GAPS diet? What's that???

If you're reading this blog, you've likely seen me refer to the GAPS diet several times. This is a diet that my son, daughter, husband, and mother, are following pretty much 100%, and I am also mostly following. It is not a diet for weight loss, although it can certainly have that effect. Instead, it is a diet for healing one's gut.

Now GAPS is far from the only protocol out there, and it is not perfect. A number of health conditions/gene mutations can make other healing diets or protocols, such as SCD, Yasko, Paleo autoimmune protocol, and others a preferable one for yourself. The GAPS diet, as it is written, is also able to be highly customized to your needs.

The GAPS diet was developed by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride to treat her autistic son. The name is actually an acronym for Gut and Psychology Syndrome.

Dr. Campbell-McBride, or NCM as she is known to her adherents, has a basic theory about chronic disease in general. We are evolved to have a robust, symbiotic colony of bacteria living in our guts. These bacteria help create, liberate, and absorb nutrients, and help our immune system repel invading pathogenic bacteria. However, if our good bacteria is compromised, it allows pathogenic bacteria to overgrow and damage our gut lining. Once this happens, it can be very difficult for the beneficial bacteria to recover enough to regain control of the ecosystem. Additionally, continued damage to the lining of the intestine can cause it to become permeable, a condition known as "leaky gut". This means that proteins that should stay in your intestine are leaking into your bloodstream, provoking your immune system in a variety of ways and leading to autoimmune diseases in various parts of the body, from allergies to eczema to asthma, as well as more serious conditions like RA or Crohn's disease. In addition, the intestines are responsible for the synthesis of many important vitamins and neurotransmitters, so when they are not being correctly produced, it can lead to cognitive symptoms, which can be intensified by inflammation in the brain caused by autoimmune issues. Hormone production, particularly thyroid and reproductive hormones, are often impaired in a person with gut damage as well. All of this systemic inflammation is thought to be implicated in many people with neurological disorders such as autism, ADD/ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, and many types of depression. And of course, all variety of GI symptoms from GERD to IBS tend to be common in a GAPS person.

Obviously, many of these conditions have been with us to some degree for many millenia. So, how does one end up with a damaged gut? Well, in the past, it seems most likely that it would be from a nasty infection that a person was never able to quite recover from, and the fallout from that infection may have persisted for multiple generations, due to maternal transmission of bacteria, maternal inflammation/nutritional status, and genetics/epigenetics. However, in our modern world, it is becoming epidemic largely because of two factors. One is antibiotics, which are known to kill good bacteria indiscriminately, and some types, such as penecillins, tend to hit our beneficial bacteria particularly hard. There is some evidence that many of us never sufficiently recover our levels of good bacteria after even just a few rounds of antibiotics. I don't know about you, but I remember many, many doses of the pink goo over the years.

Another thing that causes damage is our standard American diet, chock full of sugar, starch, carbs, and chemicals that disrupt our guts. While the jury is still out on GMO's, some also may have the potential to be harmful to our gut bacteria as well. While we have historically eaten many of these foods without too many issues, the problem is that we are eating them in far larger amounts, while the concentrations of certain irritating substances, such as gluten, has also been bred to be higher than ever in history.

So, the GAPS diet proposes a relatively basic solution to fix someone with a damaged gut. First, eliminate as many foods as possible that might feed pathogenic bacteria, basically starving them out. Complex sugars, like those found in all grains, sugar, and most sweeteners except honey, are out, because they require enzymes to break them down, enzymes which a damaged gut might not be able to make, or make enough of. This renders such sugars unusable by our bodies, freeing them up to be feasted on by unfriendly bacteria. The same goes for starches found in potatoes and beans. So you are left with a diet that is made up of fruit, vegetables, meat, and some dairy products.

But that's not all. In addition to eliminating foods that can damage your gut, you also need to introduce foods that are going to heal and seal your gut lining and allow your beneficial gut bacteria to repopulate. So basically lots of meat and bone broth, and lots of fermented foods - yogurt, kefir, cheese, sauerkraut, kimchi, lactofermented pickles, water kefir, kombucha...

There is an introduction diet, where you eliminate all but very easily digested broths with well cooked meats and vegetables, and then gradually introduce new foods, as they are tolerated, according to an introduction structure that NCM has provided. The Well Fed Homestead has an awesome blog entry with a fairly complete list here.

So basically, you do the intro diet and once you get to full GAPS, you stay on the diet for at least 6 months after the cessation of symptoms. Then you gradually transition off to eating a mostly whole foods, unprocessed diet, but with far fewer restrictions and the wiggle room for the occasional cheat. Some people experience amazing healing on GAPS alone. Some people find that their symptoms get worse, or that it doesn't fix the problem. Many of the other healing diets out there (with the exception of SCD from which GAPS was developed) exist to help out people who don't find healing on GAPS. There are multiple gene mutations out there that seem to correlate with GAPS patients and some of these other protocols address those issues more directly. Some people need to supplement beyond a few GAPS recommended things, such as probiotics and FCLO (fermented cod liver oil). It's all very complicated and can get very confusing when you get down into the nitty gritty of it. But if you think you have a leaky gut, or severely imbalanced gut flora, if you're suffering from an autoimmune disease or other chronic disease that is making your life miserable, or if you're trying to heal a child from a lifelong burden, then you might consider looking into the GAPS diet.

A tall, warm cup of milk...coconut milk.

I love milk. Especially whole milk. It's fully of creamy fatty goodness (and is actually much better for you than skim, but that's for another post). However, once milk is pasteurized, it looses the enzymes that naturally occur with it, making it harder for your gut to break down the lactose sugars into the monosaccharides glucose and galactose. If there is any damage in your gut, the job gets even harder, because you may simply not be able to produce enough enzymes to break down those sugars. This means that certain bacteria in your gut have a feeding frenzy, producing all the lovely symptoms that we associate with lactose intolerance. For this reason, milk is typically verboten to those of us on GAPS who already have a damaged gut, and unless you can source some raw milk, you'd better find an acceptable alternative.

In my toddler's case, he wouldn't even drink cow milk to begin with - perhaps it was a defense mechanism from his already damaged gut. However, I wanted him to be drinking some kind of milk, so we explored the "alternative" milks before settling on coconut milk. And he would drink it - as long as it was fully sweetened and flavored. So Delicious vanilla was his daily milk beverage and he loved it enough that I silenced any nagging doubts about fat content and additives. Then we went Paleo as a family and I started using canned coconut milk for us as well.

Now don't get me wrong, coconut milk is pretty awesome stuff. It's fully of medium chain tryglicerides (MCT) which help fight cholesterol and inflammation, support gut health, and encourage weight loss. And who would want to eat Thai green currry without tons of it? However, most of our store bought versions tend to be less than ideal. If you can find a coconut milk with only coconut and water as ingredients, stored in a non-reactive container, then you're doing great. Unfortunately, you tend to run into a couple issues with store versions of coconut milk.

For the fresh milks, the biggie is carageenan. Carageenan is used to thicken coconut milk so that it has a texture closer to cream. You find carageenan in all sorts of other things like heavy cream and ice cream. On first blush, it doesn't sound so bad, since it is naturally derived from seaweed; however, research indicates that it aggravates intestinal inflammation and GI issues. Read this report for more info. So those cartons of coconut milk? Not so great for someone who is already experiencing digestive distress.

The cans have their own set of issues, BPA and other thickener gums foremost among them. Chris Kessler does an excellent summary of it here. There are a few varieties that don't suffer from these issues but they can be trickier to find at your convenient grocery store. Also, if you suffer from fructose malabsorption, coconut milk can be an issue for you.

If you would like to avoid all these pitfalls by just making your own, it is surprisingly easy, and cheaper, to boot. All you need is a blender, some water, and some cheesecloth or a nut milk bag. Then you just need to obtain some coconut. While you could crack and peel the coconut yourself, then shred it, and then make milk from it, that sounds a little too time consuming for me. I prefer to use dried, shredded coconut. I avoid sulfured coconut when possible. Fortunately, my local health food store sells organic unsulfured shredded coconut for about $3.29/lb, which will make me at least a gallon of coconut milk, and if I ordered in bulk from a co-op like Azure, I could probably get it far cheaper. You can make the coconut milk as rich or thin as you like by how much water you add - I prefer a richer milk so I use:

2 cups shredded coconut
3.5 cups filtered water

Add the ingredients to the blender:

Blend for one to a few minutes:

Pour into a strainer lined with cheesecloth, over a bowl or alternately, pour through a nut milk bag. After it sits for several minutes, the coconut solids will begin to pull away from the sides and form a cake:

Gather up the edges of your cheesecloth and squeeze all the excess liquid out of the coconut pulp:

Once you are finished, it should feel very dry and crumbly. You can, if you are feeling particularly industrious, go on to dry these solids in a food dehydrator and use them for coconut flour.

Finally, you have the finished warm coconut milk. My toddler, who wouldn't touch the unsweetened store bought carton of coconut milk, will happily down a glass of this if I let him.

We primarily use coconut milk for making dairy free kefir for my daughter, who is dairy sensitive (though healing) and for using in coffee or chai tea. I also occasionally make popsicles for my son. However you use it, it is tasty stuff, and GAPS legal. Enjoy!

Pizza, how I have missed thee.

When I was 7 months pregnant, I went gluten free in the hopes that it would help my son, who was nursing and was suspected of having celiac. Then, when my daughter was 2.5 months, I went dairy free in hopes that it would help her reflux and unhappy poop. I have only recently reintroduced dairy, at 9 months - she seems to be tolerating it well so far.

Anyways, if there is one food I miss with a fiery burning ache, it is pizza. Since we are finally on full GAPS, tonight I figured I would try my hand at a GAPS legal pizza crust, but I didn't want to be disappointed. The cauliflower crust is probably good but doesn't sound like it crisps up very well. A straight coconut flour crust has more eggs than I prefer. So I settled on this recipe: http://thischickcooks.net/2012/06/11/coconut-flour-pizza-crust-perfect-for-pizza-night/

I also simmered down a can of whole tomatoes and seasoned with thyme, oregano, basil, and a few whole garlic cloves.

I doubled the pizza crust and spread it out with a piece of plastic wrap. Then I baked it for 14.5 minutes, spread pizza sauce and sprinkled with the remainder of my raw goat milk cheddar (I don't have access to raw milk mozzarella, the only GAPS legal mozzarella), and dotted liberally with oil cured olives and capers.

It was awesome. I didn't get to eat til the pizza was not so hot any more, but the crust still had some crispness, decent texture, and excellent flavor. I'm already looking forward to trying this again.

GAPS pizza, lemony cauliflower, and salad. Yum!

Babies. Bacteria. Bacon.

Yeah, it's kind of a quirky blog name but those three words will probably encompass what I am going to spend most of my time talking about. However, if you're taking the time to read this, I'll spell it out a little bit.

I have two adorable little monsters, we'll call them Big E and Little E for now. Big E basically knocked out my ideas of what parenting was like with his incredible high needs behavior. So because of that, I'm a pretty AP minded mom, and I do crazy things like full term nursing (aka extended breastfeeding), bedsharing, and not spanking and trying to use positive discipline methods for my children. So I'm sure that my blog will discuss parenting issues and ideas and strategies from time to time.

Bacteria. It surrounds us, and lives within us. I'm no germaphobe, but I never really gave bacteria much thought apart from washing my hands. Or at least, I didn't start considering it seriously until Big E became part of the club known as "failure to thrive" and after an initial suspicion of Celiac disease went nowhere, our doctors didn't seem to know what to do with him besides push copious amounts of Pediasure and Miralax at us, and acted like I was a crazy person for insisting that something else must be going on. I kept researching alone, since no medical professional seemed to be interested in helping us, and eventually started to see a bigger picture about health and disease across our culture. And it all comes down to - our guts are sick because we eat lots of foods that feed bacteria that can harm our gut lining, and because we load ourselves up on medications like antibiotics and painkillers that can kill off the good bacteria and again, damage our gut lining. Once your gut is damaged, all kinds of problems, from malabsorption to allergies to autoimmune disease to mental illness to autism can readily develop. Throw in a few gene mutations that can inhibit absorption of certain nutrients already and you have a perfect storm for an epidemic of chronic diseases and syndromes that you see all over the place today. I'm still sifting the information that I've started to learn. I'm planning to become a nutritional therapist so I can help other people with the information I've learned. My family is doing the GAPS diet to heal our guts, although the more I learn, the more I come to see that there are numerous paths to healing and it just takes tweaking to find the right one for you. I'm researching natural methods of healing, including using DoTERRA essential oils therapeutically, and sharing them with other people. And I'm learning new relevant information all the time. So I will be musing, putting ideas down on paper, and sharing what information I think is important, with anyone who wants to read this blog.

Bacon. Because what's not to love about bacon? (*vegetarians, vegans, and various religious affilations excluded). Although bacon really should just stand in for all things delicious. I love food. I am trained as a chef. And since my son became ill, we have radically changed our diet, first to Paleo and then to GAPS. I'm also learning about Weston A. Price Foundation guidelines for the preparation of foods in traditional styles to maximize nutrition and minimize damaging anti-nutrients in the food. I have never been in love with processed food, but realizing how much it was contributing to my family's health concerns really made me appreciate my culinary skills all the more. I have been very reliant on the internet for recipes and I am starting to get to the point where I am able to easily adapt and maybe even write my own. However, I will probably share links to a number of great blogs where I am getting some of my ideas from. If I can inspire anyone to try out one of my recipes, even if it seems weird or out there, I'm thrilled. And if you learn something or discover a new favorite, even better!


Thanks for reading!