Doc says i may have gout - The diet for this is an American nightmare

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mindlessobserver

mindlessobserver

True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
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Jul 18, 2017
So for the past year I have been getting horrific pain in my right foot. For awhile the docs thought it was a recurring skin infection but now they think its gout. Which was always something I thought old fat people got, but go figure. I guess my love of beer and sausages has decided to punish me hard.

This dietary restrictrictions for this are horrendous too, so I need ideas. No beer ever. No liquor ever. No organ meats (like sausage, hot dogs) ever. No fatty meat like bacon, salmon, tuna or hamburger ever (and for an American this is a fate worse then death), Limited red meat.

Really the only things on the okay list for protein is lean white meat and dairy. After that lots of bread and high vitamin c fruit. The merciful drunk gods still allow wine. So from the sounds of things I may have to live like a french peasant now.
 
Have you felt like starting a streaming business? Buying a condo in Connecticut? Have you dated any horses lately? Feeling pahsitive? Snorting and crunching up water bottles?
 
Carbonated kombucha is a good beer replacement and grilled or sauteed mushrooms are a good stand-in for meat.
 
Maybe if you weren't such a unhealthy fuck then you would still be able to treat yourself to a beer and hotdog. I have 0 sympathy for your poor choices leading you to not be able to enjoy food and beer. Speaking of which, I'm going to go back to drinking a nice cold beer.
 
Nice User said:
Maybe if you weren't such a unhealthy fuck then you would still be able to treat yourself to a beer and hotdog. I have 0 sympathy for your poor choices leading you to not be able to enjoy food and beer. Speaking of which, I'm going to go back to drinking a nice cold beer.
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To be fair I am actually quite healthy weight wise and diet wise. Which is why it took them a hot second to consider it. Some people are just really unlucky. Gonna miss cheeseburgers though.
 
Gaining an accurate diagnosis is vital before they take you down such a restrictive lifestyle path, my friend.

Have they tested your Uric Acid levels sir?
 
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Nice User said:
Maybe if you weren't such a unhealthy fuck then you would still be able to treat yourself to a beer and hotdog. I have 0 sympathy for your poor choices leading you to not be able to enjoy food and beer. Speaking of which, I'm going to go back to drinking a nice cold beer.
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mindlessobserver said:
To be fair I am actually quite healthy weight wise and diet wise. Which is why it took them a hot second to consider it. Some people are just really unlucky. Gonna miss cheeseburgers though.
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High alcohol use and poor diet can contribute to the emergence of gout, but more often than not its pretty much purely genetic. I come from a long line of massive drunks who ate about as well as you'd expect and nobody in my family ever ended up with gout until they were well into middle age, and even then it was pretty rare.

BowlOfDick said:
Gaining an accurate diagnosis is vital before they take you down such a restrictive lifestyle path, my friend.

Have they tasted your Uric Acid levels sir?
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Seconded. Get the readouts too, even if you can't make much sense of them, its always good to examine the paperwork yourself.
 
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As much as I hate to pile onto the list of "probably don't", you'll want to be careful with fructose and sugar-sweetened drinks (Sweetened Fruit juice / sodas), too. They're not purine-rich but they can still cause uric acid levels to raise and cause your gout to flare up anyways. Low-fat dairy products, soy products (Sorry) and vitamin C can actually help prevent gout attacks because they contribute to reducing blood uric acid levels. It's a pain in the ass to have to essentially completely change your diet overnight, but you acclimate to it pretty quickly, and once you get a really good understanding of what can cause it to flare up, you can "cheat" in the occasional beer and steak.

All fruits are fine, legumes, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, dairy products (low-fat especially) eggs, coffee, tea, and I can't think of any herbs or spices off the top of my head that cause any problems, so go nuts with your seasoning. White meat like chicken, pork and lamb can be okay but don't take that as an excuse to go carte blanche on them or you'll be right back to grabbing your foot and screaming. Eaten in moderation they're alright (About 4-6 ounces a few times a week), just don't get excessive about it. If you absolutely do want to eat fish, do it in moderation and go for fresh salmon since it's the most readily-available fish with the lowest level of purines.

One of my friends got slammed with this same diagnosis out of the blue about a decade ago, and he was a bacon & beer nut so he didn't take it very well, but after awhile he got into the habit. My advice would be to make friends with oatmeal, pasta (Especially whole wheat), eggs, rice, and breads. Thankfully, eggs are pretty much the most-versatile food available and pasta doesn't exactly skimp on options either, and there's plenty of options for low-fat cheeses (Like feta) that you can mix in with either of those, to say nothing of the fact that most any tomato-based sauce is perfectly fine, too.

The diet seems like a monsterous pain in the ass at first, but once you really start to understand the "menu" and get more effective at managing your uric acid with foods that actively help decrease it, the menu's pretty damned robust and not nearly as much of a vegan-hippie nightmare as it appears at first glance.
 
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Unpopular opinion: Dairy and meat are probably among the worst things you could consume if you have a condition like this because of their production process and what else you're likely consuming inside them.

I'm not suggesting you become a vegan, but a diet akin to Gerson therapy (i.e: A mostly plant-based diet) might not make the condition any better, but it certainly does slow down degeneration.

It gets a lot of flak as quack science because it's former founders/owners made some very grand claims in other fields such as being able to cure cancer, but the diet itself has been found to either stall or halt the progression of a range of ailments (the NHS for instance, is introducing it as a treatment for type II diabetes among other things. )

It sounds bland, but it's actually quite surprising how many innovations and new products are available for plant-based eating; some like jackfruit which has only fairly recently become available in the western world are (prepared correctly) near-indistinguishable from things like pork it's regularly used to imitate.
 
You can cook some pretty good shit with chicken. Here's one thing I came up with which was pretty good.

Take chicken breasts, and cut into strips while raw.

Take habaneros, jalapenos, and dice finely as possible. (easier to do with something like a slap chop) Leave seeds in, and adjust for portion size, and personal spice tolerance.

Take preferred BBQ sauce, and pour in a bowl.

Next add about a couple of tablespoons of honey to the BBQ sauce. Mix well, and then taste. In most sauces, you should just barely be able to taste the honey. You might want to skip this step if you're already using a really sweet sauce.

Add your preference of lime, or lemon juice and mix well. In most sauces it should have almost a mirror sheen to it, and after tasting, you should kinda be able to get a hint of the lemon, or lime juice taste.

Now you're going to dump the diced peppers into the sauce bowl, and mix well.

Once mixed, you're going to first take the chicken, and then the sauce, and pour about half of it into an iron skillet, and then just kinda flip the chicken strips around in the sauce to get them coated good. In most skillets it's going to look kinda crowded in the skillet, but don't worry as it will cook down a lot.

Now, I put the skillet on my grill to cook mine, but that's kinda risky with how hot an iron skillet can get on the grill, so you might prefer to just use a stove top. You'll get a better taste on the grill though.

Now as soon as you put the skillet on the grill/stove, you're going to want to start flipping it a bit, or it will end up getting stuck.

Once everything is kinda starting to look a bit like a soup, you wont have to just keep agitating it. During the whole process, you're going to want to keep adding more of the sauce just a bit at a time, about like you would if you were just barbecuing a chicken breast on the grill normally.

Once the chicken is thoroughly cooked, sprinkle just a bit of parsley flakes on top, and then take it off your heat source, and you'll notice that the liquid in the skillet will kinda coagulate as it cools, if it doesn't completely, that's fine.

At this point, it's ready to serve. You can either eat it as is, or if you prefer put it in something like a flatbread wrap, with your choice of toppings. I'm thinking about trying to use naan bread cooked in olive oil for this sometime, but haven't tried it yet.
 
My dad had gout, he never really made any lifestyle changes except for drinking a shitload of tart cherry juice whenever he had a flareup. About every six months he would be incapacitated for a day or two and then back to normal. Sometimes the cure is worse than the ill.
 
Have you considered getting a Rascal?

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Fagatron said:
Unpopular opinion: Dairy and meat are probably among the worst things you could consume if you have a condition like this because of their production process and what else you're likely consuming inside them.

I'm not suggesting you become a vegan, but a diet akin to Gerson therapy (i.e: A mostly plant-based diet) might not make the condition any better, but it certainly does slow down degeneration.

It gets a lot of flak as quack science because it's former founders/owners made some very grand claims in other fields such as being able to cure cancer, but the diet itself has been found to either stall or halt the progression of a range of ailments (the NHS for instance, is introducing it as a treatment for type II diabetes among other things. )

It sounds bland, but it's actually quite surprising how many innovations and new products are available for plant-based eating; some like jackfruit which has only fairly recently become available in the western world are (prepared correctly) near-indistinguishable from things like pork it's regularly used to imitate.
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I would kind of edit this just with a bit of my own advice here. Get a juicer. Juicing (mostly vegetables) is going to help you and anybody else out there immensely. I do not have the gout, but I have hypothyroidism. I would get a book or two on juicing as well. Don't juice a bunch of fruits, because they are better eaten because the fiber slows down the sugars, but say if you make beet juice or some other disgusting tasting juice, you might add a bit of apple or pineapple for taste etc.

I can feel really really shitty, and after juicing, feel great due to anti-inflammatory effects of turmeric/beets/etc, as well as the nitric oxide generation from the beets. (Much better than the pepsi generation ((boomerjokeLAWL))). I can run longer, with less fatigue, and joints operate better, etc. The only issue is having too much within a certain period probably, as beets could lower blood pressure too much and make you dizzy.

Anyway, a masticating juicer would be the best probably. don't get centrifugal, because it rips through the produce too fast and oxidizes nutrients faster and probably makes less juice. You could find a masticating one for probably a couple hundred or a bit more. It's a great investment, and make sure to do a good amount of carrots and also green things. If you want more workout stamina, use a beet or two, (just not mixed with a lot of calcium containing produce, because it could possibly create kidney stones, although I've never had an issue with this). Adding a few couple inch long turmeric roots will help with inflammation (I think grinding a bit of pepper in with it helps with absorption of the curcuminoiods). Adding a knuckle of ginger or some red cabbage helps with digestion and gut heath respectively.

Try a couple of 8 oz glasses a day. Carrot and green apple (less sugars in the green kind). Beet and some pineapple (both have high magnesium which is great for mood etc). Or do a green one with some spinach, cucumber (which is actually a type of melon from what I understand and is great for summer), celery, green apple, etc.

Keeping some fiber in the juice may be desirable if you have added some fruit.

Here is the juicer that I use: Tribest Slowstar. https://www.tribestlife.com/product-category/refurbished-juicing-items There are even refurbished models, one of which I indeed bought! It is still working well (bless those quality Korean motors!), and I bought it in mid 2017. Most juicers have a few parts to them, so cleaning isn't too time consuming. Even if your diet remained somewhat the same, adding vegetable juice is great!

The main juices that I make are carrot and turmeric (sometimes green apple), and beet/pineapple/celery/cucumber/ginger/red cabbage. I also steam Japanese sweet potatoes, cauliflower, other vegetables. I have tried to see if hummus or dressing, indian sauces/dal, or tahini, or ghee work best. The person who said kombucha is right too, because it's great for the gut, etc. I like to buy the big bottles of G.T.'s brand. Anyway, I hope I helped. There are a lot of options and I like what I'm doing!. :heart-full:
 
Really, after a few months of sticking to the new diet, people generally don’t want to go back because they are healthier physically. That first month is going to fucking suck, though.
 
I suppose it can't really be a powerlevel when you're talking about gout because Jesus Fucking Christ that shit is painful! I used to get attacks regularly, crippling attacks, started in my early 30's and my initial reaction was identical -- isn't that some fat old people disease? No, it's not. It sort of starts one day when you get out of bed and are wondering what in the fuck you did to yourself to hurt your foot so badly. Couple of days go by, okay attack goes away, Rinse/repeat for a period of months off and on until BOTH feet go off at the same time and you cannot walk. You can't even get the fuck outta bed, it's absolute torture.

And did you know that technically you can get gout in any joint of your body? It generally affects the feet because as you sleep at night, bloodflow is less there, it's cooler and the uric acid crystallizes in your joint fluid. But after having a knee blow up like a fucking basketball with gout, I went meds full-time to prevent attacks for several years.

Yes, rich foods and drinks (including beer) are triggers. I used to guzzle brandy. And beer. Paid very little attention to red meat or other food that would set it off. You ARE going to have to modify your diet. Get your happy ass on Allopurinol ASAP - usually a 300mg tablet once per day. Generic and very cheap. The Allopurinol buffers the uric acid in your system and will help prevent attacks. It will not help relieve an attack, but it DOES prevent them and make any you might get milder. There is another drug you'll learn, too, called ColCrys (Colchicine). This works during an attack and will actively break up the crystals in your joint fluid. It's pricier, only because one company has all the rights to it. But, it's an age old remedy made from the bulb of the crocus flower and is literally a poison. Directions generally say take during an attack until it makes you sick, then stop. But it works and can stop a bad attack within a day or so.

I lived with this disease for years (I'm now an old fat person that I originally envisioned might have gout!). I haven't had an attack in years now, don't take any meds. I gave up beer, but can have an occasional one with no ill effect. And I can pretty much eat most anything in moderation. Had some nice bratwurst the other night. You CAN manage to live with gout once you understand your personal triggers and make the necessary lifestyle changes. I still drink -- vodka. It doesn't trigger my gout. But NO brandy, no liqueurs, and I avoid most "brown" liquors. But as said, get on the Allopurinol for awhile, get your uric acid levels down, and avoid foods that have a high uric acid content.

Oh, one other thing that can help when you feel an attack coming on (trust me, you'll start to recognize the tell-tale symptoms before you get a full blown attack) -- cherry juice. Buy a bottle and keep it in the fridge. Drink it copiously when you feel an attack coming on. Not sure of the exact mechanism at play here, but it works and you'll find it commonly recommended as a treatment.

Hope this helps - understanding WHY and WHAT is causing the attacks is the key to living with gout.
 
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