, please ask in the gout support forum.

Rather than individual foods, perhaps you are interested to see if Chinese cuisine in general has any effect on gout. Unlikely as it may seem, this question has also prompted some scientific research. Two studies have looked at Chinese dietary patterns and uric acid in the blood:

Relationship between dietary patterns and serum uric acid concentrations among ethnic Chinese adults in Taiwan
Major dietary patterns and risk of asymptomatic hyperuricemia in Chinese adults.

The first investigation found that uric acid was lower in participants with higher vegetable and fruit intake. However, after adjusting the results for several confounding factors, the differences were deemed insignificant.

The second investigation found three major dietary patterns, and relationships to uric acid in the blood:

Animal products and fried food – higher uric acid
Western – neutral
Soybean products and fruit – lower uric acid

It is not clear if the confounding factors that neutralized the relationships in the first report might also do the same in the second report. Both reports are much smaller than corresponding American investigations into dietary patterns. As such I will not add these reports to the Gout Diet Foods To Eat guidelines.

Make Noodles Good for Gout with Chinese Vegetable Stir Fry

There is a strong suggestion that some Chinese foods are good gout foods to eat. As soybeans are a large part of Chinese cuisine, we can see that these reports mirror the American studies. Normal advice is to balance meat and fish with plenty of vegetables and fruit. Advice on Chinese food seems to be: balance meat and fish with plenty of vegetables, soybeans and fruit. Different cuisines – same rules.

Next, I will present #88 in this series of top gout searches. More science updates of a gout diet nature. Be sure not to miss it by subscribing:

Leave Chinese Food and Gout to browse Gout Diet Foods To Eat guidelines. Or return to your GoutPal Plan for Gout Foodies.

Chinese Food and Gout Comments

GoutPal visitor responses and associated research include:

Gout in Chinese

Many GoutPal visitors are asking about the word for gout in Chinese. As I researched that, I found an interesting gout page from China Medical University Hospital^[1]. Not only does that page reveal the English translation of the Chinese word 痛風 is gout. It also includes a purine content table for many foods popular in China. I’ve changed the layout slightly, and corrected the heading from mg to g.

Chinese Food containing purines (per 100g)

0-25 mg Lowest Purines: vegetables, fruit, milk, egg class, honey, fat and nut, sugar and sweet fruit, fruit jelly, rice, noodles, macaroni, lotus root powder (except for cereal). Drink, cheese, roe, trepang, sweet potato, water chestnut, rolled cat, auricularia auricula, melon seed, potato, and sea wise skin.
25-75 mg Low Purines: Common fish, lobster, fish pill, crab, oyster, chicken, chestnut, husked lotus, ham, gut of beef, dry legumes (red bean, mung bean), pea, kelp, three-color amaranth, dried bamboo shoots, jack bean, bean curd, dried beans, kidney bean, blue Jiang Ts’ai, and mushroom.
75-150 mg Medium Purines: Lean meat, turkey, duck, pigeon, pig, cow, sheep, beef tongue, carp, Cao Yu, mullet, snow fish, perch, big flat fish, carapace class (soft-shelled turtle), pheasant, hyacinth bean, crab, cuttlefish, and peanut.
150-1000 mg High Purines: Meat broth, thick bouillon, brain, kidney, liver, sardine, pancreas, bamboo shoots, shiitake mushroom, dike fish (black carp, piece mouth fish), black soybeans, soybean, and porphyra capensi.

As you can see, some of these foods are hard to understand. However, there is a more complete purine list on this university website^[2]. But that shows Chinese foods in three purine ranges.

My research also confirms that many of the dishes that we call “Chinese food” are actually American food with a Chinese label. But I’ll write more on that later.

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Common Terms: foods cause, Most Helpful Gout Pages, recipe, veggies