Gout diet: what to eat, what to limit, what to ignore

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

Most gout food lists are copied from each other and contradict themselves. This one is built from published purine tables and says where each number came from.

How to think about it

Forget "good" and "bad" foods. What matters is how much purine lands in one serving, plus two things purine tables don't capture at all: fructose and alcohol.

A rough working scale, per serving: under 50 mg is comfortable, 50–150 mg is occasional, over 150 mg is worth limiting — especially during a flare.

Limit these

• Organ meats — liver, kidney, sweetbreads. The highest purine foods there are, by a wide margin.
• Small oily fish — anchovies, sardines, herring, mackerel. Genuinely heart-healthy and genuinely purine-heavy; a real trade-off to discuss with your doctor rather than an obvious "avoid".
• Shellfish — mussels, scallops, prawns.
• Beer, including non-alcoholic versions, which still carry brewer's yeast purines.
• Sugary drinks and fruit juice — high fructose, near-zero purines, still a trigger. The most-missed item on any list.
• Large portions of red meat — portion size is doing more work here than most people realise. A restaurant steak and a small home portion are different foods as far as your uric acid is concerned.

Eat more of these

Gout advice is overwhelmingly about avoidance, which is both miserable and incomplete. Several foods are associated with lower urate or fewer flares:

• Low-fat dairy — the most consistent protective association in the diet research.
• Coffee — associated with lower urate in long-term studies.
• Cherries — popular, plausible, and honestly still unproven in trials (the full evidence review).
• Vitamin C-rich foods — modest urate-lowering effect.
• Water — dull, free, and genuinely one of the highest-leverage things on this page.

The vegetables you can stop worrying about

Spinach, asparagus, mushrooms, cauliflower and peas appear on nearly every "avoid" list because they are high in purines. But plant purines have not been shown to raise gout risk the way animal purines do — a finding that goes back to Choi's 2004 NEJM analysis and has held up since. Broccoli, tomatoes and beans get blamed constantly and rarely deserve it.

This matters practically: cutting vegetables makes your diet worse without making your gout better.

What a normal day looks like

Coffee with breakfast. Low-fat dairy. Vegetables without anxiety. Water throughout. Meat and fish in sensible portions rather than banned outright. Alcohol and sugary drinks as the two things you actually watch. It is far less restrictive than most gout advice implies — and closer to what the evidence supports.

Checking a specific food

We publish the purine content of common foods, each with the published table its number came from, at Can I eat this with gout? — or check any food instantly, free and unlimited, in the app.