Foods to Avoid with Gout: Sweets and Gout

Sweets and Gout is #83 in the Gout and You series, a countdown of your top gout search topics.

Sweets are usually sugar-based, eaten as a snack or to finish a meal. As such, they represent a high proportion of nonessential carbohydrate in the diets of many gout sufferers. As you will see, there are two major risks from sweets, which might make them foods to avoid for people with gout.

Before I explain those risks, let’s look at some facts about sweets as gout foods. I have produced a Gout Foods Table for Sweets, which lists all the key foods in the Sweets food group of the USDA nutrition database. You will see from that list that relatively small portions of sweets can easily provide more calories than we might need.

The risk of excess calories, combined with certain properties of sugar, means that gout sufferers face a double whammy of increased gout. That does not mean you have to avoid all sweets, but you do have to understand the dangers, and how to manage them.

Within the foods to avoid with gout guidelines, I recently added an article about sugar and gout. Though there is not much research in this area, it is quite likely that sugar does cause uric acid levels to rise. As yet, there is insufficient evidence to say exactly what level of sugar is safe. However, general nutritional advice from Harvard recommends no more than 5 or 6%. Given the limited nature of investigations into sweets and gout, that level is probably unlikely to raise uric acid by a significant amount.

Closely related to sweets consumption is excess weight. As you can see from Gout Foods To Avoid, excess calories are one of the worst causes of gout from a diet. If you are overweight, it is best to avoid sweets completely until you reach your ideal weight, then treat yourself occasionally.

Avoid excess Sweets and Gout! — Are sweets bad for gout? Only if you eat the whole house!

If you have any questions about sweets and gout, please ask in the gout support forum.

I will continue this series of gout search topics with #82 tomorrow. There are a few more aspects of gout diet this week, then some variety with various aspects of gout treatment. Be certain not to miss any of this series by subscribing to my gout information update service: