Diet impacts gout and its cause. Combining gout treatments and diet encourages the body’s natural ability to ward off gout symptoms. For a triple whammy against gout, add exercise to your combination of gout treatments and diet.
Gout develops when the kidneys can’t handle uric acid. If there’s too much in the blood, uric acid forms crystals in the joints, most often in the big toe, knee or ankle. Small wonder gout is unusually painful. Sufferers try to double up their defenses by combining gout treatments and diet. Think of the pain of granules of uric acid, irritating on the inside, inflaming on the outside of a joint.
What is the science behind the notion of combining gout treatments and diet? Some foods are high in purines, which is largely uric acid. Foods very high in purines, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers, include animal hearts, herring, mussels, smelt, sardines, and sweetbreads. Perhaps you would find them easy enough to avoid. But look at the list of food moderately high in purines: anchovies, veal, bacon, liver, salmon, turkey, trout, haddock, and scallops.
Combining gout treatments and diet strikes some as a natural route to avoiding or treating gout. Diet puts less uric acid in the body. Gout treatments encourage kidney function. You’ve devised a one two natural punch, if the supplement used to promote kidney function is also natural. You can find these among the over the counter gout treatments to combine with diet. Many of these natural supplements incorporate an added bonus, which is an ingredient to ease inflammation and pain.
A simple way of combining gout treatments and diet is to take a gout treatment made with Vitamin C. The website mayoclinic.com reports that supplements containing vitamin C may reduce the levels of uric acid in your blood. You are combining gout treatments and diet in one pill.
Here’s other gout treatment diet advice, also from The Mayo Clinic. Coffee lowers uric acid levels. Not the caffeine, but other properties. Both decaf and regular coffee have been shown to affect uric acid.
Alcohol makes it worse.
For centuries, the only gout treatment was diet. One example involved eating dozens of cherries a day. Cherries lower uric acid.
Gout hurts so much wearing shoes is excruciating. Few bosses allow barefoot workers, so missing work is common, sometimes for a week or more.
Combining gout treatments and diet can be effective. Gout pain is so severe it isn’t difficult to imagine desperate sufferers fantasizing combining gout treatments and diet with witchdoctors and voodoo! Anything for relief!
However, when combining gout treatments and diet consider exercise. Physical activity will help control water retention and weight, both of which mess with the body’s ability to deal with uric acid. Exercise is a preventative. It is not a gout treatment. It’s a myth that exercise breaks up uric acid crystals in joints. During a severe bout of gout, suffering through exercise is not recommended.
Combining gout treatments and diet with proper exercise and natural gout supplements draws upon the body’s natural ability to take care of the scourge of gout.