The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #106 - Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride (GAPS)

TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Hi, friends. Welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly thrilled and excited about the conversation that I am about to have. It is honestly, a long time coming for me. On this show, I have interviewed a ton of really, really amazing people, but a few of the people that I've interviewed are figures in the health movement that I have been a personal follower of for years. Today's guest is one of those people. When I first started experiencing my own personal digestive issues and health issues, probably a decade ago or so now, I started looking up different dietary protocols to try to heal my gut state. One of the protocols that just kept coming up and that I learned so much about and implemented some of the practices was the GAPS protocol. The book that I read at the time was Gut and Psychology Syndrome: Natural Treatment for Autism, Dyspraxia, A.D.D., Dyslexia, A.D.H.D., Depression, Schizophrenia, and I was fascinated by the GAPS protocol. I thought there was so much to it. Even at the time, I had my website up and my blog, and I would blog about it, and I created food guides revolving around it. So, it's been a huge part of my life for so long.

Then, just last year in 2020, the author, Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, released a new version, like a part two, which is the Gut and Physiology Syndrome: Natural Treatment for Allergies, Autoimmune Illness, Arthritis, Gut Problems, Fatigue, Hormonal Problems, Neurological Disease and More. I was so excited because I saw this as a perfect opportunity to reach out to the author and invite her onto the show. I wanted to invite her on anyway, but now with the new book, it was just really perfect timing. This book, oh my goodness, listeners, talk about mind blowing. If you think you know things about the gut microbiome, it just scratches the surface. When you read this book, you realize there's so much more. It was just really, really a fascinating book. I'm so excited to discuss it today. So, Dr. Campbell-McBride, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: Thank you for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here.

Melanie Avalon: To start things off, we were just chatting right before this about how people's stories in this world often come to be. But I was wondering if you could tell listeners a little bit about your personal story of what made you so interested in health. I will let listeners know that you did graduate with honors as a medical doctor in 1984 from Bashkir Medical University in Russia. You also have a postgraduate degree in neurology. But what led you to your interest in health and writing the many books because I mentioned two of them, but you have many books, what led you to all of that today?

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: Well, it's a typical story of a mainstream medical doctor who was pulled out of the mainstream medicine by my family, by my children. My first child was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, which threw me into a very steep learning curve, because my own professional had absolutely nothing to offer. That learning curve led me to getting a degree in human nutrition and learning everywhere, whatever I could learn from whoever I could learn. That's how the GAPS protocol was born. That's how the whole concept of GAPS was born, because my child was a GAPSter. The result of that search is that my child now is in his 20s and he's a healthy young man leading a normal life. So, that was a huge lesson for me.

As I was in touch with many other families with autistic children at the time, because we were all searching, we were all helping each other, I started sharing this information with other families. That's how my clinic was born. As I was working with all these children, I realized that their siblings are not well either, and that they have digestive issues, they have ADHD, they have allergies, they have asthma, they have eczema, they have diabetes type 1, all sorts of things. Then, I realized that their parents, also GAPSters, that the parents very often suffer from again, digestive disorders, allergies, autoimmunity, chronic fatigue syndrome, sometimes mental issues as well.

From all of this, this all snowballed and the whole concept of GAPS was born as a gut and psychology and gut and physiology syndrome. Why I divided the concept into two, because the first book I've written in 2004, Gut and Psychology Syndrome, where I indeed focused on the brain because I was dealing largely with autism, and ADHD, and dyslexia, dyspraxia and other learning disabilities in children and mental disease in adults as well. That's what I focused on in the first book. But obviously, the cause of all of this is in the digestive system, and it doesn't just address the brain, it doesn't just affect the brain. It affects the whole body. So, as I was working with that, gradually I've developed a second concept, gut and physiology syndrome, and that book, I was working on for quite a long time. As you said, it came out last year, Gut and Physiology Syndrome, which completes the GAPS concept because it covers the rest of the body. Both books are important, both books carry their own, they stand on their own. They carry their own information. The first one's focusing on the brain, the second one focuses on the rest of the human body.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, that's absolutely fantastic. I have a question. With your son and autism, did he or does he still experience symptoms that would typically be attributed to autism, or does he not experience that at all? I'm just wondering to what effect does following the dietary protocol influence the conditions that people experience.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: He has fully recovered and he has recovered in childhood. He is still eccentric and he is much deeper than many young people in his generation that I meet because of what he's been through. He's my spiritual guru, I have to say. Whenever I have any spiritual question, whenever I have any deep philosophical issue, he's the person I ask. He just lays it all out for me. He's never read any books, he's never listened to any spiritual gurus, but he knows all of that. He’s connected to some other level. He's connected to something else, and that's the eccentricity that he has, the immense depth in his philosophy and his understanding of this world, understanding of humanity, and understanding of life, the meaning of life, and the sense of it all, and what actually is going on in this world. So, he's always been my teacher, and he remains my teacher. He's 28 years old now.

But what I would like to say about autism, from my point of view, almost 100% of children with autism today, nowadays, and in the last 30 years, were babies who were born with a perfectly normal brain. These were perfectly normal babies. But they were poisoned from day one of their lives because they have acquired abnormal gut flora from mummy and daddy. We now have generations of people with abnormal gut microbiome, and this damage in the gut microbiome is getting deeper with every generation because of the environment that we've created in our modern world, particularly in the western world. Mother and father pass damaged gut flora to the baby from day one. So, the baby starts its life from a very bad starting point with the damaged gut flora. What this abnormal gut flora does, it damages the integrity of the gut wall, making it porous and leaky. At the same time, these pathogenic microbes digest food that comes along in their own way, even breast milk, converting it into millions of poisons, downright poisonous chemicals. These chemicals absorb through the damaged gut wall. There's a river of toxicity flowing from the gut into the blood, into the lymph, and being distributed around the body.

What happens with these babies? That wave of toxicity gets in their brain and interferes in the normal development of the child's brain. Children from the moment of birth, their brains develop at a very rapid pace. New skills are developed, new synapses, new connections between the brain cells are developed. New memories, new understanding of the world, they're developing language, they're developing skills of walking and talking and coordination, and putting things together, making sense of this world, adapting to this world. But the problem is, if the brain is clogged with toxicity, it cannot develop properly. It cannot develop all these skills.

Where does the child get information? The information comes from their sensory organs. That's how we interact with this world. We use our eyes, ears, smell, taste, tactile sensitivity, proprioceptors, and other sensory organs to communicate with the world. These organs collect information in the world, and then they pass this information to the brain to be processed, and from that information, the child learns that this is Mommy, this is Daddy, I can trust them. These are other children, I copy them. This is food I eat and these are other children, I copy them, and this is toys they play with them, like that.

But if the child's brain is clogged with toxicity, it's unable to process this information appropriately. All this information coming from sensory organs turns into a noise, into a mush in the child's brain. From that noise, the brain cannot decipher anything useful and doesn't develop appropriately. That's why these children, very often autistic children, don't know their mother and father. The mummy and daddy don't mean any more than any other human being around. They're known to pick up the hand of any stranger on the street and try to walk away with that person with mummy running behind him calling his name. They don't know what to do with toys. They don't know how to copy other children. They don't develop all the normal skills a normal baby would develop. They were born with a normal brain, but the brain is poisoned. The longer the brain is in that state, in that poison state, the more entrenched the abnormalities become, the more physically damaged the brain becomes because toxicity accumulating in the brain inflicts damage to the brain tissue, to the physical structure of the brain.

Then, the immune system, of course, cannot stand by and do nothing about the situation. It tries to clean this contaminated brain of the child. It launches inflammation in the brain, which causes headaches in these babies, in these children. The brain is swollen. Inflammation is swelling usually, and it hurts. That is why many autistic children bang their heads on furniture, and on the floor, and other things because it hurts. They just have a permanent headache. They may feel nauseous, they feel awful. Autoimmunity is developed fairly quickly against these toxins in the brain and complexes that the toxins create with proteins in the brain, because toxins like to attach themselves to various proteins in our bodies. They find a protein that is suitable for the chemical structure of this particular toxin. It fits like a hand in a glove quite often with a protein.

Once this toxic molecule that came from the gut attaches itself to a protein in the brain, a new molecule was born with a different three-dimensional structure, it's large, and it looks alien to the immune system. So, the immune system then develops antibodies against these molecules. There is an autoimmune attack on the brain, there is inflammation going on in the brain, and the toxicity itself inflicts damage to the brain. The longer that situation goes on, the more physical damage is inflicted on the brain of the child, and the more autistic abnormalities become entrenched. That is why we want to catch a little one and put this little one on the GAPS nutritional protocol as soon as possible. It's an absolute urgency in treating children with learning disabilities. We must not let them be in that toxic state, in that terrible state a minute longer, because the longer they're in it, the more entrenched and more physically damaged they become.

So, the younger the children are when they are, autistic children, or hyperactive children, or children with other learning disabilities when they start the GAPS nutritional protocol, the quicker they recover and the more fully they recover. Because what the GAPS nutritional protocol will do, it will heal and seal the gut wall. It will basically build a new gut wall for the child, and it changes the gut flora, rebalances the gut flora. It changes it. It normalizes it. So, that river of toxicity coming from the gut stops, eventually. Gradually, it turns into a trickle, a little trickle, and then eventually it stops. It takes time, of course, to heal the gut.

Once that level of toxicity stops, the brain cleans up. Our human brain has a marvelous ability to clean itself, and it does that all the time, and it constantly cleanses itself. It cleanses itself, and from that moment on, the baby wakes up. The child comes out of this toxic fog, the immune system retreats, stops launching inflammation, inflammation stops, and autoimmunity stops in the brain, and from that moment on, the child starts developing normally. The brain clicks into the normal programming, and it starts developing all the normal skills. The younger the child is when that happens, that moment happens, the less development the child missed out on, and the less physical damage was inflicted on the tissue of the brain, and the brain itself by all those chemicals, and inflammation, and autoimmunity.

In my clinical experience up to the age of four or five, children can fully recover from autism if we catch the child young enough. Older than that, children do get better but there is always a residual left because enough physical damage was inflicted on the brain already of the child. But it doesn't mean that after five, there's no point to the GAPS nutritional protocol. Not at all. At any age, an autistic individual, a child with any other learning disability should be put on the GAPS nutritional protocol. You can never predict to what degree a child will recover. Indeed, in the clinical setting, you see this very severe child, just absolutely hopeless looking situation, and that this child takes off like a rocket and a year later, you don't recognize this child. Then, there is a child who is fairly mild and you think, “Oh, this one's just got a little bit to get rid of,” and yet that child might turn out to be the most difficult one. So, you can never predict to what degree. So, at any age, it makes sense to start the GAPS nutritional protocol and do it seriously. As soon as the parents found out about it, there is an urgency to start immediately as soon as possible. Just get the book. The diet is online on many, many websites. It is on my website described in detail on gaps.me, G-A-P-S dot M-E. It is in my books, the diet, in order to arrest the process and allow the child, to give the child the best opportunity to come out of this situation and to start developing normally.

Melanie Avalon: You answered the question I was going to ask which was-- because I hadn't really thought about things like autism in the context of, if the cause of it isn't genetic or isn't a standalone cause, but rather is toxicity from the body, because it's developing in the brain and the brain develops on a specific timeline, I was wondering if there was a point of no return where you couldn't recover, but you answered that really well as far as-- That's really good to know that before age four and five, there's the potential for full recovery, and then beyond that, obviously, massive, massive improvements in the condition.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: I have adults with autism, and they are in their 40s, in a wheelchair, severely disabled individual, not toilet trained, in nappies, screeching, smearing feces, aggressive. It is just terrible, very difficult to look after, terrible situations. Even these people, when you put them on the first and second stages of the GAPS introduction diet, what happens with them? Inflammation stops. Headache stops. Nausea stops. These people feel awful permanently. That is why they're screeching, that is why they're misbehaving, that is why they're aggressive. They just feel awful. They're trying to get attention that way. But when inflammation stops, when autoimmunity stops, nausea stops, headache stops, they feel well. They become happy. They start sleeping through the night. We had 40-year-olds who were trained for the first time in their lives. That's a huge thing for carers. If you want to invest in that person, if you want to try, you can even teach them to speak certain words. We had one 46-year-old man who learned to say 'toilet' when he wanted the toilet, and they would wheel him in a wheelchair to the toilet, and he will have-- He developed normal toileting skills because the carers really cared about that particular aspect of looking after him. So, you can teach them as they become teachable at any age. So, it is worth doing it with any adult at any age. Once they're on the diet, they need to stay on it permanently for the rest of their lives.

Melanie Avalon: That is so incredible, and something else that you touched on, and all of that was, it was a paradigm shift for me in the concept of autoimmunity. It's a really interesting idea that you posit because most people think of autoimmunity as the body misidentifying its own proteins as a problem and attacking them. But you posit that there's always a toxin or there's always something in the protein of the body, like the immune system isn't-- and correct me if I'm wrong but the immune system isn't attacking the body at all. It's attacking, whatever is going along with it. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: Absolutely. Human body is a perfection. It is the pinnacle of perfection. It is designed perfectly. There is nothing wrong with our bodies. All the healing, all the repair is programmed into your body. Your own body heals you. Not the pill, not the doctor, not the diet, not anything else. Your own body does all the work. It does all the healing. The concept of autoimmunity that our mainstream medicine is believing in is called the mimicry phenomenon. That's what it is taught in medical schools to medical students. It's this kind of fairytale that goes that your own immune system for whatever reason, and there is no reason that the mainstream medicine can identify. Just for some reason, your immune system just decided, “Well, shall I attack myself?”

Melanie Avalon: [laughs]

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: "Shall I attack perfectly healthy and normal tissues of my own body? Shall I become rogue shall I become a highway villain and start attacking myself for no good reason?” That theory suits the Big Pharma very, very well, the pharmaceutical industry perfectly well. Because it is the pharmaceutical industry that creates the curriculum of medical school, that is why this phenomenon is given as the dogma of autoimmunity to mainstream doctors. Because this idea leads them to selling medications, which suppress the immune system. Let's beat the immune system down, so, it's unable to function at all. As a result, the autoimmunity will stop. It will stop attacking the body, kind of thing. That's the idea.

Every thinking, a reasonable person will know that you can't live without the immune system. This is something essential. Everything in our human bodies is absolutely essential. You cannot protect yourself from the environment, you cannot interact with the environment without a well-functioning normal immune system. That is absolutely essential. Once you start suppressing the immune system, you open your body to all kinds of problems, long term problems. Toxicity coming out of the gut or coming into the body from other places. All toxins, when they come into the body, they look for a place to attach themselves. They'll look for an anchor. Like any boat, eventually, no matter how much it sails around the seas, it wants to come into a harbor eventually and anchor itself somewhere. The same thing happens with all the toxic things, and pathogenic molecules, and various hormones, and various neurotransmitters, and enzymes, and various other molecules. They look for a place where they can fit in, where they can drop anchor.

As I say, they fit like a hand in glove with various proteins, they look for their own protein, that this is nice to attach to. But once they find that protein, they attach themselves to this protein, and they become one with that protein, changing it's three-dimensional structure. Your immune system surveys the body all the time. It goes around the body surveying it all the time checking everything. It finds this change protein looks at it and says, “Oh, gosh, you don't look like mine. You look foreign. You look strange. You look like a virus or something else that got in.” The first thing the immune system would do in that situation, it would use an off-the-shelf method, reaction that is ready right there, grab and use, and that is inflammation. What is inflammation? Inflammation is, it's swollen, it's red, it's hot, it hurts, and it doesn't work. That is what inflammation is. Typically, this happens with a molecule of protein in the human body called collagen. About three quarters or two-thirds according to different researchers, of all protein in the human body is collagen. This is an elastic protein that holds our bodies together, but it makes us elastic, it just holds every tissue together.

Collagen creates the skeleton of your bones, the skeleton of your muscles, the stroma of your inner organs, the capsules of your organs. The joints and ligaments around joints are largely made out of collagen, [unintelligible [00:23:18] and similar elastic proteins, elastic molecules, the capsule of the joint, the liquid inside the joint, the meniscus, the old surface of the bones are covered by cartilage, which is made out of collagen. All your organs are hanging inside you on ligaments and inside capsules which are made out of collagen. Then, fascias, which are big sheaths, tough layers between muscles in your abdominal wall, around your body, around your torso, around every muscle, all the sheaths of nerves, and sheaths of blood vessels, walls of blood vessels are largely made out of collagen. Majority of you is collagen in other words. The problem is that collagen is a magnet for toxins, because it has many sulfur-containing amino acids and sulfur is the magnet for toxins. Itself is a major detoxifying molecule in the human body, sulfates, sulfur. So, a large percentage of toxicity that comes out of your gut, or from other sources from the environment target collagen. They get attached to collagen.

You wake up in the morning and the joint where this toxicity attached itself is swollen, red hot, hurts, and it doesn't bend. Doesn't work very well. That is inflammation. Your immune system came in, identified this contaminated collagen, contaminated molecules and launched inflammation to clean them up. What do people do in this situation? They get diagnosed with arthritis. Your knee is swollen. So, that's arthritis. What is arthritis? Inflammation of the joint. That's what it basically means. Then, people start taking anti-inflammatory drugs, painkillers, and so on to beat down inflammation, to stop the inflammation. If you stop the inflammation, the pain of course will subside the swelling, the redness, the limitation of functionable subside because inflammation has subsided. But now, nothing's cleaning your contaminated joint. Your knee is still contaminated and nothing is cleaning it anymore. And having contaminated tissues and contaminated proteins in the body is a very unhealthy situation. It's a situation which lays the ground for development of cancer, the development of other terrible diseases and abnormalities in the body.

The immune system is doing its work by launching inflammation. You do not want to fight inflammation. You do not want to interfere with it. If this toxicity came in one bunch and then stopped coming, inflammation is an extremely powerful and effective way of cleaning contaminated tissues. It will clean up the joint for you, that knee for you a couple of days, inflammation will subside. If you don't take any painkillers or anti-inflammatory drugs, it will subside and your knee will be as good as you. It will be cleaned up by inflammation, all the toxicity will be removed and you'll be absolutely fine. But if toxicity doesn't stop coming in, if it continues coming in and comes in every day, every day, every day a little bit, inflammation becomes not enough to keep up with that influx of toxicity. It's not enough. Because the body focused on your knee on that first joint that got affected, it will clean up that knee, and the inflammation will subside, and your knee will be all right. But these toxins now will target other joints. They will go through your other knee, to your elbows, to your thumbs, to your other joints. The inflammation of the joints can become systemic.

Give this situation a couple of months, the immune system then will realize that inflammation is not enough. It will start learning about this contaminated collagen molecules with this particular toxin, learn the three-dimensional configuration of that molecule, its properties, what it does, what it doesn't do, and starts developing specific weapons against them. Specific antibodies. Antibody will then dismantle that molecule and remove it. You go to the doctor, the doctor takes a blood sample and finds these antibodies in your blood. As soon as the doctor finds these antibodies in your blood, they say, “Oh, well. This is autoimmune disease. Your immune system is attacking you. We must suppress it. Let's take steroids, let's take cytotoxic drugs and other very damaging drugs to beat your immune system down, so it stops doing this.” Because the pain and inflammation come from the activity of the immune system, when you beat it down with the drugs, the pain will stop, the inflammation will stop in the joint, and you think, “Oh, this is good. I'm better.” But that's just symptomatic. You've removed symptoms. You didn't remove the root cause of the disorder of what's really going on. So, the process will continue, destroy your joints, destroy your collagen all over your body. But this time, without you being aware, because the symptoms is your body calling for help. Your body letting you know, letting your conscious mind know that you're doing something wrong to it, through pain, through inflammation, through swelling, through other symptoms.

Our pharmaceutical industry is designed to produce symptomatic medications. The medical profession has been turned into a salesforce for this pharmaceutical industry to sell these drugs. So, you take the symptomatic medications, you remove the symptoms. By doing that, you're basically telling your body to stop calling for help and suffer in silence. The process will continue. The disease hasn't gone. It will continue raging in your body but this way silently, without letting you know because you're taking medications to remove the symptoms. That is what happens in autoimmune disease in the world today.

In reality, what we need to do, instead of beating the immune system down, we need to respect it and understand that our immune system is never misguided. It never makes mistakes. It knows exactly what it's doing. Instead of attacking it-- It's like somebody has broken a leg and the doctor is trying to fix that leg for you, put the bones together, and that hurts, doesn't it? The surgeon, when the surgeon is operating on you unless you're under general anesthetic, it hurts if you don't have general anesthetic. So, you bang the surgeon on the head so that pain stops but the leg remains broken. Nobody fixes the leg. That's what exactly happens in this situation. What we want you to do, we want to address the broken leg and help that surgeon to do the work quicker and more effectively. Yes, of course, it will hurt. Yes, of course, there will be a period of inflammation, and pain, and limitation of function, and everything else because immune system creates symptoms.

In fact, all the symptoms that we ever get of our headaches, toothaches, pain in any place in our body, swelling, inflammation, redness, rash, any kind of symptom we ever get, all these symptoms are created by our immune system because it's doing work and it's letting your conscious mind know, "I'm doing some very important work. Assist me, help me, respect what I'm doing." But instead of doing that people beat the immune system down to stop the symptoms. As a result, the problem goes deeper, and the problem becomes chronic, and more entrenched in the body.

With autoimmunity, all autoimmune disease is born in the gut. There is no doubt about it whatsoever. In the GAPS community, we've been talking about it for the last 20 years. In the last few years, the major immunologists, the most respected immunologists of the world, started saying the same. They finally caught up with us. They understood that, yes, indeed, every autoimmune disease is born in the gut. No matter how far away from the gut, the symptoms may manifest. If you have rheumatoid arthritis, it comes from the gut. If you have multiple sclerosis, it comes from the gut. If you have Hashimoto, or you have lupus, or you have psoriasis, or you have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or anything else ,that is autoimmune.

Even if you don't have any digestive symptoms, even if you don't have diarrhea, constipation, gas, bloating, pain, whatever it is in the digestive system, your disease is still coming from the gut. It was born in the gut, because you have abnormal gut flora. This abnormal gut flora damaged the integrity of your gut wall making it porous and leaky. It's like a sieve. This abnormal gut flora digests the food that you eat in its own way producing millions of poisonous chemicals. These chemicals absorb, further damage gut lining, and they race around your body. Your gut is a major source of toxicity in your body.t is these toxins that cause the autoimmune disease, not your immune system. The toxins are causing the autoimmune disease.

On top of that, what we need to understand that about 85%, between 80% to 85% of our immune system is located in the gut wall. Your digestive system is the major, the biggest, and the most important immune organ in the human body. There is a very close interaction between gut flora and the immune system that is sitting in your gut. When the gut flora is abnormal and this river of toxicity flowing through the gut wall, of course, the immune system will get that information first, and it will act upon that information appropriately, launching inflammation, launching autoimmunity, and using many, many other mechanisms. Because apart from these two mechanisms, our immune system has many, many other mechanisms that it uses. It is an immensely complex system. We've only scratched the surface in researching it and trying to understand it. All science knows very, very little about the immune system.

Of course, say, if anybody who tries to act upon that little knowledge, do not interfere with what your immune system is trying to do. The important thing is to remove toxicity. How do we remove toxicity? How do we stop that river of toxins from the gut? We have to change the gut flora, we have to drive out passages, and reestablish normal, healthy, balanced microbial flora in there. We have to heal and seal the gut wall. We have to build a new gut wall for the person. It's easily done through diet. That is what GAPS nutritional protocol is designed for. That is what GAPS diet does. It changes your gut microbiome, and it builds you a new, solid, strong, healthy gut wall. All those holes get closed up. So, that wave of toxicity stops. With it, your autoimmunity stops because your immune system as soon as it finds that toxin stop coming in, contamination stops, that the tissues are not being contaminated anymore, it will put all those antibodies on a shelf in some library, somewhere in some storage room, just in case for the future if it needs them, and will stop using them. As a result, your level of antibodies in the blood will drop dramatically to zero, and autoimmunity will stop inflammation will stop, and with that the symptoms will disappear.

Melanie Avalon: Do you know what those antibodies, because you just mentioned you know putting them on a shelf for the future, do they ever completely go away, or does every antibody that we've created at some point, is there some memory of it somewhere?

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: The memory space, once the immune system learned about something, it never forgets the rest of your life. If you again get contaminated the same way, you've recovered from your disease and then five, six years later, you got tempted and you decided, “Oh, no, I can eat chocolate muffins for breakfast.” [laughs] You start eating chocolate muffins for breakfast, again. These chocolate muffins feed particular pathogens in your gut because they never go away either. They just reduced the numbers dramatically and got controlled by other microbes in your gut flora, but they're still there. But chocolate muffins specifically feed those microbes. If you start feeding them, they will again grow out of proportion, again damage your gut wall, again, produce all those toxins, and launch the same process again for you. The same rheumatoid arthritis, the same autoimmune disease, but this time immune system will remember that, it will have the memory of that. So, those antibodies will be out on day one. You will not have to wait for two months for the immune system to learn about that situation and start developing these antibodies. They will be out immediately. The immune system will roll them out straight away and roll your whole autoimmune disease back up again. It's a discipline that your body imposes upon you. But if you can't eat chocolate muffins, you can't eat chocolate muffins.

Melanie Avalon: This feels like a very naive question, but do you know where the immune system is? I'm just wondering where the information is stored.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: The immune system is everywhere, literally everywhere. In every organ, every tissue, absolutely everywhere. But as I said, the commanding echelons of the immune system are in the gut wall. The generals, the admirals, the officers, all the commanding elements that make the major decisions, they’re in the gut wall. Why? Because of the gut flora. Gut flora is a huge microbial community. The recent research is telling us that 90% of all cells in your body are in that gut flora, 90%. So, your body's just 10%. It's a shell. A habitat for this muscle microbes that live inside this. Majority of us are microbes. If you think about it, evolutionary biology is telling us that human body actually evolved from microbes over billions of years on the planet. We are of microbial origins to start with. Your blood cells, many blood cells in your body behave like microbes. They look like microbes, and they change depending on the situation. They change and they start behaving like microbes that they used to be billions of years ago. They never forget who they came from, where they came from. They never forget their predecessors. So, we are of microbial origin to start with and we are full of microbes. Majority of this microbial community lives in the gut. But then, we now know that there is nothing microbe free in the human body. No tissue. You have microbes in healthy people, normal microbiome, living in your blood, in your lymph, in your lungs, in your heart, in your abdominal cavity, in women, in uterus, in fallopian tubes and ovaries, in the brain, in the eyes, everywhere. Everywhere, there are microbes and certainly on every mucous membrane without doubt.

But the headquarters of this whole microbiome of the whole body, the headquarters of it are in the gut. Thank God for that, because that way we can affect our whole microbiome. Because microbes are very responsive to food. Food is the biggest influence on microbial composition in nature, anywhere. You change the food supply, and you change the composition of microbes in any environment immediately, literally, within hours, within minutes. So, by changing our diet, we can alter the microbial community in our gut, our gut flora, and because it's the headquarters of the whole microbial community of your whole body, by changing that gut flora, you will rebalance the whole microbiome in your whole body.

Melanie Avalon: Quick question about the collagen, while we were still talking about it. Because a large part of the GAPS diet is eating collagen-rich meats, does that mean collagen, though, is often a source of toxicity from animals? Does that collagen often have toxins attached to it?

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: Absolutely. We now know that gelatin capsules and all supplements on drugs, gelatin sold in the shops, what is gelatin? It is collagen from animals, that's been boiled, processed, and turned it into gelatin powder. That's a collagen from animals. It is contaminated by glyphosate nowadays. Glyphosate is one of the most widely used agricultural chemicals. It stemmed from Agent Orange that was used in the Vietnam War. It's extremely poisonous and originally it was patented as a broad-spectrum antibiotic, glyphosate. Glyphosate is the Roundup herbicide that many people spray their poor dandelions in the gardens on their lawns. It's used as an herbicide. It is extremely toxic.

For decades, industrial, agricultural, chemical complex got away with lies that it just degrades immediately as soon as it touches the soil and doesn't have anything. Now, we have plenty of research to show that glyphosate causes autism, causes mental illness, infertility, heart disease, obesity, Lyme disease, and all other illnesses in people. It's one of the most toxic-- It's more toxic than the DDT was. Many of you probably remember about DDT, Silent Spring, the book that came out. That got DDT banned in the western world. But glyphosate is worse than DDT. It probably will take another few years, hopefully not too long, before glyphosate will get banned. But glyphosate, in its chemical structure, is similar to amino acid glycine. Collagen is very rich in this amino acid. Glyphosate replaces this amino acid in the molecules of collagen, because it's chemically more powerful than glycine is. It pushes glycine out and puts itself into the molecules of collagen.

Of course, the immune system cannot be fooled. It can see that. It can see that this is not a proper molecule of collagen. This is a contaminated dirty molecule of collagen. The dirt that is stuck on it is glyphosate, and they put out autoimmunity against this collagen, and it will launch inflammation against this collagen. Unfortunately, a lot of commercial products are made out of collagen, such as capsule from supplements and capsule from drugs. and other things are contaminated by glyphosate. It is quite a considerable source of glyphosate. That is why in the GAPS diet and GAPS nutritional protocol, we look for proper clean animals from proper farms. That is a big, big issue in farming. I'm an organic farmer. I have been an organic farmer for the last eight years, because working with food as medicine, you realize at certain point, you cannot trust anyone to produce your food. The good news is this industrial, chemical, agricultural is telling us that we're feeding the world, and western governments are repeating that, they just tell you what they're told to say, basically. It's not true.

About 85% of humanity is not fed by industrial agriculture. It is fed by small subsistence farming, because majority of humanity lives in third world countries, and these are the people who have a big garden behind their house, and they have a goat in the garden, and they have chickens running around, and they're using natural practices. They're using manure in the garden, and they're using all the natural ways of growing food. So, 85% of humanity are fed proper, natural food and grow it in a sustainable way. Thank God for that. That's what the people that are saving the planet. These are the people who are preserving the integrity and the health of our planet and the soils on our planet. Because industrial agriculture is destroying the planet and it's destroying the soils. We're losing our top soils at an alarming rate in the western world. In fact, majority of arable fields in the western countries are deserts for all intents and purposes. It's a dead dust. If you don't put chemicals on it, nothing will grow on those fields at all. This is what local farmers are telling me.

Local farmers in their 70s, 80s, they're all elderly people, nowadays, because young people don't want to do this anymore. They're telling me that, "If I don't put chemicals on my fields, nothing will grow in them at all." There are no worms, there is no life in that soil. It is a lifeless dust that just physically holds the roots in place, and all the nutrition for the plants comes from chemicals that are sprayed on the land.

 The nutritional value of this produce coming from this field is very low and it's full of chemicals. Then, that is fed to animals in the industrial agriculture in the industrial setting, and we get meat, and milk, and eggs from this poor, unfortunate animals and goats. That is what is on the shelves of supermarkets. We need to abandon supermarkets, if we want to be healthy, if we want to preserve our health. Because in every country, including western countries, there are hundreds and hundreds of real farmers, proper farmers who love their land. Every farm must be mixed. Monocultures are appalled by nature. There are no monocultures in nature. They should not exist, monocultures. Every farm, a real farm should have all the animals, and birds, and bees, and gardens, and arable agriculture, all in rotation. Because once you've taken the crop from the land, you have taken a lot of nutrition of that land, you've taken a lot out of the soil. You have to put animals on that soil for at least a few months to restore the fertility of the soil. Because that is the role of farm animals of cows, and sheep, and pigs, and chickens, and turkeys, and geese, and ducks, all of them. They all should be free ranging. They should all be on pasture, not sitting in some prisons in some buildings, not seeing the light of day at all. No, they should all be grazing free in the open natural organic pastures, natural organic fields. As the animals graze on these fields, they return nutrition back into the soil in their excrement. Their manure, their urine are precious gifts for the soil, because they inoculate the soil with a balanced healthy microbial community in its own nutritional medium of digestive grass of digested vegetation. That is the best fertilizer for any soil. It is a natural completely perfect fertilizer.

After a few months of grazing animals, then you can move the animals to the next field, and you can grow another crop on that field. That is what traditional farming, natural organic farming does. Everything's in rotation on the farm and every farm must be mixed. Every farm. Chickens need to be completely free ranging everywhere because they do so much valuable work on the farm. They are amazing, chickens. The way they restore the microbial community in the soil with their digging, and their activities, and everything they do. That way you create-- You have happy soil, happy healthy soil, you have happier animals, happy birds, happy eggs, happy milk, happy meat from happy animals. As a result, you are happy if you eat food like that.

There are farmers like that everywhere in every country, and it's not so difficult to find them. The simplest thing to do is to go to a local farmers market on the weekend, talk to these farmers, take their contact details or you can find them online. There are many online websites now which lead to all these good farmers, and the most fantastic international organization, which will provide you with plenty of that information is Weston A. Price Foundation. It's an American association, American organization which has many, many chapters all over the world. It's International. On its website, it has the list of all these organic natural farms, proper farmers, which will provide you with proper food.

I have many patients who live in cities. Of course, not all of us can become a farmer, no doubt about it. What I recommend to my patients and that's what they do in the cities, they find the farmer like that. They go to the farmers market, they make contact, and they ask the farmer, “Can I visit your farm?” Every organic farmer will welcome you with open arms. If the farmer says, no, you want to say goodbye to that person, and never say hello to him again. If he doesn't want you to come to the farm, that means the farm is full of chemicals, full of antibiotics and steroids, refrigerators full of drugs, and so you don't want to have anything to do with that. But the real farmer will always be happy to welcome you to come and visit his farm, always. So, on the weekend, take your family, take your kids, and have a lovely day out visiting a farm, looking at animals, looking at birds, and look that person in the eye, meet the farmer meet the wife of the farmer, meet the whole team in there. Look, are there any bags of chemicals lying about? Are there any refrigerators full of drugs in there, antibiotics and steroids? Are the animals really truly free ranging? Are the chickens running around all over the place? Are the pigs free ranging? Are the cows on pasture? How it's all done? Once, you found these farms that you trust and you know that this is proper food coming from proper land and proper healthy and happy animals, you start buying food directly from the farm.

These farmers are not subsidized by governments. The governments in the western world subsidize industrial agriculture. The money for the subsidies come from the agrochemical companies. It's a closed circle of circulating money. That's what it is. Western governments are a huge impediment and a huge pain for real farming in the world. They're trying to destroy the real farming. They make life for real farmers very, very difficult with their regulations, with their meddling and interfering. They busybody while helping the industrial agrochemical complex. So, the only farmers in this organic sector who are surviving and doing very well are the ones who have a good customer base when they sell their produce directly to the consumers. So, by buying directly from this farmer, you will be supporting a good person, a good farmer who is really caring with his farming for this planet. At the same time, you'll provide your family with proper real food, good food.

So, what these people do in the cities once they find a few farms like that, they start driving once a week, getting all their weekly supply, their weekly supply of eggs, weekly supply of milk, weekly supply of meat, and vegetables, and whatever else you need, and you do that. Then, eventually, people start talking to family friends, I put all my patients in touch with each other. They form cooperatives in the city where they take turns. One person, one family drives and buys stuff for the whole cooperative for the whole group bring it into their apartment or their house in the city, and everybody then pops around to their place and picks up their bits and pieces. That way, you don't have to drive every weekend. There is a rota. Somebody goes this week, somebody else goes next week, and so on. When the cooperative becomes big enough, farmers are quite happy to deliver to one place in the city, to one house in the city. Then, everybody can come and pick up the bits and pieces. So, all it takes is getting organized in order to get real food from real people rather than just running to the supermarket.

Melanie Avalon: This is something I'm personally so, so passionate about, and for listeners who would like to learn more, I actually recently had Robb Wolf on the show for his book, Sacred Cow, for people who want to learn the really far-reaching implications of regenerative agriculture and the implications of a plant versus animal-inclusive system for the future of our planet. I just think it's so important. So, I can't thank you enough for educating and spreading that word. Things that we raise on the farms, animals versus plants, where do you stand-- because we haven't actually really talked about what foods are in the GAPS protocol yet. So, I bring a lot of people on the show. Some people are very carnivore, very pro-meat. Then, some people are vegan. What are your thoughts on plant versus animal-based foods and how they affect the gut microbiome?

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: I'm glad you touched on this subject because it's very important. Because the mainstream propaganda for vegetarianism is very strong at the moment, and it comes from western governments. Of course, western governments are at the front, behind them pushing them to do that is the agrochemical industrial complex, industrial agriculture. Why? Because it is very profitable for the industrial chemical agriculture to produce plant matter. Extremely profitable. But it is very unprofitable and difficult for them to produce meat, milk, and eggs. Animal products. I will go deep into that.

It is within their commercial interest to malign meat, to malign eggs, and malign milk, and dairy products. Pronounce them unhealthy, destroy the planet, and they've created so many lies. It's unbelievable. The lies that are circulating around the globe, that cows are causing global warming. Cows and other herbivorous animals on the planet have created life on Earth, because they created the topsoil. Large, huge, huge, enormous herds of herbivorous animals have created topsoil. Topsoil is where all life begins and all life ends. Without topsoil, there will be no life on Earth. If there will be no herbivorous animals, there will be no topsoil because it needs to be created all the time. And we are destroying it with arable industrial agriculture.

So, I was getting all these anorexic girls in my clinic, and young people with bipolar disorder with psychosis and with other mental illnesses and autoimmune illnesses, and very quickly very quickly after correcting their illnesses, I realized that the person became ill because of vegetarianism, because for whatever reason, they adopted vegetarianism in their teens. Some of them wanted to lose weight. Some of them were dancing and wanted to become thinner. Somebody heard something else, somebody watched the film about industrial CAFOs, confined animal factory operations, which are the most appalling cruelty that can be inflicted on any living creature. That forced them to push them into this idea of becoming a vegetarian and a vegan. Once they become vegan and vegetarian, they destroy their health, and become mentally disabled.

So, that made me very interested in the whole problem. The first thing, I went to basic sciences. The science of biology, physiology, and not the mean zoology, and clinical experience. My own clinical experience and clinical experience of my colleagues that I have many all over the world. Based on that experience, I have written a book called Vegetarianism Explained: Making an Informed Decision. What I've explained in that, I explained the basics, which are in the textbooks of basic sciences from 1930s, 1940s, 1950s. We know this, and we have known this from decent, honest science, which haven't been paid by some agrochemical company. The basic fact is that nothing on our beautiful planet can digest plant matter. Nothing, apart from microbes. Only microbes are capable of digesting plants. Microbial communities. Let me repeat this. Nobody, not a cow, not a deer, not a goat, not a mouse, not a human, nobody can digest plant matter apart from microbes.

Melanie Avalon: I just learned-- was in your book about the termites? Even termites use a microbiome to digest wood. People think that it's the termite, but it's not.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: No creature on this planet is capable of digesting plants apart from microbes. It's this fact that Mother Nature used in creating a digestive system of a cow, or a deer, or a giraffe, or a goat, or a sheep, or another herbivorous animal. It equipped these animals with a huge multi-chambered stomach called a rumen. A cow has three stomachs called the rumen full of microbes. The majority of her microbiome in the body lives in that stomach. So, when she swallows a lump of grass that she chewed, it lands in those three stomachs. She doesn't digest it herself. The microbes do that work for her in her rumen. The interesting thing is that all the carbohydrates, about 70% of carbohydrates in the grass, are broken down and converted into short chain fatty acids, which are fully saturated animal fat. So, cows actually live on a very high fat diet which comes from the grass, which comes from this microbial community. That's where cream comes in her milk and the butter comes, this beautiful fat that the microbes have created from grass for us. So, that's how cows digest. The same even with termites, and the same with insects, and the same with any animal that eats plant matter.

We human beings don't have a rumen. We have a small stomach, which produces hydrochloric acid. The acidity can be below 1 pH when we're hungry, definitely below 2. That is an extremely hostile environment to any microbe. That is why human stomach has a minimal, absolutely minute microbial community that is barely holding on and there, barely surviving. We definitely cannot digest plant matter. We don't even have microbes in our stomach to digest the plants for us. Plants are indigestible with the human beings. Our stomach cannot digest them.

However, the hydrochloric acid and other elements of stomach juice are perfectly designed to unravel and digest meat, fish, eggs, and dairy, perfectly. These are the foods that are easy for us to digest. They digest very well completely in our stomachs, and once they are digested, then they pass into the intestines, duodenum and the small intestine, and that is where the absorption of food happens. The only food the human body can absorb is the food that has been properly digested. What's been digested properly in the stomach, then goes into the intestines and gets absorbed. That is what is feeding us.

Just think about your body. You have big heavy skeleton. You have big muscle mass. You've got a huge skin. You've got a big brain, big liver, big lungs, big heart, all these other organs in your body. This is the physical structure of your body. What is this physical structure made of? 70% of everything on the planet is water, of all life forms on the planet is water. Remove water out of human body, what's left is dry weight is 50-50, protein and fat. When we analyze human protein in a laboratory, we find that its biochemical structure, it's very similar, almost identical to proteins that we get from meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. The same with fat, the other 50% of our dry weight. The human fat in its biochemical structure is extremely similar to fats that come from meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. So, your physical structure is built only out of foods, out of molecules that come from animal products, animal foods, because we can digest them, because we can absorb them, and because they are very compatible with our physical structure. What we have to understand is that human body renews itself all the time. Every cell in your body lives a short life. It works very hard, it gets worn out, it gets old, and the dice gets removed, and it's replaced by a newly born baby cell. So, human body every day produces trillions of new baby cells to maintain this process. It's a magical, beautiful process called cell regeneration. That's how human body perpetuates itself, renews itself, kills any damage, rejuvenates itself, and that's how children grow.

Children need building materials not only for this maintenance of the human body, but for growth. They need double amounts of protein and fat to the adult. Children, small children, growing children. The only foods that build the physical structure of the human body and maintain the physical structure of the human body are animal foods, because in order to give birth to trillions of baby cells every day, building materials are required, protein and fat. The only foods that are capable of providing the right quality building materials for that process and for the growth in children as well are animal foods. So, animal foods are particularly vital for pregnant women, for growing children, for people recovering from illness, for people who are trying to conceive, for athletes who are spending huge amounts of-- their cell regeneration is very rapid in the body because they’re damaging a lot of tissues for excessive exercise. So, all of these people, for healing, for perpetuation we need that.

What are the plants for then? Why do we eat them with all? Plants do not feed this. They’re indigestible for us. On top of that, when we analyze proteins from plants and fats from plants, we find that in their biochemical structure, they're completely unsuitable for building our physical structure. Proteins in particular, are very problematic, plant proteins for human beings. The most researched protein is gluten. The more we're researching gluten, the more we're realizing nobody can digest gluten. It damages every body. Modern varieties of hybrid wheat that the whole world is eating nowadays, we've abandoned the natural wheat that Mother Nature gave us, and created these new hybrids because the yield is high and profit is higher from this wheat. That's the only reason. It has 80 times higher percent of gluten in it, it has 80 times more gluten in it than the natural breeds of wheat. No wonder everybody's allergic to gluten and everybody's reacting to gluten nowadays. So, apart from gluten, that is the most researched protein in plants, there are many, many other proteins in plants.

The more we're researching them, the more we're starting to call them antinutrients. There is a whole class of new chemicals that are being researched nowadays called antinutrients. The soy lecithins, [unintelligible [01:04:47], salicylates, phenols and other substances in plants. These substances are called anti-nutrients because they damage over human bodies. They damage our digestive system. They make the gut wall porous and leaky. They attack your collagen. They attack your joints. They attack many various tissues. They can cause autoimmunity. They can cause chronic inflammation in the body, they’re very damaging.

Why is that? Because plants can’t run away. You see, plant is sitting in one place, rooted in one place. It can’t run away, so if an animal comes and wants to eat it, it can’t protect itself. Plants equip their leaves and their stems and particularly their seed with these antinutrients to make them damaging to the animal's digestive system. The animals instinctively know this. I have goats on my farm, we have fantastic milk from them. They’re lovely animals, goats, and if you allow them to roam free, they will never eat one plant. They nibble. They have bit of this and a bit of that, and then they stop. No matter how much they might love this particular bush or this particular plant, they will just have a little bit, a couple of mouthfuls, and then they move on. Because they know that if I too much of this, I'll get too many antinutrients from this particular, I need get the balance, and then they can damage myself.

When my grass goes to seed in July, my cow stops eating it. It just gives me this dirty look, and she refuses to eat the grass, because she knows that if she eats too much seed of the grass, she'll get a tummy ache. She'll get ill. Because seed in particular, seed of any plant, seeds are their babies. They want them to grow. They don't want them to be eaten by something. So, seeds are particularly equipped with antinutrients. They are particularly damaging for the human digestive system. We're not equipped to digest them. That means grains, beans, legumes, all the rest of the legumes and pulses, nuts, seeds, oily seeds, all kinds of seeds.

People in traditional societies have realized that. That is why they would always allow microbes to digest the seed for them first before they put it in their mouths. Fermentation, all seeds all over the world in traditional cultures is soaked first, and then fermented or sprouted, because during the process of fermentation and particularly sprouting, when the seed starts growing a little shoot, it unravels its antinutrients, it's destroys them. The antinutrients get destroyed. At that point, the seed becomes far more digestible for us, and it damages our digestive system much, much less. Many people who can't digest beans, for example, or peas, or other seeds and grains, if you ferment them well first, or sprout them first before you grind them, before you do anything, or cook them, or do anything else with them, they become far more digestible and much, much less damaging.

Let's come back to vegetarianism. Why do we eat plants at all? If we can't digest them, if they do not feed us, the proteins in them are inappropriate for us, they cannot feed us, but plants are powerful cleansers. Many of these antinutrients, phenols in particular, and many other substances in plants, phytonutrients, they are powerful cleansers. They detoxify our bodies, they clean us on the inside, and they provide a bit of vitamin C, and a bit of folate and some other bits and pieces, minerals, and some vitamins, and other little cofactors. But the bulk of what your body is built from, the protein and the fat, they are unable to supply. They cannot build your body, and they cannot maintain your physical structure where you live in. The only foods that can do that are animal products. We eat plants to keep clean on the inside, and if we combine the two, if we combine the animal foods and the plants, then we not only feed our bodies well, but we keep clean on the inside as well.

So, working with my patients, what we have to understand that the GAPS patients in particular, the more damaged your digestive system is, the less it is capable of handling plant matter because all plants are damaging for human digestive system. They're indigestible, and they damage all of us. The more robust and strong, and healthier digestive system is, the more plant matter you can handle. The more damage your digestive system is, the less plant matter that you can handle. I became particularly aware of this some years ago, when a mother from America contacted me who had a three-week-old newborn baby, three or four weeks old, who was exclusively breastfed, little girl, vomiting, diarrhea, vomiting, diarrhea, the child was losing weight, just dying right in front of everybody. The doctors did tests and found that the baby is allergic to all proteins on the planet. The mother was told to stop breastfeeding, and the baby was put on an elemental formula made from soya, where proteins are broken into single amino acids. The baby was alive, but that's all that could be said. No more that could be said, the baby was still vomiting. There was still diarrhea. She was still losing weight. She was still dying in front of everybody else. The diagnosis, this is a fairly new diagnosis, but it's becoming an epidemic amongst all babies. It's called FPIES, food Induced Protein Enterocolitis Syndrome. These children have such damaged digestive system. All proteins absorb and digest this am it's just like a sieve. The gut wall is like a sieve. Proteins don't have any chance to be digested properly, before they absorb, they absorbed and digest it. As a result, cause reactions and cause problems in the body.

To help this mother, I knew that plant matter will be an absolute no-no for this baby. Because this baby would not be able to handle plant matter. So, we started with meat stock. Pure beef stock because she could find some good organic clean pasture-raised beef. We started with beef stock, and the more collagen, the reason the stock is better, that is why in GAPS, we make meat stock. We don't make bone broth. Please understand that. There's a difference between bone broth and meat stock. In GAPS, we use meat stock. These are the recipes described in my book. There is a confusion in this area between people because they get their information from different sources, and they don't read the recipes in my book. Please read those recipes.

Melanie Avalon: What is the difference between the meat and the bone broth? I know that is, like you said, a huge source of confusion and debate on the internet. [laughs]

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: Meat stock, you take a chunk of animal. The problem is, in the western world, the butchers are taught to dissect the meat. Remove the muscle, pure muscle, and throw everything else away because everything else is considered to be a waste, and rubbish, and nobody wants it, and nobody needs it, and they don't want you to pay for it. They just want pure muscle. Because when you say the word 'meat' to people in the western world, they see pure muscle of the animal. That is a big, big, big, big mistake. Because if you look at your own body, remember three quarters of your body is collagen, the same in the cow, the same in the sheep, the same in the pig, the same in the chicken. Three quarters of their body is collagen. It's the bones, it's the joints, it's the fascias, it's the capsules. It's all those sheaths for nerves, and then blood vessels, and all these elastic tissues and bits and pieces, and that's what we want. When we make a meat stock, we take a chunk of animal with nothing dissected and nothing removed. So, if it's a leg of an animal, it's a whole leg with the bone in the middle, bone marrow in there, all the fascias, all the ligaments, everything. And a joint is the best. If there are feet of the animal, spine of the animal with all the meat on it, all the soft tissues on it. If it's a pig, we want skin of the pig, and we want feet of the pig, and we want the head of the pig. The tail is absolutely amazing, oxtail or pig’s tail, any other. We want collagen as bits of animal with all the collagen, all the tissues, all the blood vessels, all the nerves in there, all the immune lymph nodes, and other bits and pieces, everything.

And then, we put that in a pan, we cover it with water. For a piece of meat, you want maybe double volume of water of that piece of meat. Whatever volume that piece of meat takes, you want to double of water in that. Then, we add salt and pepper, you can add a few vegetables if you like in there, well, some spices if you like, the natural spices, and you cook it for two, three hours. Maybe, four hours maximum. A chicken usually an hour and a half, lamb a couple of hours, beef and pork maybe three hours. The resulting volume, the resulting stock, the resulting stock is delicious, and it's usually clear. You strain it out, and the meat that you've made it with falls off the bone and it's delicious. You serve it for dinner, you eat it as it is, and you eat particularly all the gelatinous, collagenous tissues in there because that's what your gut lining is made, from collagen and it's being destroyed by abnormal gut flora, by autoimmunity, by inflammation. It's being dismantled your collagen in your body. It needs to be rebuilt. You need to pile collagen into your body to rebuild, to give building materials to your body, to rebuild your physical structure, majority of which is collagen.

So, that's the kind of meat stock we started with this baby. But let me just digress to the bone broth. What is a bone broth? Bone broth is a poor man's meat stock. People in poor communities for centuries, they could not afford to just throw away the bones. After they've cooked the chunk of animal, they ate all the meat, they scraped the bones like a piranha, there's no soft tissues, nothing left, just the bare shiny bone. They couldn't afford to throw those bones away. On a proper animal, a bone is so hard, even a dog can't handle it. A wolf can't handle that bone. They just leave it. It's very, very hard. It’s like a rock. What people do with that, with these bones, nowadays? They accumulate them in the freezer, they freeze these bones left from the meals, and then, when there is enough to feel a slow cooker, the crock pot, the electric pan, that works on low voltage. It's inexpensive to run. You fill it up with water and you add vinegar to it or you squeeze a lemon into it. You want some acidity, acid added into that water in order to dissolve calcium in the bones, to release minerals into the water, and amino acids are released into the water. You cook those bones for two, three days, minimum 12 hours. That is bone broth. It's rich in minerals, it’s rich in amino acids, very rich, but in GAPS, we need much more than that. We need collagen, we need glucosamine, we need gelatin, we need glycoproteins, and all these other substances that come from the soft tissues, not only from the bone.

Bone broth, I do not recommend for GAPS patients in the first year of treatment, minimum. Sometimes, even longer than that, because it's too high in amino acid, it’s too high in minerals, particularly glutamic acid, and people with mental illness in particular can react to that very unfavorably, can be quite an unfavorable reaction. So, we do not start with bone broth. We start with meat stock. In order to make a meat stock, you buy a whole chicken. You put that whole chicken in the pan. You cover it with water, salt, pepper, cook it for an hour and a half, there's your meat stock. You put couple of [unintelligible 01:17:02] or you put couple of pheasants, or guinea fowl, or a goose, or a duck, or a leg of pork, or a leg of lamb, or a chunk of animal, offcuts with bones. Bones are very important, joints are very important, cartilage is very important, all the soft tissues are very, very important.

So, let's come back to this little baby. We put her on the meat stock. We then added raw egg yolks and then we added homemade goat’s kefir to her fermented goat's milk, and the baby started recovering. Vomiting stopped, diarrhea stopped. She started putting weight on slowly, slowly, slowly, gradually. And then, rosy cheeks came back and she started developing, this little girl. After a year of this, she was rosy cheeked, bushy tailed, developing normally healthy, young, beautiful little toddler.

Then, we tried the bit of a vegetable. Literally, microscopic amount of courgette, cooked very, very well. They re-returned, and every time we tried any variety of plant matter with this little girl, they were re-returned, and she would get ill again. She could not handle plants. That went on for four years. The child was living entirely on animal foods. Pot a speck from plant kingdom could be given to her because it just destroyed her digestive system immediately. Because plants are indigestible and if the digestive system is so damaged, and these children are like canaries in the mine, their digestive system is in such damage to such an extreme end, they cannot handle any plant matter at all. So, this little girl lived on no-plant GAPS diet, and that's a variety of GAPS diet that I described in my second GAPS book, in the Gut and Physiology book, for four years.

Then, what we did, we fermented some courgette and some garlic for five months, until it just literally turned into mush. Fermentation predigests plant matter. The bacteria, the microbes, they break down all the tough fiber, starch, and whatever else there is in plants that's indigestible, all the antinutrients get destroyed. It's a predigested vegetable. Then, we took literally a microscopic amount of that vegetable, and we cooked it in a cup of meat stock. Cooked it very well for half an hour. We gave her a teaspoon of that stock and she survived it. That's how we introduced plant matter to her. We started from fermented courgette. Then, we introduced fermented garlic, and then we introduced fermented onions I remember, and then something else fermented.

Once she started tolerating good amounts of fermented vegetables and then cooked very well, we started cooking them a bit less, so she could have them less cooked, fermented vegetables, and it took us about a year to introduce a few vegetables into her regimen without stimulating diarrhea and vomiting in this child. Now, today, she is a healthy little girl, and this mother is a wonderful lady, she was in communication with lots of other parents, with babies, with the same situation. She created a group online for FPIES children. Now, we have a very large group of families who are treating their babies this way, and they’re recovering beautifully without any drugs, without any formulas, without anything.

And then, I got children with ulcerative colitis that are tried this no planned GAPS diet. Beautiful recoveries. They've come off all medications, all inflammatory markers disappear, diagnosis is removed. Children just recover from all sorts of colitis, and Crohn's disease without plants at all. Then, quite a few of my patients with mental illness have chosen this form of GAPS diet to stay on it without any plant matter, and they've recovered completely from their mental illnesses, and they do not even dare to touch any plants. They say, “I'm perfectly happy to live without plants at all.” So, these patients have taught me that human beings can live with our plant matter perfectly well, very healthy people, functioning beautifully, working, lovely energy, playing with children, playing football, playing tennis, have friends, excelling in school, wonderful, absolutely wonderful outcomes. So. these patients taught me that human beings can live perfectly well without plants at all. But my other patients taught me that human beings cannot live without animal foods.

Veganism is not a diet. It is a form of fasting. You are not feeding your body at all to any degree. Well, all you're doing is cleansing, cleansing, cleansing, and cleansing, and cleansing. Fasting is a very good way of cleansing the body and recovering from serious illnesses. They have been centuries, I don't know, millennia of episodes described where people recovered from all sorts of chronic serious diseases for fasting, eating nothing at all, drinking water, or eating just one fruit, or just drinking milk, or eating a limited variety of something. Various forms of fasting exist in the world, around the world and have been described. Veganism is one of those varieties of fasting. When you start a vegan protocol, it should not be called a diet because it's not a diet, it's a form of fasting. When people go on vegan regimen, a cleaner body feels always better than a toxic body. The first improvements that people get in their health, and they get improvements. Of course, in the first few weeks, they get dramatic improvements. These improvements come not because you're eating lots of plant matter, but because you've removed all the major offenders. You've removed chocolate muffins, bread, pasta, sugar, soft drinks, breakfast cereals, and other junk, and vegetable oils. You have removed the worst offenders that cause every disease in the world. That's why people start feeling better. Not because they're eating lots of carrots and bananas, not at all.

But then, as they continue eating only plant matter, they're cleansing their body, they removing toxicity, so the body feels better as a result. But then at a certain point, the body will finish cleansing, and it will give you a signal, “I finished cleansing. Feed me now. I'm hungry.” The way the body will give you the signal, it will give you a desire. A huge desire for a roast chicken, for bacon, or bacon and eggs, or a pot of cream, for a piece of cheese, or a piece of fatty meat, or the belly pork, or something like that. Problem is many vegans do this for political reasons, emotional reasons, other reasons, and within these first few weeks of veganism, they've already written blogs, and written books, and convinced everybody that veganism is the way to go. [giggles] They feel that there's no way out of it. There's no way back. So, they don't listen to their body. When the body is asking to be fed, they override the signal and they're forced the body should continue cleansing. They force themselves to continue being a vegan.

At that point, the body has no choice but to start breaking down less important tissues to feed more important organs. So, the person starts losing bone mass and muscle mass to feed the heart, the brain, the lungs, the liver, and otherwise life organs. The person starts losing muscles and starts losing bones. If this process continues longer, then the person starts developing degenerative disease, and I have seen too many of this young people and these patients who destroy themselves with veganism. Destroy themselves. Finish off with schizophrenia with bipolar disorder, with epilepsy, with anorexia, with Lyme disease, with chronic infectious mononucleosis, with chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis, multiple sclerosis, God knows what. And reversing that process is much more difficult than causing it, that starting it. Cancer is usually the end result of long-term veganism. Cancer of the blood, particularly leukemias. Cancer of the blood and neurological illnesses because the brain is particularly hungry for protein and for fat, and the kind of protein and fat the brain needs can only come from animal foods. They do not come from plants.  People need to understand that.

If somebody is very toxic, the body has accumulated lots of toxicity, the person is overweight. Going on a vegan fast is a good idea for a month, maybe three weeks, four weeks, no more than 40 days. 40 days is maximum. You will lose weight, you will feel better, you will cleanse your body, you will remove a lot of toxicity, and lots of diseases, and symptoms will leave you. Wonderful, fantastic. But then, you need to start feeding yourself, you need to listen to your body to give you that signal. All of us have met people who boast in the vegan community. “Oh, I've been a vegan 20 years. Look at me,” kind of thing. "Look at me, I'm perfectly healthy, perfectly good, perfectly, this, that, and the other."

Initially, I wondered as well because I met people like that, and then this boy arrived to me from Edinburgh, a lovely young boy, and he told me a story. He said, "I was a vegan for four weeks, and I was walking along the streets of Edinburgh distributing leaflets about veganism, and the smell of roasted chicken wafted out to the shop." He said, "I went to some kind of trance. I walked into the shop, I bought a whole roasted chicken, I came outside, I sat on the pavement, and I consumed the whole chicken." Then, he said, "I came out of this trance and I was so ashamed of myself." Since then, he said, "I've never told this to anyone. I've never mentioned this to any soul in the world. You're the first person that I mentioned this to."

Then, I met another person who told me the same story, then another vegan who told me the same story, and then, I met a lady who was a recovering vegan, who's writing a book about this phenomenon. What actually happens to these people, when they get into such starvation, the body is so hungry, so starving. What it would do, it will shut down your conscious mind and force you to eat animal foods. You will go into this kind of trance, and you will binge on meat, on bacon, on eggs, and that can go on for a few hours or even for a few days. Then, people come out of that trance after the body got what it needs, got enough resources to survive. Then, the person comes out of this trance. And because these vegans are already invested into their veganism so much, they block that many of them actually even don't remember these episodes. They just block it out. It's a well-known phenomenon in psychology when a person blocks out the painful memory of some sort, particularly, one, their reputation depends on blocking that out. 

Melanie Avalon: I had Dr. Paul Saladino on the show, and he's a big figure in the carnivore movement, and in his book, he talks about some studies on the brain, where-- I don't remember the exact terminology of what they were testing, but basically, they were looking at either vegans or vegetarians, and omnivores, and their brain's response to seeing animal products, and the vegetarians or vegans consciously, the parts of their brain didn't light up for desire for the animal products, but subconsciously it still lit up. Basically, their bodies were desiring the animal products, but consciously they were not aware of that desire, which is really fascinating. What about populations like Loma Linda, which is one of the longest lived population and apparently are vegetarian or vegan?

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: There are no such populations. Weston A. Price, a wonderful man. Anybody who never heard of this person, please research this person, and please join the Weston A. Price Foundation. It's an amazing group of people. The world is a better place because there is Weston A. Price Foundation in the world. Weston A. Price travelled around the world at the beginning of the 20th century, the 1930s, when indigenous cultures still existed on our planet. Cultures where western civilization hasn't gotten to them yet. They ate and they lived exactly the same way their predecessors live for thousands of years. So, he traveled to most remote areas of the world, and he traveled all around the globe. He's been on every continent in most places. He recorded their health, and he recorded their diet, and he recorded their lifestyle. What he found that all of these indigenous cultures have very different diets because they lived in different environments, and they ate what was available to them in their environment from both the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom. All of them were healthy and didn't have any diseases of our modern civilized world. Perfect teeth, perfect childbirth, painless childbirth. A woman would be working, doing whatever she's doing, stop for five minutes, give birth to a child, hang the child on their back and continue working [laughs] as if nothing has happened. That's how it's supposed to be, apparently. No mental illness, happy, healthy people not depression, very cheerful people, joyful people.

Specifically, Weston A. Price, he travelled for 10 years like that. Recording and collected amassed a huge library of scientific data. Tests, blood tests, photographs, descriptions. It's amazing. There is an archive of Weston A. Price and Pottenger archives in California, which keeps all this scientific data and looks after it. So, he was specifically looking for a vegan culture around the globe, a culture which lived entirely on plants. He didn't find one. Everywhere in every environment, people ate a mixture of animal foods and plants, everything they could find in the local environment or catch in their local environment. In every culture, people particularly prized animal products and spend maximum energy on getting fish, collecting eggs, milking animals, hunting animals, or growing animals, looking after animals. Most plant matter was fermented or sprouted, and eaten that shape or form. In the indigenous culture of Sudan in Africa, there is even a traditional saying that they've been repeating for thousands of years, that the one who doesn't eat fermented foods should expect disease. That's a proverb, their national proverb.

In every culture, people knew that plants should be eaten as a supplement to meat, that the most important piece on your plate is the meat, or the eggs, or the fish, or the dairy product. That is the most important thing. He describes a very interesting island in the Pacific, where there was a big mountain. It was a mountainous Island. The population of the island was divided into two groups. The people who lived by the shore of the sea, and they fished and ate a lot of seafood, these people. They were very, very healthy and happy people. Then, people who lived in the hills, that was the second group, where there were no animal products at all. They just had fruit, lots of fruit because it was tropical. Lots of tropical fruit and some crops they grew there. So, they had plant matter only, these people. Every week they would come to the coast and exchange their fruit and their plants, with the fish from the coastal people. So, they would take fish up the hill and bring the plant matter for the coastal people. But periodically, when there were storms or they couldn't get enough fish for whatever reason, when there was no season or whatever, they would get very hungry, and then, they would run down to the coast, would kill the coastal people and eat them. They would become cannibals, these people, they would eat them. Apparently, they always targeted the fisherman because they knew the fisherman ate more fish than other people and their organs were particularly nourishing, that they would get proper nourishment from a fisherman than from another person.

In the wonderful book of Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Weston A. Price described an interview that he took from one of these fishermen on that island, who was in hiding, because he said that, "I was given the news that the hill people have targeted me as their next victim, So, I'm hiding from them." [laughs] This example just shows what can happen to a human being when the human beings very hungry, truly hungry. The true hunger is always for animal foods, not for plants. Never, never for plants. Only for animal foods. the true hunger. When human beings can become truly hungry, they can turn to cannibalism. They can turn to anything.

Melanie Avalon: So, what are your thoughts on the fact that things like fasting tend to promote longevity, because they upregulate all these genetic expressions, like you said, if repair rather than growth, but might there be a correlation then to-- if a vegan diet were sustainable to longevity, because it's constantly sending the genetic signals for repair rather than growth?

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: Longevity is a hoax. Every human being has an expiry date stamped on our forehead when we are born. That is what I'm told by some spiritual masters that I'm working with. I'm very privileged to know some spiritual masters. These are people who are not visible, they don't advertise themselves, they lead very ordinary lives usually. But they know things, these people, they’re spiritual masters. What they're telling me that, every one of us before we are born has an expiry date on us already. When your moment to die comes, that's your moment you die, no matter what you do. So, longevity is a hoax. You will die when it is your time to die. You might as well relax about it, [laughs] and stop chasing longevity, and stop chasing that concept. Real beauty is health shining through your skin the same at any age. If you maintain yourself in good health by eating properly, by sleeping enough, by not stressing yourself, by loving the world, by filling yourself with good vibrations and good feelings and good emotions, then you will shine at any age, and you will look youthful at any age, and beautiful at any age. There is no need to put any effort into looking younger or living longer, because you're not going to live longer a moment than when your moment is to die.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, that was one of the really fascinating things that you ended the book with was the concept of entropy, and how it relates to life and death. I had never really thought about it in that way. Would you like to talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: Entropy is a wonderful phenomenon that has been researched by physics. Now, we have a new physics, biophysics. That is an amazing, fascinating science. If I was 17 years old right now, I would go into biophysics. [laughs] I would want to be a biophysicist that would let you--

Melanie Avalon: Me too.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: -to study that science. It's an absolutely amazing science. What entropy is, basically, what it says that everything in this world is ruled by this force of entropy, which is a destructive force, because everything juggles. All the molecules or electrons on the atomic level, nuclear level, all of it is juggling. Everything is vibrating, gyrating, and juggling. This juggling produces a lot of energy, and this energy cannot be harnessed. It's wasted, this energy. That's called the entropy. You see, that's the second law of thermodynamics that says that we cannot capture this energy, it is just wasted. This phenomenon is particularly well known in computing, because every computer heats up, and that heat is lost, so a lot of energy is lost. That's the force that destroys, turns the rocks into sand eventually, and that's the force that destroys every human invention and every dead thing, everything in the world that is not living, not an alive thing. No matter how fine or beautiful, anything we manufacture, when it leaves the factory, eventually, it will become old, and worn out, and will fall apart. You buy your car, and it's nice and shiny, and it's driven out of the factory, and next week, you have to repair something, and then repair something else, and eventually, it falls apart. Every human invention, everything we do, all of it falls apart. That is the law of entropy. It's a force of destruction that is dominating this material world.

This force only affects dead things. Living things, alive things let's start from the top. Human beings, animals, birds, insects, microbes, viruses, plants, anything that's alive, that is living has a force in it. A living force that resists entropy. Entropy cannot take over us, it's not allowed, because there is a living force inside us that pushes it out and doesn't allow it. And who should study this living force because there is a difference between dead objects and living objects. The first research that was done by a group of scientists who were studying death. What happens at the moment of death? There's a body or a human being, let's say, who's breathing, the heart is beating, the person is talking, the person is resisting entropy. The human body is not falling apart. It's aging, but aging has nothing to do with entropy. Aging is just a complete hormonal program that we follow from conception to the moment of death. From conception, this hormonal program evolves us from a baby into a child, and then the child goes through puberty, and then they go through middle of our lives when we procreate and produce new children. And then, after we've done that, then, we age, and eventually reach the moment of death. That is a hormonal program that we go through. It has nothing to do with entropy. Your body is perpetuating itself, renewing itself, maintaining itself all the way until the moment of death.

Then, the moment of death happens, literally, the second before then, there was no entropy in the body. As soon as the death happened, entropy moves in. From that moment on, a second after death, the body is still warm, the nails are still growing, even the hair is still growing. The heart is not beating anymore, the person is not breathing anymore, but the entropy moves in, the decay begins. The body starts falling apart. Depending on the ambient temperature, it can fall apart within days. Literally, it can start decaying, and falling apart, and rotting within days, and eventually, it turns into soil, from dust to dust as they say in Christianity.

The scientists ask, “Well, what happens at the moment of death? Why before death this magnificent machine called the human body, or an animal body, or a body of a bird, or a body of a microbe, or any other living-- or plant, for that matter, tree, let's say, why until the moment of birth, this creature was resisting entropy and entropy could not move in, could not do anything, this universal force of destruction, could not move into this body, could not destroy it? What happens at the moment of death that entropy moves in and takes over and destroys it, and it happens to human body, to an animal body, to a tree that just died, or you plant that just died. They just decay and turn into dust, turn into soil into the pool of materials that other lifeforms can grow from? So, what happens at that moment? We have now many measurements and we have some research coming in, because there are some rebels in science, people who do research this sort of things. There is a living force in us. Through ages, people called it different things. You can call it spirit, you can call it soul, you can call it God.

So, the moment of death, what happens? This living force leaves. It moves into a pregnant woman at the beginning of pregnancy into her womb, takes over, and through Kirlian photography, we now have photographs, we have pictures, where at the age of 12 weeks of pregnancy in a woman, there is a picture superimposed on her lower abdomen of a fully developed baby. Because Kirlian photography photographs the spectrum of the light that is invisible to human eye. It can photograph other spectrums. By photographing that, they see a picture of a fully developed baby superimposed. It's a matrix that gets superimposed on the womb of the woman that is a program, a matrix, and all the cells that the placenta produces, the fertilized egg produces in the womb of the woman, they’re clones. They're absolutely identical, the cells, they have no differentiation whatsoever. They're absolutely identical twins. The placenta, the fertilized egg just keeps dividing, dividing, dividing, producing these clones, these stem cells, they're called. But then, the stem cells are fitted into this matrix superimposed onto the womb of the woman, and it's this matrix that dictates to the cell, "Now, you will be a cell of the brain. You will become a liver. You will become skin. You will become bone," and this stem cells who were all clones and completely identical start changing, and differentiating, and becoming a cell of the brain, or a cell of the liver, or a cell of the bone.

Where does this matrix come from? Where does this fully formed matrix comes from? It usually comes in the first trimester of pregnancy, and this is the living force that moves into the woman. This is a soul according to spiritual teachings from different places of the world, according to spiritual masters, that we choose our parents, and then, our spirit moves into the womb of a pregnant woman that was chosen to be our mother, and then, the spirit superimposes its picture, its matrix on the womb, and the spirit creates a body for itself to live in. The spirit fills the body and it actually is beyond the body. It's outside the body, it is much, much bigger than the physical body. It's the spirit that maintains the life of the body, and then, maintains hormonal balance, and personality, behavior of this person, everything, It's a unique individual as a result due to this spirit, due to this living force. This living force is immensely powerful. It resists entropy, it doesn't let entropy close. This universal force of destruction that dominates the material world is not allowed, because the spirit is living in there, and it says, “This is my home and you're not welcome.” Normally, at the moment of death, when the spirit leaves, when the living force, that spirit finished its lifetime and it leaves. It goes where it came from. Once it's left, then the board is left to the mercy of entropy, and entropy gleefully moves in immediately and decays that body and turns it into the dust, from which back to the elements of this material world, from which another spirit can build its own body.

Melanie Avalon: Wow. That was a lot more that was in the book. That was really, really incredible. I'm just so fascinated by all of it. I was raised very religious, and I've also very much-- I know they're often posited as a dichotomy, clearly very much into the sciences and everything, but the more I studied and learned, the more I just realized, I just think we can't even remotely grasp anything really about reality. But the more we study with everything that you were mentioning, what the studies they do, showing the mirror images in the womb, and things like that, I think the more we do science, the more it actually reveals these mysteries to be the very true state of being.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: We have ways of researching this. We already have quite a few. Because it's a partisan research, it's an underground research, because the mainstream science, which is by the way ruled by commercial powers of the world, and let's be just frank about this. It's all money. It’s money. These scientists have to work in a partisan fashion, almost in a hidden fashion. But they do have methods of researching this, and there's quite a bit of research already amassed, and there are some fascinating books written on this subject, and this is interesting, very, very fascinating research.

Melanie Avalon: Well, I have so many questions for you, but I want to be respectful of your time, and for listeners, you have to get the GAPS books. There's so much information in there, and actually, we didn't even talk about this. You have multiple different versions of the GAPS. You have the intro diet, the full, the no plant, the keto, the more plant, the liquid, and those are all very specific protocols. The protocols itself, just to give listeners a general idea, they're very specific and very outline. So, if you're looking for-- It's not just a food list and [laughs] something you're done, there's steps to everything, there's methods of cooking, it dives deep into fermentation into things like the role of dairy. It's just a wealth of information. So, I cannot recommend enough that listeners get it. Is there anything you wanted to mention specifically about the actual protocols for listeners that are interested in trying them?

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: Well, what we need to understand that there is a place for every form of healing in the world and how mainstream medicine, as misguided it can be, has its place. It's developed excellent ways of saving our lives when it comes to it. If God forbid you, you got hit by a bus, you wouldn’t want an ambulance to take it a homeopath, would you?

Melanie Avalon: No.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: You need mainstream medicine and you need it fast, because they know how to save your life when something like that happens. Something drastic, life and death situation, acute situation. However, when it comes to chronic, long-term conditions, a mainstream doctor is probably the last person you want to go to. You have to avoid them, because they have no idea what causes chronic diseases. They have no idea how to address the root cause of the disease. All they will do for you, they will sell you drugs to suppress your symptoms, and drive the disease deeper, and make it more chronic, and make it eventually more destructive for you. If that suits your agenda, if that's what you want, and some people do, they don't want to recover from the disease, they just want to suppress symptoms, then perhaps that's what you want. But if you want to address the root cause of your disorder and really get rid of it, it is the alternative you need to look at. The alternative is that every chronic disease, mental or physical, every single one of them in my opinion is born in the gut. They come out of the gut. So, GAPS diet is the baseline treatment for every chronic disease. I really have no exceptions.

For a while, I thought that cancer was an exception until one of my GAPS practitioners put me right. I've been training health practitioners all over the world for more than 10 years now. We have an online training platform called gapstraining.com where you can get trained and not only medical practitioners can get trained, but people who are not trained in medicine or medical practitioners can train now in various training courses there. So, please have a look at that if you're interested. One of my trained GAPS practitioners put me right. She cured her husband from the worst form of melanoma with GAPS diet. Amelanotic melanoma. He a beautiful, healthy man, and he was diagnosed 12 years ago, and alive and kicking and clear of the diagnosis. So, she put me right. Even cancer now is not an exception for the GAPS diet. All diseases begin in the gut, and you need to start cleaning any disease, whether do you have digestive symptoms or not, you have to start healing the gut first in order to address the root cause of every disease.

Melanie Avalon: Really quick note to the cancer. I've also interviewed Dr. Jason Fung and he wrote The Cancer Code, which is his newest book, and thinking about it in that perspective, basically, his overall ideas that cancer's caused because cells get damaged to such an extent where they're not repaired by the body, but also aren't eradicated by the body. So then, they have to go rogue and develop the traits of cancer. That would fall exactly in line with what you're saying, because if the gut is creating a state of toxicity, which is leading to this cellular damage on a chronic level, that would be a causative factor.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: I explained cancer in the second GAPS book, in the Gut and Physiology book. I don't know how much time we've got, I explained cancer there. Cancer cells are hybrids. They are only partially human. Because the role of microbes in nature-- Microbes are all friends. They're not our enemies. Now, the mainstream because it wants to sell you all these antimicrobial chemicals made out of oil, crude oil basically, including antibiotics, they've vilified microbial community of the planet. Microbes are our friends. With very, very tiny, tiny, tiny exceptions, all of them are our friends. Their main purpose in nature is to clean dirty places. If your body accumulated a bunch of toxins, chemicals from your personal care products, from your redecorating materials in the house, from electromagnetic pollution, from all the human activity, we've filled our environment with toxicity. Once you've accumulated a bunch of toxins in the body and if your immune system, if your body itself cannot handle it, cannot clean this rubbish out basically, it would employ microbes to do the work for it. In fact, it always does.

We are full of microbes. We are descending from microbes. Our bodies have descended from microbes. Microbes are everywhere in your own body. They don't come from outside. Every microbial disease, every infection arises from within your own body, most of them. They don't come from outside. [laughs] They arise from within you. When there is a bunch of toxins like that immediately in that lump of toxicity, fungi will grow. They’re first, because the basis of every microbial community are fungi. We are full of fungi. Beneficial fungi, normal fungi in the human body, microscopic fungi. They grow into that lump of toxicity. Then, along this fungal network that is created in there, bacteria make their little villages, and towns, and homes because the fungi are about hundred times bigger than the size of bacteria. Then, the viruses build their own little houses, and villages, and homes, and hamlets around bacteria. The protozoa move in, and it’s a microbial community that's created in that lump. And then, the immune system, if it cannot and then the body, if it wants this microbe to do the work for it, it would build a capsule of protein around that lump of toxicity to make sure that the immune system can't see it because it's your own protein. Immune system leaves them alone. Doesn't touch them, doesn't kill them. It allows them to proliferate in there in order to eat up all that toxicity to neutralize it, to remove it from you.

But this toxicity keeps coming, and keeps coming, keeps coming, that microbial community can't cope. What happens in that situation then, the fungi, and bacteria, and other creatures in that area, they have a free market of genetics, microbes. Microbes have a free market of genetics. They throw genes out of their own bodies into the environment, and pick up genes of other creatures, and take them within themselves. That's called pleomorphism. It's a fascinating subject, and it goes on in every microbial community all the time.

So, microbes exchange genetics all the time. Apparently, they do the same with our human cells. What they start doing with the cells which are poisoned in that lump of toxicity in there, they start exchanging genetics. So, fungi will put their genetics into that cell, and the cell will throw out some genetics for the fungi to pick up. So, these cells with mixed genetics then start producing babies, so they become hybrids. They're partially half fungal and half human. The more that cell divides, the more it becomes fungal and less it becomes human-- and fungi produce their cells very fast. They multiply much, much, much faster than human cells do. They have a different metabolism. They love sugar, and they use alcoholic fermentation, and they hate oxygen, all the characteristics of a cancer cell. So, cancer cells are not human. They are partially yours, and they're partially fungal, or bacterial, or viral. They have genetics from microbes, so they’re hybrids. They’re Frankensteins. They pick up the ability of microbes to reproduce very, very fast. That is why cancer cells reproduce very, very fast. That is why they do not respond, and they don't behave like human cells, and the human body rejects them because human body knows that this is not mine, this is kind of some hybrid. So, it rejects them, and that is what cancer is, basically.

Melanie Avalon: That is so fascinating. I'm so glad you discussed that, and I'm glad you touched on because one of the things I wanted to ask you was, the correlation between heavy metals and fungal overgrowth, and I know so many people are haunted by this idea of being sick with candida, and I think people go on really intense antifungal diets, and it's a whole rabbit hole and world of things that people struggle with. But you talk about in the book how the body allows candida to proliferate because it's feeding on these metals and cleaning us up, and there's just a lot going on there. It's more complicated than I think we think.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: Oh, yes, it's far more complicated than that. Fungi are our friends, candida is our friend. If it's overgrown in your body, there is reason for it. You might not want to attack your fungi, because the result of that can be much worse than what the fungi doing to you.

Melanie Avalon: Yep. Again, for listeners, all the information is in the GAPS books. I can't thank you enough for writing them. This ties in very well with something that you talk about all throughout the book. It's the last question that I always ask on this show to every guest. You talk about in your book, the important role of mindset surrounding everything. So, what is something that you're grateful for?

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: I'm grateful to my life. Life is amazing. It's wonderful. Just every day, it's just absolutely amazing. I'm very grateful to my son. He's my teacher. Children come to us as teachers. People somehow believe that we adults are so clever and children don't know anything, and we teach them. Yes, we teach them mundane things, like how to dress, how to drive a car, how to behave in this human society. But children teach us, they come to this world to teach us most profound spiritual truths. They come here to make us better human beings, and to make us evolve, and to improve our consciousness, to raise our consciousness. My son has been my teacher in life. He still is. He was my spiritual guide and my spiritual teacher.

I'm very, very grateful for what happened to me, very grateful for the fact that he's chosen me as his mother, that he came to me, I'm very grateful to him for that, and gave me all the lessons, and took me by the scruff of my neck, and pulled me out of the mainstream medicine, [laughs] and forced me to go through all of this and look into food, and look into nature, and understand what life is about. So, I'm very grateful to my life, and the way it turned out to be and to my child. I'm grateful to all the GAPS people all over the world. Every one of them teaches me. What I write in my books, I haven't gone through any book, I haven't gone through many other doctor or any scientist. All of it, I got from my patients. My patients and my teachers. I'm very grateful to them for that.

Melanie Avalon: This has been absolutely amazing. I as well am so grateful for your work. Like I said, I've been a follower of it for years, and years, and years, and I've seen so many testimonials of how it's just radically improved and changed people's lives. So, it's a really surreal moment to be talking to you right now, and I can't recommend enough that listeners check out all of your work. Is there any links that you would like to put out there? How can listeners best get your work, follow your updates all of that?

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: There's a lot of GAPS information online. My main website is gaps.me. G-A-P-S dot me. I have a blog also, doctor-natasha.com, where I put news and new information. I've just put a wonderful testimony there over lady who recovered from autoimmune disease, generalized autoimmune disease from the GAPS diet, and gapstraining.com. So, if you would like to get trained in how to run the GAPS nutritional protocol, we have two training courses running at the moment. The one is for medical practitioners to become a certified GAPS practitioner to work with clients, and another one is for GAPS coaches. A GAPS coach is like doctors and nurses. The GAPS coach is a person who doesn't have to have a prior training to become a GAPS coach. You can become a GAPS coach without medical training. You will be the hands-on person. These are the people who can come to the home of the patient of the person, help them shop, help them cook, help them deal with daily issues, with fussy eating child or with whatever daily issues occur.

Because many GAPS people don't have much energy. They're tired, they're exhausted, they have low energy, they're debilitated by the diseases. Mothers of autistic children haven't had a proper sleep for years. They're exhausted, these poor ladies. It’s very too difficult for them to read all the books, to learn all the material, am I doing this right, am I doing this wrong, what do I need you to do here? So, having a person like that who can guide you day by day is invaluable. So, these are GAPS coaches. We have these two courses running in parallel.

We're planning to have a course for GAPS chefs, hopefully, to come out this year. This course hopefully will launch this year, GAPS chefs. We will have a course that is going to be launched soon for people who are following the GAPS diet, so you can just do the course and follow the diet at the same time, and you'll be able to ask questions from the experts. I have a fantastic team that I'm working with in GAPS training. I'm blessed to have a wonderful team of people who are working with me. They're doing very good work.

Melanie Avalon: Wow. There’s so many resources. You are a busy woman. Again, [laughs] I am so grateful for everything. For listeners, we'll put links to everything that Dr. Campbell-McBride just discussed in the show notes and the show notes again are at melanieavlon.com/gaps. Well, thank you so much. This has been absolutely amazing. I look forward to your future work, and hopefully, we can have another conversation in the future, because it's just really, really incredible, and I'm just so grateful for this conversation.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: That's a pleasure. Thank you very much for organizing this interview and thank you for your work, for spreading the word, and for helping people to find the right information.

Melanie Avalon: Thank you. Bye.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride: Thank you. Bye-bye.