There are more and more young people with high uric acid.
Someone always asks Lilac in the background: I don’t eat seafood, I don’t eat meat, I quit drinking, why is uric acid always high.
Frankly speaking, according to the existing research results, a large part of the reason for high uric acid is caused by congenital genetic factors.
However, acquired efforts through diet, weight loss, exercise, etc., can also help you play the “card” given by your parents to a certain extent.
In terms of diet, eating less seafood and drinking less beer is right, but many people are likely to overlook another very important detail:
Sugar-sweetened beverages!
The European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) Recommendations for the Management of Gout (2016) The dietary recommendations for gout and hyperuricemia to “eat less” actually consist of a total of There are three, in addition to the well-known alcohol and high-purine foods, and one is sugar-sweetened drinks.
Sugar-sweetened beverages are also known as cola milk tea and fruity teas.
However, you may wonder why sugar-sweetened beverages have no purines, so why do they increase uric acid? This starts with one of the most common misunderstandings.
Uric acid is not just about purines you eat
Uric acid is a metabolite produced when the body processes purines.
What determines the level of uric acid in the blood is the process of uric acid “synthesis-excretion” balance in our body.
In a healthy person’s body, the liver will process the useless purines into uric acid, and then excrete the uric acid through the kidneys and intestines. The whole smooth process is in a stable range. Inside.
Image credit: Author & Dr. Lilac Design Team
But if any of these links go wrong, uric acid can rise. To put it simply, it is either that there are too many purines in the raw material, or less uric acid is excreted.
The problem of less excretion is largely influenced by genetic factors. That is to say, the ability of some people’s bodies to deal with uric acid in the blood is inherently worse than others, and some people can only be relieved by drugs.
The problem of too many raw materials is partly related to diet, which is why people with gout and hyperuricemia are recommended to control purine intake.
But another major source of purines, which many people do not know, is the purines we produce ourselves, also known as endogenous synthetic purines.
That is, even if you don’t eat anything, the body itself metabolizes purines.
The scary thing is that some foods are very “scheming”. Although they do not contain purines themselves, certain ingredients contained in them can promote the body to synthesize more purines, resulting in increased uric acid.
Sugar-sweetened beverages are a typical example of this.
Many patients with high uric acid are unaware of the dangers of sugar-sweetened beverages, and may even think that replacing alcohol with beverages is a “healthy” dietary choice, which is really worth the loss. .
Sugar-sweetened beverages may also increase risk of gout
Sugar-sweetened beverages are not just as simple as increasing purines in the body and raising uric acid. Some studies have confirmed: People with higher intake of sugar-sweetened beverages, even if they do not have gout, follow-up There is also a higher chance of developing gout.
Two studies by Harvard scientists, published in the top medical journals BMJ and JAMA, followed 46,393 men and 78,906 women, respectively, for more than ten or twenty years, and concluded that 5 A conclusion worth sharing:
Men who drank an average of 1 sugar-sweetened beverage (about 250-300 ml, less than a can of Coke) per day had an average increased risk of new gout compared to those who did not drink it at all 44%;
Women who drink 1 sugar-sweetened beverage a day are twice as likely to have new gout than men;
On this basis, drinking more sugar-sweetened beverages was associated with a higher risk;
Even switching from sugar-sweetened beverages to unsweetened fruit juices may still increase the risk, perhaps even more so than sugar-sweetened beverages;
Sugar-free drinks without fructose and artificial sweeteners do not increase the risk.
Image source: Figureworm Creative
In other words, sugar-sweetened beverages may not only prevent uric acid from falling, but may also further induce gout, and pure fruit juice also requires vigilance.
Fructose, which may be responsible for elevated uric acid
Why is a small bottle of sugar-sweetened beverage so harmful? From the known research, it may be the fructose in it.
Fructose is a special kind of sugar.
As the liver processes all other sugars, there are various mechanisms that regulate how quickly it processes these sugars, ensuring that things get done in an orderly manner.
Only when dealing with fructose, it’s the kind of madness where you hit the accelerator and don’t install the brakes. This frenzied process eventually promotes the production of more purines.
And the liver will continue to use these accumulated purines to synthesize uric acid, which directly results in an increase in blood uric acid.
And some studies have also found that fructose molecular structure is similar to uric acid, which may cause a decrease in the ability of the kidneys to excrete uric acid. This “two-pronged” effect makes it difficult to think that uric acid is not high.
The process of fructose metabolism in the body
(It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand! The point is that more purines will be induced)
Image source: References
The Karolinska Institutet did part of a human study where healthy people were given drinks with the same calories but different fructose content.
It was found that the subjects who drank the most fructose-containing beverage had an average increase of 15% in their blood uric acid levels after drinking 35 grams of fructose.
And 35 grams of fructose is only the amount of fructose in a 600ml bottle of Coke.
Almost every sugar-sweetened beverage contains fructose
The name “fructose” may be unfamiliar to everyone, but in fact, most sugar-sweetened beverages in life contain fructose.
If you occasionally look at a beverage’s ingredient list, what are the most frequently found ingredients in sugar-sweetened beverage ingredient lists?
White sugar? crystal sugar? Honey? sucrose? Fructose syrup?