The Truth About Your Gout Diet: Download A Patient’s Guide to Gout, Second Edition
It’s a common mistake to think that diet alone triggers gout and therefore, treating gout with diet changes alone can manage it. Research increasingly shows that gout is more influenced by genes and family history than diet — and most people with gout need to take medication to lower their uric acid levels.
However, what you eat can help tip the odds in your favor. For example, staying away from high purine foods and drinks like alcohol, soda, liver, and seafood can help decrease your risk for flares. This guide offers advice on what to eat (and what to avoid) to best manage your gout, as well as how to fit diet, exercise, and more into your overall gout treatment plan.
Inside, you’ll find comprehensive yet easy-to-understand information on gout and its treatment: what causes gout, how gout can affect your health, how gout is treated, and the steps you can take on your own to prevent flares, manage symptoms, and avoid long-term complications.
Vetted by both medical experts and patients with gout, we hope the information in our patient guide will help you, alongside your provider and care team, navigate daily life with gout so you can get what you want, need, and deserve from your treatment plan.
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What's Inside
Our patient guide covers the basics of gout and offers clear, simple answers to many of your questions about managing symptoms and treating this type of arthritis to prevent long-term complications. You’ll find answers to such questions as:
- How is gout diagnosed?
- What causes a gout flare?
- How does your doctor determine your gout treatment plan?
You’ll also get actionable advice on managing gout with a combination of medications and lifestyle changes, such as exercising, losing weight if needed, and avoiding foods that can trigger gout flares.
We’ve also included information to help you raise your voice and advocate for your own care with tips on getting affordable treatment and talking with employers and coworkers, family and friends, and elected officials about your condition.
Don’t miss our real-life tips from patients throughout the guide, where people living with gout share honest answers about how a gout attack feels, what works to relieve pain, and what they wish someone told them when they were first diagnosed.
The information in this guide should never replace the information and advice from your treating physician. It is meant to inform the discussion that you have with health care professionals, as well as others who play a role in your care and well-being.
CreakyJoints® is a digital community for millions of arthritis patients and caregivers worldwide who seek education, support, advocacy, and patient-centered research. We represent patients in English and Spanish through our popular social media channels, our websites, and the 50-State Network, which includes more than 1,600 trained volunteer patient, caregiver, and health care activists.
Part of the Global Healthy Living Foundation, CreakyJoints also has a patient-reported outcomes registry called ArthritisPower® (ArthritisPower.org), which includes tens of thousands of consented arthritis patients who track their disease while volunteering to participate in longitudinal and observational research. CreakyJoints publishes the popular “Raising the Voice of Patients” series, which offers downloadable patient-centered educational and navigational tools for managing chronic illness. It also hosts PainSpot (PainSpot.org), a digital risk-assessment tool for musculoskeletal conditions and injuries, and eRheum (eRheum.org), for telehealth and virtual-care support. All programming is free, always. For more information and to become a member, visit CreakyJoints.org.
A Patient’s Guide to Gout was made possible through the support of Horizon Therapeutics, a global biotechnology company with corporate headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.
© 2021 GHLF All rights reserved
About the Editors
Dr. Theodore Fields
Theodore Fields, MD, FACP, is an Attending Rheumatologist at Hospital for Special Surgery and Professor of Clinical Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is the rheumatology medical editor of www.hss.edu, the HSS website providing comprehensive education on musculoskeletal disease treatment and prevention for physicians and patients. He is the Clinical Director of the Early Arthritis Initiative at HSS, which focuses on education of patients and physicians about early intervention in inflammatory arthritis. His special clinical interests are rheumatoid arthritis and gout. His most recent publications have focused on clinical aspects of gout and on improving education for patients with gout.
Willa Bryer-Douglas
Willa Bryer-Douglas was diagnosed with gout in 2013. Since then, she has researched the condition thoroughly on credited sources like PubMed or major hospital and medical school websites. She is a member of our CreakyJoints Gout Patient Council and hopes that these patient guidelines can help others living with gout control their disease.
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