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!
is there a place or way to check if something is a non-grain starch? My husband and I are avoiding all grains and most fast carbs (no fruit except avocado and tomato), but we have started to make a delicious non-sweet hot or iced drink from roasted CACAO powder (not COCOA) and I am wondering if the actual cacao would be considered a starch? It would be really sad to have to give that up as it is a fantastic replacement for coffee in the morning as it gives a bit of a zip and we load it up with all kinds of good stuff (coconut oil, cayenne and cinnamon)
thanks so much for your always informative information, I hope you know there are many people out here who are silently benefiting from your generous spirit. Know that good juju is coming your way from us, whether we comment or not! big love,
jessica
is there a website you recommend to learn about this… I am wondering what they heck you have left to eat????! I did a mostly protein and veggie diet for my candida issues and I got REALLY sick. My It was way too much protein for me it seems. But how do you keep your energy levels up with only veggies? I would like to learn more.
Yes most people neglected this fact. It is really alarming to know that the basic ones have been taken lightly and never had been studied to understand its importance.
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When you have a 22 month old you don’t have a choice but to include baked goods, fruit, and honey more often because intro is not recommended and they still have a small sweet tooth. Most toddlers will not eat eggs and sausage every day of their life for breakfast let alone leftovers all the time unless they have taste aversions! I think intro is the only way to ditch the sweet tooth. My son gets WAY too thin on soups and he is already thin. We do butternut squash fries in lard as a way to keep him fuller. Also sour cream smoothies. I am still unsure about yogurt and berries as his constipation came back. I’m finding that making food for him and myself is becoming harder and harder. We are running out of recipes!
My little one is 17 months now and we have been on GAPS since she was 15mts. We did the full intro, as our diet was already mostly Paleo so it was not such a hard transition. I did have to introduce eggs a little bit early however, as its her main protein source. We were lucky that none of us got much reaction to the intro diet so moved through it rather quickly to the full diet.
She loves eggs if I scramble them or cook as a fritata. I whisk stock into the eggs and very finely grate zucchini or spinach into it before cooking. She has this easily one meal a day, but its hidden stock, eggs and vegetables so I feel its fine to have daily. Its a typical breakfast as we cannot find any sausages or bacon we can eat (sugar or preservatives in all).
I also cook mixed vegetables in stock and butter then puree and keep in the fridge. I add this to her eggs too or I mix it into yoghurt – this way she is getting stock and mixed vege in her eggs or yoghurt.
It is when you just want to make something sweet and satisfying that they will eat. What I make is a lot is smoothies, she loves them. Using 3 probiotic ingredients: kefir, yoghurt and fruit left over from making Kvass. A little honey to sweeten and she will very happily drink a glass or two.
I do make a lot of raw nut based sweets now that we are on full GAPS and we have a small piece once every day or so as a treat.
My lil one will NOT eat leftovers 90% of the time. She will eat whatever I have on my plate though so a lot of the time I just eat with her. I wish I knew how to get her to eat something like a stew with all the vege and meat and stock in one. But she does drink saurkraut juice by the glassful so I cannot really complain.
The Five Most Common GAPS Diet Mistakes – The Healthy Home Economist http://t.co/R5OnaeSR
Hi Sarah,
I have been considering doing the GAPS diet for some time to try and heal asthma I’ve had since I was 2 (I am now 41). I’ve been cooking Noursihing Traditions style for almost 5 years now and overall feel pretty good. The only problem is we really can not afford the probiotics. The whole idea of doing the GAPS diet feels very overwhelming and I don’t want to start it up if being that we can’t afford the probiotics it’s not going to help. The cost of Green Pastures cod liver oil for me and my children is already more than we can afford but I splurge on it since I feel it is so important. What do you suggest for people who can’t afford Bio-Kult?
#4 is the big problem for me – how does one heal when you can’t tolerate the smallest amount of meat broth, let alone bone broth? My gut is in such bad shape that histamines, glutamates, etc. all cause me major distress…
Did you ever find a way to tollerate the broth or meats. Im trying so hard and they all just make me so sick. I can hardly eat anything.
will you please contact me about where you’re at with your gut health and whether you found a way to heal despite your sensitivities to the high histamine foods? i’m in the same place you were when you posted this. Thank you
will you please contact me about where you’re at with your gut health and whether you found a way to heal despite your sensitivities to the high histamine foods? i’m in the same place you were when you posted this. Thank you
About mistake #1:
Are cooked beets, cooked carrots, and cooked chestnuts also starches? Should they also be excluded like potatoes etc?
I have been looking EVERYWHERE and still have not found an answer, and I am very excited cause I think you will know! I have been on this diet for months, but still haven’t found out about them (and I love all these foods!)
I cannot wait for an answer! Thank you very much!
🙂
Hi Theodora, I was wondering if you ever found out about the beets for intro? I want to make soup with with beets and make fermented beet juice, please email me [email protected]
Beets are fine on GAPS, especially fermented with other veggies. I think she has a fermented veggie medley recipe which includes cabbage, carrots and beets and the juice is delicious. I use it as a dressing or just drink w/water as recommended. and yes! Carrots are to be used in making broths. Actually it is important to start w/cooked veggies, like carrots, on the intro diet before introducing any raw ones. Best to read the book, glad I finally got around to getting it. It clarifies a lot!
Hi Sarah,
This is an old post, so I hope that you see this comment! My husband and I have been on the GAPS diet for around 2 months now, and I have a question about the probiotics. We were honestly trying to avoid the cost of Bio-Kult and we were hoping that juices from fermented veggies and milk kefir would be strong enough to repopulate…Apparently we were wrong! My husband usually takes a good deal of juice with every meal (either from sauerkraut or other fermented veggies) in addition to a diet full of sour cream (made with kefir) and milk kefir and other fermented veggies/drinks.
I was under the impression that milk kefir contained strains of bacteria/yeast that WERE aggressive (and in very large amounts). Is this incorrect? Are the liquids from fermented veggies more probiotic than the veggies themselves?
Would you also recommend kombucha and water kefir on GAPS even though they are made with sugar? I am very interested in the liver cleansing benefit of Kombucha, but the GAPS book doesn’t say if it is legal or not.
Ah, and the last thing, I remember reading that probiotic supplements never make it to the lower intestines (I’m pretty sure this is in the GAPS book) and that is why you need fermented foods/drinks. What is your take on this?
Thank you so much! I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your blog. You have changed my life, really!
-Julia
My husband is on the GAPS diet. I am wondering if this diet has been the focus of research into the creator’s health claims? I understand that perhaps parts of the foundations of the diet are based on some research, but has any research been done using subjects that have been on the diet?