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Dr. Eric Berg DC — The #1 Best Protocol to Reverse Gout (and Prevent It). Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
Why your gout keeps coming back. And we're going to talk about the real cause of gout. If you keep getting reoccurrent gout attacks, despite doing what everyone's telling you to do, which is get rid of your red meat, your shellfish, your organ meats, basically lower your purines, and you find in that's not working, there are several other reasons that you're running up against. So yes, there's totally true that purines do turn into your acacid and for a small percentage of the population, reducing this does work. But what happens when it doesn't work? When researchers have a viwet, a gurek acid, in the joints, there was a very interesting finding that flips this entire story upside down. The strongest driver of gout, apparently, is not the quantity of purines. It's actually how much insulin resistance you have. And I'm going to explain exactly what to do to reverse this problem. So you no longer have gout. Basically, you have two routes that your acid can leave the body.
One is the kidneys, and one is your gut. Your kidneys get rid of most of the uric acid. But when you have insulin resistance and your insulin is too high, that door that's supposed to be open gets shut. So now you don't flush out the uric acid. And this is why people, especially with diabetes, for example, that have insulin resistance, tend to also get gout. So gout, insulin resistance go hand in hand. And that uric acid not only backs up into the joints and creates a lot of pain, but it also backs up in the kidneys. And it can create a kidney stone made out of uric acid. And also the uric acid can build up in other joints and create arthritis as well. Now I also need to talk about fructose. You may already know this, but high fructose corn syrup majorly increases uric acid in the liver. In fact, out of all the different sugars, fructose is very unique. Fructose is in table sugar. It's in a GABA nectar. It's in fruit. It's in fruit juices. But fructose cannot be metabolized by all of yourself in the body.
It primarily gets broken down by your liver. And there's a lot of other technical things that make fructose damaging to the bodies. One is that there's no turn-off switch for hunger. And also there's no turn-off switch of this actually turning into fat. So you can develop a lot of fat in the liver. But what you also develop is a tremendous amount of uric acid. If you're consuming a lot of fructose, and you might say, well, I don't consume a lot of fructose, but a lot of people are drinking a lot of fructose and fruit juice, something that is considered healthy when, in fact, it's not. And especially if you're trying to get rid of gout. So here you are, getting rid of your red meat, your shellfish, your organ meats, reducing your purine, your gout doesn't go away. Yet there's other reasons for your gout. Fruit toast is one of them. Let me just kind of get back to this kidney because I mentioned insulin. And what's interesting about fructose is fructose has a much lower effect on insulin than actual glucose. So you might then think that, wow, I can actually get away with fructose
because it's not going to increase this insulin. But realize it's going to affect the liver and it's going to make uric acid from this other mechanism. There's something else that will really increase insulin that is below most people's awareness. And that is hidden glucose as in industrial starches. I'm talking about the bread, the pasta, the cereal, the biscuits. All of that creates a massive glucose and then an insulin spike. And it's going to affect the kidneys and it backs up in your joints, especially your big toe or your knee. So we talked about this mechanism. We talked about this mechanism. This mechanism, there's one more, okay? Your gut. There are certain microbes that help you get rid of uric acid. Every single day, the microbes in your intestine pump out this uric acid if you have the right microbes. Some of people have microbial dysbiosis, which is an imbalance with gut microbes. Not to mention eating the same foods, little fructose, that can also alter your gut microbiome.
So a lot of this crosses over. And I better mention alcohol too. Alcohol really will increase this uric acid probably more than a lot of these other things. If your environment is off, everything else struggles. It's like a fish tank. Pollute the water and the fish gets sick. You could feed them the best food. You can treat every single symptom. But if the water stays toxic, nothing recovers. The body runs in 10 signals like insulin, cortisol, inflammation, sleep quality, gut function. Every one of them affects how you feel. But there is always one signal that is more broken than the rest. And until you fix that one, everything else stays stuck. I built a free two-minute quiz that finds it for you. It tells you which one of the main signals is holding your body back right now. Click the link in the description. Take the quiz and stop guessing. So just think about the average person's diet. I'm surprised not everyone gets out. Because a lot of people have problems with insulin. A lot of people are consuming massive doses of fructose. And a lot of people have missing microbes because they're taking a lot of antibiotics.
And when I was in practice, I had this patient come in and they had really, really back out. And of course, I recommended what I was taught in school. You get them off red meat. You get them off shellfish. You make sure they don't consume organ meats. Well, it didn't really work. Little did I know back then, even about the insulin or the fructose factor, let alone the gut issue. But this person I remember was consuming a lot of apple juice. And I wasn't connecting the dots. Juice from fruit is not a normal thing because we're meant to consume the whole food, not just the carbohydrate without the fiber. And also it's pastrised, so it's kind of heated. And so you don't get this whole spectrum of all the phytonutrients. All you're getting is a lot of concentrated fructose. And I don't even know what happened to this patient because at the time, I didn't really know that juice was that bad. And I didn't even recommend getting off of it. Now, I'm going to explain very simply what to do. But I need to mention something about when people go on the ketogenic diet, sometimes they complain of a gout attack.
When you start to change your metabolism from running on glucose to running on ketones, which is a type of fat, your acid will tend to go up temporarily for one to two weeks. Because ketones do have very similar exit transporters in your kidneys. So early on, you might see some ketones interfering or blocking the exit for your acid. But realize it's only temporary. After the first or second week, you will find that your acid goes right back down and even lower than when it started. Because you are actually correcting insulin resistance, which is at the root of most of gout problems. A couple things you can do to counter the uric acid. You could consume more celery, for example. You can also increase your fluids. So a lot of people ask me, what supplements do I recommend? Now, of course, I'm not biased of my own high quality supplement line.
But if you go to Amazon and type Dr. Berg supplements, you'll find more information. There's three things to focus on to completely get rid of this right here. Number one, cut out the fruit toast. This means cutting out all sugars and cutting out fruit juice and anything with high fruit is corn syrup, but also cutting out fruit. Okay? Number two, lower insulin. How do you do that? Start cutting out not just sugar in the fruit, but also you cut out the hidden sugar. The starch is the bread, the pasta. One thing that I found that really brings that insulin down is intermittent fasting. Don't eat so frequently. Have two meals instead of three with snacks. Okay? And number three, start rebuilding the gut. This does take some time. You want to start consuming fermented foods, sour crowd, kefir, yogurt. Because the more you build up your microbial diversity, the more that the microbes can pull out this uric acid.
And so focusing on these three things are your best bet to eliminate gout. Most people get hung up on the details of how to fix insulin resistance. And for that information, you must watch this video right here for the details. Check it out right now.
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