A chart comparing the 10% increase in uric acid after drinking soy milk, with the 10% decrease after drinking skim milk.

Please remember that no single individual food is important. You (or your nutritionist) should check the Gout Diet Section to fully understand the part that food and drink play in gout treatments)

All these delicious high protein foods are often banned for gouties. But who is doing the banning? And do they know what they are talking about?

I’ve used this image in a number of gout diet articles where I’ve discussed the relationship of protein to gout.

Have a browse, and you’ll see that the low protein brigade are rarely right.

Photographs of MRI scans showing gouty tophi growing in the spinal joints.

A chart showing the increasing risks of early kidney disease as uric acid rises. Interestingly, risks begin to rise steeply above 5mg/dL (0.3 mmol/L) which is towards the lower end of what many labs report to be the “normal” blood uric acid range.

The chart is drawn from data in the Association between serum uric acid and early kidney damage in middle-aged and elderly. The spreadsheet generating the uric acid chart, and this GoutPal image, are published under a Creative Commons license:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

This intriguing image from Lenore M. Edman, www.evilmadscientist.com shows a ‘litmus test’ with a twist. The twist is that the acid/alkali test is done with red cabbage. To add further interest, and a touch of surrealism, the red cabbaginess comes not from cabbage, but from candy! Oh how those Canadians love to wile away the long winter nights.

Well I’ve used the image to illustrate my point in Alkaline Foods, that litmus testing has little to do with alkalizing food, and alkalizing food has little to do with gout.

Why use it then? Because I like it.

You can see the original image from Lenora (The Evil Mad Scientist) at Flickr. If you reuse any part of this image, you must attribute the original work to Lenora under the Creative Commons Attribution License. No need to mention me, as I’ve done very little except add some tantalizing text.

What you must do now, is visit the original Kithchen Science picture, then follow the link to the explanatory Litmus Candy article.

Chart of the number of months taken for uric acid crystals to dissolve after starting urate lowering treatment. 18 gout sufferers took between 3 and 33 months for all uric acid crystals to disappear from synovial fluid samples.

Used to illustrate the article describing the time taken for uric acid crystals to dissolve.

Not gout related. I created this image for a joke (almost) response to a gout forum discussion about diet. It is inspired by Frank Skinner’s joke (almost) about the baby food diet fad and Reese Witherspoon.

For the lead image on my Home Remedies For Gout page, I couldn’t resist this photo from flickr.

Big time water drinker from Drew Stephens says it all – Drink Water – Big Time. OK, 5 gallons a time might be just a little too much, but if you are a goutie, you need to get the water habit.

Drew’s photograph is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license, as is my derived version.

Gout sufferers worry about how sauna and other sweat inducing activities affect gout. I picked this fiery image for my gout and sauna article to reflect the heat of a fierce gout attack.

When I wrote about gout and sweat, I didn’t particularly want to produce images of sweating people. Gout patients really need to focus on what might make them sweat, as well as understand the effects of sweating on gout. As I was inspired to write this by a question about the benefits of sauna, what better than a picture of a sauna fire.

I particularly like this image.

I’m grateful to brkl at morgueFile.com for this hot image.

Chart showing how the incidence of gout falls with lower uric acid.

This is used to illustrate the article Avoid Gout By Uric Acid Reduction, which is part of the Gout Treatment Reference Section describing the treatments that are available to lower uric acid.