GAPS Stories: Personal Accounts of Improvement and Recovery through the GAPS Nutritional Protocol
By Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride
Medinform Publishing
Do you need encouragement to continue on the tough road to healing, or want a friend or loved one to try a healing diet? If yes, Natasha Campbell-McBride’s collection of GAPS Stories may help. Whether for infants, small children, college students, people in the prime of their careers, stay-at-home moms, workers in the trades or older individuals, the GAPS Stories show that real foods and healing protocols like GAPS can help anyone who is willing to give them a try. The problem might be indigestion, reflux, allergies, asthma or a hundred other possible health issues—all may find help through traditional foods and lifestyles. Stories from across the globe—Australia, Hong Kong, France, the U.S.—show that regardless of where someone is, a healing diet is available to them.
The book is divided into two parts. In both, Dr. Campbell-McBride provides brief reflections and commentary at the end of each story. The first part covers families who went on the GAPS diet adventure, motivated by health problems in their children, and discovered benefits for all involved. Many adults in these stories experienced unexpected and surprising results after going on GAPS to support their struggling child. Gabriela, for example, suffered from severe lifelong health issues that modern medicine could not address and found healing after adopting GAPS because of her children’s health issues.
The second half covers stories of individual adults. Something that stands out are the number of stories that involve chronic fatigue. Although much of mainstream medicine considers chronic fatigue untreatable, GAPS allowed these adults to experience healing.
The stories remind us that “all disease begins in the gut.” The book also records how healing isn’t always easy. The harm we’ve done to our bodies, individually and collectively, can’t be fixed overnight. Nor does the book minimize the struggles and challenges involved in transitioning to real foods. Real food is an investment, and it takes time and resources to learn the skills and find and prepare the foods. Healing takes time as well. The stories make it clear, however, that the end results are worth the investment, which pays off again and again. Despite the pain of healing, the costs and the difficulty of changing old habits and learning new ones, many people say they will never go back to their old ways.
The stories show that people who have undergone healing want to help others experience healing, and many go on to become GAPS practitioners. Isn’t that the story of so many of us who joined WAPF? We have a burning desire to fulfill Dr. Price’s famous words, “You teach, you teach, you teach!”
Campbell-McBride captures the essence of the book in the introduction, stating: “Many of these stories are humbling: the kinds of horrific problems that people have had to deal with are hard to imagine for the majority of us. Yet, these wonderful people tell their stories with such humor and such grace.” The stories may make you laugh or cry. They may convince a friend or loved one to try something other than conventional medicine, or they may help you stay the course when the going gets tough.
On a practical note, the book comes with a helpful index so that if you want to read stories specific to particular health issues, you can quickly find the ones that are pertinent. Each story also begins with key words that let the reader know exactly what the story covers. The book is both user-friendly and inspiring—an added bonus. Thumbs up!
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2018.
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