While changing your diet won’t likely cure gout, it might help reduce the severity or frequency of your symptoms by limiting foods that increase uric acid production and emphasizing others. The best gout diets also promote healthy weight management, since excess body weight adds strain to your joints.
What’s the Best Gout Diet?
Choosing healthier foods might be as important as avoiding problematic ones, both for managing gout and your overall health. Best gout diets emphasize antioxidant-rich foods such as cherries, blueberries, squash and bell peppers for reduced symptoms and strengthened immune function. As low calorie, fiber-rich foods, fruits and vegetables might also help you manage your caloric intake, appetite and weight.
Protein-rich meals include black bean and split-pea soup, low-fat vegetarian chili, vegetarian burgers, chilled bean salad, and tofu. Low-fat milk might help flush excess uric acid from your body and reduce gout symptoms. Include in your gout diet healthy fat sources such as nuts, seeds, avocados, olive oil and canola oil.
Vegan Gout Diet
A vegan gout diet may be one of the best to relieve pain, because vegans do not eat meat or other animal-based foods, thus eliminating one of the chief reasons for the buildup of uric acid in the joints that causes flare ups.
If you go on a vegan gout diet, you still need fats, whole grains, vegetables and fruits to complement your plant-based proteins with the other nutrients these foods contain. The majority of vegetables are acceptable on a vegan diet for gout, except for spinach, mushrooms and asparagus. These vegetables are all high in purines, so you should be cautious when eating them and check to see if your gout gets worse.
You can eat any fruit with the vegan gout diet and should add fruits and vegetables high in vitamin C, which is known to reduce gout pain.
Low Purine Gout Diet
Following a low purine gout diet significantly minimizes the risk of damaging body joints and the development of gout. Here is a gout diet list consisting of low purine foods: pudding, peanut butter, low-fiber breads, rice, pasta, low-fat cheese and ice cream, soups containing no broth or meat extract, sweet items in limited amounts, fruits and vegetables, red and white cabbage, luncheon meat, green olives, sauerkraut, tofu, hazelnuts, and figs.
Be aware that breads, cereals and crackers advertising as being “100% wheat”, “stone-ground” or “multi-grain” are generally not whole grain foods and may contain ingredients such as yeast, which increases uric acid levels and promotes the formation of crystals.
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