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.