Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride

The GAPS concept

GAPS describes the relationship between the digestive system and the rest of the body — the brain, the immune system, the skin, the joints, the heart. Dr Natasha’s argument is that a damaged gut lining and an imbalanced microbiome do not stay in the gut. They shape everything downstream.

The protocol that follows from it is not a diet in the ordinary sense. It is a sequence: remove what is doing damage, restore the gut lining with foods the body recognises, rebuild the microbiome, and only then widen the diet again.

“All disease begins in the gut.” — Hippocrates, 2,400 years ago. Dr Natasha’s work has spent two decades demonstrating how right he was.

Books that travelled

Gut and Psychology Syndrome was published in 2004. It has since been translated into some thirty languages and sold in the millions, and it did something unusual for a book by a practising doctor — it reached parents directly, in their kitchens, without waiting for the medical establishment’s permission.

Four more books followed: Gut and Physiology Syndrome, which extends the concept from mental illness to physical; Put Your Heart in Your Mouth, which takes on the orthodox account of heart disease; Vegetarianism Explained; and GAPS Stories, a collection of recovery accounts sent to her from around the world.

See all the books

The farm

Dr Natasha and her husband run an organic, regenerative farm in England, where they raise animals, grow food and teach self-sufficiency. This is not a sideline to the health work — it is the same argument at a different scale. Healthy soil grows healthy plants, which feed healthy animals, which feed healthy people. Break the chain anywhere and the whole thing suffers.

Teaching and research

She founded GAPS Training to certify practitioners and coaches, and the GAPS Science Foundation to fund and publish research into the protocol. She lectures internationally to audiences of doctors, nutritionists, farmers and parents — often in the same room — and is known for explaining genuinely complicated biology without flattening it into slogans.