Food and our nature
Colin Austin © 15 December 2023 This document it published under the creative commons system which means it can be freely copied and distributed without further permissions.
The only restriction is that the source Colin Austin at gbiota.com should be acknowledged.
Abstract
Homo eructus, our ancient ancestor was a puny little creature that barely survived.
But it discovered fire and learned to cook and the extra nutrients led to a bigger brain and the combination of intelligence and cooperation led to humans becoming the dominant creature on earth.
We have the technology to produce goods on such a scale that we should all be enjoying a wonderful life - yet we are not.
Why? Aggression.
We need to understand why this creatures which has such in built advantages of intelligence and cooperation should put this all at risk by aggression.
Simply changing our food changed our nature - our DNA.
Changing food has since occurred a number of time always with the same effect, a change in our nature and DNA.
We are now in the midst of a major change to our food, increased consumption of sugars and fats and a failure to feed our gut brain.
This is again changing our very nature, we are getting fatter, our health span is decreasing and above all we are becoming more aggressive - hangry.
Do we really want to breed a new species of humanity that is fat, sick and aggressive?
Would it not be better just to feed our gut brain which has been evolving over thousands of years to control our appetite naturally?
Food and our nature explains all and what we can do about it. It goes against the current trend of a quick publicity grab, it is a long article for serious concerned thinkers.
It analyses the link between food and our nature and what we can do about it - the action plan.
But will the click bait society win or will we put the effort into serious thinking then act?
Tell me at colin@gbiota.com
Introduction
We know for sure that the food we eat can make us fat and sick, but what if it can affect our very nature, our DNA and make us a less aggressive and more cooperative creature. In this article I put forward the arguments for this idea.
Internet marketing experts tell me that my web has too much text and that people just want a few cute sayings and lots of graphics and videos.
Well I am not Taylor Swift in the mass entertainment business, I am trying to make a viable world for Elowen my great grand daughter and the others that follow.
I know that the world is not going to be changed by an eighty four year old man, even if he is still fit and healthy, I have to convince a smallish number of younger thinking people who have the energy to persuade the world to change the food they eat so people can live a healthy life with greater cooperation and less aggregation.
I have to create a social movement.
If this could be you, please keep on reading, despite it being very untrendy text.
Humans – one of the great apes
We can trace our ancestry back to homo erectus who first appeared some million years ago. A pretty unsuccessful creature that barely managed to survive until what is probably the most significant event in history.
Wait – its coming.
But we are just one of a very mixed family. Our cousins the chimpanzees are one of the most aggressive creatures on the planet indulging in totally pointless mass genocide of their own species which make humans look relatively restrained.
But our other cousins, the Bonobos, are the exact opposite friendly cooperative and indulging in unrestrained sex which make the Californian hippies of the sixties look totally restrained.
How can we start to stitch these facts together for the benefit of our great grand kids?
Fire – the technology that changed us
Fire just came, we don’t know how but suddenly we had fire.
We could now cook food to make if more digestible - the result - our gut shrunk and our brain increased in size which led to us becoming the dominant creature on the planet.
This is the theme I will keep on coming back to - we change our diet and there is the immediate and obvious effect but there can be a much more important and longer term effect.
We did not methodically set out to discover fire so we could cook and grow bigger brains, fire was simply a random occurrence that changed us and the world.
Back to Taylor Swift
Our bigger brains gave us more sophisticated language, music and dancing.
Music and dancing may not seem a big deal in the survival movement but they were.
Dancing is part of our mating ritual but it is much more, it is part of our hunting skill. Our bodies are not naturally well suited for hunting, we are a bit lite on in the claws, teeth and beak departments.
We need to hunt in packs with coordinated synchronised movement. You see that pre-planned, well rehearsed, coordinated movement every time you watch a footy match.
Synchronised movement, or mass dancing, is universal in hunter tribes and is a rehearsal for the synchronised and coordinated activities in hunting large and ferocious creatures.
Even the concept of rehearsal requires brain power which was enabled by fire.
You can’t beat that for dramatic events.
Brain power and aggression
The early hunter gatherers didn’t just wonder around aimlessly, they had a defined area which they thought of as their territory.
It may be two hundred thousand years ago but those early hunter gatherers had similar brain size, and presumably similar intellectual capabilities as modern man.
When they were hungry they suffered pain and understood that they were totally dependant for their food supply on the land that supported them.
They were also totally dependant on other members of their tribe so cooperation and intelligence became key to us not just surviving but becoming the dominant creature on the planet.
All because we learned to cook - and no I am not promoting chicken wings and chips.
If they felt our food supply was secure they would trade with other tribes without conflict. Pretty good - we all win.
However if they felt that the other tribe was a threat to their food supply by invading their land they would be extremely aggressive, the most aggressive creature on the planet that inflicts incredible harm on members of our own species.
Not as bad as our cousins the chimpanzees who go in for total pointless killing of their own species but don’t expect any gold medals from the UN.
Fortunately the chimpanzee don’t have atomic bombs which could annihilate their species (ps and us).
How we think
How did this mess happen. It is useful to contemplate how we think.
We do not think every new situation out from scratch - thinking is a slow and tedious process. So we have evolved to pre-think through a large number of situations and have answers almost ready when needed - we just pick the most relevant pre-solved solution.
Look at a baby – as soon as it gets hungry it senses pain and starts to scream and yell and get real angry until mum feeds it. Getting food is its one and only mission in life and if it does not get fed it gets real angry.
Getting angry is a pre-solved solution – and it certainly works on mum.
As baby grows up it soon works out that food comes from the land, it’s land. It expands its pre-solved solution to become angry when anyone threatens its source of food - it’s land.
Protecting our bit of land, our territory has become ingrained into our thinking.
We don’t go through a process of logically working out how important that piece of land is to our needs, it is ingrained into us that this is our land and we will commit any violence or atrocities to retain that land.
It is so powerful that it almost appears to be a natural instinct - but it is not - it was ingrained into us when mum did not feed us quickly enough.
Changing this ingrained thinking is what makes changing paradigms so hard.
For now I just make the point that we become a nasty aggressive creature when our food supply is threatened. I will come back to that theme later when I talk about the threat that climate change has on our future.
Cause, effect and enabling
Much of modern science involves establishing statistical correlations and then trying to work out which is the cause and which is the effect.
Enabling is an equally powerful effect. Fire did not directly give us the bigger brain to undertake rehearsals - it was an ‘enabling factor’.
In my younger days (I have never worked out why teenagers find it impossible to image that old people were young once and snogged behind the bike shed - or whatever teenagers do now).
I was a pioneer in computer aided engineering, writing software to solve complex engineering problems.
Often the basic physics had been understood for centuries, Newton with his understanding of the laws of mechanics and the development of the calculus could have easily solved the problems I solved - if he had had access to computer technology.
I was able to solve these problems because of the enabling capability of the modern computer.
There is no more important illustration of this than in climate change. We have known the basic physics of climate change for almost a couple of hundred years, it is only with the immense power of modern computers can we predict what this actually means on a global scale, or more important to me to Bundaberg where I live. Ps Bundaberg is prone to flooding so I have empathy for low lying countries.
The central theme
The central theme is that food does more than change us in the short term - yes eating too many chicken wings and chips and yet more chips followed by a double serve of cheese cake will make us fat, sick and probably diabetic - but it can also change our very nature.
Fire changed our DNA creating a smaller gut (not a big deal) but a much bigger brain ( a very, very big deal) which literally changed the world.
Agriculture and Seeds
The next big shift was agriculture. Our best explanation is that some hunter gatherers harvested wild grains and stored them to eat in the winter.
Probably they had plenty of grains that year so they just threw the old ones away, they grew and they accidentally discovered agriculture.
We shrunk
Agriculture changed us as a species. We know from fossilised records that hunter gatherers were quite large people, size matters when you trying to bring down a Mastodon.
But when we developed the technology of agriculture we physically changed as a species.
We became smaller, physical size is not so important in an agricultural society, so the laws of evolution allowed smaller people to survive.
But there was a much more important change - our immune system.
Our immune system
Even more dramatic was the development of our immune system.
Hunter gatherers lived in small communities and moved around so disease was not a major issue in the survival battle.
More directly we had a fresh place to poop every time.
Agriculture led to high concentration of people in static cities, conditions which naturally led to disease.
(In London the Thames became an open sewer and the smell got so bad they had to shut down parliament on bad days - it was not the politics that stunk it was the river.)
So natural selection led us to develop enhanced immune systems with survival of those with the most developed immune system which had been trained to defend against the local diseases of that time.
We see this in other creatures, bats living in caves full of fermenting bat shit have evolved an incredible immune system protecting them from diseases which kill us.
There has certainly been a lot of debate whether the Covid epidemic in humans originated from bats who were totally immune to Covid.
Colonisation
We certainly know from the era of colonisation that the diseases from the colonising humans decimated the native human populations who had not developed immunity to these new diseases.
It is startling to think that a little change in technology from finding that a few stored seeds would grow would lead to fundamental changes in us as a species.
How will modern food change us?
This should certainly make us wonder what the effects of the current changes in our modern food system will be on us as a species, not just in the short term but in the long term.
We don’t have to predict, the short term is happening right now. We have become fatter and sicker with reduced health spans. Diabetes, heart attacks and dementia have reached epidemic proportions.
I know a bit about diabetes, my wife is both a medical doctor and diabetic. She monitors her blood sugar very carefully but sometimes she over does it a bit and her blood sugar drops down to low.
I don’t need to see her blood sugar levels, she just get angry for no particular reason (other than living with me). There is a medical term for it hangry, angry because the blood sugar is low and she feels hungry.
I look at all the violence and wars on the News and ask myself if there is any connection between this anger and the real or imagined fear of hunger.
Medicine and modern food
The next major shift was more deliberate but again the cause was external.
Until recently three out of every five babies born died within the first five years, then another died as they the reached teenage and died doing dangerous things - as teenagers do.
Four out of five dying before reaching maturity kept the global population down, but then we improved our medical technology and most babies would reached adulthood.
In the hundred years before I was born the global population trebled and in my life time trebled again.
Fertilisers and the green revolution
By this time we had fine tuned the process of innovation, the development of technology and science and we responded with fertilisers - particularly the fixing of atmospheric nitrogen by the Haber Bosch process, the green revolution, chemical industrial farming and food processing.
We now produce food at a far higher rate than the increase in global population - a spectacular technical achievement.
On the surface it looked like a fairy tale, ample food and increasing life span. What could possibly go wrong?
Climate change
The first warning that this fairy tale may not have a happy ending was climate change. Floods and drought were making it more difficult to maintain food production - not a general decline but random events in time and geography causing local food shortages.
We only have to look at Pakistan where lack of food from climate change is causing a new generation to grow up stunted from lack of food.
To add to our worries, agriculture and our food system shipping food around the globe, is a significant source of green house gases.
May be we could console ourselves that our technological prowess has resolved worse problems so it is time for action but not panic.
Chronic diseases
But then something much more sinister appeared, the rise of chronic diseases like diabetes, heart attack and dementia which rose to epidemic levels.
These diseases have always existed but on a small scale, the epidemic scale is man made and is a direct result of a change of our food technology.
There was no doubt that this is happening - but why, we need a nice neat scientific explanation.
The first hypothesis to achieve popularity was fat or more specifically the wrong fat in the wrong place.
We quickly learned that diabetes is a two stage process, at first we store fat in our muscles and developed insulin resistance - which at first is not a major issue as the pancreas simply makes more insulin.
We don’t know, in fact we cannot know, but we suspect that there is a large number of people who are pre-diabetic but there are no symptoms and they go undiagnosed.
It is only when the pancreas gets cluttered with yet more fat and cannot make insulin that we have a real problem.
And it is a very real problem, every eight seconds someone unfortunate soul has a limb amputated from diabetes.
Too much fat – not so simple
So the initial fashion was to reduce fat intake and wherever possible our food become low fat.
But we still just got fatter and these chronic diseased kept on increasing so we needed a new villain – and that villain was sugar.
Sugar - the new baddie
So cakes smothered in icing and marzipan were reserved for Christmas but again this was no more effective than the low fat diets. We still got fatter and sicker.
Life span, which had been steadily increasing plateaued - but worse health span, how long we remain fit and active, reduced alarmingly creating a major problem of generation of older unwell people.
Nutritionist, bio-chemist, micro-biologist and engineers.
The field of food and nutrition is very clearly the province of nutritionist, bio-chemists and micro-biologist and there is no place for dumb old engineers.
But let me tell you a bit about my training as an engineer.
Strength of materials
The first lecture was about strength of materials. We were taught that people generally preferred it if things just didn’t break the first time you used it and we were told the poem of
The one horse Shey (cart)
that lasted a hundred years and a day
then disappeared into a pile of dust.
(Even Mr Google does not know the correct spelling of an Irish Cart).
It was only later, after I left University and entered the commercial world that how strong to make things was not decided by the engineering department based on what was needed but by the marketing and account department on what they could sell at a profit.
We were given the rule – if in doubt make it stout.
My Engineering faculty did not win any prizes for their poetry.
Thermodynamics and entropy
The next lecture was on thermodynamics and the wonders of Entropy.
Entropy is one of those magic words which has entered into common usage without anyone having any idea what it actually means.
Engineering is really all about power and its creation, transmission and use.
I have found myself spending a lot of time thinking about the human body as a thermodynamic machine which is very different to the way a nutritionist thinks about the way the human body works.
It is a very simple thermodynamic machine with a fuel inlet, combustion chamber and exhaust pipe. Any engineer knows that you input high quality energy, convert some of that to mechanical energy and get rid of the lower quality energy through the exhaust pipe.
That is what entropy is all about, measuring the quality of energy.
Nutritionist pay a great deal of attention to the high quality energy content of the fuel that goes in but very little to the low quality energy that comes out, understandably it is a shitty topic.
Control theory
The third lecture was about control theory.
It is fine to have machines which don’t break, and generate lots of power but you must have a control system so they don’t go bizzerk.
It can be as simple as an on/off switch but more likely to be a PID controller.
P for Proportional means you adjust you adjust the power in proportion to the error or offset. But that can lead to instability so we have a D for derivative function which really means damping.
But even with all that you still get a permanent offset or error so we have an I for integral function which gradually nudges the machine back to is set point.
All very simple and mechanical.
But years later I found myself writing computer aided engineering software for which I was recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators.
One of the projects was writing control software (actually for an irrigation system) where you don’t really know how the system works.
So we play a little game and just nudge the system a bit in one direction and see what happens, and we can keep on doing this until we really understand how the system works, even if it is changing daily (and in an irrigation system plants have a habit of growing and needing more water).
This is generally described as self learning software for the simple reason it learns and keeps on learning and adjusting to the new circumstances.
Our gut brain as a self learning system
This is exactly how our gut brain (a combination of our gut and head brain) works.
From the first suck on mums boobs to when we die our gut brain is monitoring what we eat, recording what the effect is on our body and deciding whether this is good of bad.
Every time we eat anything we are training our gut brain control system and it will remember that throughout our life.
If good - eat a bit more next time, if bad eat a bit less next time. And the sole point of this is to keep us alive.
We can see that this leads to effects which are in direct conflict with the calorie theory of diet which argues for restricting calorie intake to reduce excess fat.
In many cases this could be exactly the wrong thing to do.
It is going to be very difficult for recognised experts in the field, who have built up reputation for their knowledge that they got it wrong so the concept of our gut brain as a self learning intelligent control system will be rubbished.
What makes if even more difficult is that we have virtually no idea how the gut brain control system works at the code level.
This is the challenge for the next generation of researchers and it wont be easy - our gut brain is a complex and sophisticated device perfected over millions of years of evolution.
This makes changing the paradigm a hazard occupation which any sensible person should avoid. Unfortunately my brain missed out on its allocation of sensible.
What does this means in practice?
The advice of the current calorie paradigm is to stop stuffing yourself with chicken wings, chips and cheese cakes.
This sounds pretty good unless your basic diet happens to be chicken wings, chips and cheese cake in which case you are training your intelligent control system that it needs to be stacking away any food that comes it way for emergencies as the food source is not reliable and has a habit of disappearing (as people try diet after diet after diet).
The advice from the intelligent control school is go out and stuff yourself with food that is full of nutrients. In practise that means fruits and vegetables grown in living, nutritious soil.
You don’t have to advice people to stop eating chicken wings, chips and cheese cake because their intelligent control system will say that it has plenty of reliable food and I don’t want you getting fat in case you get attacked by a tiger, need to run to catch the train or probably more important attract a suitable mate so my microbes will continue their happy lives.
Jumping silos
A bit of silo jumping is sometimes very useful and although I am not a micro-biologist I did learn that our gut contains trillions of cells and they can communicate with each other to provide real intelligence.
To a dumb old engineer like me this is really interesting as thinking about our gut brain as a control system like my self learning software explains so much.
It is not simply too much fat or too much sugar - it is our control system that has gone wonky (technical engineering term for failure to function correctly) and is sending out signals to store the wrong sort of fat in the wrong places.
We are all familiar with stories of people who have either gone on an extreme diet -or simply been starved as has so often happened in wars - and end up monstrously fat.
It is just our self learning control system gone wonky.
So what to do about it?
There are two possible reasons why our gut brain control system would go wonky.
The first is that we are simply not feeding our gut brain the sort of food that gut brains need so it goes wonky and sends out signals to say ‘just feed me’.
So we do and get fat.
The second is a bit more of a problem, the cells in our gut brain breed like crazy and die like crazy, they are like ants in an ant nest, same old nest but new generations of ants.
This happens if we are not replenishing our gut brain on a continuous basis with the right sort of food that leads to the right sort of species breeding in our gut.
Either way does not really matter, we just need to feed our gut brain the right sort of food so our control system does not go wonky.
Growing gut brain food
So how do we grow gut brain food?
It may seem that the obvious experts to talk to are the specialist in the gut biome.
The snag here is that how the gut brain works as an intelligent control system is incredibly complex and the raw truth is that we have no idea how it works, let along fixing it.
But there is an old saying that the art of science is managing truth, the art of engineering is managing ignorance.
Engineers have been bumbling around with no real idea on what they are doing until they find a system that actually works.
The ancient Romans built the most spectacular aqueducts without finite element analysis, (computer based stress analysis like I used to write).
They did have a rather effective incentive scheme, they had the engineer sit under the arches while they removed the scaffolding. No worries about strict employment regulations, if the aqueduct collapsed he’s already dead and buried so go get a new one.
The Romans were not the most subtle of people.
Ecological balance
We may not fully understand the science but we know exactly how to do it. It has been happening naturally for millions of years.
The answer lies in the soil. If you have the right soil with the correct microbes and nutrients and grow plants in that soil then you end with with a happy gut brain that does not go wobbly.
It is as simple as that. If you ask me how I know I will just reply because you are here. Humans evolved from homo erectus who lived some million years ago. Homo sapiens evolved much later some two hundred thousand years ago.
We simply would not have evolved into modern man without having a fully working gut brain control system.
All we have to do is to study the conditions that allowed the gut brain control system to evolve then using modern engineering technology to create similar conditions.
That is really both very simple and inexpensive, just a question of turning dirt, organic waste and minerals into living soil and that is what the gut brain (Gbiota) technology does.
Technology is not the problem, we know exactly how do it. It is not a problem for the micro-biologist, it is an engineering problem to create the right condition for the required species of microbes.
That is an engineering problem - I am an engineer and have been doing this sort of stuff for ages, probably long before you were born.
There is a much bigger problem ahead and that is the problems of creating a paradigm shift.
Food revolutions, the changing species and the changing planet
I have tried to show that every time there has been a revolution in our food system there has been unintended consequences - that it has changed us as a species.
The Haber Bosch process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen was certainly one of the great technical achievements of modern technology but we have to consider the unintended consequences of that technology.
It has allowed a ten fold increase in the size of the human population.
Without fixing nitrogen we would be totally dependant on the microbes and algae which naturally fix nitrogen. There is no way that these could support the current population so now we are totally dependant on this fertiliser revolution.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that fixing nitrogen is bad, I am saying that we must understand the implications - the unintended consequences.
We must understand this in the light of the other technologies which may be beneficial in isolation but are leading to climate change and the localised threat to the food supply.
The pre-solved response to lack of food is anger and aggression - it is ingrained in us all. (Actually the anger comes from lack of sugar in the blood stream but lets not nit pick.)
It is not just a question of any old food, we need food that will feed our gut brain.
We are not home yet
But paradigms are funny things. People can go along for many years using an old paradigm which is working moderately well for years, just not bothering to adopt a new paradigm because it is in the too difficult basket.
The internal combustion engine has been the accepted paradigm for cars for over a century. Actually the very first cars were electric, Thomas Edison had an electric car but the internal combustion engine became the accepted paradigm.
It was only the threat of climate change that forced a change in the paradigm which initiated a major period of development of electric cars which is almost there but not quite.
A bit more in the way of longer range, flexible solar panels on the roof and bonnet so it can charge while parked, better charging and we will be there - but the paradigm has changed so we are investing in the development - we just have to do the grunt work and it will all happen.
The gut brain paradigm
This is the exact opposite of the case of our gut brain control system - the grunt work on the gut brain control system has largely been done, but we have yet to change the paradigm so that we are all eating gut brain food.
How do we change a paradigm? Well I have been in the paradigm busting business for years. My computer aided engineering software showed that many of the ways we had been designing things were just plain wrong.
Telling experienced, high ranking designers that they had been doing it wrong is a hazardous occupation. I don’t think anyone tried to assassinate me but I am sure many wished I would just go away and let them get on with their jobs as usual.
I may have a few bruise marks on my back, paradigm busters are not generally welcome or popular but I have learned a bit about the process of paradigm busting, it is hard and does not get any easier.
The internet and paradigm busting
You may think that in the internet age of unlimited access to information that paradigm busting would have become easier. But it is not for two rather sad reasons.
The first is that the internet has turned into a Hype Machine with masses of information which is clearly manipulative, designed to sell stuff, and does not accurately portray the real situation. (Posh way of saying fibbing).
People have stopped believing what they see on the internet.
The second it attention span. The internet is focused on grabbing attention (so someone can sell you something).
The concept of sitting down and reading a long article belongs to a bygone age, not the modern age of a thirty second scan.
Conventional wisdom
But the major problem is still one of adjusting the conventional thinking which says people get fat simply because their calorie intake is greater than what they burn.
We can start by correcting that to what they burn and shit out and how much they shit out is determined by their intelligent control system.
It is very clear that the calories in calories out theory is too simplistic. Some people eat vast amounts and are as skinny as a rake while others get fat from walking past the extractor fan of a restaurant in the street.
People get fat because their gut brain decides it needs to store more fat and sends out signals for us to eat more food (or shit out more food waste).
The fact that our gut brain instructs us to eat more food may mean we end up eating more food so there is a direct correlation between how much food we eat and how fat we get.
But the cause of getting fat is not eating more food, that is the ‘enabling’ factor, enabling us to store more fat, the cause is our gut brain deciding we need to store more fat and sending our signals so we eat more.
Sounds like semantics but there are people going on extreme diets all over the world. All they are doing is training there gut brain that there is a risk of a food shortage so it better store more fat. Exactly the opposite of what is needed.
Show me the code
All this would be easily resolved if I could put up a few slides showing the code that the gut brain uses to decide how much fat we need to store.
But I can’t. No one knows how the gut brain works at the code level - we just know that is what it does.
A very inconvenient truth but true.
Solutions
So how do we go about getting a paradigm shift.
The fact is that there is an entire professional body who has built its reputation on the calorie in calorie out theory. They are not going to suddenly turn around and say ‘whoops, I got that wrong - sorry’.
We have to accept that most people will not want to change but there is always those rebels, entrepreneurs or intropreneurs (enterprising people working inside large organisations) who are looking for something different and willing to change.
They are out there - it is just a question of finding them.
It much more effective if these rebels have recognised expertise in the area so they become the influencers who make change happen.
Someone who already has expertise in nutrition or at least a science background.
They become advocates for the new technology.
But that is not enough, in an age when no one believes anything on the internet.
There has to be some practical way of demonstrating that this works for real, not some finding hidden away in a statistical nightmare.
Fortunately this is reasonably easy.
People are all different so there is no absolute truth in this business, you can only say that a certain percentage of the people will benefit from this technology - but statistics are not convincing.
So instead of looking for a universal truth we focus on the individual - one at a time. Just let one individual eat a gut brain diet for say three weeks - which is long enough to change the gut biota.
If this is working for them they will feel a change in their appetite, they will feel satisfied and food cravings will disappear. Their gut brain will lead them to eat what their bodies need without a highly restrictive diet.
But being convinced at the logical level is not enough. We have to understand the convenience factor and the desire to conform.
Convenience
Modern food is incredibly convenient. Just toss a packet of processed food into the shopping trolley or pick a take away - so easy.
The food industry loves it, they are making big money from the current system and the customer loves it because it is so easy.
Conformity
But the biggest obstacle is conformity. We are a heard animal and like to fit in and not be thought the weirdo.
But get a group of thinking people, the health professionals, doctors, nurses, nutritionists, teachers etc doing it then it becomes the accepted thing.
It is just a physical reality that microbes have a short life so gut brain food must be either grown at home (which has many advantages, cost, reliability and food security) or at least locally - but it does mean a change.
At one time people washed themselves and their clothes in communal baths - we can thank the Romans for that trend. But with the modern technology of plumbing it is the norm to wash ourselves and our clothes at home - and it is easy.
We need a similar change with gut brain food - it just needs to become the norm to have a box or so of gut brain food growing on the windowsill, balcony or patio.
Why bother
I just want to go over the reason why we should bother.
There is the short term reason that we are suffering from an epidemic of diseases resulting from the gut brain deciding that we need to store the wrong fat in the wrong places or more simply people are getting fat and sick.
We are attempting to treat this by restrictive diets which don’t work - rather than feeding our gut brain which does work - and is simple and inexpensive.
The cost to both the individual and the community is massive.
That should be enough to convince most people but there is a bigger issue which really scares the gadgibers out of me. (Gadgibers is a word that Mr Google does not know but is used by people who have longed since passed their teenage years to mean scares the shit out of them.)
As I have tried to show every time there has been change in our food system, our bodies have made a short term adjustment to adapt in the short term and a longer term adjustment as we change our DNA and become a new variant of the human species. For example our bigger brain.
How are we going to adapt to a wobbly brain? As they say the problem with prediction is it has not happened yet but we do know for sure what happen with a wobbly gut brain when it is not being fed the right sort of food - we become aggressive.
Do we really want to run the risk of breeding a new variant of homo sapiens with the dominating feature of extreme aggression? Do we not have enough of that already and should we not be looking to breed a new variant with a higher level of cooperation.
What I have just said (eg conclusion)
What I have just said is so incredibly important let me hit the key points.
Our modern food system of ultra processed inert food is causing a major health hazard - an epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases.
This is caused by our gut brain failing to operate as an effective intelligent control system.
Our gut brain is the result of thousands of years of evolution, is a highly sophisticated system and we have no real idea of the mechanics of how it works.
But we do know that we have to feed it gut brain food and we know how to do that, it is simple and inexpensive but means some changes to our food system (grow at home or at least locally so food is eaten fresh).
Modern nutrition science is strongly influenced by the calorie in calorie out theory which need to be replaced by the feed our gut brain approach.
Proponents of the calorie theory are likely to be highly resistant to this change.
In any profession there are always rebels, we need to locate them to form a Gbiota or gut brain movement. We can classify these as concerned thinkers or Tier one.
These tier one group needs to recruit a wider group of people prepared to act as guinea pigs (Tier 2) and go on a diet which contains sufficient gut brain food. They need to monitor themselves to see if they feels satisfied, any food craving stop and they generally feel that their gut brain is acting as a functioning control system.
This Tier 2 group are then encouraged to participate as part wider program aimed at the feed your gut brain approach becoming accepting as the new paradigm replacing the old calorie paradigm. Tier 3
If you want to discuss with me any issues from this article of just chat email me at colin@gbiota.com
Food is one of the major threats to humanity, not an absolute lack of food - we produce more than enough energy food, carbs, fats and sugars, to feed the entire world now and well into the future.
Gbiota.com is our technical web site which shows how to feed our gut-brain by breeding beneficial microbes in the soil, which is used to grow plants which, if eaten fresh, before the microbes die, will feed out gut brain.
What food crisis? For most of us there is plenty of food in the Supermarkets, at least for now.
This is the underlying cause of chronic or non infectious diseases overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, and dementia.
Modern food, relying on chemicals is inert, dead, lacking the essential microbes on which our bodies depend.
But that means a change in thinking, creating a balanced Eco-system, breeding the beneficial microbes in the soil under favourable conditions so they out-compete and out-breed any harmful microbes the grow plants in this soil and eat fresh before the microbes die.
We get fat because our gut-brain decides we need to store more fat (probably because we are not feeding our gut-brain). It sends out signals for us to eat more which enables us to get fat. The cause is the gut-brain - eating more is the enabling factor.
However, this is a very different way of growing food which many people find scary. Fortunately, there are many people with a permaculture background who are successfully using these methods.
So join the gbiota club and join or form a local group.
I would refer you to a most interesting book, What the Fact? Finding the truth in all the noise by Professor Seema Yasmin who has a whole string of accolades after her name.
Scientists have known for a long time that we have an intelligent control system that regulates our bodies – they even have a name for it ‘homeostasis’.
I can tell you with confidence that the food in our stomachs does not just flow into our bum, they are the same height and fluids will naturally flow downwards.
It was like working on a vintage car, you had to know how it worked at the very basic level.
Our modern food system is often blamed for the epidemic of chronic diseases, and I am certainly not going to leap to their defence of using artificial fats and sugars.
Breeding microbes is easy, we have been doing it for years by composting.
Worms are highly efficient recyclers but there are numerous other creatures, some like the beetles, saw-bugs, and soldier fly larvae we can see but under a microscope, soil is just teaming with creatures.
In the natural environment, there is always a balance, it is the same with our gut. We do not have to eliminate every single pathogen. Most people have the harmful E-Coli in their gut but the numbers are so small it does not matter.
Compost tubes are a ‘hear and now’ technology that anyone, even people living in a flat can use.
There does not seem to be much of a problem with making the boxes, they are just a box you can buy from a hardware store, they do need a few holes to be drilled but that does not appear to be an issue.
The real problem for the apartment dweller is how to handle the pongy food waste.
The smell problem can be solved by sealed containers but those pesky flies still seem able to smell out a delicious fly meal - at least in Sunny Queensland where I live.
So I have two experiments.
In the second experiment, I go back to an old system, the compost tube.
I recently wrote an article 
That is not what happened, it can only be described as a lead balloon - but why?
Take something as simple as a bicycle. Was the bike invented because some enterprising applied mathematician studied the theory of gyroscopic couples and the self-centering action of the offset in the forks and so invented the bicycle.
My innovation to reduce the number of people having their legs chopped off is based on a simple observation that the body has an inbuilt intelligence that regulates what and how much we eat and where and how much fat we store.
But, and here comes the punch line, my body, or rather my intelligent control system has learned over time that if I eat certain foods or drinks I replace these salts.
But the problem is we have no idea how it works. In my younger days, I used to write sophisticated software, solving partial differential equations and writing self-learning software. I could be described in Australian slang as a gun coder.
Or we can recall one of my favourite quotations.
So let’s get back to my solution for reducing the number of amputation from diabetes.
My solution is simple, grow plants in living soil full of beneficial microbes and nutrients, and eat the plants while they are still fresh so they feed the gut-brain which forms our intelligent control system.
The general view of the medical profession is that this is not a tried and proven method that has gone through the normal scientific verification process.
Support our gut health movement
‘Prevention better than cure’ looks at our gut brain.
‘Health starts in the soil’ looks at the critical issue of soil biology
My wife, Xiulan is a medical doctor, a surgeon, but she became diabetic, her foot started to turn black and our medical advisers were saying they may need to amputate.
Diabetes is caused by fat in the wrong place, at first in the muscles and then in the pancreas.
But 
We live in an age of hype and super sophistication. People just do not believe that a complex disease like Diabetes can be overcome in such a simple and inexpensive way.
Then actually create soil full of beneficial microbes and minerals, grow plants and eat them while they are really fresh before the microbes die.
The Gbiota system solves this by loading the regenerated soil into boxes so instead of buying already harvested plant people can buy boxes (which they swap over) with growing plants which they pick and eat at home while still genuinely fresh.
Many people are quite rightly worried about the toxic chemicals in their food.
Two hundred years ago the great Mathematicians like Newton and Leibniz knew how to solve coupled partial differential equations, but they could not do it - there was too much computation.
Today I realised that our bodies have a highly sophisticated control system but it needs the right species of microbes to work effectively but that the wrong species make us sick or even kill us.
This is what the Gbiota technology is all about, creating the conditions so the beneficial microbes out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.
Yes, we do grow vegetables. But that is not the point. Let’s face it, if you just want a cabbage, and aren’t bothered about beneficial microbes, you can buy one from the supermarket at an amazingly low price.
We need to feed the beneficial microbes and that is just so easy.
What does it cost us to manage this system? We need to collect organic waste, any organic waste which would otherwise be converted into greenhouse gases in waste tips. We also need minerals, typically in the form of rock dust which is readily available as a waste product from quarries.
I need to talk about these together as they are linked.
In addition to these large pores there are channels made by the creatures of the soil, particularly worms but also rotting root systems which provide channels through the soil.
Gbiota beds are, as their name suggests are in-ground beds. We have recently suffered major flooding from climate change so I now use raised beds so they are really on-ground beds.
Gbiota boxes are a lot smaller so don’t have the production capabilities of beds but they do have the big advantage that they can be used at home to grow plants.
I drill a hole in the side as low as I can then use a rubber grommet and connector to make a swivel tube.
I cut a piece of Ag pipe to fit neatly into the base.
I then fill the base of the box to about a third of the height of the box (eg about 100mm) with organic waste. I then add a nutrient mix, containing minerals, manure, and trace minerals, (typically available in blood and bone) on top with of course the worms to process the organic waste.
I set the swivel tube to the vertical position and fill the box to the top of the swivel tube through the filler pipe.
At mid-week, which is the maximum length of time I want the soil blood to be stagnant I twist the swivel tube down and catch the soil blood in a suitable container (eg milk bottle - I am into recycling) for reuse on the next cycle.
Just think what is happening here. When I flood the base of the bed I am expelling the stale air that always accumulates in the soil from the biological action. Rotting organic waste can make growth inhibitors - who wants that?
Gbiota bed work on the same principles as boxes, partial flood and drain and recirculate. But the mechanics are a bit different.
The food system underlies re-solving Diabetes. I was a kid in the war, everyone ripped up their lawns and grew vegetables fertilised with organic waste, and if you were lucky enough to be able to access it, that valuable resource - manure.
Many of my readers know that I am a bit OCDish about how our food system is compromising community health.
Mice are cute little creatures who are happy to eat each others pooh. Many other animals such as elephants, eat their pooh as well to develop their gut.
Within twenty minutes of a cell forming it is dividing (breeding) - beat that you randy teenagers.
I have learned that there are a few people who are quite prepared to go to all the trouble of creating living soil, what is generally referred to as regenerative growing, and grow their own plants and eat while genuinely fresh.
The modern chemical industrial food system is highly productive producing large quantities of standardised energy food at economic prices.
A further key feature of the Gbiota system is that plants can be grown at home in Gbiota boxes full of living soil so they can be harvested and eaten straight away - pick and eat.
It is turning dirt into soil.
Most people can tell the difference between a jellyfish and a fellow human being (I would worry about their sex life if they can’t). A jellyfish is like a bag full of squishy stuff while a human body is rigid with a structure.
This is analogous to what is happening in the soil. Soil is hard and solid and nutrients are simply not available directly to the plants.
Feeding our gut brain is one of the great challenges facing humanity and is what the Gbiota movement is all about. The technology is resolved the challenge is to change the food paradigm so we eat gut brain food.
All those trillions of cells are communicating with each other like some super computer. Unfortunately we have no idea of the code but we know for sure that it is regulating where and how much fat we store and to do that is has to regulate our appetite.
Conflict and aggression or peaceful coexistence - these are the options facing humanity. Just look at what is happening in the world - people killing other people on every continent.
We have the technology to produce wealth on an unprecedented scale yet we squander this wealth in conflict.
I am asking you to
Then I am asking you to 
That is my contribution - now I ask you to take this technology out to the world. Just show your friends how they can feed their gut brain and feel better.
Food is the root cause of the modern epidemics of diabetes, heart attacks, dementia and feeling hangry.
My wife, Xiulan, is a medical doctor. She became diabetic and her foot started to turn black and our medical advisers told us they may have to amputate her foot.
There is an old saying that fire and water are good servants but bad masters, we must now add technology.
Technology could destroy us in an atomic holocaust much more likely is the slow and insidious destruction of our food system from climate change and the destruction of our soils.
The Gbiota technology is simple - we take food and other organic waste like grass clipping and prunings, add an inoculant of living soil creatures from microbes to worms and minerals to create new soil, living soil full of beneficial microbes and nutrients.
We grow plants in this soil, cheaper than buying from the supermarket but this is not just for the poor.
The wrong sort of fat in the wrong place is the root cause of the modern epidemic of chronic or non infectious diseases like diabetes, heart attack and dementia.
I am Colin Austin, engineer and innovator. I was recognised by the Institute of engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators. I believe that technology should work for the benefit of the people - the community and not just a few ultra rich people.
Across the globe people are getting fat a sick from an epidemic of diseases like diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
Our gut brain has trillions of cells which communicate with each other to create our gut brain which evolved over millions of years to regulate our appetite, emitting hormones to tell us when we need to eat and when to stop eating because we are full.
How do plants give us beneficial microbes?
As the soil in the root zones dries our more water will wick in from wetter soil away from the root zone.
Some of these microscopic beneficial microbes are carried into the plants by this flow of water from wicking, osmosis and tensile forces into the plants and if we eat the plants while they are still fresh, before the microbes die, they will enter our gut to form our gut brain and keep us healthy.
This process of growing plants to feed our gut brain is what the Gbiota technology is all about.
With the swivel tube system there is always some water left in the bottom of the box so I fitted a sight tube (just a
bit of ag pipe pushed into the soil) so I could check that the water had been used up before I watered again.
That put the swivel tube system in the lead over the two-box system and it was clearly the system I was going to promote.
But when I was away for the best part of a week I had been too clever by half in trying to use the swivel box as a normal
Wicking Bed with a built-in water supply.
When I returned the plants had started to turn brown – a sure sign that they were suffering from waterlogging.
However, the plants in the twin box system (which had a hole in the base so there was no possibility of them becoming
waterlogged) were fine.
The plants were showing signs of beginning to wilt after being left, but as soon as I watered them they sprang back into life.
