Have you considered the GAPS diet? Maybe you have heard of it, or know someone who is doing it. Maybe your Internet searches turned it up or a healthcare provider recommended it. If you want to improve just about anything about your physical or mental health, you may want to consider the GAPS diet!
When I started the GAPS diet for my family in August of 2022, more than one person told me something like, “If you can pull this off, you should put the recipes on a blog.”
Well, I pulled it off, sort of. It wasn’t perfect by any means. But I did make up a lot of recipes, and they are trickling onto Happy Recipe Box. These recipes are fine for people who aren’t doing the GAPS diet, too.
Though we aren’t quite doing the GAPS diet anymore (we are close), I am still making up recipes all the time. Most of them are GAPS recipes, or at least GAPS adaptable.
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A diet for health problems? Ugh, why?
There are a lot of “diets” out there. Some are pretty kooky, or even risky. Many come and go as fads. Several have been around awhile and have actual research and scientific underpinnings. A few boast adherents who have seen short or long term benefits, and even “cures”.
None of them sound all that appealing.
The thing is, most people who look into a particular diet do so because they have a real problem and need help. It could be anything from athletic goals to better appearance to treating a serious disease. Many feel desperate, because their issue is life altering or even life threatening.
Sometimes diets are straightforward, like a gluten free diet for celiac disease or a specific diet for avoiding food allergens. I have experienced both of those!
Other times, we sort of know our food may be part of the problem, and part of the solution, but the way forward is murky. Most medical professionals don’t help. We all hear about people trying one diet after another, with results ranging from great improvements to some benefit to no change. Some people even get worse!
What makes the GAPS diet special?
The GAPS diet is one of many I have read about, but the only one (other than allergy or celiac specific) I have thoroughly implemented. Of the many I have delved into, it is by far the most thoroughly research-supported. The GAPS diet isn’t all that new, and it isn’t a fad. It also claims wide-ranging effects.
I won’t try to list all the conditions it is intended (and has been known) to treat. These conditions range from brain-related (autism, learning problems, anxiety, depression, memory problems, and many more) to more obviously physical health problems (autoimmune, allergy, hormonal, digestive, joint, and far more).
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The GAPS Diet Premise
All disease begins in the gut. –Hippocrates
Broadly speaking, the idea behind the GAPS diet is that the health of our digestive system determines the rest of our health. Pretty much every health condition, mental or physical, has a root in the gut. What is (or isn’t) happening in our guts affects body and mind.
This is not to say that the person who could benefit from the GAPS diet necessarily has tummy symptoms. They might, or they might not. Or not that they are aware of until they start to heal and some symptoms they took for normal go away.
This happened to me when I found out I have celiac disease. I ditched gluten and quickly realized that things were different. The stomachaches I had thought were normal went away. I stopped feeling my digestion churning away, a feature I hadn’t really questioned. Digestive noises I had noticed since high school went quiet. (One eighth grade French class I taught right before lunch named my gurgling tummy “Georges.” No more Georges!)
Leaky Guts and Messed-up Microbiomes
You may have heard of “leaky gut”. Junctions in our digestive tracts that should be tight and prevent most things from seeping straight into our bloodstream are instead loose and let all manner of undigested matter through where it shouldn’t be. Sadly, most people have at least a somewhat leaky gut in today’s world. GAPS seeks to heal the leakiness.
Another problem that is very common these days, but far from normal, is a poorly balanced microbiome. A thriving microbiome consists of a wide variety of friendly “microbes” in our digestive systems, as well as other places, like our mouths and skin.
These microbes are meant to help us digest and absorb nutrients, keep us from getting too sick, and help regulate assorted processes all through our bodies and brains. When there is a healthy microbiome, these beneficial microbes balance out the harmful ones so our bodies and minds thrive.
Our microbiomes consist of different families, including bacteria, fungi, protozoa, viruses, archaea, and more. We have (or need to reacquire) a veritable zoo in our insides! Estimates vary, but we may be walking around with more microbial than human cells; some researchers think we have far more nonhuman than human cells!
How do we get messed up?
Especially in today’s world, we come into contact all sorts of toxins in food, water, air, building materials, furniture, cleaning products, personal care products, and more. Then we sustain more damage from pharmaceuticals, electronics, stress, and other features of modern life.
Once this happens, if it isn’t corrected, health problems tend to crop up. As the leaky gut and damaged microbiome worsen, and maybe get treated with drugs, the likelihood is that more health conditions will pile on in a cascade of new problems.
These conditions may seem unrelated, but common to all will be the gut problems. There may be other roots, too. We might need other sorts of treatment in addition to gut healing, but gut health will definitely be in play.
The GAPS Diet– Gut and Psychology Syndrome
There is a lot to the GAPS diet. It is really more than a diet; it is a lifestyle with a heavy emphasis on healing, nourishing, whole foods. There are other components besides the diet, such as detoxification, managing stress, cleaning up our personal environment, and more.
The GAPS diet is based on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride adapted the SCD for her patients. She found it effective in treating brain-related disorders such as autism, ADHD, depression, and many more. The “yellow book” is her earlier book detailing the diet and the science underlying it– Gut and Psychology Syndrome, or the acronym GAPS.
The other GAPS– Gut and Physiology Syndrome
As physical disease also begins in the gut, she later wrote a second GAPS book, the “blue book”– Gut and Physiology Syndrome. How convenient that they could use the same acronym! That book presents the exact same diet, but with additional information about physical diseases, such as allergy, autoimmune disease, hormonal problems, and so on.
There are groups of foods to eliminate (anything processed, most sugars, all grains, unfermented dairy products, many starches). There are a lot of foods to keep eating (meat, eggs, fermented dairy, many vegetables, and later many fruits, nuts, seeds and beans carefully prepared). A key to the GAPS diet is the foods you add in order to heal.
There are introductory phases that are quite restrictive; each stage is less restrictive until you reach “full GAPS”, which is the least restrictive and, for many people, lasts the longest. There is much more to say, and it has been said best in the yellow book and the blue book. Both are written by Dr. Natasha and give thorough scientific explanations and practical instructions.
The GAPS diet is not just about what you don’t eat!
The GAPS diet is partly about eliminating foods that irritate our guts and feed harmful microbes. It is also about adding foods that help us to heal. There are two main things to add and a third support, as I see it.
First, you make and consume fresh meat stock in quantity every day. The purpose of the meat stock is to “heal and seal” the gut– we are fixing the leaky lining of the gut. Meat stock is not bone broth, though it is similar. Learn more here. The meat stock is simple to prepare, and contains a variety of amino acids, minerals, and other nutrients to help us heal.
Second, you add fermented foods. The purpose of adding fermented foods is to replenish the beneficial microbes in our guts. They will in turn keep harmful microbes in check and provide various other benefits to our health.
There is a wide variety of fermented foods you might try, including sauerkraut (cabbage) and other vegetables, milk kefir, yogurt, sour cream, and more. These fermented foods are ideally consumed with each meal to aid digestion and rebuild the microbiome.
While the meat stock and ferments are the workhorses of the GAPS diet, organ meats are also a food group we try to add. The reason to work some organ meats into your plan is that they are extremely nutrient dense, and nutrients are needed for the healing process.
Also, nutrients tend to be depleted in people with health issues. Eating foods that are rich in nutrients that are easier to absorb than those in supplements is helpful to healing.
Our Family’s Foray into GAPS
While I won’t go into great detail (in order to protect people’s privacy), it is fair to say that our family is a GAPS family. This is to say, we have a lot of chronic problems, large and small, that fall under the GAPS umbrella.
Then again, most people with health struggles, mental or physical, are GAPS people. In a way, this isn’t so bad– someone who undertakes GAPS for one person in the family, or for one particular reason, may find unexpected benefits to other people following the diet and resolution of problems that weren’t the main target.
We have been taught, as many of our doctors have been taught, to look at health troubles as separate from each other. It is pretty typical, if maybe not so effective, to see a dermatologist for a skin problem, a psychiatrist for mental issues, and a gastroenterologist for digestive disorders. They may help, or they may not help much at all. We may keep getting worse with this approach.
A whole body/mind approach
The GAPS diet addresses the body as a whole. There is an assumption that the body is designed to heal and thrive, and that all aspects of our bodies and minds work together. So, there is a chance that you do the GAPS diet for your digestive problems, and find that it helps your digestion and also resolves your skin issue and increases your mental well being.
Although the connectedness of the body runs counter to common medical practice, it makes intuitive sense to me as a believer in God and His kindly design for people. I believe we were designed by God with a tendency to recover and heal. While the bad effects of the fall are ever with us, it seems accurate that working with the way God designed us would tend to lead to better health. I think we can support that idea both from the Bible (theology) and the world we observe around us (science).
Why we tried the GAPS diet
Our family, among the five of us, had both physical and mental reasons to try the GAPS diet. Mentally, various ones of us have been troubled with depression, anxiety, OCD, brain fog, attention and focus problems, learning difficulty, and such.
On the more physical side, we have quite a bit as well. Food and environmental allergy, asthma, Lyme disease, irritable bowel syndrome, thyroid and other hormone problems, joint problems, chronic fatigue, and acne.
Two of us have celiac disease, which is autoimmune. Knowing that one autoimmune disease tends to lead to another and then another, we are interested in reducing our likelihood of acquiring more autoimmune diseases!
We really sound like a real mess, don’t we?! None of us have all of these issues, you understand. But we struggle. A lot.
How It Went
We did the GAPS diet for a year. Two years is the minimum recommended time frame, so we didn’t “do it right” or nearly long enough.
We “cheated” some, but not a lot. Even one “cheat” can set you back, so our results shouldn’t be as good as they would have been if we had been more diligent. We also ate more fruit than was probably best.
We did the intro stages, and moved through them quickly. I thought we would stick with it better and have better compliance that way! The “kids” were ages 17-20, which is both easier and harder than little kids. We could always go back through the intro stages again later, as many people do in order to accelerate their healing.
So did anything get better?
While we initially started the GAPS diet for some brain related problems two of us were working on, our most obvious improvements were more on the physical side. One person may have had some benefit to OCD, but it isn’t perfect and he was also doing other things at the same time. It is hard to say about that.
The physical improvements were evident, and more measurable in any case:
- less severe hay fever (not totally gone, though)
- less IBS, and no severe episodes in 2 years, even though we did GAPS only the first year– previously we could expect a few bad episodes per year (not totally gone, but improved)
- much improved acne (also not eradicated)
- possibly diminished asthma
- slow thyroid improvement (also doing other treatment)
- several life threatening food allergies gone and one other known to be less severe
- better energy (still not ideal, though)
My Unprofessional Thoughts on Imperfect GAPS Implementation
As I mentioned, we didn’t do GAPS perfectly. I do not recommend our approach, but it is what we did in real life. If you really want results, you should implement it a lot better than we did!
Confessions of a GAPS underachiever…
We didn’t do the full two year minimum. We sped through intro and had more fruit and honey than ideal. Eventually we added sweet potato and white potato. On occasion, we cheated a little. We didn’t maintain the 5-6 cups of meat stock per day for very long; we ended up with more like 2-3 cups per day. Some people never had much fermented food or organ meat, either.
After that first year, we were having potatoes and rice most weeks, and a little coconut sugar and raw milk. We had more occasional “cheats.” We kept up with some meat stock most days and a lot of the healing foods. We didn’t add any other non-GAPS foods. So, while we weren’t really following the GAPS diet the second year, we were not far off of it, either. Definitely not the Standard American Diet!
You will hear people say that you should do the GAPS diet all the way if you expect to get better at all. I would agree that doing it properly is the best way to see the benefits. Especially if you are very unwell, and you are in a position to do the GAPS diet right, that is the way to go! Also, doing it fully by the book would be more likely to give quick results.
In real life, people have reasons to not follow the GAPS diet as fully as the ideal. It could be overwhelm with time. Feeling sick and tired or coping with struggling children is a real obstacle. Finances can make things harder. There could be trouble eliciting compliance from family members (even, or especially, the ones who need it most!). Any number of other factors can hold you back.
There is still hope!
Given that we had help from the GAPS diet with imperfect compliance, it clearly isn’t true that doing it partially is totally useless. In my opinion, doing some of it badly is much better than doing nothing. Any improvement on the Standard American Diet is likely to help you! Baby steps still get you somewhere, eventually.
If you were to do one thing, I would suggest eliminating anything processed from your diet. I mostly buy food that is one ingredient, or maybe two (like salted butter). That isn’t as hard as it sounds, though you do need to cook at least a little bit.
If you were to do two things, learn to make a good meat stock and have it often. The GAPS diet really functions on the meat stock more than on eliminating things. Meat stock, not bone broth, is easy to make, and it is key to healing.
From there, you may find that you are already getting better. If you are a GAPS person, you may not be all better, though. When you can, you can keep learning to implement the GAPS principles so you keep getting better.
So, though going all in on the GAPS diet is the best thing to do, doing some of it is also good. Imperfect GAPS is not useless!
Happy Recipe Box is born
Happy and sad are opposites. The Standard American Diet, abbreviated SAD, is part of how we end up with compromised health. So, we need HAPPY recipes– happier guts, happier minds and bodies, and, I hope, also happy mealtimes filled with good food and good company.
Many of the recipes I put on Happy Recipe Box are ones I made up while trying to feed my family on the GAPS diet without making them feel deprived. Nobody is going to be happy about the GAPS diet if they are hungry, or if the food tastes bad or boring!
My family mostly likes the GAPS food. Even if they miss chips and cornbread and regular cookies, they like the meals well enough.
There was a period of adjustment where three of us had die off symptoms of feeling sick and tired and foggy. Ironically, the two people we were most trying to help did fine!
There was also a period of getting used to eating differently, and, yes, there was grumpiness! I knew we were getting there when my pickiest family member was asked about the GAPS diet and replied that “the food is actually good!”
Making the GAPS diet achievable
For some of us, food needs to taste good. I know it is popular to say that food should be nothing more than fuel. It is fuel, but I think it is much more! It is social, it is enjoyable, and it is a blessing.
GAPS can be expensive and time consuming. I try very hard to keep expenses down and recipes do-able. I need those features, and I think a lot of people would be more apt to try the GAPS diet if it seemed easier and affordable.
So, now you know how Happy Recipe Box was born! I am just making it up as I go along, with a mix of science and faith, creativity and culinary interest. I hope you find some recipes you like, whether you try the GAPS diet or not!