Health span or Epidemic
Colin Austin 6 March 2025 published under the Creative Commons system. It may be reproduced without further permission – just acknowledgement of source.
Why is it?
Why is it that some people are fit and healthy, enjoy a long health span with hardly a visit to the doctor while despite the sophistication of modern medical research does the epidemic of chronic diseases continues to increase causing a great deal of personal grief and costing health systems trillions of dollars?
Why is it that some people are slim, fit and healthy and others are fat and sick?
Maybe it is time to take a moment out of the rush of modern living and have a deep think.
Who the (?) are you?
Let me start by saying that I have no formal medical qualifications, I am a successful innovative engineer and was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators for my pioneering work in Computer Aided Engineering.
Innovation requires more than developing new technologies, important as that is, but it also requires challenging long established views often held by experts in the field – not a pleasant process.
However, among all those well respected experts there are those free thinkers, the technical entrepreneurs, who see the need for a new way of thinking, pick up the baton and lead the charge for a new way of thinking.
Change is often born when an isolated individual, often outside the field, without the burden of the conventional paradigms rethinks an issue.
But that isolated individual rarely makes the change. That happens when a few entrepreneurial thinkers within the field see the need for rethinking and lead the charge.
Our intelligent control system
We have a wealth of perfectly valid science helping us understand the biochemistry of our bodies which has led to the development of the so-called wonder drugs like Ozempic based on glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1).
This is based on a naturally occurring hormone which our bodies produce to tell us to stop eating. Development of such drugs is highly sophisticated and valid technology which we must respect.
But the question we need to ask is – “This is a naturally occurring hormone which our bodies produce, why is our body not producing this hormone to stop us getting fat and sick?”
This is the question that the entrepreneurial free thinkers within the health profession should be asking.
The answer lies in understanding how our intelligent control system works.
The change in thinking we need right now is to recognise that our bodies have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly what and how much we eat and try and understand how this intelligent control system works, why it sometimes does not work and then how to fix it.
Intelligent control software
One of my activities was writing intelligent or self-learning control software for irrigation control.
This is of course nothing to do with how our body’s intelligent control system works, but understanding the methodology of how human generated intelligent control system works gives us an insight into how our natural intelligent control system works.
Irrigation is a complex problem as the weather is changing, the plants are growing and have different water requirements throughout their lives.
By continuously monitoring soil moisture, past evaporation and rainfall and anticipated evaporation and rainfall it is possible to learn how the ever-changing system works and predict how much water should be applied at the next irrigation to cater for anticipated needs.
Chronic disease
I say I have no medical qualifications but I am married to a medical doctor who is also diabetic, her foot started to turn black and our medical advisers were talking about the necessity of amputation.
However, I did learn that chronic diseases have a basic cause of the wrong fat in the wrong place, in the case of diabetes fat in the pancreas. (nb she still has both feet.)
Out of the Silo
So I asked myself, as an engineer, what is the basic cause of the wrong fat in the wrong place.? The classic answer from the viewpoint of biochemistry is overeating, but as an engineer knowing how intelligent control systems work it seemed that the more valid answer is that it is a control problem.
Why do we overeat?
Swarm intelligence
We know that the gut contains trillions of cells with each cell being able to communicate with neighbouring cells to create swarm intelligence – which is well understood.
We also know that the gut is in continuous communication with the cerebral brain to create an intelligent control system for our bodies.
This is a remarkable system but as it operates in our subconscious brain we are not aware and have no control over its operation.
Subconscious control
But it is still remarkable, it can control our temperature over a range of conditions to a fraction of a degree, it controls our heart and breathing rate to ensure that there is adequate oxygen for our muscles.
But perhaps some of the most remarkable achievements occur with a combination of our subconscious and conscious brains.
We can walk upstairs, carrying a cup of coffee while talking on our mobile phones. Even a three-year-old kid can ride a bicycle which requires the skill to apply the mechanism of self-balancing gyroscopic couples – truly remarkable.
Equally remarkable is the control of appetite. For the last billion years, all animals (and despite our intellect when it comes to scoffing down slices of piazza and cheesecake we are all animals) have been able to manage their appetite knowing what and how much to eat to thrive.
So I suggest that when we face the very real problem of the epidemic of chronic diseases we expand our thinking from the science of bio-chemistry and diet to include the thinking of a control engineer.
Three critical issues – intelligent gut, deficiencies, learning
It seems there are three critical issues where we only have partial understanding, at least at the theoretical level but where we have indisputable, even if empirical evidence.
There is a saying that science is the art of managing truth while engineering is the art of managing ignorance.
Maybe to combat the epidemic of chronic disease we need to learn to manage our ignorance.
Intelligent control system
Unfortunately, we do not have a proper understanding of how our intelligent control system works, at least at the code level but there are certain experimental observations which are indisputable and important.
We have known for many years that we can make fat mice skinny and skinny mice fat by changing their gut biota and that is equally true with humans, (although we have not adopted the habit of eating each other pooh).
Specific deficiencies
Empirical evidence shows that the human body is far more sophisticated than the simple calorie theory. Our bodies can detect specific deficiencies, and when it does it will create hunger hormones so we eat more, not just more but more of the specific food it has learned will satisfy that specific deficiency.
If we don’t eat the specific food it will keep on sending our hormones until we do – a somewhat random process which results in overeating.
Again the understanding at the scientific level is limited but at the empirical level, there is no doubt as anyone who has dug their garden on a hot summer day experiences.
Sweating on a hot day leads to a loss of salts which, if our self-learning process has worked, will normally create a craving for salty food – often beer and crisps but not cheesecake.
But again our body will keep on pumping our eat more hormones until the deficiencies are filled.
This is not a new concept, homeostasis was first proposed over two hundred years ago.
Training and long-term memory
We know that from birth our intelligent control system is monitoring the specific food we eat and associating this with our feeling of following satisfaction.
If there is a serious deficiency it will decide that it needs to operate with a higher safety margin for food – a long-winded way of saying the intelligent control system decided we need to store more fat.
We have known this for over eighty years, people who suffered severe starvation in the war became obese when food was later available.
Three-pronged solution
Changing the gut biome of eight billion people
Changing people’s gut biome is already a well-established technology, the issue is how to viably and economically change the gut biome of the eight billion people on Earth. Now there is a challenge.
There is no difficulty in breeding gut microbes, the issue is how to breed the right sort, the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful ones.
We have to step outside the confines of the lab and think on an industrial scale recognising that a healthy gut biome may have over a thousand different species of biota.
The solution, which can operate on an industrial scale is based on the principle of ecological balance, creating the conditions that favour the beneficial microbes so they out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.
This is not a medical or even a biological issue, it is a straightforward engineering problem – largely based on fluid flow.
By luck I was a pioneer in computation fluid flow and when younger was recognised as a leader in this field. The solution is technically straightforward and well within the capacity of an experienced grower.
But there are two obstacles.
The first is with the scientific community in getting them to accept a simple, pragmatic solution when the underlying science has not matured.
The second is with Governments. It does mean creating what is a new industry of gut-brain food. This really needs Government support, just waiting for economics and the profit motive will not lead to a rapid solution.
But there needs to be a sense of urgency with eight million people having a limb amputated every year and the ever-increasing increase in obesity, now creeping into the younger generation.
The second problem of specific deficiencies is automatically resolved by this technology as breeding the beneficial requires a supply of the trace minerals to feed the microbes.
The third problem of training our gut-brain is more difficult. For years the standard promotion of ‘eat less exercise more’ has become ingrained into the system.
As we learned from wartime starvation a simple restrictive diet aggravated rather than resolves the obesity problem.
Changing the paradigm within a profession which has a duty to be cautious is not going to be easy. That can be resolved by pilot plant style demonstrations working on the show me don’t tell me basis.
The punch line
The health of billions of people and controlling the trillions of dollars spent on trying to manage health care costs depend on recognising the importance of our intelligent control system.
I may have developed technology to power our intelligent control system but I cannot create this change myself, this has to come from the entrepreneurial free thinkers within the health profession.
If this is you I would love to hear from you colin@gbiota.com
