Summer "high-end meal": beer + seafood? Learn more about gout →

In the hot summer, beer and seafood seem to have become the standard for many people's dinner parties. But although delicious, it also contains hidden health traps. If you are not careful, it will lead to a very painful disease - gout.

Drink beer and eat clams!

When it comes to gout, many people are familiar with it. It is the most common inflammatory joint disease. Starting from the scientific name of "gout", it is easier for us to understand its cause. The scientific name of gout is: hyperuricemia, as the name suggests, it means high uric acid levels in the blood. Uric acid is a metabolite of purine (a component of genetic material in the cell nucleus, which will be oxidized into uric acid in the human body). Therefore, when purine metabolism is abnormal or uric acid is not excreted properly in the body, the uric acid level in the blood will increase, thereby triggering a series of gout symptoms.

So, what are the symptoms of gout?

Generally speaking, most gout patients have no obvious signs before an attack, but the attack is extremely severe. They often wake up in the middle of the night due to the worsening pain, and the pain reaches a peak about 12 hours after the onset of the attack, showing tearing, knife-like or biting-like symptoms. The painful joints and surrounding tissues will have symptoms such as redness, swelling, heat, pain and limited function. Returning to the essence of gout, when uric acid is deposited in different parts of the body, it will cause different degrees of damage to that part: when uric acid is deposited in the joints, it will cause gouty arthritis; when deposited in the kidneys, it will cause kidney damage or kidney stones; when deposited in the skin and subcutaneous soft tissue, it will produce tophi visible to the naked eye.

Gout attacks are excruciatingly painful

Gout attacks are not short-term pain, but will last for several days to weeks, and then will be relieved on its own. Generally, there are no obvious sequelae. Some patients will experience local skin pigmentation, desquamation and itching. However, when the symptoms are relieved, they will enter a relatively long stable period and will no longer recur, but they will relapse again after several months, several years or more than ten years. Most patients will relapse within 1 year. What's more frightening is that after the first gout attack, the attacks will become more and more frequent, more and more joints will be affected, and the symptoms will last longer and longer.

We often say: Diseases come from the mouth. Is this true for gout? In fact, diet is only one factor that causes gout. Weight, blood pressure, blood lipids and genetic factors are all related to it. Despite this, doctors still emphasize the importance of diet to gout patients, such as limiting alcohol, trying not to eat hot pot, eating less seafood, etc. Therefore, controlling diet is still important for gout patients. The core principle is:

Resolutely limit alcohol ( especially beer ), eat less high-purine foods , drink less sugary drinks , and eat more fresh vegetables .

So how should gout patients eat? Medical materials usually divide foods into four categories according to their purine content. For easy understanding, a table is made for your reference:

Although summer nights and delicious food always go well together, when gout symptoms occur, those beautiful things will turn to ashes, so gout patients must avoid certain foods! But here I want to pour cold water on everyone: even if someone is very careful and does not drink a piece of meat, a mouthful of soup, or a glass of wine, gout may still occur. Why is this? This has to start with the cause of gout - uric acid. Only 20% of uric acid in the blood comes from food, and the remaining 80% is produced by the human body itself. Therefore, controlling diet can only reduce the blood uric acid content to a limited extent, and can reduce it by 60μmo/L at most. This degree can be said to be negligible for most gout patients.

Diseases come from the mouth

Since diet only accounts for 20% of the cause, do we still need to be so hard on ourselves? The answer is yes! Because: Although abstaining from food cannot prevent gout attacks, not abstaining from food will lead to repeated attacks of gout. Think about the pain during a gout attack, so you should be a little harder on yourself! In addition, not abstaining from food may also lead to obesity, and will also affect the metabolism of purine in the body in many ways, so fat people are more likely to get gout.

Finally, I would like to share with you a rheumatologist’s advice:

Keep your mouth shut and move your legs;

Avoid seafood and thick soup;

Check frequently and take the right amount of medicine;

Episodes, vegetarian bars ;

During the stable period, eat less meat.

Do you remember it?

(Pictures from the Internet, please contact us if there are any copyright issues)

References:

[1] Zhang Zhuoli. Analysis of the latest diagnosis and treatment guidelines for gout[J]. Chinese Journal of Medical Frontiers (Electronic Edition), 2014, 6(10): 1-3+6.

[2] Baidu Encyclopedia, Dingxiang Doctor.