What do Sir Issac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, King Henry VIII, former NY Yankee’s pitcher David Wells, Actor Jared Leto and my husband Kevin, all have in common? They have all suffered from a debilitating and extremely painful disease called gout. (I’m sure they have a lot more than that in common but for the purposes of this article, we’ll stick to gout:). Cases of gout are rising in the US. There used to be a stereotypical picture of the person who would get it. Now they are athletes, celebrities and a wide age range of people who suffer from this very painful disease.
Gout is caused by a buildup of uric acid in the blood. When the body cannot get rid of this, it causes sharp crystals to form in the joints. This leads to severe pain and inflammation. But pain has purpose. Remember that. We need to learn the language our body is speaking and I believe these ancient, cultured foods help us communicate. If this condition remains unchecked, it will lead to more serious consequences.
In our traditional way of treating ailments, we usually treat the area that’s affected. We have specialists for certain areas of the body. When we have eye problems we go to the eye doctor. When we have a reoccurring ear infection we go to the ear, nose and throat guy (or gal). The way we treat disease is to concentrate on the symptom rather than the underlying cause. Research is pointing more and more to one root cause for many non-communicable diseases, dysbiosis - an imbalance in the ratio of good to bad bacteria in the digestive system.
Along this new way of thinking, gout is a tremendous teacher. This ailment is just one of the many examples that shows us we need to look at underlying causes rather than acute manifestations. I have such a cool healing story about this I have to share.
There were a few reoccurring instances that were telling us something was going on with my husband’s health. The first one was a kidney stone (2012). They say the pain associated with these are the closest thing men will ever come to experiencing what childbirth is like. The next incident was an acute gout attack which happened years after the kidney stone. We had no idea it was gout at the time. Neither did his doctors. The symptoms were a very swollen, red and painful big toe. He was sent to a foot doctor. It was concluded, upon seeing the inflamed toe that he had been bitten by a spider, probably in the middle of the night, that had gotten infected. The remedy? Antibiotics. We thought that would be the end of that. But after a week, the foot was only slightly better. It took over 2 weeks for the swelling to go down to where he could even put a shoe on. After talking with many friends who have also suffered from this and reading many articles we realized what he suffered from was misdiagnosed gout. We went to a foot doctor for what turned out to be an abundance of uric acid. But Kevin did not fit the typical profile for someone with gout, he was too young, not overweight and had a pretty healthy diet over all. To make matters worse, antibiotics are the last thing that should be administered during an acute gout attack. They won’t do anything to treat this since it isn’t a bacterial infection. Plus, broad-spectrum antibiotics kill bacteria that would normally facilitate the process of ridding the body of excess uric acid. That was 2015. This is the time I was just starting to make fermented foods. It would not have occurred to me at that time that these foods could have helped gout. After all, I was just trying to treat a chronic immune deficiency.
Fast forward two years to 2017. My husband had another attack. It happened overnight, and it happened rapidly. It looked exactly like the previous attack and again resembled a spider bite on his toe. We decided that a spider would not bite in the same exact place twice so we figured that this was indeed gout. This was bad timing. It was a Saturday morning and my husband received a call from our good friend and Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame Drummer, Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez. Vini was Bruce Springsteen’s original drummer and founding member of the E Street Band. He had called to invite us to a show that he was going to be in that night. We would have backstage passes, would be eating with the cast and crew of the show and have incredible seats to watch the concert from. When my husband told me of the plans he didn’t sound as thrilled as I was about the invitation. He said there was no way he could go because his foot was too swollen and painful to get a shoe on. He was thinking he would be in this predicament for the next two weeks like the previous incident. NOT ON MY WATCH! It was only 9 am, We didn’t need to leave the house until 5pm that evening. Plenty of time, I told him! For what? Was his response. To take care of the symptoms, I responded! I was so inspired by my success and energy from these foods I was making that I told him I could cure him that day. I just blurted that out! Ok, full disclosure, I wasn’t 100% sure my plan was going to succeed but sometimes just THINKING something is going to work, can help tremendously. I told him, if he ate and drank everything I put in front of him for the next 8 hours, that he would be able to get his shoe on and we would be able to go to the show. He was skeptical but said he would do it. Off I went. I had read that a high alkaline diet was good to keep gout away. But what if you were already suffering from it? Could those foods help you then? I had to try.
The first course of action was a big glass of homemade kefir just to get things started. An hour later, I made him 2 egg yolks (the alkaline part of the egg) cooked in grass-fed butter. Butter, the delicious, grass-fed kind (like Kerry Gold) has something in it that helps your body produce butyrate. Butyrate is a powerful inflammation fighter which we really needed help with that day. Along with the eggs was a small bowl of one of the best high alkaline foods - raw, fermented sauerkraut. Of course I had a ton of that in the fridge. I was making a lot of it to hone my skills, experiment with flavors and perfect the process. Since I was the only one eating it, I had many varieties available. His drink with breakfast was a glass of filtered water with raw apple cider vinegar and raw honey. Yes this was breakfast but the deal was, if I put it in front of him he had to eat it:). Lunch was a big green salad with lots of different colors of vegetables, complete with a high probiotic salad dressing, using fermented garlic. To drink, he had a sparkling glass of kombucha. By 1pm, it seemed like we were making some progress. The pain was definitely subsiding and so was the swelling. But we only had 4 hours until foot-in-shoe time. No time to take our foot off the pedal.
I kept alternating fermented vegetables, teas, kefir and fresh fruits along with an abundance of filtered water with fresh lemon to flush all of the uric acid out. By 5:00, as promised, the shoe fit the prince:) we had an amazing time and were so grateful we didn’t miss the experience. We were able to connect with some pretty cool people, got to see Vini take the stage, and learned a whole lot about just how incredibly regenerating our bodies are! This one really did surprise me though. I wasn’t surprised that it worked, but that it worked so fast. 8 hours! To update this story, it has now been over three years since his last gout attack and he has never had another kidney stone. After that incident he believed me about these healing foods. That was the proof he needed to adhere to this regiment daily. For this reason, I am so thrilled it happened this way. It’s one thing for me to tell someone how amazing cultured foods are but it’s another for you, yourself to experience it. And this is just one thing these foods can heal!
Ours lives are busy and we want to be able to react at a moments notice when life grants us exciting opportunities. We don’t want our health to keep us down. This is why it’s so important to keep these foods on hand. They can take up to a week to get to the point that they can be really beneficial for you. You can’t wait for an emergency situation to start making them. This is the best health insurance money can buy!
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