Does tart cherry juice lower uric acid?

Not reliably in people who already have gout. Randomised trials have not shown a consistent urate-lowering effect, likely because most people with gout under-excrete urate through the kidneys, and cherry's mild uricosuric action isn't enough to overcome that.

How many cherries would I need to eat?

The doses used in trials are large — one 2026 trial used 250 mL of juice containing 30 mL of concentrate, roughly equivalent to 90–100 fresh cherries. That is a meaningful amount of sugar to take on daily.

Is cherry juice better than whole cherries?

No trial has cleanly compared them for gout. Whole cherries come with fibre and without the concentrated fructose load of juice, which matters because fructose raises uric acid.

Can I stop my gout medication if cherry works?

No. Talk to your doctor before changing any medication. Urate-lowering therapy has decades of trial evidence behind it; cherry does not.

Does tart cherry actually work for gout?

5 min read · Reviewed 2026-08-06 · Every claim cited

Coach Cherry examining a bowl of tart cherries with a magnifying glass

It is the single most recommended gout remedy on the internet. The evidence is genuinely split — and the split is the interesting part.

The short answer

Promising, not proven. Studies that observe what people already do show a real association with fewer flares. Studies that randomly assign cherry versus placebo mostly fail to show it lowers uric acid in people who have gout. Both things are true at once, and that tension is the whole story.

Why the observational data looks so good

The number everyone quotes comes from a case-crossover study of 633 people with gout: cherry intake over a two-day period was associated with a 35% lower risk of a gout attack compared with periods of no intake. That is a large effect, and it is why cherry appears in mainstream guidance — the British Society of Rheumatology's gout guideline mentions cherry consumption.

The catch with this study design: people who eat cherries during a calm week and skip them during a bad week will produce exactly this result even if cherries do nothing. It shows an association, not a cause.

What happened when researchers ran actual trials

This is where it gets uncomfortable for the cherry story.

Dose-ranging trial in people with gout: cherry concentrate dose had no significant effect on serum urate, urine urate excretion, or flare frequency over 28 days. The authors offered a mechanistic explanation worth understanding: cherry's mild uricosuric effect may be enough in people with normal kidney urate excretion — but most people with gout under-excrete urate, which is why they have gout in the first place.
2026 crossover trial: tart cherry juice had no acute effect on uric acid, vascular function or inflammation. This trial also exposed a flaw in a lot of earlier work — many acute studies had no control group, despite urate naturally drifting down over the course of a day anyway.
The one positive flare result (TaCCi, 2023): 282 men starting febuxostat had fewer flares on a tart-cherry-plus-citrate mixture than on sodium bicarbonate. But it was open-label, the comparator was citrate rather than placebo, and the cherry was combined with citrate — so the benefit cannot be cleanly attributed to the cherry.

What would settle it

A 12-month, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of Montmorency tart cherry juice in 120 people with gout is underway, with flare frequency as the primary outcome. That is the design that can actually answer the question. Until it reports, anyone telling you cherry is proven — or proven useless — is ahead of the evidence.

So should you drink it?

Cherry is cheap, safe, and about a quarter of people with gout already use it. There is no good reason to stop. There is a very good reason not to treat it as a replacement for urate-lowering therapy: no randomised trial has shown it reliably lowers urate in people who have gout, and untreated gout damages joints over time.

The useful move is to find out whether it works for you. Log your flares and what you ate, and after a few weeks you have your own data instead of someone else's anecdote.

Common questions

Does tart cherry juice lower uric acid?: Not reliably in people who already have gout. Randomised trials have not shown a consistent urate-lowering effect, likely because most people with gout under-excrete urate through the kidneys, and cherry's mild uricosuric action isn't enough to overcome that.
How many cherries would I need to eat?: The doses used in trials are large — one 2026 trial used 250 mL of juice containing 30 mL of concentrate, roughly equivalent to 90–100 fresh cherries. That is a meaningful amount of sugar to take on daily.
Is cherry juice better than whole cherries?: No trial has cleanly compared them for gout. Whole cherries come with fibre and without the concentrated fructose load of juice, which matters because fructose raises uric acid.
Can I stop my gout medication if cherry works?: No. Talk to your doctor before changing any medication. Urate-lowering therapy has decades of trial evidence behind it; cherry does not.