What GAPS Says About Reconnecting With Nature During Healing

The GAPS physiology book connects time in nature with the way food is grown and sourced. Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride starts with gardening and animal care, then discusses soil, pasture and regenerative agriculture. Her idea of reconnection includes ordinary contact with the outdoors and a closer understanding of where your food comes from.^[1]

The Practices Named in the Book

The closing chapter names gardening, planting, growing food and looking after animals as activities that bring people into fresh air and sunshine. It describes them as joyful and restorative physically, mentally and spiritually. Campbell-McBride calls reconnection with nature essential to recovery from chronic illness. Elsewhere, the book includes gentle outdoor walking, time away from screens and contact with animals among its stress practices.^[1]

Campbell-McBride describes former patients who bought land and became small farmers. She also describes her own farming and regenerative work. Those are the author’s and her patients’ experiences. They are not a description of my household or a requirement that every reader buy land.^[1]

Why the Chapter Spends Time on Soil

The book presents healthy soil as a living microbial community and emphasizes its role in storing carbon and holding water. It discusses humus, damage from repeated cultivation and agricultural chemicals, and runoff from depleted land. The 2020 book cites an estimate of 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil lost worldwide each year, or about 3.4 tonnes per person. That is the estimate used in the book, not a newly measured figure for this year.^[1]

Its main food-sourcing question is easier to bring into a shopping trip: how is the soil cared for, and how are the animals raised? You can ask those questions when you buy food even if you do not grow any yourself. It gives a conversation with a producer more substance than looking only for an attractive label.

The Book’s Case for Pasture and Regeneration

Campbell-McBride criticizes industrial grain production and confined animal systems. She contrasts concentrated waste from those operations with manure returned to living pasture. Her examples describe cattle, sheep and goats grazing vegetation, birds finding plants and insects, and pigs foraging in a more natural environment.^[1]

She then argues for regenerative systems that restore soil through carefully managed animals and vegetation. The chapter cites Allan Savory’s work and describes projects using plant biomass to restore damaged land. These are the agricultural examples she gives, rather than a single method that fits every landscape.^[1]

Bring the Idea Into Food Choices

The source links the GAPS diet with buying from organic farmers who care for soil and animals, supporting pasture-based husbandry, growing vegetables, fruit and herbs where possible, and avoiding food waste. It says that no scale is too small.^[1]

• Ask a farmer or supplier how the land and animals are managed.
• Choose one food you would like to understand from production to the plate.
• If growing something is possible, begin at a scale you can actually care for.
• Use the food you buy well, including suitable leftovers and parts of the animal that fit your GAPS route.

These are practical ways to organize the source’s larger idea. They do not depend on presenting yourself as a homesteader. The seasonal meal-planning guide covers the kitchen question of building meals around what you can find.

Nature and the Stress Discussion

Contact with nature is also part of the book’s guidance for reducing an ongoing level of demand. The complete Stress House guide explains that context, and the mental-environment guide covers quiet time and the media side. You do not have to turn a walk or a small gardening task into a promise to cure an illness.^[1]

Your Next Step

Choose one source of food you would like to learn more about, and ask a specific question about how it is produced. My guide is the relevant companion for making sourcing choices work with the household budget. My Budget Sourcing Guide is listed in the WFLI Shop.

References

1. Campbell-McBride, N. Gut and Physiology Syndrome (2020), “A Few Last Notes,” reconnecting to the planet, gardening, animal care, soil, source estimates and regenerative farming, pp. 400–402; “Healing,” nature and gentle exercise.