The Heal Your Gut Cookbook (Chelsea Green, 2014) by Hilary Boynton and Mary G. Brackett brings together recipes designed by Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) diet experts that help protect your gut from illnesses. This cookbook arms readers with the tools and ingredients to make sure their GAPS diet is a successful and pain-free experience. The following excerpt is their input on why the GAPS diet is important.
Most of us are not mindful of the importance of gut health, or just how far we in the modern world have been distanced from it. Many of us were not breast-fed; we received countless simultaneous vaccinations as children and were overprescribed antibiotics and medications from the start. Any one of these phenomena could contribute to an early imbalance of gut flora—not to mention subsequent years of consuming processed foods, artificial sweeteners, genetically modified foods, and heavily sprayed produce! Well, the notion of gut health is finally entering the mainstream. This is ironic, since Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine (460–370 BC), warned long ago, “All diseases begin in the gut.”
At birth, a mother’s gut flora is passed on to her baby. Good or bad, the baby gets what it gets. Think of your great-grandmother’s flora compared to yours. She was most likely breast-fed, with no obsessive hand sanitizing, GMOs, antibiotics, or drugs. Now, simply by being members of modern society, we have unknowingly diminished the birthright of our gut flora; over the past few generations, its quality and balance are believed to have deteriorated significantly. Today there are diseases that did not exist fifty years ago. Think of the diseases that will plague the next generation, and generations to come. We are facing an epidemic.
Still, if we adopt a glass-half-full attitude, we have an opportunity to turn things around. What’s done is done and we can’t go back, but think of the gift we can give to our children and grandchildren. We must all learn how to cook again! We must pass along nutritional lessons learned through recipes and the loving act of preparing a meal. It’s as simple as that.
More from: The Heal Your Gut Cookbook
• Salmon Cakes with Lemon Pesto Recipe
• Easy Vegetable Tian Recipe
• Home Baked Faux “Cheez-It” Recipe
This excerpt is adapted from Hilary Boynton and Mary G. Brackett’s book The Heal Your Gut Cookbook: Nutrient-Dense Recipes for Intestinal Health Using the GAPS Diet (Chelsea Green, 2014) and is printed with permission from the publisher.
