At GAPS, we are not Diet Dictocrats. We respect people’s food choices and beliefs. To each his own. 

However, for sound, scientific and evolutionary reasons, the human body is tailored to eating different meats and animal fats. The GAPS Protocol is consistent with authentic, time tested nutrition practices as practiced by our ancestors for eons. The human body does best on its Nature Proven diet of meats and animal fats, with some plant matter added during scarcity. This is proven by well researched Human Trophic Levels. Anthropology and stable isotope testing of ancient human bones have proven beyond a shadow of doubt, what it is that humans ate and what they sought out and what they thrived on. 

Therefore, GAPS is not about wrong and right with regards to food. It is about evolution and human needs, based on what it took Mother Nature to help us upto this moment.

Vegetarians who are comfortable with or willing to consume eggs in sufficient quantities can definitely benefit from the GAPS Protocol, along with generous amounts of high quality dairy ghee, butter and cream. These are animal fats that Ancient Ayurveda also recommends and is consistent with modern human diets for say, the last fifteen thousand years, approximately. 

Generous amounts of full fat dahi/yogurt made at home from high quality, raw organic milk is also consistent with Ayurvedic practice and every Indian home is familiar with the healing properties of dahi/yogurt. At GAPS, we are big consumers of high quality dahi, long fermented at home. 

In fact, with the addition of high quality, organic eggs, it is 100% safe to be a vegetarian. 

We are inclusive and embracing at GAPS. We love and respect people. People are beautiful in all their differences and traditions. That’s what makes life so beautiful.

However, for integrity purposes, we do not/cannot serve people who will not include plenty of eggs in their diet. 

But, for the Jains, pure vegetarians and vegans you may get your answer on https://thenutritionparadox.com with the SANE method of working on the body’s health. Please visit https://thenutritionparadox.com and decide for yourself. A Discovery Call will clarify a lot for you and help you decide with enough information.

Animal produce coming from animals treated with love, kindness and respect. Animals fed what they would have eaten if they were not captive: their natural diets. (Animals Do Not eat grains in their natural diets. Grains are harmful for animals even if they are organic). Free roaming animals and birds. Animals feeding on chemical-free, unpolluted land and water. Fish from rivers, lakes and sea, not farmed fish etc. 

Vegetables, nuts and grains (grains much later, thoroughly processed for safety and after assessment by your GAPS Coach) grown organically, preferably Certified Organic.

Yes. Very true. 

Please read up on the ancient Chinese concept and meaning of the metaphor: Death By A Thousand Paper Cuts.

Our lives have been so polluted by industry, right from the air that we breathe, the water we drink, the food additives we eat, the chemicals we apply in the name of looking and smelling good, to the cleaning products at home that are laced with inflammatory and toxic chemicals that we breathe in and soak our hands in and onto the synthetic clothes we wear, to the furnishings at home with their dyes and chemicals to retard fire, avoid stains etc. all add to the toxic load on the body, little by little, drop by drop: Death By A Thousand Paper Cuts.

A few paper cuts may do you little to no harm. However, a thousand paper cuts will bleed you to death without you suspecting it. 

Yes, we do encourage and help you in detoxifying your Sacred Space: Your Home, on the way to detoxifying and restoring to health, your Temple: Your Body.

We understand where you are coming from with regards to your question. Many people come to the GAPS Protocol after having been through many different attempts at trying to resolve their health challenges, with little to no results and therefore they are very skeptical, cynical and often in a hurry to see some results. We understand your pain and past experiences.

However, having acknowledged your condition and pain, it is pertinent to draw your attention to certain points:

Please read the “Disclaimer” before progressing further.

The GAPS Protocol is about giving the body the right tools to thrive. This is crucial to understand and digest right at this point. 

All the symptoms that you have been diagnosed with by your physician, may be distress signals by your suffering body, suffering from: an imbalance in the gut micro-biota (micro and mycobiome), a permeable/leaky/sieve like gut wall (in Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride’s words), a toxic body and nutrition deficiencies. 

All that the GAPS Protocol does, is to facilitate, help, support the body to get healthy through interventions that bring back balance. That’s it. 

When the body achieves Balance, it naturally drops the symptoms that it was using as signals to get help. This is what actually happens. It is people that use words like “healed”, “cured” etc. We Do Not use those words

As to how long that takes? We Cannot and Do Not predict. The body is very Wise and takes its own time. It necessarily Triages (priortizes according to its own priorities)  nutrition and the body processes it in its Timeless Wisdom. No one is competent enough to predict that. It may also depend on the compliance with the Protocol and several other factors. 

However, what has been observed repeatedly in Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride’s clinical experience, and the anecdotal stories of her patients, parents with severe GAPS children and their own GAPS conditions (please read “GAPS Stories”), can be a beacon of hope for you and your lovely children. 

You can eat all the grains that you want after your body achieves balance and rights itself. However, until that happens, your body needs your help and understanding.

During the Protocol, nut breads, made from properly treated/processed/fermented nuts are allowed, so that some variety is available to the client.

Grains can be eaten after your body comes off the GAPS Protocol. Slowly and very gently.

However, they will need to be “treated/processed/fermented” to mitigate their powerful toxins and inflammatory effects,  just like traditional cultures did: prolonged fermentation. 

For some people, grains can be a lifelong No! 

Absolutely! Yes.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride has listed out a long list of vegetables that are GAPS friendly. Also aromatic herbs and spices are allowed, based on her extensive clinical experience.

These are introduced in steps based on the stages of the GAPS Protocol that one is on and on one’s progress and state of digestion capacity. 

Indian vegetables that are locally available are listed for consumption.

This is “best practices” as advised by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride. This is an effort to empower the client with the complete information. 

Reading the book makes a huge difference in understanding the entire process and the Protocol itself. When the “Why” of it is clear, compliance with the Protocol and benefits to the client are enhanced. 

Journalling each day’s progress in Amy Mihaly’s: My GAPS Insights, makes a big difference in one’s progress and keeping accurate track of daily GAPS activities and reactions to foods, detoxification and die-off symptoms. 

As we understand, you do not mean a complete food fast, or, a water only fast. We do not advise that. That is not compatible with the GAPS Protocol. If you mean the weekly day fasts with fruits and vegetable (vegetarian food only days) consumption, read on:

On the days that you fast, you can have a vegetable stock with plenty of ghee in it, plus, high fat dairy probiotics. The nut breads and chilas are compatible with Indian fasting protocols. However, these are based on stage compatibility. As Coaches, we will hold your hand based on how your digestion condition (the importance of journalling) is and direct you with the right combinations which are situational. If you have a chronic condition with diarrhoea, or diarrhoea that is temporary, the vegetable stock may prove an irritant.

Based on a complete understanding of your health, we could also start you on The Full GAPS Protocol. This is much less restrictive, but again only based on a client’s health and lifestyle.

Our best advise would be to start your fasting based on your religious beliefs, after the Six Introduction Stages are successfully completed. If you are unable to do that, the GAPS Protocol may not be suited for your lifestyle.

That is Best Practices or, The Gold Standard. Why?

The GAPS syndrome is a condition that afflicts the gut: Gut And Psychology/Physiology Syndrome.

As the father of modern western medicine, Hippocrates is quoted, “all disease begins in the gut”, and Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride frequently quotes Hippocrates and other later day scientists who pointed out to the human gut as the source of all human diseases, including Psychological and Physiological, it is the gut that needs healing, sealing and repopulating with helpful, friendly micro-biota and myco-biota (fungal species).

The introduction diet and its six stages help with this critical process very efficiently. 

Recurrence of stubborn symptoms may be due to the gut wall remaining porous, whereas nature intends it to be a very tight impenetrable seal. It is when this impenetrable seal is penetrated that the host of diseases begin, according to Hippocrates and Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride’s vast clinical experience.

We would always advise starting with The Introduction Diet and completing the six stages patiently, rather than cutting corners, unless, your lifestyle demands that you start with the Full GAPS Diet. Then we can work on that. As we say at GAPS, some GAPS is better than no GAPS.

Not you. Its your fungal population (myco-biome) that has run amok and has a sweet tooth (and they don’t even have teeth). 

The myco-biome and the micro-biome have a very powerful puppeteering effect on its host: you. They have devastating effects on the psychology of the host when they are in an imbalance and literally out of control. Since you can’t see them, you think it’s You who has the sweet tooth and actually “cravings”. No! It’s them, signalling your brain to keep asking for sweet and starchy food/s. They love it. They live on it. One very effective way of culling their numbers is to starve them: stay off the very foods that give them life and strength to mess with your health and life.

As, you increase the healthy fats intake on the GAPS Protocol, sweet cravings will start disappearing on their own. You do not need to struggle with it. We have proven techniques that will help you.

An affinity to sweet things is natural for human beings and humans have the “sweet taste receptors” on their tongues and the brain is wired to sense it. Under normal conditions occasional sweet treats are quite natural, provided its source is natural, whole fruit (in prehistory it was wild berries with a mild, pleasant/sweetish taste, rather than the horticulture manipulated sweet/pulpy/seedless fruits) and limited quantities of raw, unprocessed organic/wild honey (available only in season, certain regions and a lucky strike). That is what humans undoubtedly ate throughout their evolution over billions of years. 

However, do note, finding and discovering honey, was a very occasional event for our ancestors, besides being a very risky endeavour. Moreover, with prolonged ice ages, there was very little suitable vegetation for honey to be found. Therefore, honey was a lottery. Not a regular thing.

Processed sugar is quite a different animal and very addictive to children and adults alike. An imbalanced microbiome and specially fungal overgrowth, exacerbates the sweet tooth condition, leading to various chronic diseases.

Yes! The GAPS Protocol will help you with your sweet tooth quite naturally, as “an outcome,” rather than a cure.

As stated earlier, at GAPS it is important for us to state the facts as they are. If you can’t or won’t eat plenty of quality eggs, we are unable to help you.

However, if you are a pure vegetarian, Jain or vegan, you can look up www.thenutritionparadox.com and work with the SANE Protocol, which may help you. You may also read the testimonials based on the SANE Protocol.

Definition: Fermentation  is an age old process used by humans: 13,000 years as per this page. While humans may have discovered fermentation accidentally, they did discover that it could store their food for long. However, what they also discovered was that it had benefits that the generations of humans experienced from mothers to daughters. This practice was carried on for mainly these two benefits: food storage and health benefits.

Fathers may have started tinkering and discovered that fermentation also creates a substance, which on consuming, gave them a High: alcohol. A by-product of fermentation with specific species microbes under specific conditions and with high sugar content in the substrate. Obviously, such a discovery has been kept alive and prospering.

However, for our purposes, fermentation adds various species of bacteria, yeasts and archaea that are highly beneficial for the human gut, keeping our entire body healthy systemically. The entire body benefits in many ways, most still not discovered ie. the benefits.

In Europe and maybe other parts of the world,  beer was consumed by men, women, children alike. Why? It was a milder beer and it quenched the thirst for water, which often caused dangerous water borne diseases and early death. Fermentation of grains neutralised the dangerous strains of microbes into a healthy, safe and fun drink: beer. Therefore, fermentation has saved billions of lives.

For our purposes, several courses of antibiotics, which at some point may have saved our lives, then also caused death and demise of various beneficial microbial species causing a gut imbalance. This gut microbial imbalance, now works in reverse: instead of helping the body systemically, it now damages it systemically. 

This gist will give an insight: if we’ve damaged our gut microbial population through the abuse of antibiotics, and many other causes, replacing/resupplying this microbial population with species known to science as beneficial, will give back the body its army of helpful microbes and restore the body’s health: systemically. And, this is what does happen, when on the GAPS Protocol, the body is given various types of microbes through home fermentation and if needed, commercial probiotic supplements.

Therefore, go ahead, ferment fruits, vegetables and dairy and reap the harvest of great health.

Warning: do not assume that regular drinking of commercial beer is healthy. It is not. An occasional beer is fine, but not regularly. It may cause hormonal imbalances and oestrogen imbalance effects that you do not want.