If you want to make a significant improvement in something, whether it is an old car or the world, you really need to understand how it works.
It may be quicker, easier and cheaper to use AI to trawl its databases, but real advances come from understanding.
But that understanding can come by serendipity. Let me tell you the story.
For many years I was a natural pig; I loved food and trying the different culinary skills from around the world. As a result, I ended up on the operating table undergoing a triple bypass heart operation at the age of 60.
It is like having a milk crate crushed into your chest, definitely something you don’t want for a hobby, and you don’t have to be an expert in statistical theory to suspect a link between my natural tendency to be a pig and the resultant heart attack.
But even such a starkly obvious correlation is not an understanding of the underlying mechanism, so I have now spent many years of my life trying to understand this mechanism.
I described the approach in my last article on Metabolic food, and statistically it looks like sound evidence: for years I ate like a pig, I suffered a heart attack, changed my diet and twenty-six years later, at the age of 86, I was still fit and healthy.
But I am an engineer; I like experiments with real results that can be measured without the threat that correlation is not causation.
And then the opportunity came along in a rather unpleasant way.
I like most 86-year-old men had a swollen prostate, so I decided to undergo green light therapy in which a laser is used to bore a hole through the bloated prostate – a very common and reliable process.
I was released from hospital with an electronic prescription for antibiotics. I did not think it wise to drive, so the next day I walked to the local chemist, which I do regularly and which takes about 40 minutes each way.
But I was not my normal self, and it took much longer than usual; by the time I returned, I was exhausted.
The next day I was clearly seriously ill, and my family decided this was no time for delay. They rushed me off to the local emergency hospital where I was diagnosed with an infected urinary tube.
I was put on an intravenous antibacterial drip. After a few days, I was allowed home, obviously not in any immediate danger but far from my normal healthy state (for an 86-year-old).
If you have read any of my articles on food and health, you will be aware that a key part of my thinking is that our bodies have an intelligent control system that naturally regulates the body. The gut has crowd intelligence and responds to signals from the subconscious brain to produce a combination of electrical and chemical signals (hormones) that are the final stages in this control system.
This is why we need metabolic food and why we need to learn to grow metabolic food.
This is why we need a paradigm shift in how we think about food; paradigm shifts come from the collective responses of active but small groups of dedicated people, and that is what the Gbiota club is all about.
It may seem that my little health crisis is a bit of a block to this process, but it actually gives me an opportunity to reconstitute my body and document the entire process.
There is no guarantee of the final result, which is why we call it speculative research.
I plan to provide regular documentation of this speculative research to members of the Gbiota club. If you want to be an observer in this project, or, even better, conduct your own metabolic food project then why not join the GBiota club here.