When you look at the factors that are associated with gout andcompare them to the factors that are associated with diabetes thereis too much overlap to be coincidence. I am writing about thiscoincidence of risk factors from pure intuition here but the medicalcommunity is also aware of the overlap. They often comment about itinformally in conversation as well as more formally in writing.
I want to focus on the recent post by “tony8167″ who lost 14 poundsin two weeks on the Atkins diet. From many of the discussions we havehad on here we can conclude that if Tony is indeed a gout sufferer,and his overall uric acid level is above what his body is able toexcrete, we would conclude that losing that much weight that fast, asfat mind you, will surely induce a gout attack if you are prone togout. With uric acid being stored in the fat tissues and that tissuebeind depleted by 14 pounds, that will leave a lot of uric acid thathis body has to remove. If you think about it, he may not even be areal gout sufferer long term and he simply overloaded his excretioncapability while on the “fat burn”.
This is a critical point we need to look at and understand. I finallygot Dr. Atkins new book, sort of new, at least some of the statisticsare new. I read his first edition about 10 years ago. When it firstcame out I was maybe 2 pounds over weight, in great shape and figuredthat I didn’t need to pay attention to it. However, there are somevery important points covered in his book that I believe affect allof us and I am ready to conclude, in my own mind, that the root causeof my gout, is that I live in a “glycogen excess” state, all thetimes. My body never has depleted glycogen levels, unless I am losingweight, and in my normal operation mode, I keep my glycogen level,that is my blood sugar level, at or over the max level it can orshould be. I am definitely not diabetic yet but I am doing abouteverything I can to move myself into being a diabetic and it is areally, really stupid thing to be doing.
I suspect that many of you are doing the same thing. Each and everyday, when your blood suger gets even slightly low, you put acarbohydrate in your mouth and voila, you fix the hunger symptombefore it gets too bad. The older I get the worse this seems to getand although I feel I am living in a perpetual state of hunger, Istill manage to gain weight, albeit slowly, month after month andyear after year. I seem to be gaining about 2 pounds a year andalthough that may not seem like much, after 10 years now, the 20pounds are here and it is ever so hard to get motivated to get rid ofit.
Moreover, remember that the #1 risk factor associated with gout istoo much weight. Clearly there are gout sufferers who are skinny as arail, my grand father was skinny and he was wracked with gout painalmost all the time. However, most of us are not skinny and we knowthat if we could lose the weight, we would reduce the rate of, andseverity of, our gout attacks.
It will take a while to get this all organized so that it is easy tounderstand but I’ll start with a simple fact that Atkins covers inhis first few chapters.
When you have excess glycogen, your body makes insulin to get rid ofthe glycogen and from that glycogen the body makes as much energy asyou need to live on and then it turns the rest into fat. The riskfactors associated with this kind of behavior, with keeping a highblood sugar level all the time, are astonishing and it can bepredicted-with absolute certainty by the way-that it will lead us toan early grave. High blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes,arterial schlerosis and all the other problems associated with beingover weight-much higher cancer risk, etc., etc., etc..
If there is not enough blood sugar in your system to live on, thatis, if there is not enough blood sugar there to generate the energyit takes to go through the day, your body turns to the fat andprotein in your body for energy. If you have excess protein from yourdiet it will leave your mscles alone, and then it will then turn toyour stored fat and convert your stored fat into energy. The energycycle from “FAT BURNING” does not involve insulin and this is what Iwant to focus on. As I said in the beginning of this post, theoverlap with diabetic factors is just too great for me to believethat insulin is not the main culprit in triggering my gout.
For those of you that need a mechanism, or a proof of details, Iain’t gonna even try but my belief is that I can go on a controlledatkins diet-yes higher protein intake, much higher in fact, and Ibelieve I will not increase my gout probability unless I do it tooquickly.
In simple terms, I am going to target 1 pound a week, not 7 pounds aweek, and I will drink lots of water, and I plan to reduce mycarbohydrate level to where I am getting most of my energy to liveon, from either the fat I eat or from the fat I already have stored.I’ll stay on allopurinol, watch my BP and go back to my exercizeroutine.
As Atkins says, it is very hard to live when you are hungry all thetime and high carbohydrate intake but insufficient calories makes youhungry and keeps you hungry…
Oh yes, one thing I didn’t mention but Atkins does cover, and I haveknown it since graduate school and my biochemistry work in the late60’s. When you eat one spoon full of sugar, that sugar will triggerinsulin release and the insulin will work on reducing your bloodsugar. It will take about an hour to deplete your system of that onespoon full of sugar. The problem is that when the blood sugar levelreaches normal, there is still insulin in the system and that insulingets eaten up by completely depleting your system of blood sugar.The low blood sugar level sets off bells in your brain that say toyou-FEED ME- it says-FEED ME- FEED ME-FEED ME- and, if it fails toget food it will then start to shut the system down and you willprobably take a nap.
After another hour, your system will have been able to restore theblood sugar level by burning some fat, if it has to, and your hungerwill go away.
My proposal, based on nothing other than intuition, is that theconstant cycling of my glycogen-insulin system-causes my gout.Clearly this is not the case for all people with gout,but I am smackin the middle of this “too much sugar” thing and my gout attacks seemto correlate well with having been in that cycle too long.
Comments(3)