An increasing number of folks that I know seem to be trying out the GAPS diet in order to solve autoimmune issues. Many are unwittingly making mistakes that are making success more difficult and time on the diet more lengthy.
GAPS, as it is commonly known, is a short term protocol to rebalance and heal/seal the gut wall. This halts the flood of toxins from pathogenic strains dominating the gut environment from pouring into the bloodstream 24/7. It is this unpredictable mix that triggers autoimmune symptoms.
The diet is described in detail in Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride MDs book Gut and Psychology Syndrome. It is based on the century-old Specific Carbohydrate Diet.
The autoimmune disorders significantly alleviated or healed by the GAPS Diet include the simply annoying, like seasonal allergies, to the more life-altering such as autism, fibromyalgia, MS, lupus, and the list goes on and on…
Ok, let’s get real for a minute. Does the GAPS diet as outlined in the bestselling book by Dr. Campbell-McBride MD really work for alleviating allergies and other autoimmune disorders?
Absolutely it does.
My husband used to be the poster boy for allergies. He was allergic to every single prick the allergist tried on him some years ago. Today, he is allergic to nothing. Absolutely nothing. His asthma (during respiratory illness) and eczema resolved permanently as well.
Another person I recently talked to has arrested the progression of her IBS symptoms and gotten herself off the medication using the GAPS Diet. In fact, I know many folks who have received significant relief from their autoimmune disorders from the GAPS Diet.
How empowering to know that there is an answer for autoimmune illness and that something as simple as the GAPS diet can make it happen!
The trouble is, GAPS is simple but not necessarily easy. When folks go on GAPS, a number of common mistakes seem to be made. Here is a rundown of the five most frequent mistakes I’ve encountered coaching folks at various stages in the process:
Mistake #1: Going off Grains but Not Starches
The most important premise of GAPS is to eliminate all sources of disaccharide containing foods from the diet until the gut wall can heal and reseal. Most sugars and all grains, even those not containing gluten, are disaccharides and hence must not be consumed while on GAPS as a compromised gut wall is unable to digest them. Undigested food in any form provides the perfect environment for pathogenic viruses, bacteria, and fungi to thrive.
Talking to people on GAPS, I have frequently encountered those who have eliminated all disaccharides from the diet but not all the starches in the form of potatoes, sweet potatoes, arrowroot flour, potato flour/starch, carob powder, cocoa powder, chickpea flour, all other gluten-free flours and almost all beans and legumes (navy beans and lentils are ok).
This can be confusing, as resistant starch is food for friendly gut flora and overall, good for the gut! Thus, don’t take this to mean starch is “bad”. It definitely isn’t! It just isn’t something to eat while on the GAPS Diet.
Why is this?
Starch is a very complex food molecule comprised of very long strands of hundreds of mono sugars that are very difficult for an imbalanced gut to break down. Undigested starch feeds gut pathogens. Even worse, the starch that does manage to get digested results in molecules of maltose, which is a disaccharide!
As a result, for success on GAPS to be achieved and long term results attained, grains and starches must be eliminated on a short term basis.
Mistake #2: Taking a Cheaper Probiotic or No Probiotic at All
GAPS success requires an infusion of strong, therapeutic strength probiotics to reseed the gut with dominant, beneficial flora at the same time the GAPS Diet is starving out the pathogens. Unfortunately, a number of folks I’ve talked to who claim to be on GAPS are not taking a probiotic at all.
This is a mistake. Taking a probiotic on GAPS is not an option, it is a must!
Unfortunately, a decent quality probiotic is expensive, as you may have noticed! Resist the temptation to settle for cheaper brands.
Dr. Campbell-McBride MD warns about this in her book. She writes that most brands on the market are not strong enough nor do they have the correct aggressive probiotic strains necessary to recolonize the gut. Moreover, many brands of probiotics do not contain the strains listed on the label or have the claimed bacterial strength.
In other words, you get what you pay for.
To avoid the problem of probiotic label fudging, make sure the brand selected is reputable and can deliver the results you need.
After all, you’re going to all this trouble and inconvenience to eat GAPS. Why cut corners with the probiotic and threaten the success of the process? This article explains in detail why a soil-based probiotic on GAPS is critical to the success of the protocol.
Mistake #3: Going Wild with the No Grain Flours
Our culture’s food supply is so overly dominated by grain-based foods that when a person initially decides to go on GAPS, the thought “what in the world will I eat” can be rather overwhelming.
As a result, a common mistake for people on GAPS is to make a wholesale switch from grain-based foods to those exact same foods made with no grain flour such as coconut or almond.
Eating bread, muffins, pancakes, waffles, pizza, and cookies made with coconut or almond flour at the same rate one used to eat these same foods made with wheat can cause unintended consequences.
Coconut flour is extremely high in fiber and eating too much of it can cause gastric distress. Almond flour contains a lot of omega-6 fatty acids. While essential to health, too many omega-6 fats in the diet contribute to inflammation.
As a result, eating a moderate amount of baked goods made with alternative flours such as coconut and almond is the best way to go to ensure GAPS success.
Mistake #4: Not Eating Enough Homemade Broth
A very important part of the GAPS diet is the consumption of copious amounts of homemade bone broth. A small cup (about 4 ounces) with every single meal is recommended. The reason is that broth contains so many easy to assimilate minerals, vitamins, and amino acids. It is a very soothing food to the intestinal mucosa. Physicians have known for centuries that it aids digestion due to the natural gelatin which attracts digestive juices.
Many folks I know on GAPS are not consuming nearly enough broth. Or, they are using commercial bone broth which is almost always watered down (no gelling in the fridge) and/or packaged in toxic containers like aseptic, shelf-stable cartons.
A good idea before going on GAPS is to make sure your freezer is completely loaded up with any and all forms of homemade broth that you can find quality bones for including chicken, turkey, beef, lamb, fish, etc. Note that the best and most nutritious bone broth is made from fish heads, so be sure to include that in the rotation.
Broth is inexpensive to make and is so very important to GAPS success. Be sure to include it with every meal if at all possible! Once or twice a week in soups is not often enough.
Mistake #5: Giving Up Too Soon
Success with the GAPS Diet takes time. In most cases, it took years for the gut to get in bad shape. Thus, it’s going to take months or even a year or two to get it back to normal. For a child, the average amount of time on GAPS to achieve a significant level of autoimmune remission is 18 months. For an adult, it can take longer.
I have known adults who have achieved success in only 6 months. However, these were typically people who had been eating traditionally for many years already. They simply needed to go on full GAPS for a few months to complete the healing process.
If you are coming to GAPS from the Standard American Diet, then plan on 2-3 years to success. While this may seem like a long time, it is really short considering living the rest of your life with an ever-worsening auto-immune situation.
Don’t give up too soon! Initial subsiding of symptoms within a few weeks or months on GAPS does not mean healing. Stick with it to heal and seal the gut wall for good so you can reclaim full vitality of life!
If the GAPS diet is of interest to you and you would like a complete overview of the program, please check out this article on how to heal autoimmune disease.
There are also many GAPS diet recipes on this site to help your journey.
More Information
Heal Autoimmune Disease with GAPS Diet
How to Speed Healing and Shorten Time on GAPS
GAPS and Ulcerative Colitis
GAPS vs Autism
Chronic Stomach Pain and Bloating Gone!
I hope these parents are not doing this without professional guidance. I would suggest biodynamicwellness.com where the staff is extremely experienced dealing with GAPS conditions and helping people through the diet.
What kind of eczema did your husband have? I have seborrheic dermatitis and I have food intolerances to grains. Starting GAPs with a practitioner at the moment.
Back in the early 90’s I did go through a candida diet in line for the most part with Dr. Crook’s methods. It was amazing and changed my life. But as a few years went on, I began drinking beer every now and then, and has brownies and things like that. You know the outcome!! But, now I am a vegetarian. More of a pesco-ovo veg. I don’t eat potatoes as it is. I use quinoa and oat infrequently, so they won’t be hard to cut. You would think a vegetarian diet would naturally be yeast-free. I assure you it is not. Beer and cider, as well as breads, are all part of a vegetarian diet! I am having all the same issues again as I did in the early 90’s. I will do some more reading on GAPS. I do the probiotics and all that stuff when I do these diets. I”m also due for my colonoscopy, so I may get a jump start on cleaning the colon. I hate my reactions to the prep, but it will be a great chance for me to start anew!
So, I’m roughly at the beginning of stage 3 right now. I seem to be tolerating everything just fine. I had a fish allergy previous to starting this and when I tried the Swedish gravlax a few days ago, I didn’t react like I normally did (throat swells and hurts to swallow). I still haven’t had that reaction, but if I noticed correctly, I may have passed it in my most recent trip to the bathroom. So my question is, I am able to skip fish for now and keep moving through the intro diet? I’d rather not sit on stage 2 until fish are tolerated. I assume that if I kept going and tried fish again later, that would be fine. I just need some more thoughts and opinions. Thank you!
I have been struggling with leaky gut for a very long time. It was diagnosed (finally) 2 1/2 years ago, but looking at the symptoms I had been experiencing, I would guess that I have actually had it for 15 years or more. I have been eating a mainly traditional diet for most of that time (Nourishing Traditions, raw fermented dairy, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, etc). I have been soaking oats (for 48 hours) to make a homemade granola, and that had been a staple of sorts for me while many other foods have been eliminated from my diet. Where do soaked, organic grains fit into any of this? I have developed very severe intestinal reactions to many of the other fermented foods, even after they had been a part of my diet at every meal. I no longer tolerate sauerkraut, kimchi, yogurt, or kefir. I do drink at least a pint of kombucha every day. Any other thoughts or suggestions for me to try?
Jennifer, I had to reply because both the oats and the kombucha could be the problem! It’s possible you may have an allergy to oats, as it is quite a common allergy, but it is also a starch which does not help heal the gut. Kombucha could also be a problem because the sugar in it is not 100% consumed by the fungi, so it could be adding sugar into your diet which encourages the Candida overgrowth. Basically, eating these 2 things daily are making it more difficult to replenish the healthy gut flora and will make it more difficult to digest other things. Try quitting starches/grains entirely for a while and take a high quality probiotic supplement instead of the probiotic foods. In a few weeks, give a little yogurt or kefir a try to see if your new gut flora is happy. Remember to drink lots of water and broth too. I’m sure you will feel good after a few minor adjustments… blessings~
One HUGE important thing most articles like this leave out is the importance of getting tested for food allergies and avoiding them like the plague. The GAPS diet allows things like eggs and garlic, but if you were unknowingly allergic to these foods (or more) and you’re still eating them, you are not going to get better.
I have gone years going from doctor to doctor, been eating paleo and trying everything under the sun, and nothing was working. I have finally found and amazing doctor (whose moto is “we don’t guess, we test!”) and after testing, sure enough I have 13 major food allergies. Wheat, cow dairy, goat dairy, eggs, almonds, potato, cashews, peanuts, and more. After strictly avoiding these, I am now starting to feel better. Because my body isn’t being bombarded by these things anymore, my body feels more sensitive to things, and I can feel that I don’t tolerate certain starches like arrowroot or tapioca and possibly rutabaga, though I do fine with sweet potato. (Each person is different and I NEED carbs for my chronic fatigue and mental state.)
Moral of my comment, GET TESTED FOR FOOD ALLERGIES! This is soooo important, I don’t know why it has been left out of this article.
I guess it kind of astounds me that testing for food allergies isn’t one of the first things doctors do. Reading comments below of people not getting results on the GAPS diet (people that are eating lots of eggs and almonds and what have you) and commenting on the big symptoms that are worsening, then people commenting back that it’s just die off. How do you know? Maybe after cutting out most of the crap your body is just more in tune and a whole lot more sensitive, and so all those eggs you are eating is giving you grief. Sure, maybe it is just detox. I have been dealing with some acne since I have been avoiding grains, sugar and my allergies, (pretty much GAPS, I eat less than what’s allowed on the AIP diet and still figuring out the kinks…) and it is detox. But how would YOU know, you who haven’t gotten those allergy tests? You could go years on the GAPS and get no good results if you are allergic to something you eat every day. No diet is one-size-fits-all, not even GAPS.
It’s not surprising to me at all that people are not getting allergy testing done! Doctors look at you crazy in the U.S. if you mention allergies or sensitivities as playing a factor in any of your ailments. In fact, most doctors are not helpful at all, not even specialists. Also, the only testing that is done here is for a full blown allergy, not for a sensitivity; which can cause just as much trouble as an allergy. What are we supposed to do if we don’t have time, money, or insurance to find a decent doctor who will take us seriously?
I’ve been dealing with food allergies and strange autoimmune issues every since i was 12. Now at 31, my list of foods I am NOT allergic to is much smaller than the the foods I AM allergic to. My list of food allergies grows every year, and recently I have become allergic to a medication which landed me in the hospital with anaph. shock. (Funnily enough, what they prescribed me was the very thing that almost killed me. It was coming OFF of prednisone that made my body produce so much histamine that I was a giant walking hive, unable to breathe or see due to swelling.) My food allergies are out of control, Most of my life I have been covered head to toe in hives. (I also have DPU, delayed pressure urticaria) If I whack my arm on something hard, about 6 hours later that area will be a painful deep hive. If i wear tight clothing, i will have hives all around that area. If I go hiking (which i love to do!) my feet will swell up so bad with deep hives that I am unable to walk for a few days. I have had bad experiences with allergists in the past, who basically told me that some of the symptoms I had such as aching accompanying my hives, had nothing to do with my allergies, which I know is not true. Now that I am older, self employed, and uninsured, allergists are out of the question and way beyond my price range. I’ve taken it upon myself to research and do allergy tests myself. Trial and error and allergy panels via the prick test. I learned about the GAPS diet yesterday, and I am willing to try anything! I have tried a Low Histamine diet for many months, but it did nothing to help with hives. Maybe this will help! I’m sick of being a walking hive and would love to take control of this situation. Professional allergy test would be nice! But really, are only practical if you have a corporate job with insanely good insurance!
My son is 13 y of age with ASD and he was started on GAPS diet 3 months ago and he was on intro diet for 10 weeks and now he is on full GAP diet. We saw some improvement within the first 2-3 weeks. Now, his symptoms are slightly worse. Am i doing something wrong? Or is this expected?
Any comments are greatly appreciated.
We had a terrible time with GAPS. We followed intro GAPS to a T for 5-6 months and then followed the diet for close to 2 years. Big mistake. We got lead poisoning from the organic grass fed bone broth we were making and cadmium poisoning from the crockpot. My daughter wasn’t making serotonin due to lack of carbs. We hung on way to long. We had a very healthy diet before hand. Now we are gluten free and mostly grain free (we do use some sprouted flour occasionally) and give plenty of fruit and do lentils and things are so much better! One size does not fit all. Some kids need carbs! I myself couldn’t maintain a 19 BMI with this diet.
Fortunately, GAPS is only temporary! Yes, I need carbs from grains too … I lost 8 lbs on GAPS and I was eating like a horse. I was so glad to transition off and back onto grains. Much better for my physiology and obviously my genetics given my ancestors ate grains 🙂
I initially lost weight on GAPS. I could have stood to lose between 5 and 10 pounds and I lost about 18 pounds. Since then, I gained it all back and then some. I could now stand to lose around 15 pounds.
Help! Is it normal for a child to get WORSE before getting better on GAPS? I started on this 8 days ago w my kiddos in part to help my daughter’s constant allergic-type reactions (runny nose, itchy eyes, scratchy throat, red eyes), but she has had two horrible days today and yesterday with no discernible trigger… we are just on Stage 4 which is about as slow as I felt I could go w my kids clamoring for more food and needing some carbs. Could it be that she is detoxing and this is causing the symptoms? Or is she reacting to something on the diet (eggs? squash? ack I have no idea!)?
Yes, this is normal due to die-off of gut pathogens. It’s called a healing crisis.
What is a good probiotic to take. My whole family is just starting the Gapps diet, most of us have had yeast related issues for about the last year and some of us longer. Are there different probiotics for kids? I have 4 children with ages ranging from 1 to 14.
My whole family takes the ProBio5 probiotic from Plexus. It has 5 beneficial bacteria and the enzyme that works as an antifungal that actually KILLS the candida. We also take the BioCleanse, because we know that bowel habits play heavily into candida overgrowths too. Both are very affordable and many doctors are recommending it in my area.
I’m on day 6 of GAPS and it’s going well and have noticed a decrease in my inflammation. No digestion issues and so far so good. I did a food allergy test before the diet and it turns out I’m sensitive to eggs, almonds, garlic and ginger which are supposed to be consumed on the intro. I’m going to wait until I finish the intro to test these foods and hopefully after I heal I can introduce them one by one. Is that how you recommend or do you have any suggestions? Thanks for the article, very helpful!