Breeze

Purine calculator

A purine calculator that shows its sources. Add what you ate, adjust the portions, and see the purine total in milligrams — measured values from 830 foods, each carrying the national database it came from. Your purine total is compared against the 400 mg a day the Japanese gout guideline recommends staying under.

Or start with:

Values are total purines per 100 g of the food as described, each from a cited national database. Nothing you type is uploaded or stored — this runs entirely in your browser, and reloading the page empties the list.

How much purine per day?

One guideline names a number. The Japanese guideline for the management of hyperuricaemia and gout recommends keeping dietary purines under 400 mg a day. The American and European rheumatology guidelines do not set a daily total at all — they name foods to limit, because diet shifts serum uric acid modestly compared with urate-lowering medication.

The figure is easy to misread as a tight budget. It is not. When researchers measured how much purine sits in diets already recommended as healthy for unrelated reasons — Japanese, Mediterranean and DASH — those diets delivered 308.5–493.9 mg a day. Normal balanced eating lands on 400 mg, more or less. That is worth knowing before treating a 380 mg day as an achievement or a 450 mg day as a failure.

What a purine calculator cannot tell you

A purine total describes the raw material a day's food delivered. It is not a ranking of what raises uric acid, and three of this site's own figures make that obvious:

  • Beer measures low — 4.6 to 13.5 mg per 100 ml — and is the drink most consistently linked with attacks, because alcohol slows urate clearance. More on that gap.
  • Sugary drinks contain no purines and are associated with substantially higher gout risk, because fructose prompts the body to make uric acid after the drink. The cohort numbers.
  • Cherries measure like any other fruit and are one of the few foods studied for lowering attack risk. What the study found.

So a low total is not a safe day and a high one is not a flare. What the number is good for is comparison — this meal against that one, this week against last.

Portions are where the error lives

Every food starts at a default portion: 150 g for solids, 330 ml for drinks, and 10 g for anything dried, powdered or in paste form, because those are used by the spoonful and scaling them to a meal-sized serving produces a true but meaningless figure — 150 g of dried sakura shrimp works out to 1,123 mg on its own.

Adjust them. Portion weight, not the database, is what usually decides whether a total is right: misjudging a steak by a third moves the day by a third, which is larger than the gap between most foods you would be choosing between.

Where the numbers come from

Two national databases, and every row on this site says which one it came from:

Values are total purines in milligrams per 100 g of the food as described. Nothing is estimated, averaged across sources or filled in — where a food is missing, it is missing. How the two databases differ, and what cooking does to the numbers.

Reference information only. Purine values describe foods, not people: they cannot tell you what is safe for you to eat, and nothing here diagnoses or treats gout. Talk to your doctor or dietitian about your own diet and medication.

Common questions

How many purines per day should you eat with gout?

The Japanese guideline for the management of hyperuricaemia and gout recommends keeping dietary purines under 400 mg a day, and it is the only widely used guideline that names a milligram figure at all. Most others — including the American and European rheumatology guidelines — describe which foods to limit rather than setting a daily total, because diet moves serum uric acid far less than medication does.

Is 400 mg a strict limit?

It is less restrictive than it sounds. When researchers measured the purine content of diets already recommended as well-balanced for other reasons — Japanese, Mediterranean and DASH — those diets delivered 308.5 to 493.9 mg of purines a day. In other words 400 mg is roughly what ordinary healthy eating already costs, not a tight allowance you have to eat carefully to stay under. Your own target is a question for your doctor or dietitian.

Does a low total mean a low-risk day?

No, and this is the most important limit of any purine calculator. Beer measures 4.6–13.5 mg per 100 ml — low — and is the drink most consistently linked with attacks, because alcohol slows how quickly the kidneys clear urate. Sugary soft drinks contain essentially no purines and are linked to substantially higher gout risk, because fructose prompts the body to manufacture uric acid after the drink. A purine total describes what you ate. It is not a risk score.

How accurate is a purine calculator?

The database values are measured and cited, but two things sit between them and your real intake. Portion weight is estimated by eye unless you weigh your food, and a 30% misjudgement moves the purine total by 30%. And preparation changes the figure substantially — boiling leaches purines into water that is poured away, while drying and grilling concentrate them. Treat any purine calculator's total as a comparison between days, not a measurement of one.

Which foods count as high purine?

On this site anything above 150 mg per 100 g is high, following the NHC 2024 dietary guideline's top band, with 200 mg and 300 mg splitting it further after the Japanese guideline. In practice the totals here are driven by organ meats, dried seafood, oily fish and concentrated stocks. You can browse all 372 foods sorted by measured content on the high-purine list.