Eat less red meat to stay clear of gout

Eating less red meat and seafood while consuming more low-fat dairy products cuts the risk of developing the painful joint condition gout by about half, according to researchers who studied the diets of thousands of men.

Eating lots of vegetables and fruit, shunning alcohol use and maintaining a normal body weight also significantly reduced the chances of getting gout, the most common form of inflammatory arthritis in men.

“Every single seafood type we looked at was associated with increased risk of gout,” said Dr Hyon Choi, a rheumatologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“This is the first evidence that dairy products can be strongly protective,” he added, and the first confirmation that gout can be triggered by foods rich in a substance called purine that’s often associated with high protein levels.

The link between gout and rich foods and alcohol has been conventional wisdom for centuries, leading to its reputation as a disease of middle-aged rich man. Famous sufferers included Charlemagne, Henry VIII, Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci.

Researchers at Massachusetts General, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard’s medical and public health schools followed 47,150 men with no history of gout for 12 years to pinpoint exactly how diet contributes to gout.

They were questioned periodically about how much of 130 foods and beverages they consumed the previous year, and about their weight, medication use and medical conditions. When the study ended in 1998, new cases of gout had been documented in 730 men, or nearly 2%.

The study was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.