Is My Vegan diet helping or hurting my gout?

[Martin Vert]

I have EDS type 3. My gout attacks all my joints especially my weakened ones or around surgical implants or especially my ruptured Achilles tendon. My uric acid levels are 10.5

I had only one gout attack on my Achilles tendon that was relieved by using a needle to extract the crystals. Now, I have eaten Vegan for 6 months. My uric acid levels continue to rise. I have CKD as well. The Allopurinol makes me retain so much water I gain 5 pounds a day. I quite that but Dr says it’s just a matter of time until my next episode.

Vegan sits very well With my digestion and elimination which also is complicated by Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. I lost 80 pounds years ago and never want to gain that back. Allopurinol is a weight gainer! I’ve tried nutrition supplements and won’t give up. I’m searching with an open mind.

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What’s your favorite vegan meal for gout?

[nobody]

Having 10.5 mg/l of uric acid in the blood is dangerous.
Unless you are doing something very wrong with dangerous supplements, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect to fix such a serious problem by changing your diet. Hence taking a drug.
There are alternatives to allopurinol your doctor should be able to provide you but perhaps you could first try to repeat your experiment with allopurinol and see if you start retaining water again. For how many days did you gain 5 pounds a day? If you do indeed gain weight very fast on allopurinol, it might be worth investigating why that is with your doctor.
It’s important that get your uric acid in control, whether it be with allopurinol or something else. Whatever you do, don’t ignore the problem.

[Keith Taylor]

Gout, or as I prefer, Urate Crystal Arthritis, is a uric acid metabolism problem, not an eating disorder. So, a healthy, nutritionally-balanced, vegan diet should not make that metabolism worse. I.e. a correctly planned vegan diet will not hurt gout.

Unfortunately, we can see that most vegan diets do hurt gout. Presumably, because our bodies try to offset poor nutrition with extra uric acid. Who knows?! Because that study is based on statistics and has not yet been followed up with specific research showing why vegans are at highest risk of gout.

Most importantly, we have to put statistics to one side. Then, focus specifically on Martin’s vegan diet.

1. Is your vegan diet balanced? I don’t know, so we’d need to analyze it properly.

2. Is your vegan diet good for EDS? I don’t know, so you need to educate me about EDS.

3. Is your vegan diet helping your gout? I don’t know enough about your gout to answer that. But, I’m confident with more information I could make it so.

However, I do not believe it is possible for any diet to get uric acid safe when the baseline is 10.5 mg/dL. So, we’re going to have to find combinations of diet and medicine that tick all the boxes. Which depends entirely on keeping the open mind – but start planning and investigating – not searching.

[Author]

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