Do Cherries Work Against Gout?

Do Cherries Protect Against Gout Attacks?

As any gout sufferer can tell you, the intense pain of a gout attack makes people willing to do basically anything to get rid of the pain. And there is no lack of supplements on offer, some with one more ridiculous motivations for why they would work than the other. There is also a surprising lack of scientific studies, or perhaps not so surprising considering allopurinol is so effective and that diet and excercise work well in most mild cases.

THE CHERRY EXPERIMENT

The lack of scientific evidence is due to lack of controlled experiments. If you want to have a scientific carreer, you are better off proving that chemical A turns into chemical B under certain conditions, rather than proving or disproving some old witches tales.
Especially considering how hard it is to organize a clinical trial. And there is no medical industry to back them up either. So I am going to do the second best thing: I will make an experiment on myself. It will not prove anything except that overweight men in their 60's with Scandinavian genes react in a certain way. But it should be possible to see if cherries have any effect on my uric acid under those conditions.

MY TRIAL PROTOCOL

I want to see if cherries actually have any effect on the production of uric acid, so first I will create a baseline by measuring the uric acid in my blood every morning for two weeks. I want to know that I have a stable production in my body, and what the normal level will be.
Then I will do the dehydration challenge for one day. As I wrote in this blog post, I got a challenge to check what happens with your uric acid level when you get dehydrated. So let us see. And after that, I will start the cherry trial. I will take two (or three) capsules per day, and see if I can measure any change in uric acid production. I have to check what is reasonable - I am not afraid of cherry poisoning, but I weigh rather a lot and want to make sure that I take a dose which will have effect.
Since I know what the baseline will be, it should be possible to see if cherries create any change. Regardless where I am with my UA level.

UPDATE: SO HOW DID IT GO?

So what happened? It has been two weeks eating first two, then four cherry capsules per day. Has my uric acid gone down, as you would expect if the popular belief is true? There is not that much uric acid in the body, so if I could reduce it even a little by eating cherries, I would decrease the risk for future gout attacks.
I started the experiment on September 23, and the uric acid levels in my blood (as measured with the UASure uric acid meter) were as follows until today:
10/7 8.0 mg/dL
10/6 8.4 mg/dL
10/5 9.6 mg/dL
10/4 8.7 mg/dL
10/3 10.3 mg/dL
10/2 8.7 mg/dL
10/1 9.2 mg/dL
9/30 8.1 mg/dL
9/29 10.0 mg/dL
9/28 9.9 mg/dL
9/27 8.9 mg/dL
9/26 9.9 mg/dL
9/25 9.8 mg/dL
9/24 9.1 mg/dL
9/23 9.0 mg/dL
Now, what happens if I compare this to a typical two-week period before (not counting our mini-vacation, where we stayed in fine hotels and ate purine-rich foods):
9/5 8.3 mg/dL
9/6 7.2 mg/dL
9/7 8.8 mg/dL
9/8 6.7 mg/dL
9/9 5.8 mg/dL
9/10 5.9 mg/dL
9/11 9.4 mg/dL
9/12 7.7 mg/dL
9/13 8.6 mg/dL
9/14 8.4 mg/dL
9/15 8.7 mg/dL
9/16 8.0 mg/dL
9/17 5.4 mg/dL
9/18 5.7 mg/dL
9/19 7.7 mg/dL
So if anything, it was lower when I did not take cherries. The idea was the exact opposite.
On average, that is 7.4 mg/dL without cherry supplements, and 9.17 mg/dL with cherry supplements. My diet is the same. So my conclusion is: Cherry supplements do not help lower your uric acid.

ANTIOXIDANTS ARE UNNECESSARY

When it comes to alternative medicine and natural supplements, their effect as antioxidants is often touted as the main selling point. But uric acid is in itself a strong antioxidant.
If you want to get rid of uric acid from your body, drinking milk or orotic acid supplements (the orotic acid in milk binds to the uric acid) is more effective than drinking antioxidants. The only exception is vitamin C, which helps in the breakdown of uric acid. Cherries of course contain a lot of vitamin C, so let us see how it works.

WHAT CHERRIES WILL I USE?

I did some checking around, and there are basically no difference between cherry capsules. Most of them come from industrial farms if they declare the source at all. So I choose a local product from Traverse Bay Farms in Michigan. The cherries are grown right there and they are standardized, so each capsule contains 600 mg, which may not sound like much, but consider what happens if you let a gallon of cherry juice boil slowly for a few hours. There is a lot of water in cherry juice, take it away and you get a residue which is what you find in the capsules (although it is actually only from the skin, which contains the active ingredients).
Another reason for using Traverse Bay cherries is that they have an extensive online library of books that you can download for free when you become a customer. And they have other interesting products, like cherry extravt with glucosamine and chondroitin, which help joints to heal after an arthritis attack. And right now, they have an offer that is hard to beat for their Joint Cherry capsules: Buy 9 and get 3 free (affiliate link). That is a saving of 73 dollars (a little less if you live outside the US).

A plastic medicine bottle showing some cherries on the label and with the text Joint Formuls - Tart Cherry - Dietary Supplement.

The cherry extract I will use to see if it lowers my UA value.

ONE WEEK DOWN, ONE TO GO

After two weeks without doing anything special my UA was 7.47 mg/dL on average. After one week of eating cherry supplements it was 10.0. Not what I had expected.
So I decided to double the dose. It is hardly like cherries are poisonous, after all. And I am pretty big, so maybe I need extra cherries. But after two weeks, it was 9.17. I can only conclude that the cherries have not had any effect on my uric acid levels.
I take the capsules at breakfast, but I do not think it would matter when I took them.

AND NOW, FOR MY NEXT PERFORMANCE.....

Update on October 26: Now I have reset my uric acid levels for two weeks. That means I shhould be able to see if there is any effect from taking some other supplement. So by popular demand, I will now try apple cider vinegar. Even though there is surprisingly little documentation of the effects for something which so many people swear by. Well, let us see how it turns out.