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Hi I’m Jon from the Philippines, 38 yrs old. I usually get gout like 3 times a year, my uric acid level and cholesterol is usually high every time I do an annual blood test.
My wife’s been nagging me to diet, So 2017 I ate less than my usual. In 2 months I lost 5 kilos, from 110 to 105. Hurrah! But here’s the thing, since Feb I am getting gout like every 2 weeks, even less. So last week, i got a gout attack again, so i said to myself maybe my dieting aint enough.
I’ve researched the web which food to avoid, and so I ended up with wheat bread and green tea in the morning, rice and potatoes covered with turmeric powder, chili powder and cumin for lunch, an apple and a glass of milk for dinner, all in small servings 3 days straight, turns out turmeric, potatoes, and wheat bread are high oxalates even if low in purines. As I am making this thread, I am again feeling some pain on my foot where my gout usually strikes. Based on my experience, this will be intense tomorrow when I wake up.
So having said that, am I doing it right? My last week blood uric test was 530ish. As much as possible I don’t want to settle with meds like allopurinol or colchicine, so I am dieting really hard.
I will be replacing my diet to: green tea and white bread for breakfast, one boiled egg, cucumber in apple cider, rice for lunch or macaroni in milk soup. A huge fuji apple or 2 bananas in the eve. No salt, no sugar, plenty of water.
Do Bananas make your Gout smile?
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Hi,
A few commendts…
There are limits to what you can accomplish with diet.
Even if some day you end up gout-free without meds (it’s not a given that it’s even possible), that would take time. Doing without meds in the meantime will cause extra suffering.Having more frequent gout symptoms can be a sign of improvement. And rapid weight loss can temporarily make gout worse.
So doing the right thing doesn’t mean you’ll feel better immediately.Your diet puts you at risk of malnutrition and protein deficiency in particular.
Your diet should be more varied and contain more vegetables. I also recommend you make at least one of the two following changes:
-eat/drink a lot more dairy
-add generous servings of the lentils/beans type of plant to your diet and refrain from excessively restricting the cereal servings (rice, bread and so forth) -
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It’s good to hear you like milk because if you do not eat meat, lentils, beans, or soy you may need to consume a lot of dairy. A relatively small amount of cheese would be sufficient since that is very nutrivtive but if milk is the only dairy you consume, you may need (depending on how tall you are and so on) as much as a liter per day (including the amount used in cooking). You probably need less and your daily egg in particular reduces your need for milk so my wild guess considering what you’re eating and so forth is that be you’d need half a liter per day.
Some veggies like cauliflower or spinach could bring that figure down when you eat large servings (uncooked cauliflower is worth about two-thirds of its volume in milk for this purpose). If you ate large cereal servings (not recommended for weight loss!), that might also bring down the figure.Most veggies have similar benefits but some have special properties (see above). Tomatoes and zucchini help lower the acidity of your urine more than most vegetables for instance.
If you eat a lot of different vegetables, you don’t need to worry about whether this one or that one is best. Even plants you might not think of as nutritious such as coffee actually contain nutrients lacking in most other plants. So variety is the one thing most likely to provide you everything you need and I would therefore recommend all veggies.What’s your concern about spinach by the way? Obviously if you don’t digest it well or it makes you sick, you shouldn’t force yourself to eat that.
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Hi again,
There are three topics here: allopurinol, uric acid tests and purines.About allopurinol, it’s usually recommended to start with a lower dose such as 100 mg and to increase the dose after a week or so if you’re doing OK. I don’t know where your ancestors came from but some Asians do not react well to that drug and lower doses must be less dangerous.
People often do a blood test after a month of so to see if the dose they’re taking is not stressing their liver and kidneys and whether it’s sufficient to lower their uric acid.
Allopurinol can also trigger serious gout symptoms so you need to be ready to deal with that. That is a normal part of the process of curing gout. So people often take colchicine or some other drug along with allopurinol during the first months.About uric acid tests, lots of factors can affect them so variations are to be expected.
In particular, exercise, not eating enough and rapid weight loss can raise your uric acid.
Nevertheless, the fact that you tested so high suggests that your average uric acid level might be higher than previously assumed.About purines in your diet, they are not the only factor determining how much uric acid you get. Your cider, bananas and fuji apple (a particularly sweet variety) may have slightly increased your uric acid for instance.
It’s also a stretch to say cauliflower and spinach are high in purines. They’re only high compared to milk and eggs and you can hardly live on that. If you tried, your kidneys might struggle to get rid of your uric acid and you might actually end up with kidney stones.
There are foods (mostly some meats and sea products) which have a lot more purines than vegetables and these are the ones which you would do well to avoid until your gout problem is sorted out. -
As explained, diet uric acid management is near impossible unless you are close to the safe UA level boundary to start with (and even then you have your hands tied). If you get no side effects from allopurinol then your answer is allopurinol.
There really is no need to make this harder on yourself with “obsessive” diet worries. Eat healthy and try incorporate more dairy.
Life goes by too fast to worry about gout. Go enjoy it.
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I try to avoid snap judgments based on incomplete information. But I’m 90% confident this is a Secondary Gout case with a primary disease of morbid obesity. So, I’d expect significant benefits from healthy diet. Because it’s very common for morbidly obese patients to recover from gout with only lifestyle changes.
But, getting to healthy eating is a long-term process. So, gout can get worse during that time. That’s why I increasingly recommend allopurinol for a year or two. Because that allows you to get uric acid safe in a few months. Then, you can implement healthy eating at a realistic speed.
Some of the detail is wrong here. But the direction looks good. I just hope your gout recovery is managed properly, MAzzaroth Man. So, keep posting about your progress.
Is Banana good for Gout?
Many gout sufferers wonder if banana is good or bad for gout. So first, I’ll say again: “No single food should ever make a big difference to your diet. Because a good gout diet starts with a wide range of different foods from all important food groups.”
Having said that, once you have established a healthy gout foundation diet, you might want to tweak it by changing some of your fruit intake for gout-friendly options.
Now, lots of people come here looking for advice about gout & banana. Unfortunately, there is not enough evidence to make a strong case for banana being good for gout. But some evidence suggests that at least it might not be bad. Because one lab study confirms that banana is high in antioxidants [1]. Prior to that, another lab study shows that banana can reduce artificially high uric acid in rats [2].
Neither of those should imply that bananas will help human gout. But they do suggest this is a potential area for more research.
Banana and gout references
1. Mallick, Chhanda, Debasis De, and Debidas Ghosh. “Correction of protein metabolic disorders by composite extract of Musa paradisiaca and Coccinia indica in streptozotocin-induced diabetic albino rat: An approach through the pancreas.” Pancreas 38, no. 3 (2009): 322-329.
2. Costa, M. A. A. M., M. A. Antonio, and A. R. M. Souza Brito. “Effects of prolonged administration of Musa paradisiaca L.(banana), an antiulcerogenic substance, in rats.” Phytotherapy Research 11, no. 1 (1997): 28-31.
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