Gbiota aims

Gbiota is a social-benefit organisation helping people access food that sustains long, healthy lives—while growing it sustainably for communities now and in the future.

Food and its effect on health have been studied for decades by the world’s top researchers. Yet modern outcomes—obesity, diabetes, heart disease, dementia—tell us something is missing.

Biochemistry — sophisticated, but not the full story

Modern biochemistry can quantify nutrients to micrograms. It can prescribe what we “should” eat for perfect health.

But most people don’t follow those prescriptions. Instead, we eat what we fancy—and the results are plain to see.

Why? We need an explanation

Over thousands of years we evolved an intelligent internal control system that regulates what and how much we want to eat. It’s powerful—it can override external advice.

It’s rarely effective to tell people what to eat; they ultimately eat what their body’s control system tells them to eat.

Like any part of the body, this control system must be fed and cared for. Modern lifestyles and food systems often neglect it—so if we want long, healthy lives, we must nourish the system that regulates us.

What we know about this control system

In 1860, Claude Bernard proposed internal self-regulation of the body. In 1926, Walter Cannon refined the idea as homeostasis—processes that maintain internal balance.

Key idea

We still don’t fully understand the mechanics, but we accept that an intelligent regulating system keeps our bodies in balance.

The global health problem

Chronic diseases cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars. Understanding—and working with—this control system is now essential.

Looking outside the box

Medicine isn’t the only place to look for insight. Consider modern intelligent control systems in engineering.

Predictor–corrector systems

Engineering uses a simple loop:

• Predict what should happen
• Apply a small change
• Measure the error (the wobble)
• Correct and repeat until stable control is achieved

It’s not about perfection—it’s about making things work, learning as you go.

What has this to do with the human body?

It’s how we learn to ride a bike. A child doesn’t know the physics of gyroscopic couples—but through tiny wobbles and corrections, she learns to balance.

Food works the same way. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans learned which foods worked for them—by trial, feedback, and adaptation.

What Darwin actually said

Darwin’s point wasn’t “survival of the fittest”—it was survival of what works.

Nature keeps what works in context. There’s no perfect creature—only many strategies that work well enough to persist.

How humans found a system that worked

Early humans didn’t know modern biochemistry, but they developed a powerful prediction-correction approach. With a new food, we:

1. Look
2. Smell
3. Lick
4. Taste
5. If it passes, eat a portion

That loop teaches us what works.

How Gbiota works

We don’t claim perfect knowledge of the human control system (and with diverse DNA, perfection may be impossible).

But Gbiota’s founder, engineer Colin Austin, spent decades building industrial control systems. We understand the wobble approach—predictor–corrector—applied to individuals.

What we do in practice

• Make small dietary changes and observe responses
• Nurture the gut microbiome—a swarm-intelligence partner in appetite and health
• Ensure adequate trace minerals & vitamins to avoid deficiency-driven hunger signals
• Keep what works; discard what doesn’t

There’s no universal magic pill for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, or dementia. Instead, we use feedback to find what works for you.

We don’t promise perfection. We ask the engineer’s question: Does it work?