In the hot summer, beer and seafood have become the standard for many people's dinners, and although delicious, there are also health pitfalls, and if you are not careful, it can lead to gout.
When it comes to gout, many people are familiar with it, it is the most common inflammatory joint disease. The scientific name for gout is hyperuricemia, which refers to the high level of uric acid in the blood. Uric acid is a metabolite of purines (a component of genetic material in the nucleus, which will be oxidized to uric acid in the human body), and when purine metabolism is abnormal or uric acid excretion in the body is poor, it will produce an increase in the content of uric acid in the blood, which will cause a series of gout symptoms.
Most people with gout have no obvious symptoms before the attack, but the attack is unusually violent, often waking up in the middle of the night due to increased pain, and peaking about 12 hours after the onset of the attack, which is tearing, knife-like, or biting-like. Painful joints and surrounding tissues may experience symptoms such as redness, swelling, heat, pain, and functional limitations.
When uric acid is deposited in different parts of the body, it causes different degrees of damage to that area: when uric acid is deposited in the joints, it can cause gouty arthritis, when it is deposited in the kidneys, it can cause kidney damage or kidney stones, and when it is deposited in the skin and subcutaneous soft tissues, it will produce tophi that is visible to the naked eye.
The attack of gout is not a short pain, but lasts for a few days to weeks, and then resolves on its own, generally without obvious sequelae, and some patients will have local skin pigmentation, scaling and itching. However, when the symptoms are relieved, they will enter a relatively long plateau and will not recur again, but they will recur after months, years or more than ten years, and most patients will relapse within 1 year.
What's even more frightening is that with the first gout attack, subsequent attacks will become more frequent, more and more joints will be affected, and the duration of symptoms will become longer and longer.
Diet is only one factor that causes gout, and weight, blood pressure, blood lipids, and genetic factors are all involved. Despite this, doctors will still emphasize the importance of avoiding food to gout patients, such as limiting alcohol, trying not to eat hot pot, and eating less seafood. Diet control is still important for people with gout, and the core principles are: resolutely limit alcohol (especially beer), eat less purine-rich foods, drink less sugary drinks, and eat more fresh vegetables.
Why do some people have gout attacks without drinking a piece of meat, a mouthful of soup, and a glass of wine? This also starts from the cause of gout - uric acid, only 20% of the uric acid in the blood comes from food, and the remaining 80% is produced by the human body itself, so controlling the diet can only reduce the blood uric acid content to a limited extent, at most 60μmo/L, which can be said to be very small for most gout patients.
Although diet only accounts for 20% of the triggers, we still need to avoid food, although avoiding food can not avoid gout attacks, but not avoiding food will lead to gout recurrence. In addition, not tabooing may also lead to obesity, and it will also affect the metabolism of purines in the body in many ways, so fat people have a greater chance of getting gout.
