The GAPS Diet: The Mother Of All Diets?

A few of you have been asking me about the GAPS diet and how it can
positively affect children's behavior. Here is a good synopsis of how
it works and some more information.

-- Dr. Tom Cowan

www.sustainlane.com/reviews/dr-thomas-s-cowan/4Y28I8AV3NPB3NZTLTBY1A1S4VYD

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FOCUS: GAPS Diet

Back a number of years ago there was a startling paper published in
The Lancet, the biggest English language medical journal in the world.
The article was by a researcher named Andrew Wakefield, who claimed he
had discovered the cause of autism.

What Wakefield did was to take a number of children with autism, do
small intestine biopsies on them and from those he discovered that
they had abnormally wide holes in their small intestinal lining. He
postulated that these holes in their intestines were allowing proteins
to leak from the inside of the bowel into the bloodstream, and that
these foreign proteins were acting like neuro-toxins and interfering
with the neurological functioning of these children. He further went
on to say that these intestinal defects were caused by the MMR
vaccine. This last part is what became big news. In fact, I can
remember clearly watching a 60 Minutes show about this, in which
Wakefield showed the biopsies, named some of the proteins which were
found to leak through the intestinal wall, and made the case as to why
he thought it was caused by the MMR vaccine.

Interestingly, the media and the medical establishment attacked
Wakefield, not for the theory of autism (which as far as I know has
never really been disputed) but for claiming it was caused by the MMR
vaccine. The shame of this is that Wakefield had in fact uncovered one
of the most important mechanisms which lead people to get and stay
sick, but he got the cause wrong. Not that I'm a big fan of the MMR
vaccine but, as claimed by the medical establishment, there are many
autistic children who have never had this vaccine. In other words,
while the vaccine is not healthy for a child's immune system or even
their gut flora, Wakefield was off base in claiming it was the sole
cause of what he called autistic entero-colitis. It is the
entero-colitis that is the big news here.

Parallel to this story of Dr. Wakefield, a neurologist in England
named Natasha Campbell-McBride had a son with autism and was not
finding much help in the conventional medical world. Her own research
into the problem convinced her that the problem does stem from the
gut, and so she set about to heal her son's intestines and see what
effect that would have on his autism. Many years later, having
essentially healed her son of autism and treated hundreds of other
such patients, we have the program now called the GAPS (Gut And
Psychology Syndrome) diet.

The theory of this diet is that we have millions of intestinal villi,
which are tiny finger-like hairs projecting into the intestine. These
villi increase dramatically the surface area of the intestinal lining,
making it a more effective semi-permeable barrier, which means it
keeps unwanted things out of our bloodstream while absorbing the
nutrients. These villi are covered with a layer of healthy intestinal
flora, in some estimates about five to seven pounds of millions of
varied bacteria, viruses, yeast and other microbes.

As I said in the flu article above, these healthy bacteria are vital
for healthy life. They make vitamins, they digest food, they make
antibiotic substances to keep down pathogens and they function as our
immune system. I tell my patients that this system is analogous to a
lush meadow with a thick layer of soil (the villi) covered by a lush
layer of grass (the healthy bacteria). When both are intact, the
meadow is healthy, but if you went to the meadow and stripped off the
grass (this would be the equivalent of using an antibiotic in a
person, or even not eating probiotic food), a whole cascade of
catastrophic events will follow. First, you will get erosion of the
soil, then the soil that's left will be weak and unsupportive of
healthy grasses. Weaker varieties of grass will grow or even no grass
at all. Next, as the soil develops erosion cracks, poisons, runoff,
etc., will start to seep into the ground water. At this point the land
is dying.

This is exactly what happens inside us. First we strip our grass, then
the soil erodes - the villi get weak and blunted, and then can't
support healthy micro-orgnisms. The cracks develop, and finally
poisons seep into our groundwater, the blood. We now have foreign
proteins in our blood, which either directly poison our nervous system
(i.e. autism) or create antibody formation in reaction to these
abnormal proteins, which is the whole process of auto-immune illness.
Diseases which are the direct result of this process include not only
intestinal diseases such as IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), ulcerative
colitis and Crohn's disease, but all the auto- immune problems such as
eczema, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and on and on. It is not a
stretch to confirm what natural medicine has claimed for literally
thousands of years: The majority of human illness starts in the gut
and must be healed by treating the gut.

There is one more part of the GAPS diet theory which is crucial to
understanding how this illness comes about and why it is so
debilitating. These intestinal villi are the sole site in the body
where production of an enzyme called disaccharidase occurs. Just as
lipases digest lipids (fats) and proteases digest proteins, these
disaccharidases digest disaccharides. When the villi become blunted,
they lose the ability to make this important enzyme, and we lose the
ability to digest disaccharides. When we keep eating foods with
disaccharides and can't digest them, they become perfect food for the
pathogens that always reside in our gut, particularly species of
candida. We then produce an overgrowth of candida, other yeasts,
clostridia and other potent pathogens - and these often make unhealthy
proteins instead of the B vitamins made by our healthy gut flora.

At this point we are deeply immersed in an unhealthy vicious cycle:
poor gut flora, eroding villi, cracks in our intestinal walls, poor
enzyme products, eating food we can't digest, worse flora, more
erosion, worse nutrition, more leaking, worse and worse immune
function, more and more toxicity, finally the diagnosis of
auto-immunity or a neurological problem. This is GAPS. Luckily it is
totally reversible, and many of these patients can be restored to full
health.

The therapeutic strategy is fairly simple: Restore the gut flora, heal
the villi, seal the cracks. We heal the villi with the Nourishing
Traditions diet with a particular emphasis on soup broth, the magic
gut restoring food. We replant the villi grass with probiotic foods
and Biokult (a probiotic developed by Natasha McBride for the GAPS
program), and until we are healed we completely avoid all foods which
contain disaccharides: grains, most beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes,
most sweeteners, milk (but not other cultured dairy products), and a
few other foods. I use this program extensively in my practice now as
a transition to the full Nourishing Traditions diet for those who
suffer from the above mentioned illness.

We have a lot of information on how to implement this diet and a
support group where GAPS patients can share their stories. The results
have been probably the most gratifying of anything I have seen in my
years of doing medicine. We would like to share one such story to help
you realize that this effective program, while admittedly tough, is
also rewarding and do-able for those who want to really heal these
otherwise intractable illnesses.