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Uric Acid's Extensive Health Impact (And How To Lower It)

Plus: how to enter a flow state

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The 10almonds Team
November 08, 2023

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

❝Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant❞

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⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

  • High levels of uric acid in the body are popularly associated with gout and kidney stones, but the actual consequences are much more far-reaching (and common!)

    • By adjusting our diet and making some tweaks to our lifestyle, we can lessen our chances of many health problems, from obesity to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

  • Could you and/or a loved one do with a little pick-me-up? Perhaps even on a regular basis?

    • Today’s sponsor, Therabox, is self-care package service that, for a tiny fraction of the retail value, delivers monthly boxes with luxuries and therapist-curated therapeutic exercises too.

Read on to learn about these things and more…

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👀 WATCH AND LEARN

TED-Ed |  How to enter flow state (5:02)

Per Csikszentmihalyi, “flow” is “a supremely enjoyable state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation”. Here’s how to get there:

Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖

Still prefer text? Here’s the transcript for that one! 😎

🧪 MAIN FEATURE

Uric Acid's Extensive Health Impact (And How To Lower It)

This is Dr. David Perlmutter. He’s a medical doctor, and a Fellow of the American College of Nutrition. He’s a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, and has been widely published in many other peer-reviewed journals.

What does he want us to know?

He wants us to know about the health risks of uric acid (not something popularly talked about so much!), and how to reduce it.

First: what is it? Uric acid is a substance we make in our own body. However, unlike most substances we make in our body, we have negligible use for it—it’s largely a waste product, usually excreted in urine.

However, if we get too much, it can build up (and crystallize), becoming such things as kidney stones, or causing painful inflammation if it shows up in the joints, as in gout.

More seriously (unpleasant as kidney stones and gout may be), this inflammation can have a knock-on effect triggering (or worsening) other inflammatory conditions, ranging from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, to arthritis, to dementia, and even heart problems. See for example:

How can we reduce our uric acid levels?

Uric acid is produced when we metabolize purine nucleotides, which are found in many kinds of food. We can therefore reduce our uric acid levels by reducing our purine intake, as well as things that mess up our liver’s ability to detoxify things. Offsetting the values for confounding variables (such as fiber content, or phytochemicals that mitigate the harm), the worst offenders include…

Liver-debilitating things:

  • Alcohol (especially beer)

  • High-fructose corn syrup (and other fructose-containing things that aren’t actual fruit)

  • Other refined sugars

  • Wheat / white flour products (this is why beer is worse than wine, for example; it’s a double-vector hit)

Purine-rich things:

  • Red meats and game

  • Organ meats

  • Oily fish, and seafood (great for some things; not great for this)

Some beans and legumes are also high in purines, but much like real fruit has a neutral or positive effect on blood sugar health despite its fructose content, the beans and legumes that are high in purines, also contain phytochemicals that help lower uric acid levels, so have a beneficial effect.

Eggs (consumed in moderation) and tart cherries have a uric-acid lowering effect.

Water is important for all aspects of health, and doubly important for this.

Hydrate well!

Lifestyle matters beyond diet

The main key here is metabolic health, so Dr. Perlmutter advises the uncontroversial lifestyle choices of moderate exercise and good sleep, as well as (more critically) intermittent fasting. We wrote previously on other things that can benefit liver health:

…in this case, that means the liver gets a break to recuperate (something it’s very good at, but does need to get a chance to do), which means that while you’re not giving it something new to do, it can quickly catch up on any backlog, and then tackle any new things fresh, next time you start eating.

Want to know more about this from Dr. Perlmutter?

You might like his article:

An Integrated Plan for Lowering Uric Acid ← more than we had room for here; he also talks about extra things to include in your diet/supplementation regime for beneficial effects!

And/or his book:

…on which much of today’s main feature was based.

Take care!

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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

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🌏 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance – by Dr. Nessa Carey

If you enjoyed the book "Inheritance" that we reviewed a couple of days ago, you might love this as a "next read" book. But you can also just dive straight in here, if you like!

This one, as the title suggests, focuses entirely on epigenetics—how our life events can shape our genetic expression, and that of our descendants. Or to look at it in the other direction, how our genetic expression can be shaped by the life experiences of, for example, our grandparents.

The style of this book is very much pop-science, but contains a lot of information from hard science throughout. We learn not just about longitudinal population studies as one might expect, but also about the intricacies of DNA methylation and histone modifications, for example.

Depending on your outlook, you may find some of this very bleak ("great, I am shackled by what my grandparents did") or very optimism-inducing ("oh wow, I'm not nearly so constrained by genetics as I thought; this stuff is so malleable!"). This is also the same author who wrote "Hacking The Code of Life", by the way, but we'll review that another day.

Bottom line: this book is the best one-shot primer on epigenetics that this reviewer has read (you may be wondering how many that is, and the answer is... about seven or so? I'm not good at counting).

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Wishing you the best of health from top to toe,

The 10almonds Team