What is Gout? It’s the reason I can’t drink beer.

Like many tragic stories that end in pain, it all started with a beer...

Yesterday I took the family to little Tokyo to do some shopping. After we stopped at a Japanese book store to get handfuls of manga for the kids we stopped at this great little ramen house. It's nothing more than a tiny hole in the wall but it serves up bucket size bowls of piping hot ramen with all the trimmings.

Ramen Now, you can't eat a hot bowl of ramen without ordering a tall glass of beer to wash it all down. And in my case, since a rarely drink beer, a cold Sapporo is a real treat. Of course, it didn't take long - about twelve hours - before I was rudely reminded as to why I seldom partake of the cold ones.

Remember the old Warner Brother's cartoons? The ones where an anvil would fall on Elmer Fudds's toe and it would swell to gargantuan proportions? Well that's what happened to me the next morning after drinking the offending beer. My big toe was swollen and throbbing just like Elmer's. Now, I've never had an anvil fall on my toe, but in the 3+ decades that I've been alive I've fractured an elbow, busted and ankle and been kicked in the nuts, repeatedly. I'm here to tell you - gout trumps them all.

Gout is this extremely painful form of inflammatory arthritis that's caused by the build of excessive uric acid in your blood stream. Uric acid is naturally produced when your body breaks down the purines found in protein rich foods. Usually, uric acid is carried through the bloodstream to the kidneys, which eliminate it from your body in the urine. However, if you produces too much of this uric acid or if your kidneys don't eliminate enough of it, uric acid can build up in your blood.

The uric acid crystals deposit on your joints, tendons and surrounding tissue and causes inflammation. A gout attack usually starts with sudden, severe pain and swelling in the large joint of the big toe. Imagine tiny razor sharp crystals cutting into the joint and tendon of your big toe and now imagine that happening constantly, day and night, for a week. If you can't rap your mind around that try to recall the last time you forgot your cup for gym class. Yeah, pretty bad, huh. The excruciatingly dull pain that subsided at a sloth's pace. Well, how do you think you'd feel if that pain stuck around for a days instead of a few minutes? That's what it feels like to get a gout attack.

Over the long run, if gout is left untreated and you don't take steps to reduce the uric acid in your blood, you'll constantly get these painful attacks. What's worse, is that gout will also start affecting other joints such as your ankles, knees, wrists, fingers and elbows. And in chronic cases of gout, the uric acid deposits will form into hard nodules known as tofi that can damage your joints and even lead to reduced range of motion and disability.

Gout affects about a million people in the US. And about 9 out of 10 of those people are men. While there are many out there who have gout because of an inherited abnormality in handling uric acid or abnormal kidney function, the major risks factors for developing gout are high blood pressure, obesity and moderate to heavy alcohol intake.

Yeah, you read the last part right. Pudgy guys that like to drink beer are at a high risk for gout. I guess you can add that to the list of what ails us. In a future hub I'll talk about treating gout through medication, offer up a great natural gout treatment that I've recently started up and offer up a gout diet that will list foods that are high in purines and should probably be avoided. Until then, if you get a tingly feeling in your toe, you might want to put down the beer.

_{*The Pudgy Wrestler does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. This content is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.}