Can Fasting Cause Gout?

A popular diet fad that has been around for a few years is the fasting diet where you basically don’t eat anything in order to detox your body or people do it for religious reasons like Muslims during Ramadan. Believe it or not there is a small study that studied the impact of Ramadan fast on patients with gout. Fasting diets aren’t all the same, some allow only liquids like water, teas or juice. Others cut your calories sharply by limiting your daily food intake and some other diets let you fast every other day, what we call intermittent fasting. One thing is for sure. Fasting or a starvation diet won’t cure or help your gout!

Problem is if use any of these fasting diets to lose weight, you’ll quickly notice that you will gain the weight back real quick. If you partake of this diet to detox your body, please note that your body naturally detoxes itself. So let’s just say I am not a big fan of this diet and there are plenty of studies that prove it. Many studies indicate how once you start eating again, you will overcompensate and gain the weight all back.

Fasting a few days won’t hurt most people as long as you stay well hydrated but fasting for a long period of time is bad for you and can be dangerous. Your body needs vitamins, minerals and other nutrients in order to stay healthy. If you don’t get your nutrients you can get symptoms like fatigue, dizziness, constipation and spike your uric acid levels in the blood potentially causing a gout attack. Fasting has also shown to spike blood sugar levels in diabetics as well. That is why doctors recommend that nobody fasts who suffers from a chronic disease, even for a short period of time. Gout is a chronic disease.

What happens to your body once you fast is or partake in a starvation diet is that your body will break down muscle to utilize as fuel since you are not feeding it food. Two substances are then produced from this muscle breakdown, ketone bodies and lactic acid which both impair your kidney’s ability to excrete uric acid and then leads to rising uric acid levels and a possible gout attack. If you dehydrate yourself as well, this will worsen your situation even more.

In conclusion, best to avoid this diet entirely and focus on eating healthy every day like I’ve stated over and over. Eat 80% of your daily calories as vegetables, legumes, fruits, whole grain breads, pastas and rice. Eat 10% of your daily calories as protein like lean red meat, lean chicken and fish. Eat 10% of your daily calories as fat like cheese, yogurt, eggs, butter etc… Don’t forget to drink plenty of water and believe me that in a few weeks you will have shaved off some pounds but most importantly you will have lost these pounds naturally and gradually, not affecting your uric acid levels and risking another gout attack.