Will it work?

The bomb shell or light bulb moment

I may be a woke greenie concerned about the communities well being, but I read a lot.

One morning I was having my after breakfast read, this time “I’m So effing hungry” by Dr. Amy Shah when I was hit by a bomb shell if you are a pessimist or a light bulb moment if your are an optimist.

You see, for years I have been working on the problem of chronic disease, or more specifically, why eight million people a year have a limb chopped off from diabetes.

I thought I had the solution pretty much sorted out from a technical viewpoint, which is my skill set, but I was failing miserably to get the message out to the wider public. I understood that I may have a good technical record, after all, I was selected as one of Australia’s leading innovators, but I was no marketing guru.

Yet here I was reading a book that said pretty much what I had been trying to get out to the public. So I decided to ask my friend, Dr. Google, how successful Amy was in getting the message out.

And what did I find out, she was a rip-roaring success with millions of followers, she was a fully qualified medical doctor, but unlike most doctors, she started by studying nutrition, which is a cornerstone in combating chronic disease.

Yet despite her success, when I go to my local shopping centre, what do I see? I see a sea of wobbly bums and tums.

There is something going on there I need to understand.

Now I admit to being a dull, boring engineer, and engineers have a role in life to study the best available science and work out how to apply it for the benefit of the community and maybe make enough money to keep on doing our job.

But we have one phrase we keep on asking, we may study all the leading science and work out how to apply it but then we ask a simple question “Does it work”.

The theory may seem unimpeachable, but when it comes to practice, there is always the fear of that hidden snag.

One of my favourite sayings is that

“Science is the art of managing truth, engineering is the art of managing ignorance”.

There is something here that we are missing, and I had to find out what.

The story I have been telling

We all want to live a long and healthy life.

No one wants to be fat, have a limb chopped off from diabetes, die of a heart attack or inflict the suffering on our carers.

These are the costs of the modern epidemic of chronic disease which is by far the biggest health problem across the modern world.

Naturally, it has received a massive amount of research, and it was very quickly understood that they were caused by the wrong fact in the wrong place.

Initially, scientist and indeed much of the population dismissed this as people eating too much and the slogan “eat less, exercise more” was promoted.

It totally failed and has largely been abandoned, apart from that handful who cling to outdated ideas.

But there are plenty of open-minded scientist who studied and experimented until they had a clear, and now well accepted view, that we have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies

Our gut is an integral part of this intelligent control system with individual microbes in the gut communicating with each other and our head brain.

If this intelligent control system decided that we needed to store more fat the gut would produce hormones which would control our appetite, telling us to stop eating if we were full or crave specific food if our bodies need certain nutrients.

The spectrum of species of microbes in our gut played a critical part in this decision. Basically there are gut bugs that make us fat and other gut bugs that make us skinny.

This was first demonstrated in mice by feeding the pooh of skinny mice to fat mice when they became skinny and vice versa.

Later this was demonstrated beyond doubt on humans by the faecal transplant. Graphically if you poked the pooh of a skinny person up the bum of a fat person they would become skinny and vice versa.

There is no doubt that the science is correct - the species of microbes in your gut determines whether you are fat or skinny.

This has led to a multi billion dollar industry of pre and pro biotics, which as anyone can see by a visit to their local shopping centre and viewing the array of wobbly bums and tums has failed miserably.

So what went wrong

We need to understand three concepts.

The first concept is dynamic equilibrium. The gut bugs we have today are not the same as the ones we have tomorrow. Microbes have a very short life span so they are continuously breeding and dying so tomorrow microbes are the sons and daughters of today’s microbes. They may be similar but are not identical to today’s microbes.

Our gut microbes are slowly but steadily changing.

The second concept was given to us by Richard Dawkins in his selfish gene story. A gene in a living creature will struggle to preserve its nature. It may die along with the animal it lives in but the gene will fight to keep the gene family intact.

The third concept is that the food we eat contains microbes.

Microbes breed in the soil. If the conditions favour microbes beneficial to us they will be the dominant species of microbes, they will enter the plants, if we eat them fresh, just after picking we will benefit from these microbes.

If we eat them later we will be eating different species of microbes, the longer we wait the less beneficial they will be.

If the conditions in the soil do not favour beneficial microbes we will be eating plants containing harmful microbes.

If we do not eat plants with beneficial microbes and eat highly processed foods we will not be gaining the benefits of the beneficial microbes, but some other microbes.

Microbes breed incredibly fast and will breed until they fill all available space. In our everyday world, there is no such thing as microbe free, it is just a question of whether we eat beneficial, harmful or neutral microbes.

The microbes we have in our gut are the result of an ongoing battle for space between the various species of microbes. Who wins is dominated by the food we eat.

What does this all mean in the real world?

It means that the microbes in our gut are dominated by the food we eat. We can eat all the pro-biotics we like or have all the faecal transplants that we can bear but ultimately the species of microbes will be dominated by the food we eat at every meal.

What is Gbiota all about?

Showing people how to grow and eat the food that will lead to a beneficial gut biota.

How do you get started? First job is to sign up for a free Newsletter and check for new posts so you become part of the world of ever-changing gut microbes.

Creating a gut-brain food industry

Life is good, we are living longer and the supermarkets are full of healthy food.

Sounds great but is it true?

My daughter, when she was about seven taught me a valuable lesson. She said she believed in Father Christmas because if she stopped believing she may not get any presents.

But the other kids around her told her that Father Christmas was not real and it was mum and dad that bought the presents so she stopped believing.

But I realised that this applied to the bulk of the population. People tend to believe what is convenient to believe and what other people believe.

I am an innovator, my job is to identify problems and find solutions and there is a very real problem with our food.

We may be very proud of our technical achievements but the human body, the result of millions of years of evolution is incredibly sophisticated. It has formed a relationship with the microbes in our gut that digest our food.

These microbes monitor the types and amount of food in our bodies and if they sense a deficiency they will send out a complex family of hormones to make us crave the foods we need. Every time we eat it learns about that food and that information is stored in our head-brain ready for use when needed.

If it senses that we have all the foods that we need it will send out other hormones to say stop eating.

This is truly a remarkable system.

But we need to feed, train and replenish our gut microbes - something we have done naturally by eating plants that have grown in soil full of living creatures with beneficial microbes living in their guts.

This has been happening for millions of years but then we changed our food system so we stopped feeding and nurturing our gut microbes. The result was that it no longer sent out those essential hormones so we overeat and get fat and sick.

This is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

This is well understood by scientists working for drug companies who have developed synthetic hormones to stop food cravings. They do work, at least for a period until our smart bodies learn about these hormones so they are no longer effective.

But my job as an innovator is to find an effective solution and that is what I have done by creating a system where people can breed the beneficial microbes that create the natural hormones, at home, even if they live in a flat with no garden.

But as is common, developing the technical solution is the easy bit of innovation, the difficult bit is getting people to adopt the solution and that is where the lessons from my seven year old daughter come in.

It is no good running some monster advertising campaign to try to convince everyone. For a start the bulk of the people don’t want to admit there is a problem and even if they do they don’t want to feel out of place with their daily contacts.

That does not work - it has to be taken in steps.

There are always a few people who are willing to admit there is a problem and be pioneers in adopting a new solution.

But here comes another problem. The epidemic of chronic diseases is a huge problem causing much misery to the sufferers and costs to the health system.

It is natural to think that such a difficult problem requires a highly sophisticated solution like synthetic hormones which is undoubtedly a sophisticated solution.

By contrast, the solution of people breeding beneficial microbes, that create hormones naturally, at home is just so simple and low cost.

It is unbelievable to most people that such a simple low-cost solution could possibly be effective - so they don’t believe it.

How do we solve that problem? Not by more and yet more scientific studies and reports, that do not convince people.

What will work is finding those entrepreneurial pioneers and supporting them to use the system for themselves. Even these pioneers may not be convinced by scientific arguments but if they try it for themselves and it works for them they will form the nucleus that leads to societal change. I have written many articles on creating paradigm shifts, the latest is Innovation is a Funny Business which you can sign up to read for free along with many other articles.

And if you see yourself as one of those pioneering spirits willing to change the society they live in for the better then email me here.

Warning

Bertha Benz ride through the German countryside may not have seemed particularly significant at the time - but look what happened.

A few pots breeding beneficial microbes may not seem particularly significant now but the global population needs a gut-brain food industry if we are to be healthy.

Failures in the development stage are part of life. When it comes to the early stage of adoption failures could kill any hopes of developing a viable industry.

Success is in the hands of a few visionary pioneers - we must get this right hence the need for an effective support structure.

Our gut-brain is highly sophisticated - evolved over millions of years to keep us alive and healthy for as long as possible.

All we have to do is to feed and train our gut-gut brain. It will then do its job with no further effort from us.

It monitors our bodies, sensing what sort of food we may need or whether we are full. It sends out a complex array of hormones so we want to eat the food we need or to stop eating.

The microbes start life in the soil, or more precisely in the gut of the creatures of the soil, enter the plants that we eat and then our gut.

These microbes have a very short life, living and dying in dynamic equilibrium. This means the plants must be eaten shortly after harvesting.

In our modern chemical industrial food system, there are few microbes in the soil and they will have all died by the time we eat the plants the microbes will have died.

This is the underlying reason for the modern epidemic of chronic diseases obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

This is easily resolved, even if you live in an apartment by growing plants in a basket with special soil. It is effective and literally dirt cheap.

Our job is to show you how.

Breeding beneficial microbes in the soil is a natural process which which has been going on for millions of years. However breeding the microbes at home in organic waste depends on the flood and flush system so the soil breathes and the soil blood never becomes stagnant. This needs to be done correctly so we restrict access to members registered with a valid email address who will receive regular newsletters.

We offer technical support by email and video conference so you can do it right.

You can start by signing up for our weekly Newsletter and reading the many articles on our website. This is free - just register. Later you can upgrade to become a consumer, buying the boxes from our licensed grower, or if you feel you have the gardening skills and space a home grower or a licensed grower running a profitable community company benefiting your local community.

Start by registering here. You can cancel or upgrade at any time.

Innovation is a funny business.

Colin Austin 27 March 2025. Published under the Creative Commons System, This may be reproduced without further permission, just acknowledgement of source.

Food and health

Let us look at the story of food and health.

In the past, and that means going back a million years to the first humanoids there was no epidemic of chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart attack and dementia.

These are all caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place and we had evolved a very effective system in which our gut would sense if there were any deficiencies in our diet and send out a hormone complex so we craved the needed food. When satisfied it would send out other hormones saying stop eating you are full.

For convenience, let us call this our gut-brain.

Evolution at work

Our gut-brain is an incredibly sophisticated system that has evolved over millions of years. But evolution is never after perfection just survival, so there are millions of creatures, from cockroaches to crocodiles, which have survived for millennia but are far from perfect - like us.

So although there were isolated cases of chronic disease, there was no epidemic.

Then, about fifty years ago, we changed our food system and the epidemic of chronic disease has been growing steadily ever since.

The great human intelligence

So what did we humans, with our great intelligence and innovation skills, do to reverse this epidemic? If ever there was a $64,000 question, this is it.

We understood the cause of the epidemic. Our gut-brain stopped working in the way it has done for the last million years.

Our gut-brain is in a state of dynamic equilibrium with individual microbes breeding and dying rapidly but with the system staying in equilibrium.

This depends on feeding and replenishing them from the food we eat.

Increased population and food demand

As our population increased, we changed the way we grew our food so instead of eating fresh plants grown in living soil teeming with beneficial microbes, we changed it to growing plants with synthetic fertiliser, which is debatable, but far worse is we changed the food distribution system with extensive delays from harvest to eating.

Net result - poor gut health and poor control over our appetite - we got fat and sick, and the epidemic grew and grew.

Ask a seven-year-old kid for the solution, and they would say we need to invent a box so people can grow plants, full of beneficial microbes, on their windowsill.

This would have been a great solution as our subconscious brain would have continued to control our appetite as it had done for the last million years.

Eat less exercise more

But being highly intelligent and sometimes overly logical creatures, we ignored the advice of the seven-year-old and decided we had the technology to manage our diet.

So we developed sophisticated diets and pills measuring calories and nutrients down to the last microgram.

People thought this would solve all the problems and we had catchy advertising programs like eat less, exercise more which sounded great but were a total failure - we just got fatter and sicker.

Subconscious and conscious intelligence

To understand why these catchy advertising jingles fail, we need to understand the differences between conscious and sub-conscious intelligence.

The fact is that subconscious intelligence eventually wins.

To make the point, let me refer you to one of my favourite characters - the kid on the bike.

A three-year-old will soon learn how to ride a bike and will be outpacing mum or dad. That is because the kid is using her subconscious brain which is highly perfected.

If dad had never seen a bike before and I tried to explain how it stays upright by talking about self-balancing gyroscopic couples he is likely to have no idea what I am talking about and certainly no better idea how to ride a bike than when I started.

It is the same with food. We may know, in our conscious brain, what we should eat but what we want to eat (our subconscious brain) will win in the end.

Back to the boxes

OK, our seven year old has the idea of breeding the beneficial microbes, and their food, in a box. She will probably love playing with all the worms and creepy crawlies but will need a bit of adult assistance to get everything working properly.

That is where we are now, but that is just the start. There is this conception that all you need to be an innovator is to have this great idea.

I have been having so-called great ideas all my life. 80% fail because they don’t work.

Another 15% fail because they don’t do anything useful that people want.

To turn the remaining 5% into a useful product or service requires a lot of grunt work.

The marketing myth

There are internet advertising gurus who will try and convince you that they can run an internet campaign and you will be an overnight success - and nothing is further from the truth.

Let us get back to the box which does have the potential to combat the chronic disease epidemic - but there is a long way to go.

Growers

It is fine to have all these wonderful concepts but they are useless without a product. A very old-fashioned idea I know but innovations need products that work and do the job and people have confidence that the product works.

That means setting up what is a new industry which requires on one hand growers who can produce the boxes but also the marketing, legal and commercial infrastructure which requires a spectrum of skills.

We may know how to do that but is still has to be done.

Changing the way we eat

Now comes the difficult bit. Persuading the bulk of the population they should have a box on the balcony growing plants which they cut and chop up to make a garnish for their main meal.

The Internet marketing gurus will tell you how they can run this brilliant marketing campaign on the web with flashy web pages, social media, video clips etc the whole shebang.

The net result will be they will end up richer, you poorer with no advance to the cause.

How innovations happen

I have spent my life in the innovation business, with my fair share of ideas that did not work, ideas that worked but no one wanted, two that worked and now the last one which is by far and away the most important. Broadly food that makes us healthy but more specifically breeding gut microbes that will create the hormones to tell us to stop eating when we have had sufficient.

There are three steps in this process.

Step 1 assembling the skill set

No one person has all the skills to generate the social change that a major innovation involves.

This requires the formation of an inner circle with a range of skills, technical, marketing, communications and understanding of how societies work and change.

This is where we are now, forming this inner circle - are you interested in changing the world for the better - let me know, we need you.

Step 2 the pioneers

There are eight billion people on Earth and we are all different. We are a social animal and being part of a group is incredibly important to us.

But there is a small minority of people who are prepared to go against the conventional wisdom and replace it with a better wisdom - the paradigm shift.

But they won’t do this based on logical augments alone, they have to test it first for themselves.

I know this very well. Fifty years ago I was travelling the world telling people about my innovation in the area of Computer Aided Engineering which challenged the conventional wisdom.

Not a nutter

Most people wrote me off as a nutter, but a few thought I may have a point. In no way were they convinced by my logic but they thought it worth their while to test for themselves.

Fortunately for me, it worked, an essential requirement for any innovation, and then they became convinced. It was not my logical or miserable marketing skills that convinced them - they had to try it and prove to themselves that it worked.

This group then became the disciples, they were often people of influence and when other people saw that people were using this technology they became the message bearers and we entered the third stage.

Step 3 Acceptance

When it became clear that there was a group, even if it was a small group, people felt more comfortable about making the change. Again they had to go through the process of trying it for themselves before they made the change but eventually, the change became the norm and the paradigm shift occurred.

Back to the box

This is the process we need to follow to get the box accepted.

We need this small group with the spectrum of skills needed.

Recruit the growers to produce the boxes so people can try it for themselves.

Make contact with the pioneers who will become the first wave of acceptance

Finally, be able to satisfy the demand as this becomes the accepted norm.

Interested

Interested in becoming part of a global change for the better - contact me