Tag: fructose

Gout and Cardiovascular Disease

My best friend was diagnosed with gout recently. I told him to stop ingesting fructose immediately.

Only twenty five years ago, when I was in training, gout looked like it was like a disease on its way to extinction, sort of like tuberculosis. We were taught it used to be common hundreds of years ago but that it was pretty rare. Sure, I had a few patients with gout in my clinic with gout but I would see a case once every couple of months at most.

Now, it’s exploded in frequency.

Gout is very, very bad. Not only because it is excruciatingly painful. (In some patients, you can’t even let a gouty big toe brush against tissue paper without unbearable pain. It’s one of the few things that may rival childbirth in the intensity of pain.) And not only because it is a major risk factor for heart disease. Not only because it causes heart disease. No, it’s very bad because your risk of dying goes up by 25% if you have gout. Continue reading “Gout and Cardiovascular Disease”

Will We Cure Diabetes, Heart Disease, and Alzheimer’s Disease One Day?

FDA, in 2008, did something that many people thought was preposterous. They began requiring companies to prove that diabetes drugs they developed did not kill people. Actually, to be more specific, they required the companies to prove that the risk of dying on the drug was not more than 1.8X higher than not being on the drug.

This caused an uproar. To prove such a ridiculous thing, some companies howled, would Continue reading “Will We Cure Diabetes, Heart Disease, and Alzheimer’s Disease One Day?”