Book excerpt: Forget about purines. Purine rich food does not cause gout and a low purine diet will not cure it. This book reveals the truth about what really causes gout. Some of you will have heard about the dangers of High Fructose Corn Syrup, but you will be surprised to learn that there are other things that many of us eat and drink every day of our lives that can cause gout. The information is this book is based on scientific evidence, not the myths that have shrouded gout for so long. For years we have been told that uric acid serves no biological purpose. This is absolutely not true. Nature has given us some simple and straightforward ways of keeping ourselves healthy and uric acid is one of them. Too much uric acid and things start to go wrong. Maybe gout is giving us a wakeup call. We need a major re-think of how we look at high levels of uric acid and gout. Uric acid is not quite the bad guy it is made out to be.