GOUT: The Real Cause (and Cure)

 

Uric acid is removed from the body by the

kidneys. But this isn’t the whole story about 

gout, and what goes wrong to cause it.

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In actual fact, the kidneys eliminate about

70% of the uric acid that might form in the

body. The other 30% of uric acid that might

be formed in the body is actually handled

in the gut.

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The full story is included in the PDF file

on the upper-right corner of this page.

If you wish to remove gout from your life

permanently, please download, read, and

study it.

 

For now, what follows below is a summary of the details. Please contact me if you would like natural herbal medicines which can assist in reducing pain and inflammation, as well as assisting in the uric acid being moved from the body. Remember - this only helps short term - I absolutely recommend you use these medicines while you learn to adjust your diet and repair your microbiome. This will bring you the ultimate relief.  It really works.

 

More precisely, the GUT handles uric acid in your body not just by the kidneys but by the presence of specific little bacteria that take a certain amount of purines from your food and directly convert them into uric acid. Then after converting to uric acid, the bacteria convert that uric acid into allantoin, which is then excreted. Bacteria can do this last step, but humans cannot – unless we have a healthy microbiome.

Ok, so what this means is that if our microbiome doesn’t pull its weight by handling 30% of the body’s uric acid load, then there will be increased demands placed on the kidneys to eliminate uric acid. In a way, if your microbiome drops the ball on uric acid excretion the kidney has to take up the slack. Unfortunately, the kidneys can only do so much heavy lifting. If we load our diet with foods that contribute to high uric acid levels, and we live a lifestyle that contributes to high uric acid levels, then the kidneys simply cannot keep up with the task without our microbiome doing 30% of the work too.

The kidneys and the microbiome have to work together to handle the uric acid load. Over time, without the microbiome’s help, uric acid levels will rise in the blood to the point where it can’t dissolve anymore. That is when it starts getting deposited in the joints and surrounding tissues. Eventually, one day, some crystals shed into the joint fluids and spaces and the immune system steps in to do a clean-up; causing inflammation, pain, and all the other symptoms linked with acute gout attacks.

These discoveries are really exciting for us because all we need to know is how to support the microbiome so that it continues to help the kidneys. This will definitely help gout patients reverse and prevent symptoms – especially in the longer term.

Which bacteria are linked to gout?
When scientists set out to answer this question, they noticed that not only were certain specific bacteria linked to gout but that those same bacteria were also linked to many other closely related disorders. We know from chapter one that gout and hyperuricemia are risk factors for many other disorders like kidney stones, obesity, diabetes and so on. We also know that many of the disorders that gout is a risk factor for are themselves also risk factors for gout. These interlinking risk factors between diseases came out of statistical studies on populations (so-called epidemiological studies), so no description or explanation as to why these diseases would be linked together could be drawn from such studies. But now, with the discoveries made by microbiome researchers, we can finally show what might be linking these diseases together, rather than just making good guesses as to why.

It turns out that the microbiome situation in obese people, people with type-2 diabetes, people with certain kinds of arthritis, people with Irritable bowel disease, and people with certain metabolic disorders all share common characteristics at the level of the microbiome. 123 124 The fact is that each one of these disorders is characterized by chronic inflammation and similar microbiome profiles. For example, the bacteria Bacteroides caccae has been linked to gout and IBD.125 Other studies have shown that the gut bacteria of people with diabetes is also very similar to gout patients’.

So, people with these related disorders tend to have characteristic populations of bacteria that go a long way to explain their problems. For example, gout patients tend to have far less of a bacteria called Faecalibacterium prausnitzii. This particular bacteria is noted because it is important for producing chemicals that provide nutrition and protection for the gut lining. This little bacteria helps repair the gut when damaged, boosts healthy gut immune system functioning, and help keep different gut bacterial populations in a healthy balance. Overall, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii also has an anti-inflammatory action which is very beneficial for soothing and preventing gout.

The thing about Faecalibacterium prausnitzii is that the same findings have been reported in the gut microbiome’s of people who are highly stressed and in people with type-2 diabetes. This means that there is a strong biological link between gout, type-2 diabetes, obesity, chronic stress, chronic inflammatory conditions, and many other disorders.

What should we conclude from this research? The facts above are really important for us if we have gout. They seem to imply the following very important things:

1. You have gout because your gut is not helping your kidneys.

a. Your gut isn’t helping because it has the wrong kinds of bacteria.
b. The right kinds of bacteria are not being encouraged to flourish by lifestyle factors.
c. The wrong kinds of bacteria are flourishing due to lifestyle factors.
d. The kidneys can’t handle the uric acid load alone (without the gut doing its proper part) because of lifestyle factors that overload the body with uric acid.

2. Your gout is linked to other disorders like type-2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and problems with your metabolism.

3. If we want to treat gout we should support our microbiome to handle 30% of our uric acid levels.
 
4. If we want to help gout, we can also draw upon treatments that help type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, etc. The common factors are inflammation, food and drink choices, lifestyle, and microbiome balance.

5. If gout is related to these other disorders, then if we get gout it should be understood as a warning sign that you are likely well on your way to developing one or more of these serious disorders in the future – if nothing is changed. We can be grateful to our body for giving us this warning sign before things got worse, even though this warning sign is painful (gout attacks are really painful) at least we can’t just ignore it.

6. We should understand that uric acid-lowering therapy will not be enough on its own to reverse or prevent gout. We need to include diet and lifestyle changes to repair the microbiome.

7. Short term treatment of gout attacks is different from long term treatment of gout. In the short term, we should try to help get through the pain and inflammation of a gout attack (see some of our amazing and powerful natural options to do this effectively elsewhere in the book). In the long term, the best way to proceed is to select our diet carefully based on knowing the kind of microbiome we want, along with understanding the powerful ability of natural compounds to help with specific gout factors. The main factors will be reducing stress, managing uric acid, decreasing inflammation.

8. The selection of a diet that is alkaline inducing keeps our blood sugar levels in awesome healthy ranges, busts inflammation, and helps keep uric acid levels low should be able to achieve the necessary conditions to heal from gout in the long run. (we will explore this topic in the final sections of the book linked at the top of this page).

Many of the points made above mention the links gout has to other disorders, particularly shown via microbiome similarities. It will be useful to consider how the microbiome affects weight loss and gain of weight precisely because of these links. Also, a small discussion of low-GI foods, probiotics, and prebiotics would be very useful for us in terms of understanding what we need to do to support the microbiome’s health.

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