What are purines, and how do they cause gout?

Purines are produced in your body when you recycle cells. That is, your body makes it from dead cells. Then it turns them to antioxidants which are used in the energy production in your body. When your body is done with the purines, it turns them into uric acid in the liver, and then the uric acid is flushed by your kidneys. In theory.

Japanese beer-like drink from Asahi, made from soy beans and with zero purines, as well as zero calories and zero alcohol. Not zero taste though.

You can also get purines through what you eat or drink. Since they are used in energy production your body takes them up very easily. The problem if you have gout is that your body produces purines and then you are adding more through your diet. It becomes impossible to get rid of gout since the purines broken down to uric acid are constantly replenished.

GOUT AND WEIGHT LOSS

Even if you were to start a water fast, eating absolutely nothing and not drinking anything but water (which has neither calories nor purines), your body would still produvce purines from recycling the cells that die in your body when you lose weight. These purines are then turned into uric acid when they have finished working in the energy production systems of the body.

There are purines in all animal-based foods, and some vegetables. What is important to remember, however, is that the production in your body is a baseline, and then you top it up with what you eat.

PURINES ARE NOT PROTEINS

When the idea of managing your diet to manage your medical conditions became popular, the people designing the diets believed purines and proteins were simular. The gout diets became protein-poor. But this is not true.
While a traditional diet rich in protein will contain a lot of purines, all protein-rich products do not contain purines. Cheese, milk, whey, eggs and tofu consist mostly of proteins but contain very little purines. The reason becomes evident if you look at how they are made.

THE MAKINGS OF TOFU

Beans are the best protein source for vegetarians. But beans are the vegetable that is richest in purines - almost as much as some types of meat (but still lower). There is no way of removing the purines from beans - except one.
Tofu contains a lot less purines than whole beans. Grinding up the beans and dissolving them in water, then making the mix settle and capturing the tofu clearly makes most of the purines go into the lees. As a result, tofu is one of the safest protein sources for gout sufferers.

NOT DESTROYED BY COOKING

Purines are resistant to cooking. As they are made from amino acids (the building blocks of DNA), they will not be destroyed unless you burn the meat to charcoal. Purines are made to withstand destruction, just like DNA. They are sensitive to some chemicals, but those are not things which the purines would encounter as they pass through rhe digestive tract and into the bloodstream.

EGGS WITHOUT CELLS

Eggs are proteins in a shell, with a yolk that contains everything else you need to make chickens. When the danger was considered proteins, eggs were a major danger. But since the problem is in the cell core, and eggs only have one, they are a better part of a gout diet than most other animal foods - except for cheese and milk products, which do not contain any cell cores.

PLANTS TO AVOID

It is animal products and seafood which contain the most purines, followed by beer (since beer essentially is a solution of dead yeast cells in water). Some plants also have high levels of purines, like beans and shiitake mushrooms. You can read more about it on the forbidden foods page. Asparagus and spinach are also among the purine-rich vegetables, but differently from beans, you can not make tofu from them.