Most of my regular readers know I was diagnosed with Chronic Kidney Disease, for which I have a very difficult road to follow staying on track with that severely-restrictive diet. Well………..that road just got a lot rockier, as I was also just diagnosed with Gout. Have had two flares in my left middle toe and ankle in the last two months. Elevated uric acid in the blood, means kidneys can’t rid my body of that anymore. The medicine of choice for treating Gout attacks is Colchicine (I know, as my Mom had Gout age 38), but I can’t take Colchicine because it has a life threatening interaction with Carvedilol, which I take for blood pressure since I’m allergic to ACE and ARB blood pressure meds. So the next line of defense in Gout treatment is Prednisone for 5 days (currently on a course of that). There is a ‘preventative’ med called Allopurinol that staves off chronic flares fairly successfully, but they don’t usually prescribe it until you’ve had chronic flares. I guess two in two months isn’t ‘chronic’ yet. Don’t know if that protocol is well-being or insurance industry driven, to be quite honest. I have my suspicions though. I’ve just had the two attacks……….so no Allopurinol for me yet. There are two newer meds as possible options, but again, they didn’t go that route just yet, and that may be restricted for awhile by insurance as they may be very costly drugs. As Rosanne Rosanadana on Saturday Night Live used to say in her skits………..”It’s always something!”

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Long story short, my diets for the two disorders are often in direct conflict with one another. One has me eating white/sourdough bread, the other diet wants me on whole grain breads. CKD wants me eating plant-based, chicken and fish, Gout is triggered off by most seafoods (smoked oysters was my culprit the first time; grilled fresh tuna steak followed by some spinach I put in my lasagna the next day set off the current attack).

Well, I won’t dwell on medical details and bore you there, other than to say tracking, logging and posting recipes just got a whole lot more complicated for me. Gout is triggered off by foods with too many purines in them, which are in most all foods. Finding any data on how many are in each food is very scarce on the net. Haven’t found a single food tracker that gives purines. Found one database in Scandinavia, but it’s not in English and has been a challenge to decipher at times. Google Translate and I chat a lot for that one.

Then adding just one more column to the spreadsheet I calculate my foods/recipes on, means I can’t print my recipes out on a portrait 8×11 sheet of paper. Can’t even get enough data on Purines in Foods to bother trying to add a column for that anyway. So I’m just having to learn which foods are off-limits for this new Gout diet and fit that into the CKD diet.

So to sum it up: From now on the nutritional information for my recipes, will only show NET CARBS (not total carbs, minus fiber and then resulting net carbs). Sorry if this upsets any of my readers, but I just can’t fit an additional fiber column (or Purine column) into my spreadsheet and render that fiber deduction calculation via formula without two columns spill off the page despite squeezing things in tighter in the columns. I deduct the fiber deduction as I am looking at the food detail page, deduct the shown fiber from carbs in my head for each ingredient as I type that line entry on the spreadsheet and the spreadsheet then renders a total on my NET CARBS in the Carb column. So rest assured, the fiber is being deducted (I want that deduction as much as you do), you just won’t be seeing the fiber itemized on the recipe page anymore. At least for the immediate future, that’s the easiest and only way I can keep a handle on all the nutrients I have to track now to stay on track and keep my kidneys, my docs, and most importantly, ME happy.