What the Blue Zones can teach us
Then, to confuse matters even more, we have the Blue Zones where people have no knowledge or interest in weird diets yet are fit and healthy to a ripe old age.
They have no idea of the importance of trace minerals like zinc, chromium, selenium or iodine; neither do they think about their gut biology. They simply have nutritious soil by recycling and composting all their waste and picking and eating their vegetables without delay.
This must tell us something.
How do we make sense of all this?
Head brain, gut brain and natural self-regulation
We could read Dr. Mosconi’s book about brain food or any of the many other books on brain and gut health.
It then becomes clear that we have an inbuilt control system in our head and guts which regulates how much and what we eat. It has worked perfectly for millions of years.
People in the Blue Zones are fit and healthy into their nineties because they are feeding their guts and brains food which is healthy for guts and brains, so they have no need to think about diet—their brain systems naturally regulate what they eat.
Conversely, the reason why we have such a health crisis in so-called advanced countries is because we are eating a diet which is incredibly harmful to our guts and brains.
Because our head and gut brains are not being fed healthy food and our diet is lacking essential minerals, our control system goes into panic mode and we develop almost irresistible food cravings—so we go and eat more sugary, fatty foods.
We try and fix this by restrictive diets when we should be feeding our gut and head brains the food they need.
The Gbiota green smoothie: a simple first step
The solution is to focus on eating food that will make our guts and brains healthy and stop worrying about weighing our food to the nearest gram to control calorie intake.
The easiest and most convenient food to feed our guts and brains is the Gbiota green smoothie. It is made by simply harvesting fresh greens using the tipping system, making it taste good by adding a little fruit and some herbs and spices, and then seeing if this can restore our gut and brain health so our bodies self-regulate.
This does not involve any major change in the foods we have learned to love, even if they are unhealthy. We just drink a smoothie before and while we eat our normal food and simply see if our natural control system cuts in to regulate what and how much we want to eat.
Will it work every time? We simply don’t know as everyone is different, but it is so simple and easy to do that it should be the first step in improving health by diet.
If it does not give the desired results then we have to adopt the more complex systems of changing our diets to restore our gut and brain health.
Why the Gbiota green smoothie is so effective
When we eat the normal modern high-sugar diet our blood sugar levels rise. Our bodies sense the high sugar levels and release insulin, which allows the sugar to enter our cells and reduce the dangerously high sugar levels. This is our intelligent body doing its job.
The blood sugar levels drop, as intended, but there is still insulin in the system so we experience what engineers call “overshoot”—the result of the excessively high sugar levels our bodies have not evolved to cope with.
As our blood sugar levels now drop below normal, we get sugar cravings and want to eat more sugary food, so we end up in an unstable cycle with our blood sugar levels swinging from too high to too low in a totally unstable way.
Eventually we become so used to insulin that it stops being effective and we have insulin resistance, which is the start of the slippery slope to serious diabetes.
But the vegetables in a green smoothie act as sugar blockers which slow the rate of sugar entering our bloodstream, so they act as a sort of damper, bringing stability to the system.
We are eating sugary food in the first place because our gut biology has adapted to high sugar levels and so the sugar-loving bugs have become dominant in our guts, making us want to eat more sugary food.
When we consume veggie smoothies on a regular basis, the veggie-loving bugs in our guts gradually out-compete the sugar-loving bugs so we just stop craving sugary foods.
Once we have changed our gut biology we no longer have to adopt strict diets—we just have to listen to what our healthy gut biology is telling us.
The biggest mistake the diet industry has made is to think of the human body as just a bunch of dumb biochemistry when in reality it is an intelligent system.
