Health – prevention better than cure
The health crisis
Two-thirds of the population are overweight, the wrong fat in the wrong place is the root cause of all chronic diseases.
Diabetes is the fastest-growing disease with half a billion sufferers and eight million people a year suffering a limb amputation.
Heart attacks are the most common cause of death while dementia must be one of the most distressing diseases.
Health systems are creaking at the joints with not enough doctors and health workers.
A shortage of beds leads to Ambulance ramping.
Governments struggle to maintain an overstretched health system.
The costs to our health system are measured in billions of dollars – one of the highest costs to Governments worldwide.
Welcome as it may be spending more money on health is not the solution so what is the solution?
In one word prevention.
Weekly blog
I read, study and experiment with the technology of preventing getting fat and sick. I write a new post every week. You can join for free for six months but you need to sign in and tick the box saying ‘Notify me of new posts by email’.
When you receive a notification of a new post you will need to come back to this site and log in.
Prevention
Prevention is not just a medical problem, we need medical expertise but essentially it is a societal problem, creating a society where people can live a long life, fit and healthy to the end.
Forget about talking about life span, who wants to spend their life stuck in a wheelchair, dribbling into your blanket, peeing your pants and wondering who those funny kids are who keep on calling you granddad.
What matters is health span and health span is a societal issue so before I talk about how to increase health span (which I will do) I have to talk about the society we live in and it is not nice.
Health span
Chronic diseases that reduce our health span are caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place.
We know exactly how we get fat. The biochemistry has been long established. One of the best books is by Ruben Meerman.
We eat food which is largely made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Our bodies burn off the carbon to form carbon dioxide which is a heavy gas which we breathe out.
If we consume more carbon than we breathe out we get fat. It is the law of conservation of mass – simple.
Nutritionists talk about calorie balance which is highly confusing but can be technically justified as burning carbon, however you do it, always releases the same amount of energy so talking about calorie balance as a measure of carbon is technically correct – but confusing.
So we know how we get fat but the real question is why we get fat. We have known about that for years with the science of homeostasis.
Our bodies have a set point for the amount of fat we need to store and will do everything possible to go back to that set point.
Set point
Understanding what determines that set point is the most important issue in managing chronic disease.
The classic example of the set point at work is in post-menopausal women who tend to put a lot of fat on their bums and thighs. This is the set point at work.
Men have a different issue tending to put on fat on their tums.
Don’t believe me – go to any shopping centre and look.
The mechanics are simple. In the millions or so years of humanoid existence, we have had to cope with a single feature of human nature. Our children take far longer to mature than any other animal.
No hopping out of Mum’s tum, then being able to run away from that lion.
Our kids need looking after for a very long time. In this evolutionary period, parents were kept busy gathering or hunting for food so much of the role of child care fell to grandmother (and grandfather too if they were still alive).
For grandparents to survive and look after the kids while the parents were gathering food they needed a store of energy or fat so we evolved to have a raised set point. That is evolution at work.
In our modern society with an ample supply of food, this set point is no longer appropriate.
But instead of focusing on changing the set point, which we can easily do by ensuring we feel satisfied, we go on extreme diets restricting food intake which means we don’t feel satisfied which raises rather than lowers the set point making things worse rather than better.
This is why operations like bariatric surgery and drugs like Ozempic are so successful – they make us feel satisfied. Both have nasty side effects and there are much better and cheaper ways of changing the set point.
That is an individual choice, there are no major operations or expensive drugs involved but it does require education.
That is why I run this website with weekly posts to help people understand how their bodies create this set point and how to change it.
Changing society
We know what we have to do to prevent an epidemic of chronic disease, it is not a technical problem we have to change the society to work on the principle of prevention.
Not so profitable for the mega-corporations but a lot better for the community.
But how do we do that when the internet is so choked with misinformation and the mega-corporations have so much influence over our Governments?
It does not matter how many technical articles I write or how many letters I write to the Government nothing will happen.
The solution is to create a social movement of people who appreciate the need for change and are prepared to spend time for the benefit of the community.
It is a simple process.
Step one is to find people with an entrepreneurial attitude who see the need for change.
Step two is for them to spend time reading the key articles on this web so they understand the basic principles but words are not enough we have to show people that it works.
Step three is for them to grow food using the Gbiota principles of breeding beneficial microbes in organic waste, growing plants in the resultant soil and eating the plants while fresh.
Even a glass of green Gbiota smoothie works wonders.
Step 4 is to sense their appetite and see if the food cravings stop and they feel satisfied. If they want to fit themselves with a continuous blood sugar monitor, as I do, they will get more specific information on how their body is working.
Not essential, the critical test is do I feel satisfied?
Step 5 is to tell their friend and contacts and persuade them to start growing some food using the Gbiota principles.
This may seem a slow and tedious process but seeing is believing and growth would be exponential 2 4 16 256, 65536 4.3 billion half the world’s population.
It is like a bolder on a mountain top, hard to get rolling but once it starts impossible to stop. Changing the world is not difficult when you have a few shoulders to get the bolder rolling.
No one wants to be the victim of a chronic disease, be fat and sick and risk having a foot amputated from diabetes.
Let’s get the bolder rolling.
When you have joined here are some earlier posts you may like to read.
See Society
See Food we love it
See prevention
See Disease
See Recycle
See community health
See friendly bugs.
See My Teddy
See Jenny
See The riddle
See Invite
See The plan
See adoption
See Think smarter
Chronic diseases require a life style change, they cannot be cured by pills or injections. You have to make the effort.
We have no funding, we are a membership only social benefit organisation with costs like any other organisation.
We are supported by our members. We have a free six month trial period. After that you can join the community and read the various articles we publish on a weeklyish basis for an annual subscription of $Au15 (about ten dollars US). Use rethinking food login here or join as a full member and benefit from our growing support.
If you want to know more I am happy to chat, I can set up video calls, but you have to email me first.
Together we can make the world a better place for humans, (but maybe not for computers).
Find out who we are at Welcome to Gbiota
There are over 300 posts and 150 videos on this site. It may be an indepth study of food and health but it can be a bit overwhelming.
I have made a short list of the key posts below in a suggested reading schedule.
I suggest you start having a look a these posts, at the end of each post just click on Home in the menu or main menu in the footer at the bottom of each post which will bring you back to this page and then you can look at the next post.
You can see all post at New Posts, Food and Health, Gbiota news for free as a signed up member or growing as a paying member
If you have question or want to chat I am available for email or video chats.
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Colin Austin © Creative commons this document may be reproduced but the source should be acknowledged. Information may be used for private use but commercial use requires a license.
