Gout Diet Restrictions

Food Gout Overview

There are two vital facts that you must learn before you can find how gout limits your diet.

1. You must have a plan to manage your gout.
2. No single food is important in isolation.

Gout Management Plan

Though I cover this in depth in the Gout Treatment section, and in the Understanding Uric Acid & Gout section, I must summarize the key points here. Without an appreciation of why a gout management plan is necessary, you will never build an effective food management plan.

The simplest overview is:

1. Gather information, confirming the diagnosis, with your best assessment of why and how you might have gout. The assessment must measure your uric acid level. Your doctor should do this regularly for all gout patients, but if you cannot get this service, you can buy effective home uric acid test meters.
2. Set Objectives for your gout management plan. What is your target uric acid level? Will you achieve it through medications, dietary restrictions or a combination of both?
3. Develop your plan to get rid of the Uric acid crystals (also called Urate deposits) in your body. This can be medication, dietary restrictions, or a combination of both.
4. Monitor the plan until all urate deposits dissolve, then adjust your medications and dietary restrictions to maintain uric acid levels at 5mg/dL (0.30 mmol/L). Gently Tend your gout, forever.

Gather information, set Objectives, dissolve Urate deposits, then Tend forever. ⒼⓄⓊⓉ.

Until you reach the final stage, you will probably need pain relief. I discuss some inflammation reducing foods elsewhere in this Gout Diet section. However, it is unlikely that, unless you have a high pain threshold, you will be able to avoid gout pain therapy. Usually this involves drugs, but my Gout Treatment section also covers non-drug gout pain therapies including T.E.N.S. machines, low level laser, and acupuncture.

Food Management Plan

We can see that food plays a part, often a large part, in managing gout. So apart from the aforementioned anti-inflammatory foods, we are really concerned with lowering uric acid.

Unfortunately, many people who should know better have tried to simplify this into lists of foods that are good for gout, and lists of foods to avoid. Whilst there is a place and a purpose for such lists, they exist to help you plan and manage your gout. You cannot live your life from these lists. They simply do not make sense in isolation. Most importantly, lists of one factor, e.g. purine content, are misleading if you do not consider other factors at the same time.

The only approach that works is to assess your whole diet. Gout is a metabolic disease that shows that your uric acid metabolism controls are not working. They are out of balance, and the only way you will get back in control is to eat a balanced diet. Simply avoiding purines is not enough. They count for a small part of your uric acid pool – the majority comes from your own flesh. As your body grows and regenerates itself, it creates uric acid. Illness, trauma, and bad nutrition will cause this process to accelerate, and your badly balanced diet will send your uric acid figures much higher than a plate of seafood ever could.

Balance applies to more than just the nutritional content. Gout diet restrictions must also consider the timing of food in balance with exercise. Your whole lifestyle needs to be planned to ensure that you give your body the best chance to turn the food you eat into energy for life, and not into excess uric acid.

It is also crucial to plan a diet that you will enjoy. If you do not enjoy your diet, you will not stick to it. Gout is miserable enough without needless food restrictions. You need to learn to plan for the things you love to eat, then balance your diet to make it healthy.

You create your food management plan for your gout as part of your gout management plan. No other way will work.

Next Steps For Gout Diet Restrictions

You can see that you must identify the gout diet restrictions that will help you, and avoid lifestyle limitations that are pointless. There is an amazing amount of information to consider when planning your gout diet, but you will only make sense of it if you have a gout management plan. The rest of this Gout Diet section will help you build your personal gout diet management plan. It has to be personal to you, as gout affects us all in different ways. My gout diet might not suit you, but my approach to gout food management will ensure you have a plan that works.