Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Gout Treatments-Part 3|Bananas

Simple Ways Bananas Improve Your Gout Symptoms Naturally

This is the third installment of our series on gout treatments. The first two remedies mentioned in this series were pineapples and grapes. This series is meant to give you alternative gout treatments to consider so you can reduce or eliminate the sharp fiery pain that is so common among episodes of this painful disease. So how can bananas help improve your pain?


A Gout Treatment that Reduces Inflammation.

Bananas are loaded with potassium. Potassium is very critical when it comes to properly treating this condition. As has been mentioned in other posts, potassium helps to liquefy uric acid. The pain from gout is mostly caused by inflammation due to increased uric acid crystallization in the joints, most commonly in the big toe, but this can occur in other joints as well. The liquefying of those crystals helps them to move out of the joint and be processed for urination by the kidneys (your renal system). Your kidneys act as an equalizer and help bring the body into balance by lowering your body's uric acid content to normal (in medical terms this is called homeostasis).

Bananas have a moderate level of potassium. Whereas pineapples and grapes both have potassium, but are lower, bananas have around 10% of your daily recommended allowance for potassium (3500mg). The average banana contains approximately 358mg. Adding bananas to a fruit mix of pineapples and grapes would really help you get closer to increasing your potassium levels to where your body is able to properly eliminate the excess crystallization that is causing you pain. Another benefit to potassium is that it also helps prevent your body from becoming too acidic.

You can supplement potassium, but I seriously advise you to seek a physician as potassium needs to be kept in proper balance since it plays an important role in your heart rhythm regularity.


A Gout Treatment that Reduces Uric Acid Levels

As mentioned above, excess uric acid leads to crystallization in the joints. If you have gout banana helps combat this because they are loaded with vitamin C which has been shown to reduce uric acid levels by 10% when taken in enough quantities (500mg was the test quantity). An average serving of bananas contains approximately 15% of your daily total, although the recommended total is less than the 500mg used during the test results showing the decrease in uric acid due to vitamin C usage.

Vitamin C also helps with repairing connective tissue in your joints that the crystals are tearing down. This is vital in getting rid of gout pain .

Conclusion

Bananas, just like pineapples and grapes cannot beat gout alone. With their ability to go to the heart of gout pain by helping to reduce swelling and the crystallization that causes swelling bananas should be part of your natural treatments for gout program.

Until later,

Medicman







0 comments: