Beet Kvass Recipe: The Ultimate Fat Digestion Aid

I’ve been meaning to write this article forever because I hear these questions a lot:

  1. I can’t eat that much fat without feeling sick, how can I do GAPS?
  2. I/ my kid threw up yesterday, why?

 

Well, in my experience, the answer is Beet Kvass.  Especially to Q #1 (#2 is more nuanced).  Here’s why.  Beet Kvass thins bile.  Bile needs to flow from your gallbladder to your liver to digest fat. 

 

At the beginning of my healing journey, my bile was pretty thick and stagnant, which is a very common side effect of growing up eating the Standard American Diet (SAD). I would get nauseous when I ate too much fat and was bummed I couldn’t absorb all the healing goodness that fat had to offer!

 

Dr. Natasha says that the more animal fat she sees people eat (pastured sources, of course), the quicker they heal.  So I knew I wanted to be eating as much fat as humanly possible.  That’s where beet kvass came in. 

 

I drank small amounts of beet kvass every time before I ate, and I increased the amounts of both kvass and fat simultaneously.  Now I don’t really worry about being able to digest fat. I’ve worked up to eating about a cup of fat per day!

 

So beet kvass is how I could do GAPS even though I couldn’t digest fat very well at first.  And what I tell people about Question #2? Well it could be low blood sugar, it could be a detox reaction, or it could be ‘you can’t digest fat that well and you ate more than your body could handle.’

 

So without further ado, here’s the recipe:

  • 3 small-to-medium sized beets with tops on
  • 1 quart sized mason jar
  • 1 Tbsp sea salt or Himalayan pink salt
  • 1/2 quart filtered water
  • 1 fermentation weight (optional)

 

First, chop the beets up so that they are about 1 cubic inch in diameter (2.5 cm).  Make sure you leave the tops on the beets, not the stems, but the part where the stems connect to the root body of the vegetable.  That’s where all the best bacteria is! 

 

Fill your quart jar with about 1 inch of headroom to spare.  This is where you can put your fermentation weight on top of your veggies if you want.  I like doing this so that the beets don’t float to the top, get exposed to air and get moldy. 

 

Now take your half quart of water (2 cups), and dump your salt into it.  It works best if you use a mason jar for this tactic because now you can just put the lid on and shake it up to mix up the salt.  Now you have your brine!

 

Pour brine over your chopped up beets up to the lip of the mason jar they are in, or a little bit below. Make sure your brine covers all the veggies.  Screw on the lid tight and don’t open this jar for at least a couple of weeks!  The fermentation time will depend on where you live.  But generally, the more humid and warm an environment is, the faster things ferment. 🙂  You’ll know it’s done when you try it and it has a sour taste.

 

Then introduce a small amount into your diet (ideally before meals) and work up from there!

 

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It took me: 3.5 years on GAPS, a lyme diagnosis, record-breaking amounts of pesticides in my body, an incredible amount of heavy metals, a GAPS practitioner certification, and 8 months working intensely with one of the top GAPS Practitioners in the world before I figured out how to do GAPS right + truly started healing myself. I don’t think it should take that much time, suffering, or study for you.

 

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