More than 2,000 years ago, “Hippocrates described gout as a disease of kings primarily because it was the wealthy who could afford the ‘rich’ foods, which seemed to precipitate gouty attacks.” Today, however, we can all eat like kings and acquire some diseases of royalty ourselves.
Gout is caused by needle-sharp crystals of uric acid in our joints. Uric acid comes from the breakdown of purines, which are the breakdown product of genetic material—DNA, the foundation of all life. So, “there is no such thing as a purine-free diet, but foods do vary in their purine content.”
The Harvard Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, which followed about 50,000 men for a dozen years, found that alcohol intake was “strongly associated with an increased risk of gout.” In terms of food, they found “an increased risk of gout with higher meat consumption or seafood consumption,” but not with higher consumption of purine-rich plant foods.
Lack of association between purine-rich vegetables and the rate could be due to the co-packaging of these “beneficial plant components (such as vitamin C, dietary fiber or some phytochemicals), which may have masked an effect of purine on [uric acid].
Read the full article at Care2