Read the Transcript Below the Bio
If you suffer from a gut issue – from indigestion to gas and bloating or Crohn’s, Colitis etc then this interview is a must watch. Dr. Natasha reveals the diet that has helped millions get back their gut health and reverse everything from autism to MS.
Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride is a medical doctor with two postgraduate degrees: Master of Medical Sciences in Neurology and Master of Medical Sciences in Human Nutrition.
She graduated as a medical doctor in Russia. After practicing for five years as a Neurologist and three years as a Neurosurgeon she started a family and moved to the UK, where she got her second postgraduate degree in Human Nutrition. She practices in the UK as a nutritionist and not as a medical doctor.
She is well known for developing a concept of GAPS (Gut And Psychology Syndrome), which she described in her book Gut And Psychology Syndrome – Natural Treatment for Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Depression and Schizophrenia, now in its second edition. Thousands of people around the world follow the highly successful GAPS Nutritional Protocol to help themselves and their families. You can learn about GAPS on www.gaps.me
In her clinic, Dr. Campbell-McBride works as a nutritional consultant with many patients with heart disease, high blood pressure, arrhythmia, stroke and other complications of atherosclerosis. She has become acutely aware of the existing confusion about nutrition and these conditions, which spurred an intensive study into this subject. The result of this study was her book Put Your Heart In Your Mouth! – What Really Is Heart Disease And What We Can Do To Prevent And Even Reverse It.
Dr. Campbell-McBride is a keynote speaker at many professional conferences and seminars around the world. She frequently gives talks to health practitioners, patient groups, and associations. She is also a Member of The Society of Authors, The British Society for Ecological Medicine, and is a Director on the Advisory Board of The Weston A Price Foundation. She has contributed to many books on nutrition and is a regular contributing health editor to a number of magazines and newsletters.
Books:
- Gut and Psychology Syndrome: Natural Treatment for Autism, Dyspraxia, A.D.D., Dyslexia, A.D.H.D., Depression, Schizophrenia
- Put Your Heart in Your Mouth: Natural Treatment for Atherosclerosis, Angina, Heart Attack, High Blood Pressure, Stroke, Arrhythmia, Peripheral Vascular Disease
- Vegetarianism Explained: Making an Informed Decision
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TRANSCRIPT:
This is auto-generated and may have mistakes. Please listen to the interview for accuracy.
[00:01] REENA JADHAV: Hi everyone its Reena Jadhav with the live longer podcast and HealthBootcamps. And today we have truly a goddess in gut healing as I call her; Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride is a trained MD who is the founder of the GAPS protocol the gaps program which is one of the programs that I followed when I had my huge gut health crisis a couple of years ago. She is a trained MD and has a post graduate in Neurology and she has a beautiful story where’ when she first got started she has been practicing the 5 years as a neurologist, 3 years as a neuro- surgeon, she started her family and then very shortly after that her son was diagnosed autistic and that prompted her journey into creating the gaps program where she worked with thousands of patients after she had help heal her son completely from being on the autistic spectrum and was able to bring the brilliance of her research and her program, the GAPS protocol to the world. I am so excited to have you here with us today Dr. Natasha welcome.
[01:10] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: Thank you for inviting me I’m glad to be here.
[01:12] REENA JADHAV: Absolutely, so let’s get started with the first most important question that has been in my mind for the years that I was doing this protocol, how you decided to create this protocol? What was the brilliant insight that you saw in your research that led you to create this?
[01:34] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: I realized for my own child and all the thousands of patients that I saw in my clinic that all this conditions that they see is coming from one place. And it isn’t a new idea at all it is stated by the fathers you mentioned all those thousands of years ago; that all disease begins in the gut. And I realized pretty much with every patient that I saw, just how correct he was in this that every disease begins in the gut. And that’s were we have to begin, no matter how far away the symptoms might manifest from the digestive system, might be in the brain, might be in the lungs, might be in the joints, might be in the skin, the roots of this disorder are in the digestive system. And now having worked within my clinic, worked with the gaps nutritional protocol for more than twenty years now, I am surer of that than ever. I just get confirmation on that every single day. When we talk about the digestive system, we have to talk about what lives there and what takes care of it, what’s the medicine in that microbiome community that lives inside the digestive system which is called gut flora only in few years. But the research in that area was going on for the last 100 years in different countries around the world. And I was familiar with that research because one of the major obstacles of that research was solid union and that’s where I grew up, that where I was trained as a medical doctor. So I knew what gaps would have done for us and how it can affect the human health. Now we know about 90% of all cells in the human body, 90% are in our gut flow, so your body is only 10% it’s a shell habitat for this muscle microbes that live inside us and with more than a thousand calories it is a very sophisticated, very complex community of various creatures, tiny viruses, bacteria to moving to larger protozoa, then moving to larger fungi and then moving to flux and worms and later long things. And all this things live with a harmony with each other and in a harmony with your body and that is when the body is healthy and the gut when everything is healthy and there is harmony and all this species of micro and other creatures in there they habit each other and they eat each other and they control each other; they don’t allow anyone to get out of control to over grow and to start causing trouble. Problem is we human beings are very good in creating imbalances, very good at that and we have been at it creating imbalances but not only outside our bodies but inside our bodies too for the last 78 years possibly longer. Ever since antibiotics were discovered and humanity started using them in large amounts in the ‘60s starting from ‘60s, ‘70s, every time we take a blood spectrum antibiotic we kill off a large portion of bacteria in our digestive system; these bacteria were controlling all kind of other creatures, creatures which are resistance to antibiotics, antibiotics don’t touch them, so when this bacteria are wiped out all this other creatures suddenly find that they are not controlled anymore and so they will grow and they will produce babies very quickly and they will occupy large lushes in the digestive system; the bacteria do recover in the cause of antibiotics was short and if they don’t happen very often they do recover but different species take between two weeks to two months to recover and that’s the window opportunity for those other microbes and other life forms in the gut to establish themselves to grow, so the recovery bacteria have a fight on their hands. So from a cause of antibiotics to the next cause of antibiotics, to the next cause of antibiotics, to the next cause of antibiotics there is less and less balance in the gut and more and more imbalance and developing. At a certain threshold in when the balance is gone and that when your gut wall become pathogenic when there are all kind of creatures that have grown in there, whoever has won, whoever had got a different positions in there and whatever deals they make with everybody around its an unhealthy situation. They digest food in the wrong way converting it into thousands of very toxic poison substances. At the same time the damage the gut wall making it leaking which is closed in developing the gut wall as a result things that we should not absorb in the gut wall start absorbing. Foods don’t get the chance to be digested properly before they absorb, they absorb partially digested and undigested; and when your immune system finds them in the blood most of them say you are not food and attacks them and that attack manifests itself as food logy or intolerance and it can be anything from under the sun depending where this complex gets to, with digestive food with all the immune cells attached to them; if they get in your joints you will get arthritis, if they get in your brain you will get psychological mental problems, if they get in your lungs you will get asthma or something else, if they get into your skin you can get thrushes, eczema or something else another rash; so whenever they get they cause problems. And then all this toxics that the gut floor manufactures also absorb as a result in a person like that they digestive system must be a source of nourishment for the person becomes the main major source of toxicity and poison. Every toxic things move from the gut into the blood into the limbs and get distributed all over the body and wherever this things get to, they cause symptoms, they cause problems, and they cause diseases. So the disease can manifest itself quite far away from the digestive system but the cause of it; the root cause of it is likely to be in the digestive system. This situation I have called gaps, gap and psychology syndrome or gap and physiology syndrome. In the English language both abbreviate the same- GAPS. Gaps in psychology syndrome- is the book that I have written in 2004 in its second edition and it describes what can happen with the brain of a person and how your mental illness develop and how your disability develops. Gaps in physiology syndrome is the you have given to the whole of the rest of the body which covers asthma, eczema, arthritis, enteritis various autoimmune disease, very various physical problems that can develop in the body of a person who has guts, who has damaged gut flora, damaged gut wall where the digestive system instead of feeding the person is actually poisoning the person and triggering a whole cascade of problems and symptoms.
[08:54] REENA JADHAV: And that was me! Right, Dr. Natasha and I were chatting before we started the recording and that was really me, and I think people don’t understand that when you get that toxic you can actually die from it, the gut is the core that’s keeping us alive, that’s keeping us healthy and to your point you know we are 90% flora and bacteria, and viruses and other amazing organisms that are in our gut only 10% human so to speak and so if we don’t take really good care of our gut you know it’s obvious what can happen and I have lived through that once. So the question is, yeah I personally understand it extremely well, I mean your gut can end up becoming an empty pipe where you are losing a pound a week because it doesn’t matter what you eat nothing is getting absorbed. So the question I have for you Dr. Natasha is, what has changed in the last decade two decades that we are starting to see so this epidemic of gut issue and of course autism as an example in itself has exploded you know the numbers of children that are suffering from autism has risen to ridiculers numbers and the forecast is even worse we are looking of about 1 in 10 kids will be autistic in the next couple of decades. What is the reason for this?
[10:23] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: The reason for this is the environment that the humans have created on our planet. Particularly after the second world war that’s when the environment really started changing and the second you will know what happened with the environment changing our chemical industry is producing chemicals that’s used in nature and we are exposed to this things, the antibiotics people are taking to prescription only, our food is raised from antibiotics because all pesticides and fungicides and many other chemicals that are sprayed on our fields and vegetables, fruits and grains and beans and all other plants that are grown commercially use these chemicals and this chemicals are antibiotics, every time you eat bread, pasta, grains, vegetables, fruits, you are eating antibiotics; you are damaging the gut, the composition of your gut flora. Commercially grown animals and everything these animals give us the meat, milk, eggs, fish also farm fish are hugely given antibiotics because of the way they are grown it’s very unhealthy it’s very un-natural to these animals of these animals are unhealthy so antibiotics are given to them routinely. So every time we eat animal food we are consuming antibiotics and many chemicals in our environment are antibiotics in their nature. So our gut flora has been sustaining an attack on us starting from the Second World War even before then. But the very important thing is our gut flora is passed, parents pass their gut flora on to their child at the moment of birth. For a long time we thought that a baby is sterile while the baby spends 9 months inside the mother now recent research has discovered that uterus is not sterile, placenta is not sterile, we have placenta flora, we have uterine flora, we have flora in our abdominal cavity, in the fallopian tubes, we’ve got flora everywhere. So baby start acquiring flora from the mother during pregnancy but the bulk of the gut flora comes in when the baby goes to the birth canal at the moment of birth. The baby swallows mouth full of microbes that live in the mother’s vagina; vagina is a richly populated part of the woman’s body and vaginal flora comes from two sources, one is her own bowel so if a woman has got abnormal gut flora she will have abnormal flora in her vagina and that what she will pass to her baby during the moment of birth and second source is the father, the father will have his own flora in the groin and all the organs in the groin that he shares with the mother on a regular basis and that flora comes from his bowel; so if a father has abnormal gut flora, he will have abnormal flora in the grain and that is what he is sharing with the mother on the basis. That’s how both parents pass their flora to the baby at the moment of birth. Babies who are born through a C-Section their flora is more opportunistic that comes from the hands from people who will cut the baby from the nipples of the mother, if the child is breast fed and from the environment so usually babies who are born through C-Section have less diversity in their gut, diversity is everything, we need to have a full diversity of different… different microbes all being present in the gut and babies who are born vaginally get their full diversity than babies who are born through a C-Section. Before I talk about the health of a child in my clinic I always talk about the health of the parents first and siblings and the health of the grandparents. And a typical picture has emerged, your grandparents in the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s maybe had a couple of questions of antibiotics because antibiotics only started coming on to the market, they damaged their gut flora slightly; then they passed that slightly damaged gut flora to their children who will then ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and these children grow up in a very different world, very… very different world. First of all antibiotics were given to them for our childhood for every cough and sneeze that means their gut got flora, secondly junk food came into the market at the same time with foods which feeds absolutely pathogenic species in the gut and all the composition of the gut flora. Then breastfeeding went out of fashion and when the formula milk came on the market at the same time, breastfeeding is actually essential for a child to develop normal gut flora because it encourages the natural growth composition of micro formula. No formula milk can ever come close in this quality to the breast milk, so many of this youngsters were not breastfed and the amount of chemicals that they were exposed to during their childhood is increasing over time and then at the age of 14 and 15, 16, that generation of young people are put on the contraceptive pill which they took for quite a few years before they were ready to start their family. Contraceptive pill has a very devastating effect on the gut flora, so by the time this generation of youngsters start their family they are passing serious damage gut flora to their babies and with every generation that you see this is getting very deeper and deeper, worse and worse. Those that are having their children this year are passing worse gut flora to their babies and babies will have even last year or three years ago or five years ago; every year this situation is getting worse and worse, its and epidemic and all the gut epidemic, think of the abnormality in the gut flora its getting deeper and deeper and it’s this epidemic that is the new root course underlining all other epidemics that we see. A child, who acquired that normal gut flora from their parent’s from day one of their life, acquired compromised constitution. This child is not going to react to the observations appropriately, this child is not going to be able to digest food appropriately and this child could end up developing autism and hyper-activity, allergies, asthma, eczema, diabetes type 1 and all other conditions that are have gained epidemic proportions in the western world in particular. Indeed there is an epidemical autism, it is predicted now, when I started practicing as a medical doctor we were diagnosing one child in 10,000 autistic, today we are diagnosing one child at 35, 36. The has already projected that line to 2020s and they are projecting that by 2020s we will be diagnosing one child in two. In two not in ten, so half of our children, half of our boys I particular will be autistic and the other half is not going to be healthy either because they will have hyper-activity, diabetes type 1, arthritis, schizophrenia you name it. All kinds of conditions are becoming epidemic.
[17:50] REENA JADHAV: It’s a question of survival and you know no one is talking about it but the more I listen to doctors like yourself, Dr. McLennan and others doctors like… I feel like it’s an essential crisis for us right, we at least in America I’m sure we don’t have this kind of chemical and antibiotic lased issues in some parts of the world but here in America I feel like it’s almost a crisis of existence for the future generations.
[18:24] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: America is at the forefront of this epidemic it has the worst statistics.
[18:28] REENA JADHAV: Natasha you have deemed a very… very grump very blink picture of the fact that we are looking at a future that’s a very sick future for ourselves and our children and our grandchildren God forbid. Let’s start talking about the effects. So the first thing you mentioned is we all have toxic guts and I can tell you from my own experience I was one of them and I had to take rifaximin, I had SIBO, I had leaky gut and when I had my gut testing done by viom a few months ago, it’s still despite me now feeling really good 15 months later it still said that I had an over growth of pathogenic bacteria, I don’t have a lot of variety and I have very few healthy species and I was blown away because I thought I was doing so great and that my gut could have you know balanced itself out I was going to get this A grade as I say on my test on my gut test I would have an A and it’s still a C. So let’s start with because this is a series of questions you know let’s start with first of all what are the most important things someone can do today starting immediately to get their gut not being toxic.
[19:51] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: Okay, I have developed the gut nutritional protocol, it is a program and the most important part of it is the diet logically, because we are dealing with digestive disorders and our digestive system is a long tube, what you fill that tube with has a direct effect on its well being so diet is absolutely not optional it is the most important. My patients have called the diet that I have created the gaps diet and what we do in that diet we change the gut flora we alter the gut flora, we bring much in molecules and we heal and fill the gut wall, we close all those holes in the gut wall, so foods have the chance to be digested properly before it absorbs and as a result food[inaudible] disappears naturally, instead of focusing on the food we focus on the gut wall we need to close it up, we need to seal it and the beauty of the gut is that its lined by very specialized cells called parasites and they just live for a few days; human body doesn’t waste time on healing a sick cell it just kills it and removes it and to replace it; it gives birth to a new baby cell, to replace it new virgin beautiful baby cell. But if a person still has damaging elements that are going on in the gut or elsewhere in the body, this new born baby cells get damaged immediately so as they are born and as a result the disease gets in the picture. But if you remove the damaging element if you change the gut flora and the external force then the gut will rebuild itself. So what we do with that gut is basically build a new gut for the person, create a new gut. And what the gut does, it removes all the foods that are difficult to digest and which feeds pathogenic microbes in the gut and at the same time we provide intensive nourishment for the gut wall because in order for the gut wall to rebuild itself it has to give birth to trillions of new baby cells and the cell has to be made of something, building materials are required so the gut will provide intensive amounts of building materials to give birth to cells for the body to give birth to those trillions of cells to rebuild new gut wall for the person. And once that moment happens, it can take for a few months for a person with a milder condition to a few years for a person with a more severe situation. And once that happens, it happens gradually that evil toxicity that was coming from the gut into the blood and being distributed all over the body, stops and once it stops the body starts cleaning itself up removing toxics, removing chemicals and rebuilding itself; because all cells in human body in every organs including the brain only live a short life they die and they get replaced by newly born cells. And as long as we keep pilling in the building materials to give birth to those baby cells to the healthy and young and vibrant and as long as we have removed the toxins the body will clean itself and the body will rebuild itself. Your brain can rebuild itself, your blood brain body can rebuild themselves, your lungs can rebuild themselves, your joints can rebuild themselves, your bones can rebuild themselves, and everything in the body can be rebuilt and can be cleaned. As a result of a kind all kinds of a long list of diseases that our medicine continue to be incurable, simply because they don’t have the cure, they don’t have the answer that is why they are called incurable but that doesn’t mean that the answer doesn’t exist elsewhere, I see people recovering from these disorders daily and I don’t know how many people now to recover from multiple sclerosis and some from arthritis and some from lupus and some from schizophrenia and autism and ADHD all kind of conditions that are generally considered to be incurable and it had just proven to me again and again that human body is the healer, human body is a miraculous creation it is the clinical of evolution in nature. It has all the programs of healing and repairing itself and rejuvenating itself; program is your body. All you have to do is remove the damaging elements that keep damaging the body and give the body building materials, give the body recourses and the body will heal itself, it will clean itself, it will heal itself , it will be good itself no matter how incurable disease might be it would be pronounced by your nation.
[24:54] REENA JADHAV: So Dr. Natasha what feeds the bad bacteria and what feeds the good bacteria?
[25:02] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: Well, gut diet is quite a large area, it’s a lot to talk about, it’s quite complex but we remove all the processed foods all the junk foods we remove all starch, starch is the biggest problem for people with digestive disorders, because starch is a big molecule under a microscope very difficult to digest. Even for people with gut fine digesting starch most of it goes undigested and when it is undigested it’s a perfect food for microbes the good and the bad and when your gut is dominated by beneficial microbes they will feed on the starch they get stronger and they make you healthier as a result. Once in the gut they digest by pathogenic flora, it is the pathogens that feed on the starch, on the fiber and they get stronger and they make you sicker as a result. So everything starchy has to be removed out of the diet for long enough period of time to allow the gut to heal itself, to rebuild itself and then when the person has fully recovered starch can be re-introduced. Starch is contained in all grains whether they are gluten free non gluten free it doesn’t matter gluten is a separate issue, completely separate issue but because we remove all grains from gaps diet, gaps diet is truly gluten free there are not even traces of it. Starchy vegetables are removed and all processed foods are removed all junk anything in packets and tins anything; everything that the person needs is cooked at home from fresh ingredients that is very… very important and I go a lot into explaining how to get the best quality foods because the king of foods that you can buy in supermarkets is provided to us by our industrial agro chemical complex and it is the worst food you can buy. You will be surprised to hear that 75% of all the 7.6 billion people who live on our planet 75% are not fed by that industrial agriculture they will be keen to give you the idea that they are feeding the world, they are not. 75% of the world is fed by small organic farms and, and small farmers from all over the world. So you will be surprised to find that in your own country and not very far away from you that they are many… many farms who produce excellent quality food organic, the animals are in the sunlight getting pasture, pasture chickens, pasture cows and pasture sheep and pawpaw organic garbage and pawpaw vegetables and fruits and all the other certainties’ and it is not very far from you and it is less expensive. Governments in the western world subsidies agro chemical companies they give them money, nobody is giving money to this organic farmers, the only farmers who really survive are the ones who have a strong customer base; so by buying directly from the farmer, establishing contact with the farmer, visiting the farmer, seeing those chickens, seeing those animals, seeing those happy cows and happy sheep and happy pigs and happy garden you will be supporting something wonderful and at the same time you will be getting good quality food for your own family, for yourselves. So that where we are connecting people and that’s where we start getting the food, very important step.
[28:31] REENA JADHAV: I love that! It is and I followed your recommendation and I ate for 15 months locally grown, farmers market, handpicked foods and I cooked it myself twice a day I very much followed your protocol and here I am to say it definitely healed. What would you recommend in terms of the foods that help to heal, so we took the starches out, we took all the grains out, what are the foods that actually help heal and feed the good bacteria?
[29:06] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: Well, the most staple of the guts diet is a good quality meat stack, I have all the recipes in my book in the gaps book where we use all the cheap bits of the animal to make the stack we want bones, we want joints we want both head, feet, skin, off cuts because all of them have the highest nutrient contents and this will provide with hundred times more nutrients than a piece of muscle of the animal; the muscle is actually the least nourishing part of the animal, the most nourishing of the organs and the joints with the ligaments and the bone marrow and the skin and the feet and the head and all this kind of things. So that’s what we are looking for, that’s why when we buy meat we buy from an organic farmer a proper farmer who butchers his own animals and we can talk and we can see the animals and know how they kill and how they grew up and what goes into them and then you can buy the whole animal, you can buy the whole lamb cut into pieces for you and you get a large freezer put in your garage or somewhere else in your house you can get second hand and put all the meat in there. So every day you can buy a half a pig , you can buy a quarter of a cow, you can buy 10 chickens, 10 ducks so your freezer is full; so every day every morning when you wake up in the morning you don’t need to say like oh I need to go to the supermarket to think what I’m going to have for dinner, you go to your garage to your freezer, pick your piece of meat out thatch or put it in a slow cooker in the morning before you go to work and in the evening when you come back its ready there for you all you need to do is just add a few vegetables and you are done. Another very… very important; what this meat stacks do and all they provide the concentrated nutrition for those little cells that your gut to help grow healthy and to keep them work. They will rebuild your gut wall, it’s simple, inexpensively and then delicious, nutritious and they keep for a long time once you have made a good meat stack you keep in the fridge for 10 days at least; so you can always make yourself a meal out of that.
[31:24] REENA JADHAV: What are your thoughts on the ready-made new sort of bone broths that are invading our supermarkets? What are your thoughts on buying something right off the shelves versus making it yourself?
[31:36] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: On the GAPS protocol we do not start with bone broth so there is a difference between bone broth and meat stack-we use meat stack. Please read my book the recipes are there it explains. I know bone broth have become popular do not start from the bone broth. It is important you start with the meat stack it’s very different. Another part of the GAPS diet is actually essential are fermented foods and we ferment them at home. We make our own fermentric vegetables and fermentric dairy products and you can ferment meat, you can ferment fish, anything can be fermented really. Fermented foods are not optional for human beings because if you think about it for most of our existence on the planet, we didn’t have supermarkets where you can buy anything at any season. Foods were seasonal and we didn’t have any refrigeration so things did not keep long so if your cabbages, you worked very hard the whole summer growing your cabbages protecting them from slugs and snails and birds and anything else, and you have got a lovely harvest of cabbages. Natural cabbages that you grow in your own garden would not keep even a week- it will rot, it will wilt, it will be gone and for the rest of the year you will have no cabbage. For most of us this is no planning because there were no supermarkets where you can buy cabbage anytime of the year so what did people do? To preserve-they fermented it, the made sauerkraut, they made fermented cabbage, and they made kimchi because sauerkraut can keep for 5 years minimum. It keeps for years it doesn’t spoil and the beauty of fermented food is that the bacteria in the process of fermentation predigests the food and releases nutrients into the mixture. For example, healthy sauerkraut has 20 times more bio available vitamin C in it than the same healthy fresh cabbage. Because in the fresh cabbage Vitamin C is locked in, the cellular structure of the cabbage and your digestive system can’t extract it. It just goes through you and doesn’t do you any good. While a sauerkraut, the bacteria have already released it out of the cellular structure into the mixture and you can absorb it in this when you eat sauerkraut. James Cook the famous British explorer who discovered Australia and New Zealand and half the world, he never had scurvy on his ships. He had barrels and barrels of sour cabbage as they called it and every sailor was obliged to eat a healthy sour cabbage every single day that is why they never had scurvy. They didn’t know about Vitamin C in those days, they just knew that sour cabbage prevents bleeding gums and that’s why they had it then. So fermented food is predigested, it’s much easier for the human digestive system to digest, to break down. It is teaming with predigested nutrition they are very nourishing and at the same time they are teaming with beneficial microbes-this is the pro-biotic foods and because humanity didn’t have supermarkets and refrigeration for thousands and thousands of years, people ate most of their food for breakfast, lunch and dinner in a fermented form. Everything can be fermented meat, fish, grain, beans, vegetables, fruits, berries anything can be fermented. So people made beverages, people made fermented vegetables, they fermented their meat, they fermented their fish and as a result, a very large percent of human diet for most of all existence on this planet was fermented. And that goes building towards our physiology and only in the recent times fairly recent times, in the last few decades has the food industry changed all our recipes. We stopped having these foods, we stopped eating them and we even got chased out of the kitchens, they have lost all the recipes, they have forgot how to cook altogether and we are depriving our physiology of something very important and that is what we are doing at GAPS nutritional protocol we bring it back. We bring all the fermented foods back, we teach people how to ferment at home and once you have done several jobs of that sauerkrauts it will keep for many years and you will have a good supply of anything and it is very easy to make and very nourishing food. So this is the true elements of the GAPS diet.
[36:02] REENA JADHAV: What do you think of adding probiotics from a refrigerator section or taking external probiotics to give your body some healthy diversity and some healthy bacteria?
[36:14] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: That is the second part of the GAPS nutritional protocol- supplements. We have a short list of supplements, which are really foods because you can spend a lot of money on supplements it’s a huge business but human body has been designed to receive its nourishment in the form of foods not in the form of pills. That is very important to remember and GAPS diet has the nutrients dense diet-it will remove food nutrition deficiencies in your body fairly quickly and fairly completely. You will find that fairly soon being on this diet you won’t even need any supplements at all because they are expensive but in the usual stages for certain patients, commercial pro-biotics are very helpful and we use some cod-liver oil, and we use some fish oils and in some patients we use digestive enzymes and in other groups of patients, we use some specified specific supplements which can be very helpful if you know what you are doing. You know that you know what you are doing you need to work with a practitioner. For the last 10 years now, I have been training health practitioners. We have more than 2000 health practitioners all over the world who are certified GAPS practitioners but are trained how to implement the protocol. They are listed on my website gaps.me, they are listed by countries, and in America, they are listed by State so you can find the practitioners close to you but if it is not close to you then what you are required is work by phone and by Skype or any other media that is suitable. So we have that health now and we are designing a course now for training people not to be practitioners but to be advisors and what these people will do, these are people who went to the GAPS nutritional protocol themselves with their families maybe with their children, maybe through their own illnesses, so they are already experienced. They have a lot of experience because of their past. We are going to train these people, they will become GAPS advisors, and these will be hands on people. These will be people who will be able to come into your home and if you have fatigue, if you are tired, if you don’t have time to cook or you just come here round to get organized. This person will come into your house, cook with you, prepare meals with you, answer your questions, and support you. Give you hands on support in your own home if you need that kind of support particularly in the initial stages because we have discovered that practitioners are wonderful, they can give good advice and they know what they are talking about but many people are so tired, so fatigued, so dilapidated particularly people with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, NMH and many other conditions. They need hands on help; they need a qualified person who is there with them most of the day, who can hold their hands and take them through the whole thing. So we are designing that course right now and we are setting up GAPS training company it will be one-half called GAPS training where we will have various courses for various people. We already have a course for practitioners, training practitioners; we will have the GAPS advisor course, very soon we will have a cooking class, cooking course for cooking GAPS recipes and other courses will come along as well.
[39:48] REENA JADHAV: How many people have gone through the GAPS protocol do you think?
[39:52] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: Nobody is counting but from where l stand and I could guess millions. My book has been translated into 18 languages; the information is all over the world, people are following this protocol in all kinds of countries all over the world and I have practitioners all over the world. We are now doing pactitioning of course in different languages all over the world.
[40:22] REENA JADHAV: Could you share a little bit about the way the actual protocol works? Do you have an introduction phase, the full phase? Just so, our audience and our listeners get a better sense of what exactly is the GAPS diet. How do you start? How do you end? What happens in the middle?
[40:40] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: GAPS diet is divided into two. One is called the introduction diet, another one is the full GAPS diet. You don’t have to start from the introduction diet. You can start from either depending on your practical, on your situation in your life. If your kitchen is not set up, if you haven’t found the food yet, if you are not organized yet, or you need to learn to cook, you need to learn the recipes, start from the full GAPS diet. You will achieve huge amounts of healing with that diet but it will also allow you to reap out and will give you much wider choice of foods. Introduction diet is something that you need to do when you are well organized and you have time to be at home and time to cook, and time to really dedicate to your health and to your diet because GAPS introduction diet will achieve deeper healing. It’s very powerful, it’s extremely powerful but it is hard. It takes a lot of dedication and perseverance and a lot of time that needs to be put into it. You need to be prepared for practical reasons to do it so when it comes to children I recommend doing the introduction diet when the child goes on holiday. The diet requires you deal with it away from school because during the school and you try to do the introduction diet it is very difficult. It is best to do it in the long holiday, summer holiday, Easter holiday or Christmas holiday at those times of the year and for adults it’s a good idea to be at home for a while. To be able to cook, to be able to rest, to be able to dedicate to your health it’s very important. So we don’t really have time to go into great detail about GAPS diet but what I would like to talk about is animal foods versus plant foods. This is something very important for people to understand that animal foods and plant foods work very differently in the human body. I had to learn this; I had to really research and study this subject because in my clinic I have got lots of anorexia girls and a lot of young people with depression and bipolar disorder and certain mental illnesses. What I have discovered the person became ill because of deprived veggie deficiency particularly albinism and that brought an intensive study into this area and into how the animal foods work and how the plant foods work in the human body. And what I now understand is because of the way the human digestive system is structured, only animal foods really feed and build the human body, these are the feeding building foods. They build your heavy muscles, your heavy bones, your big heavy brain, your lungs, your heart, digestive system, and the rest of the body while plant foods do not really provide much feeding for the human body. Their purpose in nature and their purpose for us to eat them is in their cleansing ability, they are powerful cleansers. They keep the human body clean on the inside. It is important for the human body to be well fed and to be clean that is why we combine the two. It is possible for a human person from my clinical experience with gaps; it is possible for human beings to live entirely without plants very healthfully. I started working with this idea developed several years ago when I was working with a group of children with ulcerative colitis very serious situation and these children just cannot digest any amount of plant matter. They just cannot handle any fiber at all because all plants contain fiber so the origin of introduction died and they were removing and removing plants until we finished up with no plants at all in these children’s diet. They had no plant matter at all. They live on meat stack, on meat, on fish, on eggs and on fermented dairy-these children and I have my children who have been on this diet for 6 years-beautiful children. They recovered from ulcerative colitis, they recovered from autism, they recovered from mental illnesses, all kinds of things, rosy cheeks, bushy tails, playing sports, doing very well at school, everything else. But they have returned and tried to introduce a little bit of plant matter, symptoms started returning in these children and I have adults like that with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses and people with multiple sclerosis and rheumatism who are very well and healthy. They have recovered from their disorder fully but as soon as they tried to introduce a little bit of plant matter, they regret or symptoms start returning in these people. We haven’t found an answer there yet. But why? But the fact is that is what my clinical experience has taught me and demonstrated to me that human beings can live perfectly healthy without plants at all. However, human beings cannot live without animal foods. They cannot because only animal foods have the right kind of protein and the right kind of fat to build the human body. Remember I mentioned this to you that human body renews itself all the time. All cells in the human body only have a short life, they get old, they get worn out, and they get killed and removed and replaced by newly born baby cells. You know that you give birth to those cells building material very quiet so what are the cells made from? So we take away water from the human body-about 70% of your body is water. The dry weight is about 50-50 proteins and fat, half fat-half protein so this is the true structural element that we are made from- our bodies are made from. When we analyze the structure of that protein and the human body [inaudible] we discovered that it’s very similar in its structure to meat, fish, eggs and dairy. Proteins are just perfect in those foods for converting into our own proteins. When we analyze the fat in the human body, we discover that in its biochemical structure its very similar to the lamb fat, beef fat, pork fat, goose fat, duck fat, butter, ghee-perfect fat. So those fats digest very easily in the human digestive system and very easily for your body to convert into its own structural fat because fats in your body are the structural elements. 50% of your dry weight is fat very essential, very important to understand that fats are not optional they are your structure 50% of it. However, when we analyze the protein in the plants, plants have also proteins in it gluten is one example. The more we research gluten the more we discovered nobody can digest gluten. No human being in this planet even those who don’t develop any symptoms from gluten eating gluten cannot tolerate it. It is just that their body builds up and glutton does not show up but the damage is happening. The more we researched proteins in the plants we found out that not only they are indigestible for the human digestive system and have a lot of damaging elements in them like the gluten does. On top of that, their amino acids composition is inappropriate for building your own proteins in your body. Certain amino acids are in short supply, other amino acids are excess, and the whole balance is wrong for building your protein in your body. The famous fats, when we look at the fats in the plant matter, majority of them are pollen saturated and their biochemical structures inappropriate for the human fat. Majority of your fats are saturated or one hand saturated and they have a certain composition and the only perfect fats that can convert easily into our structural fats are animal fats. Plant fats are inappropriate in their biochemical composition so plants are not designed to feed the human body, to build the human body.
[48:46] REENA JADHAV: What about nuts?
[48:48] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: Nuts are very difficult to digest. They are highly fibrous; they have a lot of lectins in them, a lot of see tucks in them, a lot of anti-nutrients. So nuts needs to be treated appropriately in order for them to be digested properly and for people with digestive disorders they are very difficult to handle nuts we have to introduce them quite a bit later. So they will supply you with some good things but they can never replace a piece of meat, or egg or yoghurt or a piece of meat, or a piece of cheese they cannot. What you also need to understand that all energy on our beautiful planet is recycled. New energy comes from the sun. In order to capture that sunlight and convert it into solid matter that somebody can practically eat, Mother Nature painted the plants. They have photosynthesis, they capture the sunlight and capture it into green matter, green mass the solid stuff that we can touch and we can eat. Then in order for something else to benefit from the sunlight in the form of plants, Mother Nature created herbivores animals and in order for these animals to be able to digest the plant matter, Mother Nature gave them very special digestive system called rumen. Cows, giraffes, antelope, deer and other goats and other herbivorous animals, they have a huge multi chain of stomach. A cow has four stomachs and the stomach are full of microbes- a huge community that’s where the bulk of gut floral lives- in a rumen because the fat, the biochemical fat, scientific fat well established in the science is that nobody on this planet can digest plant matter apart from microbes. Only microbes are able to digest plant matter nobody else can do it and this is the fact that Mother Nature used in creating herbivores animals. It packs their rumen full jam packed full of microbes and it is these microbes that digest the grass that the cow eat and they convert it into a fat that they can absorb and the cow can benefit from. And it’s interesting that about 70% of all the carbohydrates in the grass-the plant matter that the cow eats are absorbed in the form of short chain fatty acids-fully saturated fats so a cow actually lives on a very high fat diet and that is because of microbes. Then in order for something else to benefit from sunlight in the form of herbivorous animals, Mother Nature created another group of creatures on the planet omnivores and predators. Our bodies belong in that group. We don’t have a rumen, we only have a tiny little stomach and if that stomach is healthy, it’s virtually sterile, it has virtually no microbes in it because it produces hydrochloric acid and the acidity can go below 1 Ph. 2 or 1 in a healthy stomach when we are hungry, when we are ready to eat and that creates a very hostile environment for any kind of microbe. The only thing that human stomach can digest and really unravel properly are meat, fish, eggs and dairy-The other thing that really digests properly in the stomach and then they get past into the intestines and that’s where the bulk of the absorption happens, so whatever manages to get digested properly into the human stomach gets absorbed in the intestines and that what feeds and builds our bodies. Whatever got undigested or under indigestible goes through those several meters of intestines and lands in the bowel and the bowel is where the bulk of the gut flora is in the human being that’s equivalent to the rumen in the cow in us. The problem is in the cow her rumen is at beginning of the digestive system whereas in us human beings our rumen in the bowel is at the end-it’s too late to do absorption. Absorption has already happened, digestion has already happened so what finishes up in the bowel is plant matter. Fibroids and indigestible-starches are mostly indigestible and this is the two major blocks-building blocks of all the plant matter on the planet and this plant matter feed our flora. We have gut flora in the bowel and whatever that flora can extract, it will then release into the blood stream into the absorption of the starches in the form of salty and fatty acids again though saturated fats that the cow absorbs and some other things to sustain us between meals. But the bulk of digestion and absorption has already happened much higher up in your digestive system in the human beings. That is why feeding, building foods for us are only animal foods. Plants are indigestible for human beings and plants are cleansers, they do not feed us to any degree. People introduced food to the society towards the thousands of years understood this fact very well. That is why they would go a long mile to get meat, to get fish, to get eggs, to get milk and there would be plants to supplement their diet, to supplement what they could get in the animal kingdom and they developed various methods of treating plants in a way that to make them a little bit more digestible, a little bit more feeding, a little bit less cleansing. The more we cook plants, the miff plants of fermentation, mulching, sprouting and cooking makes plants less cleansing but more digestible and more feeding. So this is black and white obviously this traditional is not black and white. Animal products particularly when they are raw not only feed us very well but they have a very powerful cleansing ability. I have discovered that a few years ago that raw egg white actually is one of the most powerful metal collectors. It can collect lead, mercury, and other things out of your body like anticline while plants when they are sprouted, mulching, fermented and cooked can feed the body to a degree but the division is quite strong. That is why veganism is not a diet it is a fast, it is a form of fasting. You come from India.
[55:04] REENA JADHAV: I was going to ask you so how do you explain.
[55:06] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: Right let me talk about this let me talk about India. I went to India several years ago just at a time when I was researching veganism because I was having all these anorexia girls to deal with and the guy told us that all these Hindu pilgrims traveling long distances across India to their sacred sites and they wear special clothes. They wear black clothes with golden reams and the guy told us that part of their pilgrimage is a fast. In the forty, they fast 41-42 day fast and at the time I was on the beach, I came across a group of these pilgrims, I talked to them, and I asked them what kind of fast it is please tell me and they looked so exhausted these people. They looked so tired and they all speak English very well majority of people speak English so we had a good conversation. So I said what kind of fast is it? Are you allowed to eat something or do you just drink water or what? And they you know how they bump their head and they said very difficult and I said what is it? What do you eat? And they said wow we are only allowed to eat listen to this; rice, lentils, beans, vegetables, fruit, bread and vegetable oil. And I said Uh! That’s worse than vegan diet. These people consider it to be a fast and have considered it for millennia to be a fast, they will not do it longer than 42 days, and they said it is very difficult. And what else do you describe talking to your people in India travelling around the Indian that people in India value animal foods far more than plant foods. All the people who live along the coast or oceans and seas eat fish for breakfast lunch and dinner-sea food is their staple. People who live along rivers and lakes also eat a lot of fish. People who live inland and who are vegetarian they are not vegetarian by choice, they are vegetarian out of necessity because they are so many people in India and India was always over populated. If they start eating their animals, they will probably finish them all in two weeks, they will have nothing left. Why do you think the cow was a sacred animal in India? Because these people knew through experience through tens of thousands of years back that without the cow, without ghee, butter, milk, cheese, and cream they will perish because the cow provides them with the only food that sustains and builds their bodies and also these people all have chickens and ducks and they eat a lot of eggs and goats and they value goats milk very much and when they do get meat, when they get any chance to eat meat and fish, they eat it with relish. They eat it. Western veganism had arrived to Indians in 1930s through the activities of some vegan evangelists such as Nathan Patrician and other people who wrote very successful books, which were translated, and they believed after arrived to India and that kind of created some of the religious beliefs into the veganism in someone. But traditionally people in India were vegetarian because of necessity, because of poverty, because of meat not being available that is why, but they always ate lots of dairy and they valued it more than anything else and lots of eggs and when they could get fish and meat they ate them. So that is the picture in India. So veganism is not a diet it is a form of fasting. There are many people in the world that could do with the good fats because their bodies are so toxic so these are the people when they start moving onto a vegan protocol that they feel so much better in the first few weeks because alkaline enables you to feel much better than toxic one. But at a certain point after a few weeks when the body finishes cleansing, it will get hungry and it will ask for an animal food. It will give you desire for a piece of meat, for a pot of cream, for a piece of cheese or for something else animal but the problem is many of these vegans in the western world do it for emotional reasons, political reasons, religious reasons and other reasons. They override the signal from their body, they don’t listen to their body, they force it to continue fasting, to continue being a vegan and that is the point when the body runs out of nutrients and it starts cannibalizing less important tissues such as muscle and bone to feed more important tissue such as the brain, the heart, the lungs and the liver and that is when the person starts getting young. That is when the person starts developing regenerative disease and that is what I see with many youngsters misguided veganism, misguided vegetarianism has become a major cause of mental illness amongst our young people because they don’t know any research, they don’t do any study into the value of food and how to structure their diet. They just continue eating processed what they just remove out is all the animal foods and as a result, the body starts starving and they fall into disease, they fall into illness. So the result of this research is my new book that came out last year called ‘Vegetarianism Explained’. If you know anybody, any young person who is considering a plan based lifestyle please give them that book you might save a life because I have seen so many young people who have destroyed their health and destroyed their lives through misguided veganism, misguided vegetarianism. It is a book that doesn’t dictate anything, it just explains, it just gives them the full spectrum of information and there are good pictures there so it will be enjoyed by 15 year olds and 16 year olds this book because I have written it in an easy to understand language but it is fully referenced for professionals and for scientists.
[1:01:03] REENA JADHAV: Wow this is a bit of fascinating conversation. Wow, I have never heard such support for a meat based diet versus vegetarianism and so I think this is going to create a lot of great conversation for sure. I made sure not to incorporate my views into this interview in terms of vegetarian versus veganism versus a meat dominant diet so Dr. Natasha thank you for sharing clearly your very strong opinions about the importance of incorporating meat diet. For those of you that want to know more details you can definitely check out her book that came out last year. So is it a myth that the bacteria, the good bacteria need plant based fiber and that it needs a lot of fiber? And what are your thoughts on constipation?
[1:01:53] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: What you need to understand at first fiber and starch feed equally the good and the bad microbes in the gut. If you have got a healthy gut flora and your gut is dominated by beneficial microbes, they will feast on the starch, they will feast on the fiber, they get bigger and stronger and as a result you get healthier. But unfortunately a growing proportion of western population has abnormal gut flora. From where I stand, it’s the majority. We get in very rapidly to a situation where pretty much everybody will have damaged gut flora from pathogens, these pathogens will feast on the starch and fiber just as well, they will get stronger, and they will get bigger and as a result make you sicker. That is why in a GAPS introduction diet in particular we have to remove starch. We remove starch in the gut diet altogether but in the introduction diet, we also remove fiber as much as possible out of the people’s diet because they simply can’t be digested and it keeps feeding their pathogens in the digestive system. We have to reestablish normal gut floral first then the person is slowly and gradually will be able to introduce such fine fibrous roots and then when they fully recover, we can bring in starch as well.
[1:03:12] REENA JADHAV: And so the question is when you initially remove everything of course you end up with constipation because there is such drama going on inside and of course you have some diet off as well so at what point does the good bacteria start to grow back given that the diet is designed an essence starve everything that is in there by not feeding them. The things that they live on like the plant based fibers and starches.
[1:03:38] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: Different people recover in different period of time you can’t give a standard time schedule for your body. During the person with multiple sclerosis, for example that person will take much longer to recover than a person with a simple irritable bowel syndrome or something quite mild. So it takes different amount of time for different people to recover but fermented foods are key, you will keep putting them, you will keep putting microbes in them more and more. The more the merrier. It is important you start from a small amount you don’t want yourself on the first day on a large helping of sauerkraut because you will feel very sick for a long time because these beneficial microbes when they come into your digestive system, they will start killing pathogens killing them. When these pathogens die, they release toxins and these are the toxins, which make you hyperactive, depressed, obsessed, or give you eczema, or give you asthma or give you arthritis or give you [inaudible] or anything else of your individual sickness. So if you suddenly kill large amounts of those pathogens by eating large healthy or fermented foods, or taking a large dose of probiotics, you will throw yourself into a very severe diol reaction that’s what it’s called diol reaction more scientific name to it is Hemiacetal reaction which we call diol reaction so it’s the body that controls these reactions so that’s why we start with one teaspoon per day of a fermented food initially. Start killing those microbes gradually in the amounts that you can handle that your body can handle and increase them gradually, the same with those commercial probiotics-it’s very important to do that.
[1:05:23] REENA JADHAV: Doctor Natasha you are such a fountain of brilliant information, research and you have helped-literally helped millions of people I am one of those I used to be a vegetarian. I was a born vegetarian and during my healing, I definitely added some chicken liver and some wild Atlantic salmon etcetera so I really appreciate all great work that you are doing to help people like myself and like the millions out there that are suffering from all kinds of gut related issues. Thank you so much. Any parting advice for someone that wants to get started right away. What’s the one big piece of advice that you would give?
[1:05:59] DR. NATASHA CAMPBELL: Read my book. The website is an information website. Read my books I have many books but every one of them was written out of necessity- a necessity for that information so that will give you a lot of information. It will give you hope and one more book that I would recommend to many people is called ‘GAPS Stories’. I was receiving letters from people from all over the world very powerful processes of recovery from all kinds of illnesses. Illnesses that I haven’t even listed on my website or in my book or anywhere else and these people never had any consultations with anybody, they just got the book and begun the program and they recovered. So I got initials of these people and they published those stories on the book called ‘GAPS stories’. Half of the book have families with children, half of the book are regulars and people recovered amazing list of disorders including chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and multiple sclerosis and nephritis and a full spectrum of mental illnesses narcolepsy and alcoholism, autism and all kind of things. Please read that book. Many of these people were kind enough to provide their phone numbers and email addresses-they are happy to be contacted by people who are on the same situation or on the same boat and the will be very happy to give you advice and give you support. This book will give you hope and inspiration to start healing yourself. I don’t believe there are hopeless situations; human body is a wonderful creation. It is your own body that heals itself not the doctor, not the diet, not the pill so you have to learn to trust it, you have to learn to work with it not just throw things at it and that is the process. That is the journey to get back in touch with yourself, to get respect for your body, to get love for it because every healing has to begin from starting to love yourself without love there can be no healing. Don’t lose hope; people have recovered from all kinds of horrendous situations.
[1:08:19] REENA JADHAV: Beautifully said. Dr. Natasha, thank you so much for all your time and for the rest of you. It starts with love it starts with trust. Learn to love and trust your body. Listen to it and definitely check out the book. It absolutely was a critical and instrument of my own healing, my own journey so with that said stay smiling and I will see you on another one of our podcasts soon and check out health boot camps if you are looking for the support for a 14 day program to beat cancer, to beat gut issues, beat heart disease and more. I will see you soon.
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GAPS Diet
International Nutrition, Inc.
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