Purine content of foods

Purines are compounds found in the cells of almost everything we eat. The body breaks them down into uric acid, and when uric acid stays high it can form the crystals that cause a gout flare. That is the whole reason anyone looks up a purine chart: to know which foods contribute more of the raw material.

The number to look at is milligrams of total purines per 100 gramsof food. That unit matters. A chart that says “sardines are high” is useless when you are deciding between a small tin and a main course; 100 g of sardines at 82 mg and 100 g of dried anchovy at 1,109 mg are both “fish”, and they are not remotely the same decision.

The six levels

Every cut line below is one a published guideline already draws. The first three come from the Chinese NHC 2024 guideline; the 200 mg and 300 mg lines come from the Japanese gout treatment guideline, which separates its high band from its extremely-high band there.

We use six rather than the NHC’s four because its top band alone holds a quarter of this database across a nine-fold range — cooked chicken breast at 368.7 mg and dried anchovy at 1,109 mg would otherwise share a colour. Combining two guidelines into one scale is our editorial decision, and no single authority publishes all six; the Breeze app still uses the NHC’s four bands, which these refine rather than contradict.

Preparation changes the number more than people expect

Drying and grilling concentrate purines because they remove water: cod measures 71 mg fresh and 230 mg baked, and anchovy goes from roughly 304 mg fresh to 1,109 mg dried. Boiling can push the other way, leaching purines into water you then pour away — which is why boiled tofu sits far below the dried soybean it was made from. Any chart that lists one number per food is hiding this. Every row in this database names the preparation that was actually measured.

Portion size beats category

People tend to sort foods into “allowed” and “banned”, but purines arrive by the gram, not by the label. A 30 g sprinkle of dried shrimp on a bowl of noodles contributes around 66 mg; a 250 g plate of chicken breast, which looks like the safer choice, contributes about 520 mg. Each food page works this out for common serving sizes so the comparison is in front of you.

What the number cannot tell you

Purine content is a property of food, not a prediction about your body. Most uric acid is produced internally rather than eaten, and the effect of diet alone on serum urate is modest compared with urate-lowering medication. Alcohol is the clearest example of why the chart is not the whole story: beer measures under 15 mg per 100 ml, which looks harmless, yet it is consistently associated with flares because alcohol also slows how the kidneys clear uric acid. Use these numbers to make comparisons, not to make medical decisions on your own.