Historically known as the "rich man's disease," gout has seen a rise in the past few decades as more harmful elements have entered the Western world's diet, besides the rising life expectancies of the population - and, for centuries, sufferers of this condition have claimed that tomatoes are gout-inducing in one way or another, something that's now being backed by science.
Gout occurs when there are elevated levels of uric acid in the blood, the primary product of purine metabolism excreted in urine in the human body; and now, new research from the University of Otago in New Zealand has found that for those already living with this form of arthritis, gout's tomatoes correlation is a real thing.
According to Business-Standard, upon realizing that a good number of people living with this condition believed gout and tomatoes were somehow related, researchers from the university's Department of Biochemistry decided to figure out whether this belief was correct or just a telltale, but it turned out to be based on reality.
For the gout tomatoes study, the researchers surveyed 2,051 people from New Zealand who had been clinically verified to have gout, 71 percent of which said they had at least one food trigger for the condition, with more than 20 percent of these people listing tomatoes as one of them.
EMPR reports that besides gout tomatoes, 62.5 percent listed fish or seafood as triggers, 47.1 percent said alcohol was one and 35.2 percent listed red meat, while different fruit, vegetables and sugar-sweetened drinks were also high on the list; since the three top dietary triggers listed have shown in the past to be positively related to uric acid levels, this now marks the first possible evidence at tomatoes also being a potentially dangerous food in the aspect.
While this doesn't prove anything, it's a step in the right direction when it comes to physicians advising new diets for people suffering from this very painful condition.
The gout and tomatoes study was published on the BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders journal under the name "Positive association of tomato consumption with serum urate: support for tomato consumption as an anecdotal trigger of gout flares," according to Science Daily.
