We live in the misinformation age. Later I will take a general view of the damage caused by misinformation but let me start with a specific case - amputations from diabetes.

Diabetes is important, it is the fasted growing disease of modern times and every eight seconds some unfortunate soul has a limb amputated.

Let me work through on a step by step basis.

 

Diabetes leads to high blood sugars which makes the blood more thick and viscous so it cannot get through the fine capillaries feeding our extremities so they simply go rotten and have to be amputated.

Next step - why do we get diabetes? The first stage, which often goes unnoticed is that we become resistant to insulin which is the hormone which controls blood sugar but then our pancreas, which makes the insulin, becomes clogged with fat and can no longer make insulin.

Next step - and this is where things go wrong - why does our body store excess fat? The misinformation is that this is simply due to us eating too much sugary fatty food so the solution is to go on a calorie restricted diet. It is true that eating too much sugary fatty food is not healthy but it misses the  step ‘why do we eat to much sugary fatty food’

Next step - why so we eat too much sugary fatty food? We have an intelligent control system, made up of our gut and head brains which control our bodies including our appetite. If our intelligent control system decides we need to store more fat it will send out hormones to make us hungry and is is almost impossible to defy these hormones over time.

Next step - how do we manage our intelligent control system so it stops us storing excess fat? Answer - training and gut composition.

Our intelligent control starts to learn the minute we are born. If we cut our food intake so there is not enough food we are teaching our gut brain that it needs to store food - excessively restrictive diets are teaching our gut brain to make as fat - exactly the opposite of what we want.

Our gut brain is made up of trillions of microbes which are foreign to us. If we have the wrong sort of microbes they will make us fat but we can simply change our microbes by changing the type of food we eat.

Next step - why are we eating the wrong sort of food?

OK it is time to go general. Diabetes is just one of the many illnesses that is the result of poor food and storing excess fat. The big killers of our era are heart attacks, strokes and dementia and they all have the common theme of food that makes us store the wrong sort of fat in the wrong places.

We live in the era where we have the greatest access to information the world has ever experienced - the internet. But we are also living in the era where power has migrated to global corporations who have more power and money than even a medium sized country and they are ultimately motivated by power and money.

They have more power and money than many Governments and by comparison an isolated consumer has negligible power.

They are extremely good at manipulative promotion so we buy what will make them the most money. In the case of food that is sugary fatty foods. It is virtually impossible for them to provide the fresh food with the beneficial living microbes we need in our gut - they just die before they are even on the shelves.

Next step - what can we do about it?

We are not totally helpless we just need two things. We need information and we need the technology of growing the food that will make us healthy.

That is where the Gbiota movement comes into play. Gbiota is a social benefit organisation, we rely on people volunteering their time and sometimes money to make sure the public has access to the proper information. We cannot supply the world with food that will make people healthy and avoid getting fat and sick but we can give them the information on what to eat and how to grow it.

We simply do not have the money to run massive advertising campaigns but we can be more effective by relying on real people to tell their friends about the Gbiota movement and persuade them to join the movement.

Don’t waste good food

‘I will just give these to the chickens.’ How can such a simple phrase lead to a major rethink of how we stay fit and healthy.

You see I was standing at Community Lifestyle Support’s nursery on one of their market days when I heard that phrase and it really got me thinking about the supply system for fresh vegetables.

I know just how important our gut biome is, our modern epidemic of non infectious diseases like heart attacks, strokes, dementia and particularly diabetes all stem from a poor gut biome which forms part of our intelligent control system which manages how much and where we store fat.

Plants are natural pre and pro biotics, our gut evolved over a couple of million years by our predecessors eating green leaves so we know they work.

The snag is that the microbes in and on green leaves have a short life span, one hour for a microbe is equivalent to a human year so plants are the most healthy and taste much better if they are eaten within 24 hours of picking.

Each day after that the beneficial microbes are progressively replaced by harmful microbes until the plant is obviously rotten.

That is why we developed the Gbiota box system so people can have plants full of beneficial microbes growing in soil teaming with microbes and nutrients.

But there was two things that struck me at that market day.

First even though growing plants at home is undoubtedly the best way of improving gut health there is still a lot of people who just don’t want the hassle and prefer to buy the plants directly.

Secondly although there are many successful home gardeners growing their own food for their health there are times when the crops grow so well that there is a total abundance of plants and they have no idea what to do with this surplus other than give it to the chickens.

There are probably millions of tons of perfectly good food, full of beneficial microbes going to waste because these home growers have no easy way of supplying this to people who really need it.

Then it struck me - I am sitting on the solution with my web aptly named www.pickandeat.shop

Home growers can simply advertise, for free on my web, that they have surplus food. If they wish they can make a charge for this food which people pay for on line then just go and pick up at some set time, say between 10 to 11 on Saturday morning.

Even commercial growers could use this system, receiving pre paid orders which customers just pick up at the local market.

This would save millions of tons of food going to waste (and I hate to see food wasted) and mean people would have access to fresh food before the beneficial microbes are replaced by the harmful microbes.

Interested? Just email me at colin@gbiota.com and I will send you details of how to set up your pickandeat.shop advert.

Real and fantasy

Colin Austin © 15th May 2023 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be freely copied or republished without further permission – the only provision is the Standard Creative commons requirement that the source Colin Austin www.gbiota.com should be acknowledged.

Gbiota is not simply about growing plants. We breed a wide spectrum of microbes in a growing medium called Wickimix and then grow plants so the microbes are packaged in the plant so when people eat the plants they act as pre and pro biotics to enhance gut health.

Take a pill, become slim fit and healthy and live to 100 without ever getting sick. Scientific breakthrough or adverting BS? Whatever else it is an intriguing story.

It starts with lab mice, feed a skinny mouse pill number one and it becomes fat, feed fat mouse pill number two and it becomes skinny. Now that would seem like a major breakthrough but there is a snag, these pills are from the pooh of fat and skinny mice.

Many animals from mice to elephants eat each others pooh, it is essential for their gut biome but not us humans.

We do have an alternative, crudely put find a skinny person and poke their pooh up your bum. It actually works but apart from being a bit gross it can end up with dangerous infections.

But is does show one thing beyond all doubt - that our guts control whether we are fat or skinny.

But how? We now understand that the trillions of cells in our gut communicate with each other to create a super computer which regulates our bodies. It receives signals from all over the body, works with our head brain to decide what to do, then send out yet more signals, electric or hormones to regulate our bodies.

It does this to regulate whether we are fat or skinny by controlling our appetite, but it also does this for how fast we age and repairing our bodies as they age or wear and also for our immune system.

But can we just take a pill to change our gut biome? It seems that our gut is much more complicated than we first thought.

We can certainly conduct DNA testing and can find associations between skinny people with certain types of microbes and fat people with others types of microbes but just breeding these microbes up in the lab and putting them into a pill does not seem to be very effective.

It seems that our gut brain is much more sophisticated than we first thought.  Thinking of our gut brain as an intelligent control system rather than just an organ is a major shift.

You may like to read my article on the Lamborghini and then contemplate that our gut brain makes ChatGPT look a bit primative.

There is not just one species of microbes that makes as fat and another that makes us skinny, there are thousands of species of microbes in our gut and they all work together in a very complicated way as an Eco system which we really do not understand as yet.

Does that mean we have to give away the idea of some magic pill that will make us slim, fit and healthy for a very long life - well yes and no.

There may not be a magic pill but we can learn from people already living a long and healthy life, like people in the blue zones and natives tribes who also have a healthy gut biome and do not suffer from our modern diseases like diabetes.

So we have to ask why should their gut biota be so different to people eating a modern diet?

The answer is the same as for our gut. They eat food grown in soil with a complex, and sustainable Eco system of living creatures in the soil. The beneficial microbes enter the plants roots and they eat the plants while fresh before the microbes die, giving them a healthy gut biome.

This is the basic principle of the Gbiota system. Experienced growers breed beneficial microbes in organic waste to create Wickimix, this is placed into Gbiota boxes and seeded so people can have growing plants in their home which they can pick and eat to give them a healthy gut biome.

If you are a new viewer I suggest you go to our welcome page.

If you want a more detailed overview of the Gbiota technology go to Gbiota news

If you are a regular and just want to catch up on the latest news go to New posts

If you want to chat with me about the Gbiota project just email me at colin@gbiota.com I actually am a real person and welcome a friendly chat about the Gbiota project

Invitation to medical researchers

Every eight seconds someone has a limb amputated from diabetes.  We know how to save peoples feet but we need to make this technology go main stream.  This is an invite to medical researches to join in a project to save peoples feet from the knife.

Infectious and non infectious diseases

From when humanoids first appeared infectious diseases were the number one threat. As a kid (a long time ago) if some other kid developed a child hood disease there would be a chicken pox party for all the local kids so we caught it and developed immunity.

The young were particularly prone with many dying but if you made it to 30 then there was a good chance that you would live to a ripe old age.

Then there were amazing development in medical research, particularly vaccines and antibiotics so it looked as though we had won the battle but non infectious diseases increased dramatically.

Specifically people were getting fatter and diseases, like diabetes which is associated with excess storage of fat in the pancreas, became the fastest growing of these modern diseases.

The battle of the bulge

This excess storage of fat was largely blamed on our modern diet which could, it was optimistically thought, simply be resolved by diet, particularly the restriction of calories.

The harsh reality is that this simply has not worked and populations across the globe continue to get fatter and suffer from the related diseases. This is probably the biggest health issue facing modern humans.

Calorie restriction simply does not work and actually seems to make it worse as the body reacts by storing more fat and the resultant cravings eventually lead to even more fat being stored.

So what is going on?

Intelligent control systems

I am an engineer, I am not a medical doctor and have no formal qualifications in microbiology or biochemistry. Engineers make machines and every machine has some form of control system, even if it is a simple on off switch.

Learning how control systems work is an everyday job for engineers.

With the advent of computers we were able to device really sophisticated controllers that were given various names, adaptive control, fuzzy logic, self learning software, predictor corrector and more recently as a sub branch of artificial intelligence.

But they all work on the same principle, make a very small change to the system and monitor what happens. If it is good make a larger calculated change and again see what happens and keep on doing this until the computer has learned with a very good understanding of how to control the machine.

Intelligent control is my preferred name for this.

The human body - the master intelligent control system

There is no doubt that this is exactly the way the human body works. Don’t believe me - think of a three year old kid learning to ride a bike.

I can remember at university learning about rotational inertia and gyroscopic couples which explains exactly how a bicycle works. The gyroscopic forces twist the handlebars so we steer in the direction the bike is falling.

I come from a family of engineers and have engineering friends who like me are a bit OCDish about their profession but I have yet to see an engineer putting his three year old kid on his lap and explain the theory of gyroscopic couples to teach his kid how to ride a bike.

No - the kid sees other kids riding bicycles, gets on and falls off and keeps on doing that until he magically masters the art.

It takes less than an hour and a few cut knees.

Engineers and intelligent control systems

I understand this process of how intelligent control systems work, I used to write software to do precisely this. As a pioneer in the use of computers to solve engineering problems I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of the top one hundred Australian innovators.

Our bodies have an intelligent control system to manage our bodies, it works in exactly the same way as adaptive control systems work but is far more sophisticated then anything I ,or any other engineer, could write and is way beyond our understanding - but it is the way we work.

We don’t control the speed of a car by how much fuel we put in the tank but we use an intelligent controller, we call the driver, read my article Lamborghini and our gut.

Let us face reality

Medical science has made major advances in fighting infectious diseases and until recently has been increasing our life span.

But in this modern era of non infectious diseases we are going backwards, our health span (how long we remain healthy rather then live) is decreasing and with the diseases that stem from storing excess fat like diabetes we are loosing the battle. Just go round any shopping centre and see for yourself.

Our attempts to combat this by restrictive diets, particularly those that just focus on restricting calories, are not working and are actually making things work as our intelligent control system fights back.

We are fighting our intelligent control system rather than working with it. Not good.

Every eight seconds some has a limb amputated from a side affect of diabetes, we are loosing the battle and need to change tack.

Changing tack

We need to change tack by working with our in built intelligent control system rather than fighting it.

But neither I nor anyone else really understands the detailed coding of how our intelligent control systems works. We may one day but every eight seconds we delay some unfortunate person has a limb amputated.

How many feet are we prepared to have chopped of before we act?

We do not need a complete understanding of how our intelligent control system works. Our three year old kid happily rides her bike with absolutely no understanding of gyroscopic forces and probably never will.

But she does know that she has to let the bike steer into the direction she is falling and everything will be fine.

In the same way we know what we have to do. We have to change our gut biome, which is key to our intelligent control system, so we want to eat the sort of food that will change our intelligent control system - our gut brain.

It is not a question of forcing us to eat some horrible restrictive diet which we hate and does not work, it is changing our gut biome - which naturally regulates what and how much we eat - so we actually want to eat food that will make us healthy.

We do that in exactly the same way that our three year old kids learns to ride a bike, by seeing what works.

What worked then and now

Visit the hunter gatherer tribes in Tanzania or the Amazon or any of the blue zones where people live a healthy life to a ripe old age. Do you see them sitting around their DNA testing machines looking at the latest results for their gut biome? No.

But you do see them picking and eating plants which are growing in soil which is teaming with all sorts of wriggly creatures.

When experts actually analyse the results of any DNA test they conduct they see they have the most diverse and healthy gut biome and that the non infectious diseases, like diabetes are virtually unknown.

Now don’t get me wrong. We cannot go back to that early life style, there is too many of us, rather we should study their foods and see what we can learn then apply this with the best technology that is available to us right now.

We should not be tempted to wait until we have the perfect solution, as they say perfection is the enemy of progress.

The Gbiota system

These are the principles I used to develop the Gbiota system, breed the beneficial organisms in organic waste to create a growing mix which can be placed into boxes so people can have plants ready to pick and eat in their own home.

See the Wickimix story.

This is a simple but effective way of changing our intelligent control system - our gut brain.

This technology is now used by a group of dedicated growers who are prepared to spend their time understanding the basic principles and grow some of their own food. Technical details are in the growing section

But this only reaches a very small proportion of the population and every eight seconds someone has a foot chopped off.

If we are going to prevent people having their foot chopped of we need to make this technology mainstream and for that we need the cooperation of medical researchers which is why I extend an invitation to work together to make this mainstream.

With the harm caused to the public and the cost to the medical system of non infectious disease it should not be too difficult to raise the funds to sponsor a few of our young and brightest researchers to work in this field.

Please contact me at colin@gbiota.com

The Wickimix story

Chop my foot off - no way

My wife Xiulan is a medical doctor, a gynaecologist and surgeon, so I was a bit surprised when she was diagnosed as diabetic. At that time I knew nothing about diabetes but when her foot started to turn black and the doctors started talking about amputation I knew I had to do something.

I am an engineer, not a doctor but I have been in the innovation business for a long time and was selected as one of the top one hundred Australian innovators by the Institute of Engineers for my pioneering work on computer simulation.

I knew how the process of science and technology actually worked, so I felt I should at least try.

In my book Water, Wit and Wisdom I talk about the process of innovation. It is often not about being particularly clever but about challenging the conventional paradigm or wisdom.

I was not selected as among Australia top innovators because I was particularly clever, rather my flow simulation showed that the conventional paradigm was just not working and fought the battle of getting a new paradigm accepted - a bloody process.

Science and engineering

 

There is a big difference between science and engineering. A scientist will work at the limit of knowledge in a highly specialist area trying to push the boundaries of understanding that one step further.

An engineers job is to find practical solutions to real problems, he or she uses science as a tool, often having to understand a spectrum of sciences, fill in the holes in knowledge when needed and come up with a solution that works.

There is a saying that science is the art of managing knowledge, engineering is the art of managing ignorance.

Things rarely work first time, it is part of the job of an engineer to be a perfect pain, keep on digging away to find the real reason why something is not working - then fix it.

Type 2

Professor Roy Taylor of Newcastle University in his book Reversing Diabetes gives a fundamental explanation of the mechanics of diabetes.

It was pretty easy to find the basic cause of diabetes (type 2). At first, probably before the person is aware that they are becoming diabetic, fat begins to build up in the muscles so sugar in the blood finds it more difficult to enter the muscles.

That is the job of Insulin so the pancreas just churns out more insulin and everything seems to be working fine.

That’s pre diabetes.

But then fat begins to build up in the pancreas so insulin production is blocked and that is when the trouble starts.

Blood sugars rise so the blood gets thicker and cannot get through the finer blood vessels which is why the extremities like the feet start turning black .

By then it can be too late to fix so there is no option other than amputation.

That was the road Xiulan was on.

Why daddy why?

That is when the engineers habit of being a total pain comes in, keep on asking questions like a four year old, until the real reason comes to light.

The first question is why do people get (or rather store) fat? A common simple answer is because they eat too much of the wrong sort of food, but that is not a real answer, we have to ask the question why do people eat too much of the wrong sort of food.

Now this is where the fun starts because people start talking about conspiracy theories and how the food industry is producing food full of sugars, fats and flavourings which are addictive.

Now there may be some truth in this but again it is back to the questions, why do people keep on eating all this bad food if they know full well that it may end up with them having a limb chopped off.

People are not that stupid and there is no law saying you must eat this food.

DNA testing blows conventional wisdom

Tim Spector in his many books such as The diet Myth has been a pioneer in rethinking diet and health.

He is a genuine paradigm buster challenging the conventional thinking which is focused on the amount of calories we eat.

And this is where things get really interesting.

The view in the scientific community was that the gut was just an organ for digesting food.

Then along come DNA testing machines so scientist could see all the different varieties of organisms that make up our gut biota.

And that is where a bit of an explosion has been occurring.

I read the literature and not that many years ago the scientists were talking about a handful of species, then it grew to a thousand and now I read of tens of thousands - it is mind boggling.

But what is exciting is that the scientist were discovering what they first called association(meaning a likely connections) that this particularly species was associated with people getting fat.

Then they did tests on a large number of people and were able to identify clear correlations (meaning that there is a definite connection but no indication of a mechanism).

Will Bulsiewicz is another paradigm buster, like many medical doctors he appreciated the benefit of a plant base diet but also realised the link between the biota in the soil and in our gut.

This is important.  Bugs breed fast but die fast so to improve gut health we need plants growing in soil teaming with nutrients and we need to eat them shortly after harvesting.

The real reason we get fat

That leaves the $64,000 question ‘Why do some species of microbes make people store fat while other species do not?’

I am not a micro-biologist but I was a pioneer in computer technology, in those fun days when we had to write machine code and had things like peek and poke looking inside the computer so we could actually understand what the computer was doing.

This actually boils down to something very simple - the ‘if then else condition’.

If is is cold wear a jacket, but trillions of such statements give the impression of intelligence. (Humans are more analogue and deal in concepts which is real intelligence).

But, I thought, there are trillions of cells in our guts, maybe they can communicate with each other, maybe in a simplistic way, but building up to an intelligent system. We see this in nature with ants, bees and my favourite - slime moulds.

 

Intelligent control systems

My very first job as an engineer was working for a company that made control gear for big plants like power stations - information would come in from sensors, be analysed by the control system which would then send out signals to crack this or that valve a bit more open or shut.

Could our gut be like this intelligent control system controlling whether we are fat or skinny?

Then I read that the micro-biology experts in the field were talking the same language with set points.

Dr Andrew Jenkinson is a medical doctor who has appreciated that we don’t get fat simply because we are eating too many calories but that we have a control system which decides on a set point and ensures we maintain that set point.

We don’t get fat simply because we eat too much, our intelligent control system decides what the set point should be and pressurises us to eat the amount of food to reach that set point.

We may have no idea of the mechanics but our gut decides that we should store this amount of fat and would send out hormones to make us hungry so however much we may try in the long run we would end up at that set point.

Nice theory but my job as an engineer is not to develop theories but to work out how to apply them to solve a problem.

And the problem in this case is to stop people having their limbs chopped off from diabetes which happens every eight seconds.

Chop, chop every eight seconds

Just think about this, every eight second some unfortunate person has a limb chopped off and this may be preventable.

We can be a bit stronger than 'may be' as this scale is totally new, fifty years ago very few people suffered from diabetes but now it is the fastest growing of all modern diseases.

Back to being a four year old and asking what has changed? We certainly know how our food has changed but there was no DNA machines back then.

But there are still societies living an earlier life style, and of great interest people living in the blue zones where people live to a ripe old age, which is good, but what is even better are fit and healthy right to the end (health span rather than life span).

We got a double whammy in asking that question. Yes these people had a far healthier gut that modern people and they were doing this simply by food, basically eating a diet with a high plant content but the plants were grown in soil that was full of microbes and minerals and eaten fresh, shortly after harvesting.

Pretty simple really, and that is what the Gbiota project is all about.

How innovation really works

We live in an era where the theory of how innovation happens is very different to the way it actually does happen.

Many of the great innovations we take for granted now, originated by someone doing something and showing it is actually important and works first and then studying, in a detailed scientific way actually how it works.

How innovation actually works is the theme of my book Water, Wit and Wisdom which is really focused on the water crisis but talks about how innovation is often paradigm busting.

Good bugs and bad bugs

The key issue is that there are certainly many if not most micro-organisms which are more than desirable - they are essential for life - what I, being a crude engineer, call the good bugs.

But there are also micro-organisms which can cause us a great deal of harm, the black death, cholera, and I believe there has recently been another baddy causing humanity a great deal of harm.

The classic approach has been to try and kill of the bad bugs. May be not as extreme as then President Trump suggesting we inject bleach into our blood stream but still the same philosophy of killing off the badies. That has been the mainstay of our approach over the last fifty years.

But look at the people in the blue zones, they are living, and staying healthy to a ripe old age. What is their magic secret?

Well this is the age of internet marketing to I abhor phrases like magic secrets which is just a way of conning people into buying things. So what were they doing?

If you asked them they probably could not tell you as even they do not know but we can use the knowledge we have from the study of Eco systems to understand why it worked.

Eco system v Trumps bleach

Every Eco system is made up of many different species competing to breed.

Darwin talked about the survival of the fittest (best adapted) but actually it was the survival of the randiest, the species that survived were the ones that could out breed the others - and that really depends on the conditions.

With all due to respect to Donald Trump it is very difficult to kill off the bad bugs without killing of the good bugs. But it is relatively easy to create the conditions where the good bug out breed the bad bugs. It happens all the time without us even thinking about it.

E-coli is a really nasty bad bug which virtually everyone has in their gut. But it is normally not an issue as the good bugs simply out breed and suppress it so it is never a real problem.

 

Gbiota beds

This is the basic principle of the Gbiota beds. It is very easy to breed bugs, they are a randy lot and you almost cannot stop them breeding. The key is to create the conditions so the good bugs out breed the bad bugs and the key to that is breathing the soil and controlling the moisture level.

These can be used to grow plants which can then be picked and eaten fresh before the good bugs die off and the bad bug take over.

Not space age technology and there are many home growers who are doing precisely this.

But there are some eight billion people in the world and they all have guts and are prone to becoming diabetic or suffering from the other diseases which come from our poor gut health and they can’t all have Gbiota beds in their apartments.

Gbiota boxes

So we need another option and that is Gbiota boxes. This is a two stage system.

Local growers who have the land and skills set up Gbiota beds with the prime aim of making Wickimix.

This is a growing medium full of the beneficial creatures and minerals which is loaded into Wicking boxes which are small enough to fit into apartments, balconies or any restricted space.

People can then have plants growing in Wickimix in their own home which are full of beneficial microbes which they can pick and eat while still fresh.

There are plenty of people who would prefer not to have a foot chopped off from diabetes, what we need now to make this work are local growers who can produce Wickimix - that growing medium full of living creatures and essential minerals.

If this could be your scene please contact me as colin@gbiota.com

 

Unks and ununks

Colin Austin © 17th April 2023

This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be freely copied or republished without further permission – the only provision is the Standard Creative commons requirement that the source Colin Austin www.gbiota.com should be acknowledged.

Tumultuous meting

Hopefully you would have read about John and Sue tumultuous meeting. (read here) Now they are in a passionate, but heated relationship.

John is still claiming that the modern supermarket food system is providing a reliable and abundant food supply with hygienic and energy packed food from all over the world regardless of season.

Sue is arguing that the food is just packed with sugars and fats and lacking key nutrients and minerals and is deliberately made addictive and is the cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases.

But they have reached common ground that the food is inert lacking the life which supports our gut brain, which among other functions controls our appetite.

Even if we were surrounded by tempting food our gut brain should simply generate the hormones that would make us feel full so we would just stop eating.

Unks and ununks (knowns and unknowns)

John says look at the incredible improvements in food production since the days of Norman Borlaug.

Sue agrees is it was an incredible piece of research but at that time we had no knowledge of the importance of gut biology - it was an unknown unknown.

We conducted a real time experiment on the worlds population and we ended up with a food system that has led to a major health epidemic of non -infectious diseases. The results were clear - an epidemic which dwarfs Covid (read here and here).

We now know that our gut is a real brain which controls many body functions but at this moment we have no real idea of the coding that makes it take decisions so we should be very careful in thinking we can change our gut biology by breeding microbes under laboratory conditions.

Sue is very strong on this - our intelligent control system is made up of trillions of cells of thousands of different species - we need to recognise what we know and what we don’t know and look for solutions that have been tested in a natural environment over thousands of years.

Grow your own

So they have agreed to grow enough of their own food to feed their gut brain. But they have adopted a very different approach to poor Mary (read here) who just buys boxes with plants ready to harvest from George (read here and here and here) who gets his mate to deliver the boxes to her door and take away the old box and the bag of organic waste she leaves out for him.

She only grows a few species, mainly micro-greens like broccoli, alfalfa, lettuce, and the ever faithful flax and is quite happy to leave all the soil regeneration to George.

Mary's thinking

Mary and Sue are opposite ends of the spectrum. Mary, to be honest does not care about the state of the world, her mum only just made it through her Covid and now has long Covid which is in a way worse. Mary learned that people with a strong immune system from eating food that feeds the gut are far less likely to suffer a sever attack so Mary is just interested in her and her kids Immune system.

Sue’s thinking

Sue, to be honest is a bit of an extremest, she sees that the way humans are destroying the natural functions of the earth is leading to an inevitable collapse of the ecological system. May be not the end of humanity but mass hardship and with a food crisis leading to mass migration of desperate starving people.

She says we see what is happening in autocratic countries but how much better are we? Large corporation have immense power, including power over our Governments - it is profits over people.

If we want peoples needs to take priority over profits for the mega corporations it is up to us ordinary people to take action.

You can be like me and become an activist or you can be like Mary and quietly work away growing food that will feed your gut brain. It may not lead to a dramatic change but it will influence people around you.

Gut health is all about diversity

Sue want to be much more adventurous, she knows there are literally thousands of edible plants she can grow from seed, which she cannot buy from the regular shops and she is well aware of the health benefits of the many herbs and spicies she could grow.

But she is well aware that although you can buy bags of potting mix which are full of nutrients this is not not the same as living soil, full of all those creatures from worms down to the microbes and fungi which George can supply in Wickimix.

She also understands the importance of the growing medium being both hydrophilic (easy wetting) and having a high water holding capacity.

Natural soil contains a huge range of micro organism in the main families of fungi, bacteria, protozoa, nematodes and viruses which can only be seen with a high powered microscope. But it also contains many small creatures which can be just seen with a magnifying glass and then there are the large creatures like worms and soldier flies which have guts not that different to ours where microscopic organism breed.

Sue says that soil is complex and so is our gut - we must recognised that we are just at the beginning of long learning experience and not be over confident of our understanding.

Types of Wicking boxes

She also knows that there are a number of different styles of Gbiota Wicking boxes she can choose from, each with their own benefits and limitations. This is very different to Mary who just uses a box with a single drainage hole in the side.

Mary's box is supplied by George and is just a standard box with a hole drilled in the side, he fills the box with Wickimix and just pokes a pointed stick through the side hole to make what he calls a mole hole, to ensure proper drainage.

Apart from watering, Mary does not need to touch her box until it is swapped for a new one after the crop is finished.

Sue may well decide to go for the common design with a swivel joint on the outside of the box so she can regulate the water depth and drain when needed and with an ag pipe running along the base then up to the surface.

This means she can surface water while the seeds are germinating then swap over to water at the base and relying on wicking action to take the water up to the root zone.

The amount of water stored is limited by the void space in the soil and how far the water will wick, which depends on the characteristics of the soil. Read water to see how Wicking beds actually work.

She has an alternative of using the twin box approach. Wicks hang down from the top box and into liquid water in the bottom box. This means that 100% of the space is available for water storage and the bottom box can be made large to hold as much water as needed so giving a long time between irrigations.

While this system works quite well it is limited by the capacity of the wick to suck water up to the top box. With thirsty plants in a hot dry climate this can mean they just cannot supply water fast enough.

While cotton makes an excellent material for wicking it is prone to rotting with the intense microbial activity.

But Gbiota Wicking boxes are about breeding beneficial microbes rather than just watering the plants.

For Mary this is no problem as she gets new Wicking mix every time her box is swapped but for Sue she want to extend the time between refreshing the Wickimix.

The creatures in the soil, from the worms, through the microbes and right down to the minute viruses, are all living creatures which need to be fed and watered. They have short lives so they must have the conditions where they can breed, which they will do profusely if the conditions are right.

That is the topic of my next article.

Upgraded beds - Introduction

The information paradox

The world is changing at an incredible rate, climate change, the virus and the polarisation of the political system are immense problems, new technologies like artificial intelligence may seem beneficial but whatever the benefits increase inequality between the haves and have nots.

Innovators, like me, ask how can we develop technologies to help mitigate these problems and often that it is the easy bit, a bigger problems in how to make that technology widely available with the relevant documentation.

It is tempting to focus on the new developments but at times an overview is needed to keep things in perspective. This is such a time so I start with an overview.

The birth of Wicking beds

It is approaching thirty years since I was invited to go to Ethiopia to see if there was anything I could do to help feed people in one of those terrible droughts.

I could see the two issues were lack of water and nutrients. Nutrients were the easy bit, weeds may be a pain but they are incredibly effective at extracting the last bit of nutrients from the soil and they can then be used as fertiliser.

Water was a bigger problem but I had travelled extensively in the Australian deserts and seen the natural phenomenon of water being collected in clay basins, flowing down to the lowest point then wicking up to feed luxuriant vegetation in the middle of a dry desert.

That was the birth of what I named Wicking beds - dig a trench, line with a water proof layer, clay or plastic film, load the base with weeds then back fill with soil.

There was no question of the weeds going putrid by soaking in stagnant water - this was in the middle of a sever drought.

Publicity v technology

On my return to Australia I wrote about this and the idea caught on, but some bright spark they could improve on this by replacing the weeds with stones and having a cloth layer to prevent the soil and roots entering the water zone.

This actually works fine - as self watering beds - but does little to improve the nutrients or soil biology.

But we live in an era where skills in publicity are far more important than being technically correct so Wicking beds, with stones, caught the public imagination.

Sponge beds

I had yet another idea, the sponge bed. This was even simpler that a Wicking bed, take off the top soil and level the ground. Fill with any organic material that is available then replace the top soil.

This give three layers, the underlying earth, a layer of soft spongy material with very high water holding capacity and a layer of regular soil on top.

Plants could be germinated in the top layer then put down their roots into the moist nutrient rich layer below.

There was no attempt to contain the water, they just relied on surface tension in the sponge to hold the water in place.

Have no doubt - though this was a great system but it just did not catch peoples imagination and it went the way of many other good innovations, just a dot in the history books.

The bugs arrive

We seem to have suddenly discovered microbes - well that is not true at all, bugs (or more politely microbes) arrived well before any other living creature, they were the first and they made all other life forms possible by making soil and nutrients available so plants could grow.

It is just that humans thought that bugs were bad and had to be killed off. But then in a flash of inspiration we suddenly realised that there were good bugs and bad bugs and that our very lives depended on the good bugs.

We spent a lot of time and money trying to work out how to kill of the bad bugs without killing of the good bugs but without much success. Then in another flash of inspiration we worked out that if we managed the conditions in favour of the good bugs that they would simply out breed the bad bugs.

And that is what Gbiota beds are all about, creating the conditions where the good bugs out compete and out breed the bad bugs - a concept worked out by nature a few millions years ago. But we got there in the end.

Flood and drain

Plants need nutrients, water and air.  We can get this with flood and drain.  The basic principle has been known for years.

Lower a container into water which will expel all the stale air.

Let the water drain out and it will suck in fresh air into the soil.  This cycle of flood and drain means the soil is actually breathing, expelling stale air and sucking in fresh air.

Making it work in practise

But of course we cannot just raise and lower a complete paddock so we have to use a different way, using a pump to flood the base of the bed purging out the air then let the water drain away to suck in the fresh air.

This work well but a snag appeared.

KISS Keep It Simple Stupid

I have been writing articles about breeding beneficial microbes in Gbiota beds and people tell me it all sounds too complicated so I have been experimenting to find the simplest possible way.

So I now try and make it simple, with the help of a few made up characters, which as they say in the films are purely fictitious and any similarity to actual people is purely coincidental. So welcome George and Mary.

The crux is for George to grow Wickimix, the soil that goes into Gbiota Wicking boxes. But there is more to it than that. He is certainly willing to make and sell Wickimix which helps extend his retirement funds but he is also happy to help Mary by giving advice and encouragement on what to grow in the various seasons.

Read the full article here

Welcome

Look at the news - fires, floods, draughts, refugees, political extremes, deliberate misinformation, the world is changing really fast - all sounds terrible so what to do?

The biggest problem we face, long term, is food - how are we going to feed the eight billion, and growing, people with food that will not just keep them alive but keep them healthy. That means food that will feed our intelligent control system that manages our bodies, our gut and head brain.

Our modern food system provides ample food to keep us alive but if we want to live a long and healthy life, reduce the current epidemic of non infectious disease, (like diabetes which results in a person have a limb amputated every eight second) and be fit and healthy into our old age we need to make changes to our food system so we feed our intelligent control system - our gut brain.

But making change is never easy.

Neither Elon Musk, Bill Gate or Donald Trump are going to save the day - no one person can solve all these problems so we fall back on what has made us the dominant creature on earth - we are intelligent and naturally cooperative working together to solve the problem of the day.

That is what the Gbiota project is about developing the technology of how to grow food that will feed our gut brain and so keep us healthy for a long time (which is the easy bit) and then make this technology widely available so people can benefit from it. (which is the difficult bit, changing paradigm against powerful vested interests.)

On this site there are many articles in the food section which describes how food works to keep us healthy and in the growing section more article on how to grow food which act as natural pre and pro biotics to feed and strengthen our gut brain.

We have the technology and we know what needs to be done the issue is how do we make that happen.

Since we have adopted intensive farming the supply side has switched and we now have an abundant supply of energy food but are low in nutrients for body replacements but the critical area is the lack of brain food for our intelligent control system.

This is bad but what puts food into the number one crisis position is the threat from climate change and degradation of our soils.

Let us not get depressed - we have the technology to solve these problems, technology is not the problem which is how to change the system to apply the technology we already have. We need to fall back on the twin strengths of human nature, intelligence and cooperation which has made us the dominant creature on earth.

We have the technology of growing plants so they act as pre and pro biotics but as microbes have a short life span this means creating local food systems where people, even if living in apartments in large cities, can have fresh food growing in their homes.

We need to understand what we mean by fresh, this is has come to mean not gone rotten, but when it come to feeding our gut brain it means that the plants are picked and eaten before the beneficial microbes die.

This is what the Gbiota movement it all about - developing a system to have food growing at home. This is not going to just happen. It requires a team with the sort of dedication efforts we have seen in the recent fires and floods where individual have got into their boats to rescue their neighbours from floods or risked their lives to fight fires to protect their communities.

The web www.gbiota.com explains how we can do this. The section Gbiota News tells the stories of how nominally fictitious people, like George, Mary and Sue can pool their skills and knowledge so everyone can be eating food that will make them healthy.

The section on food looks at how food actually works to make us healthy. These are all free to access under the Creative Commons system which means the can be copied and shared without permission.

The section of growing get down to the nitty gritty of how to grow plants to act as pre and pro biotics. This is a subscription area to help fund this project, even projects with the highest social objectives need money to fund the never ending research and experimentation.

The menu item community takes you to another separate web site www.gbiota.club which is a social media site where people can find similar minded people in their area using geolocation. The story of Mary mini shows how.

I hate bugging people with emails so I only send emails when essential but I have a section in gbiota club New posts showing the latest posts. It is probably best just to check this on a regular basis but you can register on gbiota.com and click on the notify me of new posts icon at the bottom of every post.

The social media site gbiota.club site has far more members but sad to say in this troubled world attracts many spammers. While it is easy to join the club members who are not actively participating in the project by logging in and contributing are automatically removed from the site.

Summary

In the real world we all have to eat - and getting enough of the right sort of food that will keep us healthy is an issue.

We know how to grow food that will keep us healthy, we have the technology, it is simply a question of spreading the information.

The internet has become our prime source of information. But the virtual world of the internet is dominated by someone trying to sell you something, for profit or manipulate the way you think to increase their power.

But humans are the most successful creature on the planet because of a combination of intelligence and cooperating together. We naturally form groups to overcome difficulties, like the predicted food crisis.

No single person can solve the forthcoming food crisis but using the power of cooperation we can solve the food crisis, and it mother the climate crisis.

The Gbiota club is such a group, but to be effective we need to show the world that we exist, are a genuine group concerned about our grand kids future.

The first step is showing the world we exist by every one of us creating our own icon. Read more at www.gbiota.com/gbiotanews look for Mary's mini for details

Is there really a food crisis?

Is there really a food crisis - the shops are full of food so obviously this is just a scare campaign by a bunch of woke trendies - right?

Well let’s look at the story of that related crisis - the climate crisis. Now there is a real story with goodies, badies, greed, lying and devious plots.

The basic science behind climate change is well over a hundred years old and in all that time has not changed one little bit. Now here is not the place for that story, you can read all about that in the many books, Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes or This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein.

But if it is true, then what do we do about it? Before the dreaded epidemic, which I can’t say or this article will be black listed, I went to China and was lent a little electric car. Now this was truly terrible - little more that a 4 wheel electric scooter with 2 reasonable seats up front and 2 kids seats in the back.

In China, where road laws are optional, this did not stop three people cramming into the front seats and four adults in the back - and I could still drive it.

It had a range of barely 100K, I have no idea what the maximum speed was as I never had a chance to drive it on the open road but it would be pretty miserable I am sure. So who in the right mind would buy such a terrible contraption and why?

Well for a start a $10,000 purchase price and it could be fitted with solar panels, which while no where near powerful enough to drive it, if you left it out in the sun it would charge the batteries up enough to take the kids to school, do the shopping or get to work - and all for free and with no carbon emissions.

Lets face it - this is no where near as comfortable as driving the kids to school in a V8 SUV so what determines whether people would choose a SUV or a rattly little electric car.

It is nothing to do with technology, they both do the job perfectly well - it is a question of the public image which is acceptable.

If the public image is that driving your kids to school in a SUV shows that you are a highly successful career person to be well respected then you will be under subtle pressure to use an SUV

but

if the public image is that driving your kids to school in what look like a circus dodgem car with a solar panel on the roof shows you are a community conscious individual rather than an unthinking swanky prick then you may well go for the electric car.

So what has this got to do with a food crisis and if there really is one what we do about it?

If you ever get around to reading the Naomi books you will realise this is nothing to do with the available technology. We actually know how to feed the world, all eight billion of us, with nutritious food that will keep most of us fit and healthy (I am not getting into genetic here and moving the bell shaped curve towards a healthier population here - this article is about the power of managing information).

Sorry it is not really new

In my technical articles you will see I talk about partial flood and drain as some sort of new technology - but that is not strictly true.

Let me take you back to WW2 when I was a toddler. I watched as ladies (there were hardly any men about when I was a toddler, my Dad was in North Africa fixing Beaufighters - one of the few planes which could take of with a full load in the High Atlas mountains).

In those days child exploitation was not just acceptable it was socially desirable - you could get away with anything with the magic phrase ‘don’t you know there is a war on’?

So my job, as a toddler, was to lower plant pots into a foul smelling brew (literally chicken shit tea) until the bubbles had stopped then pull them out and let them drain. I may know a lot more now about the science of how water moves (see Water) but flood and drain is not some new invention.

The only instruction was not to fall in as it would spoil my clothes and ‘don’t you know there is a war on?’

The power of information

I want to talk about the power of information but please - telling a toddler not to fall into a foul smelling vat of chicken shit tea would be classified as redundant information.

WW2 has been analysed and over analysed, with typically a focus on the mechanics but one under rated factor is the power of Hitler’s propaganda machine - really the first time that modern technology (OK the radio and the microphone) was used with such devastating effect.

Without Hitlers propaganda machine there would have been no WW2 and I would not be writing about war time child exploitation.

But in this modern age the tools for propaganda, (OK lets be trendy and wrap it up in fancy words and call it information manipulation) have increased in power and effectiveness beyond recognition.

Despite every night the news being dominated by stories of floods, droughts and fires from around the world there are still people saying that climate change is a natural phenomena and nothing to do with mans activities.

This gains traction, not because of the measurable facts, but because of the power of the manipulation of information which makes driving the kids to school in a V8 SUV rather than a solar charges electric vehicle, socially acceptable.

Don’t let perfection stand in the way of progress.

One of the arguments put forwards by the vested industries in the fossil fuel industries is that currently electric cars do not have the range for long distance travel - and there may be some truth in that. (I still drive a SUV for long journeys but have a rattly little town car. I will change as soon as long range batteries are developed, as they will be. Do what you can now!)

That does not alter the fact that most car journeys are short and with current technology can be provided by a solar charged electric vehicle and would make a substantial reduction in green house gases - right now with existing technology.

The reason why that is not happening right now is because of the power of information manipulation.

It is the same with food, I spend my time trying to improve the technology of growing plants to improve our health. This is not a perfect technology and is continuously being improved but to wait until we have the perfect technology, understanding the Eco system of microbes in the soil and our guts is putting perfection in the way of progress.

Every eight seconds some one has a limb amputated from a side affect of diabetes. It is just a fact that we do not have the technology of completely resolving diabetes but there is no issues that the current epidemic of these non infectious diseases, like diabetes could be substantially reduced by changes to our food system.

Just because we can’t prevent everyone from having their legs chopped off does not mean that we should not save the legs that we can save now. Do what you can now.

To do that we have to discuss the manipulation of information and to do that we have to discuss what Darwin actually said about evolution, (which was not simply the survival of the fittest but more like survival of the randiest) and how that has formed human nature.

What Darwin actually said

and why we are the most successful creature on the planet

Even back in Darwin’s day there was that lust to condense a carefully worded scientific document into a three word catch phrase - survival of the fittest.

Now that is not what Darwin said and is not true. What determines whether a species survives is - can it successfully breed.

There are many different strategies, frogs have millions of off spring in the form of frogspawn, the pigeons who have adopted my car as the perfect place to shit are a singularly stupid bird with no sense of danger, but they lay a vast number of eggs so are successful breeders (and on-car shitters).

Humans have a totally different strategy which has created human nature so if we are to avoid the looming disasters of climate change and its offspring food shortage we need to understand what Darwin actually told us.

How humans breed (successfully)

No this is not a guide for teenagers on how to have a bit of a randy up at a party, they can do that quite well by themselves. No it is about how humans have become the most successful creature on the planet and how we are going to survive climate change and food scarcity.

Look I get a bit fed up with all the doom and gloom and how much better things were in the olden days. That is all BS, ask anyone of my age who was a toddler in the war. Things were terrible, houses and people were obliterated overnight - but us humans pulled together and not just survived but made a much better world.

We just need to understand how we did it.

Human babies are borne totally helpless and take the longest of any animal to mature. The nearest rival for that is the elephant who take almost as long to mature but a baby elephant (and antelopes and all the other animals) have young that can survive shortly after birth.

Not so human babies and that has made humans the way we are.

There is an old African saying that it takes a village to raise a child - and that is just so true.

But there is more - a village has adults with a wide variety of skills and knowledge, there are the hunters, the spear and bow and arrow makers, the old folk with an intense knowledge of the local plants and where they grow, farmers and medicine men and a leader.

And they all work together cooperatively and relatively peacefully because they are all mutually dependant.

People may say that we are the dominant creature on earth because of our intelligence, but that is only a half truth the real reason is that combination of intelligence and cooperation which won us the gold medal.

The black side

This would make a wonderful fairy story but there is a black side which could ruin everything.

We are at war, I don’t mean a physical war between the right and the left but a war within every society. A war between those people who understand that we won our gold medal because we are cooperative and those selfish pricks who put their lust for profit and power ahead of the community - a war between cooperation and self interest.

There has always been this war, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar were not the nicest of people but they did not have the internet to influence the mass of the people.

Hitlers propaganda machine was a warning but who could have anticipated the sophistication of the modern propaganda machine to mislead and misinform otherwise intelligent and thinking people.

It is just a reality that climate change is here and the biggest effect of climate change will be the disruption of our food supply.

So we need to counter attack by getting the facts out.

The key facts

We are a thermodynamic machine, we turn chemical energy in our food into mechanical energy by the very simple process of turning carbon into carbon dioxide and hydrogen into water.

The bulk of the food we eat, around 80%, is just used as fuel. At this moment we are making enough energy food to feed the entire world population - if it were distributed equitably. We do not know what will happen in the future but growing more energy food is not our immediate top priority.

We have evolved with a very clever system which is continuously monitoring the state of our body and uses the complex chemicals in some of our food to replace our body parts as they wear and age. Modern food is generally lower in these critical nutrients than previously so people eating a diet with much highly processed food may be low in these critical nutrients.

Feeding our brains

But that is not the real crunch line - that is feeding our brains (both of them).

At one time we thought of our gut as simply digesting our food. We now understand that our gut has intelligence from the trillions of cells communicating with each other which act like some super computer but we have no idea how the coding that controls the logic actually works.

But we do know that out gut is incredibly important, it controls our appetite so we don’t get fat and sick, it manufactures many of complex chemical needed to replace body parts as they age and wear and it hosts and trains much of our immune system.

While the amount of food required to feed and replenish our gut may be only 5% of our total food intake it is critical for health and that is what is seriously missing in our modern diet.

Our gut really matters

I have to get a bit pedantic and say our neglect of our gut biome may not be the direct cause of the modern epidemic of non infectious diseases but it is an enabling factor - but more directly if people were eating food that feeds their guts there would be a lot less people having their limbs chopped of from diabetes and dying from that disease I cannot mention.

And we have the technology that will enable people to eat a gut friendly diet, grow fresh vegetables at home in Wicking boxes full of Wickimix and it actually costs less than the current food system.

Winning the information war

So why it not everyone doing it? Information.

The food industry is massive, it is actually the worlds biggest industry and the large players spend billions of dollars on promotion trying to convince us that their food is healthy - and lets face reality - their propaganda (sorry I meant to say advertising) really works.

The facts are very simple, modern food is lacking the microbes and their food which keeps us healthy and also the critical nutrients that will enable our bodies to replace our parts as they age and wear. No one disputes this.

The solution is not difficult and is spelt out in my stories of the fictional characters George and Mary (well sort of fictional, like the films say based on real characters).

This allows people like Mary living in an apartment to have fresh vegetables grown in soil full of beneficial microbes and nutrients, this is the best way of enhancing gut health and is actually cheaper.

Technically there is no argument, the issue is that we have this massive industry with billions to spend on propaganda (sorry advertising) while the people who actually want to eat healthy food are isolated and without the power (meaning money) of mass promotion.

Profits v the people

It is simply a battle between profits and the people. How can the people possibly win against such odds?

Simply go back to what Darwin taught us, we are naturally a cooperative creature.

No single person can win this war, but once a cooperative group has formed people will naturally want to join and be part of the movement.

As the group grows the range of skills will increase. No one want to be a conceited prick but the reality is I do have some skills which enable me to work on the technology. But I am totally useless at social media, and I must admit it when my granddaughters are not around to help me, pretty useless at mobile phones.

But the bigger the group the more diverse the skill set will become and the more effective we will be.

The question is how to we get started. The answer to that is simple, everyone who believes in the cause, (food for the people over profits for the mega corporation) can make the first move.

And that is registering on the www.gbiota.club web and creating their own icon as shown in Mary’s mini and inviting their friends, real and virtual to join.

That is a statement to the world that you exist, believe that all people should have ready access to healthy food and are prepared to commit to being an active member of the group.

To finish I just say thanks for your efforts and showing the power of the people.