Quaker oatmeal and gout. I am confused.

[Mazzaroth man]

I was considering oatmeal into my diet as i have read websites saying its good for gout sufferers, but one site says that its bad. Something to do about it being a carb and once broken to sugar it spikes your insulin and requests more uric acid from your kidney to come back to your system instead of it being flushed.

What u guys think?

[Keith Taylor]

I’m confused why you are asking me what I think about that page. Where is it’s merit? Why is it influential to you?

Insulin spike from oatmeal!?! Really?

Anyway, I guess I should be sensible. Insulin resistance, as far as I know, is not directly related to gout. But, there are strong associations between risks of gout and risks of diabetes. So, let’s look at ” Clinical Benefit of a Short Term Dietary Oatmeal Intervention in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes and Severe Insulin Resistance”. Which is a pilot study from December 20, 2007 Exp Clin Endocrinol Diabetes.

diabetes adapted diet followed by oatmeal intervention achieved a ~40 % reduction of insulin dosage required to achieve controlled glucose levels.

Perhaps more significantly, have you tried searching oatmeal and gout in any recognized scientific resource? I’m biased enough to suggest the best search results come from the search box at the top of all my pages. Also, on that search results page, you get an option to search Google Scholar. Finally, there are other reliable gout science resources, such as PubMed. What do you find if you search ‘oatmeal and gout’? Nothing! Because there is no connection. And, I’m extremely worried about the thought processes that make anyone think there could be a connection.

If you want to get anywhere with gout diet, you have to stop putting individual foods first. Start with a good healthy diet based on whole foods. Especially plants. Once you’ve established that, and got your calorie intake under control, you might look at single foods within the context of your overall diet. In which case, you would compare your suspect food item with one or two alternatives.

I hope you realize that fine-tuning a diet takes a long time. But, each day you work on getting better diet, your uric acid burden increases. That is very dangerous. So, it’s much safer to consider allopurinol, or other uric acid lowering treatment. Because, that buys you time to get your diet sorted, without the risks of permanent joint disease or organ failure. Then, if you improve your diet, and get obesity under control, you might be able to reduce, or even stop, the allopurinol.

Either way, don’t be afraid of porridge.

---

---

Have you tried Oatmeal for Gout?

[nobody]

The “thought processes” worrying Keith are explicit, and very simple: carbs are bad, cereals are loaded with carbs, therefore cereals are bad. Surely you are aware of the enduring low-carb diet fad.
Now it is correct that a gout diet ought to be low in sugar and fructose. But conflating cereals with sugar or fructose-based sweeteners is asinine.
It may well be that the consumption of all carbs (cereals included) is pathologically excessive in many countries. But that doesn’t mean individuals can’t over-correct and end up with excessively low carb consumption. In the same way, it is certainly possible to eat too much oatmeal but avoiding oatmeal on that ground is silly.

Full disclosure: I occasionally eat rolled oats.

[d q]

I’m confused why you are asking me what I think about that page. Where is it’s merit? Why is it influential to you?

Keith you are hilarious at times 🙂

@Mazzaroth, that post should be in the discussion forum here.

[Author]

Posts