Causes of Gout Flare Up and How Your Diet Can Help You Beat the Miseries of Gout
A gout flare up is excruciatingly painful, so you need to do something fast to relieve your gout symptoms.
Changing your diet can help a lot.
Discover, here, just why diet plays such an important role in the cause of gout, and how by making some dietary changes, you can help beat it.
A gout flare up happens when you have too much uric acid in your blood.
The flare up is actually due to uric acid crystals that have formed in your joints and connective tissue as a result of your high uric acid levels.
And uric acid is the result of the breakdown of chemical compounds called 'purines' when they metabolize in your body.
Purines exist also in your foods.
So the more purines ingested, the more uric acid produced.
Your kidneys normally excrete excess uric acid levels from your body via urine, with a very small amount through stools.
But when there is too much uric acid being produced, or, your kidneys aren't processing the acid fast enough, you can end up with high acid levels, leading to a gout flare up.
So, during a gout attack you need to reduce your uric acid and keep it there.
And since the food you eat contains purines that produce uric acid in the first place, you need to reduce your purine intake by changing to a low purine diet.
Purines exist at varying concentrations in different foods.
You need to discover which have high and very high purine levels and cut these out of your diet.
You need to concentrate on relatively low purine foods.
Generally speaking, the foods that cause a gout flare up are red meats, game, organ meat, some fish, shellfish, poultry, dried legumes, some vegetables and yeast.
For example; venison, kidneys, liver, herring, sardines, mackerel, scallops, shrimps, mussels, goose, duck, asparagus, cauliflower, mushrooms, yeast and yeast extracts, etc.
Alcohol should be avoided, particularly beer.
The above list is in no way complete, but it gives you a good idea of what to look out for.
In terms of relatively low purine foods you can eat, here are a few general examples; cereals, pasta, rice, low-fat dairy produce, red cabbage, red bell peppers, potatoes, cabbage, kale, celery, parsley and other green leaf vegetables, tuna, nuts, flax-seed, cherries (great!), strawberries, grapes, bananas and other fruits.
Stay away from white flour products.
These short lists will help you to start to figure out what gout diet suits you best.
But, a word of warning, don't be too aggressive in changing your diet at the start, because a sudden dietary change can actually make your gout symptoms worse to begin with.
Introduce your change slowly.
But there's more to consider, if you are to stop future gout attacks from seriously damaging your health.
Frequent gout attacks can lead to permanent joint damage, kidney damage and high blood pressure.
And if you've had even one gout attack, you're now very likely to have more.
You need to break the cycle.
Changing your diet can help a lot.
Discover, here, just why diet plays such an important role in the cause of gout, and how by making some dietary changes, you can help beat it.
A gout flare up happens when you have too much uric acid in your blood.
The flare up is actually due to uric acid crystals that have formed in your joints and connective tissue as a result of your high uric acid levels.
And uric acid is the result of the breakdown of chemical compounds called 'purines' when they metabolize in your body.
Purines exist also in your foods.
So the more purines ingested, the more uric acid produced.
Your kidneys normally excrete excess uric acid levels from your body via urine, with a very small amount through stools.
But when there is too much uric acid being produced, or, your kidneys aren't processing the acid fast enough, you can end up with high acid levels, leading to a gout flare up.
So, during a gout attack you need to reduce your uric acid and keep it there.
And since the food you eat contains purines that produce uric acid in the first place, you need to reduce your purine intake by changing to a low purine diet.
Purines exist at varying concentrations in different foods.
You need to discover which have high and very high purine levels and cut these out of your diet.
You need to concentrate on relatively low purine foods.
Generally speaking, the foods that cause a gout flare up are red meats, game, organ meat, some fish, shellfish, poultry, dried legumes, some vegetables and yeast.
For example; venison, kidneys, liver, herring, sardines, mackerel, scallops, shrimps, mussels, goose, duck, asparagus, cauliflower, mushrooms, yeast and yeast extracts, etc.
Alcohol should be avoided, particularly beer.
The above list is in no way complete, but it gives you a good idea of what to look out for.
In terms of relatively low purine foods you can eat, here are a few general examples; cereals, pasta, rice, low-fat dairy produce, red cabbage, red bell peppers, potatoes, cabbage, kale, celery, parsley and other green leaf vegetables, tuna, nuts, flax-seed, cherries (great!), strawberries, grapes, bananas and other fruits.
Stay away from white flour products.
These short lists will help you to start to figure out what gout diet suits you best.
But, a word of warning, don't be too aggressive in changing your diet at the start, because a sudden dietary change can actually make your gout symptoms worse to begin with.
Introduce your change slowly.
But there's more to consider, if you are to stop future gout attacks from seriously damaging your health.
Frequent gout attacks can lead to permanent joint damage, kidney damage and high blood pressure.
And if you've had even one gout attack, you're now very likely to have more.
You need to break the cycle.
