How Alkaline Ionized Water Helps Cure Gouty Arthritis

By Christian Parlade

When a person has gouty arthritis, it means that the uric acid level in his body is high. For example, the normal range for uric acid is 3.4 - 7 mg/dl. My personal results show 8.26 as of late 2009. If maintained, it will lead to uric acid crystal formation, which in turn causes the extremely painful gout attacks. How does alkaline water come in to the picture?

In controlling gout, you can either minimize uric acid production (eating low purine food) or maximize uric acid excretion (doing both works best of course). Alkaline water helps with the latter. Now, uric acid is generally expelled primarily through the urine and secondarily through sweat. That's why hydration is very important and why you would see in many articles that gout sufferers should drink lots of fluids. The more water in the body, the more uric acid can be expelled.

So where does alkalinity come in? One important thing to note is that uric acid, while best expelled through urine, is NOT very water soluble. If you read my article, "Potassium to Cure Gout", you'll see that potassium helps make uric acid more water soluble, and therefore easier to release through urine. Potassium happens to be one of the minerals that makes water alkaline, so the logic follows. Generally, the higher the alkalinity, the better. For example, my water station's output has an 8.85 PH level, which is fairly high for commercial alkaline water and should therefore be better for gout than water with lower PH. Distilled or purified water in particular, are acidic, and would lessen the hydration impact.

But think in general terms too. An acidity problem should logically be resolved by adding alkalinity to the body. It's not that quite simple in the body, but it is a general concept that makes sense. To recap, drinking lots of water is good for gout; drinking lots of ALKALINE water is even better.