The Gbiota club is a community-supported agriculture movement where growers and eaters work together to restore soil health, support our gut biology, and make the world healthier for our grandkids.
Join the Gbiota Club
I am inviting you to join the Gbiota club. I can and do put forward the logical reasons to join: it is essentially community supported agriculture—buyers support growers and get nutritious food grown under carefully controlled, regenerative conditions, while growers have an assured customer base and can focus on improving their soils.
All of that is totally logical—and true—but it is not the real reason. The real reason is my grandkids, and their grandkids who don’t even exist yet.
We live in what is called the Anthropocene, where humans have a major impact on the earth. If I listed everything that is going wrong it would be deeply depressing: climate change, obesity, diabetes, soil degradation, social unrest, inequality—the list goes on and on.
The underlying reason is that many of our leaders focus on short-term benefits—profits and power now—for themselves.
But humans are smart and cooperative. If we work together, we can solve these problems. We—ordinary people—can do it. We can’t simply rely on our leaders; we have to become leaders and show them a better way.
We can start by growing food in a way that is both healthy and sustainable, by breeding beneficial biology in recycled waste and adding essential trace minerals.
For Our Grandkids
To be honest, I don’t really care about dollars and cents. I am 81 and have enough money to last the rest of my expected life.
But I do care about the lives my grandkids and their grandkids will live. So join me in the Gbiota club and help make the world a better place for future generations. Forget the greedy politicians and big-business tycoons—we can do this ourselves.
Taking Back Control
The Gbiota club is more than people buying healthy food directly from growers—although that is essential.
It is about what sort of world we, and our grandkids, live in.
We can be puppets controlled by profit-obsessed corporations, short-sighted politicians, or even by the technology that dominates our lives. Or we can take control of our food system and how our food is grown. We want food that will make us healthy, grown in a sustainable way.
I would make a useless politician, but I am an innovator. I have developed technology for growing plants that act as pre- and probiotics, and I can organise the communications platform so club members can decide among themselves what they want to grow and eat.
But I cannot do this alone. It is up to club members to take the initiative. The first step is to register and join the club.
Not All Cabbages Are the Same
Two cabbages can look identical, yet be completely different in terms of health.
One may have been grown in soil full of beneficial biology and essential trace minerals. The other may have come from tired soil, depleted in minerals and life, propped up by synthetic fertilisers and toxic sprays.
Unless you happen to have a mass spectrometer and DNA sequencer in your handbag, you have no way of knowing which is which—unless you know and trust your grower.
By joining the Gbiota club, we can ensure our food is grown in healthy soil, rich in beneficial biology and essential trace minerals. Healthy food starts in healthy soil. Gbiota beds grow food in nutritious, biologically active soil by breeding beneficial biology in organic waste and adding essential trace minerals.
Join the Gbiota Club
We have three types of membership:
Customers – people who don’t have the time or land to grow their own food but still want to eat healthy food.
Home Growers – people who want to use Gbiota technology to grow the best food for themselves and their families.
Commercial Growers – growers who want to use Gbiota technology but need access to a regular customer base.
The Gbiota club does not buy or sell food. We provide the technology for growing gut-brain food and link growers and buyers together.
Soil Is Key
Health starts in the soil. Soil is formed as microbiology breaks down rocks and is continually renewed as plants grow, die, and decompose back into the soil. We can assess soil quality by the number of worms reworking the soil. Read more in Making Soil.
Gut Microbiology
We have evolved with this microbiology, which now forms an essential part of our gut.
Trillions of cells, made up of thousands of species, live in our digestive system. They are far more than a mass of dumb cells—they communicate with each other and with our head brain to form an intelligent control system that manages our bodies.
Our gut brain:
controls our appetite so we have enough energy but don’t overeat,
manufactures complex chemicals we need to replace body parts as they age,
hosts much of our immune system and helps protect us from pandemics.
Modern industrial soils lack much of this essential biology. Many chemicals used in agriculture are advertised as safe for humans, but they can be devastating for soil biology.
The Food Crisis
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke, 1770
There are about eight billion people on earth, with around 250 babies born every minute. How are we going to feed everyone—now and into the future?
Our modern food industry is staggering in its scale and productivity. We have huge areas growing staple crops like wheat, corn, rice, and potatoes, and we are continuously clearing forests to grow palm oil.
Much of this is fed to chickens in vast sheds, pigs in cages, and cows in feedlots.
Our production of chicken wings and chips (and similar foods) is simply stunning.
Right now we are producing enough food to feed a population of some thirteen billion people—more than half again the current global population—if it were equitably distributed.
Yet massive amounts of food are wasted and end up in landfill, creating greenhouse gases and losing essential minerals.
Does that mean we are healthy and sustainable? Simply, no.
Evolution and Soil
We humans are the result of millions of years of evolution, but our modern food is very different in two important ways from the food we evolved to eat.
The key difference is in the soil. Soil is formed as microbiology breaks down rocks and is continuously cycled as plants grow, die, and decompose. This process depends entirely on microbiology and soil creatures, particularly worms.
Gut Microbiology and Health
We have evolved with this microbiology, which now forms an essential part of our gut.
Trillions of cells, made up of thousands of species, communicate with each other and with our head brain to form an intelligent control system that manages our bodies and performs three vital jobs:
controls our appetite so we have enough energy but don’t overeat,
produces complex chemicals needed to repair and replace body parts,
hosts much of our immune system to protect us from infections and pandemics.
Modern chemical-industrial agriculture often destroys this soil biology. Many of the chemicals used may not directly harm us, but they harm the soil life that ultimately supports our gut biology.
Trace Minerals
Early soils were rich in a wide range of minerals that both we and plants need. Plants are simpler than humans and require a narrower set of minerals. There is no economic pressure on farmers to replace many trace minerals that are essential for human health—such as chromium, iron, zinc, selenium, and iodine.
Chemical industrial agriculture largely replaces only the major nutrients (N, P, K) needed for plant growth. Without deliberate replenishment of trace minerals, our soils—and therefore our food—become deficient.
Our health depends on healthy soils, which in turn depend on regenerative agriculture based on recycling organic waste, adding trace minerals, and breeding beneficial biology—especially worms, which are a key indicator of soil health. Read more in Adapting to the Food Crisis.
Feeding Our Gut Brain
Our gut biota are temporary residents, constantly breeding and dying.
We simply cannot be fit and healthy without a healthy gut, and that means having the right species in the right balance. This depends on what we eat.
We can change the biology in our guts by changing what we eat—just as we can replace a graphics card or memory module in a computer to change its performance.
Modern Foods
Modern foods, full of sugars, fats, and refined carbohydrates, breed gut biology that makes us fat and sick. But we can change that biology by adding foods that help beneficial species thrive.
We know how to do this. There is a vast scientific literature on food and gut biology, and I have spent many years working out how to grow this kind of food.
The recipe is simple: breed worms by feeding them organic waste, add essential trace minerals, and maintain moisture at the “Goldilocks” level—not too wet and not too dry. This creates rich vermicast that supports beneficial biology.
This is a totally sustainable system, giving us a healthy gut by recycling waste.
This is the Gbiota bed system.
From Technology to Action
But how do we persuade people that they should be eating plants grown in vermicast—which is really just a polite way of saying worm poo?
The Post-Truth Era
We live in a post-truth era. Our media and the internet are saturated with catchy one-liners designed to manipulate us into buying something or doing something that powerful interests want. Many people have become deeply cynical about the modern information system.
Technology People Can Trust
The aim of the Gbiota club is to make Gbiota food—gut-brain food—readily available to all people at an affordable price. We need a different approach from high-pressure, manipulative sales techniques. We need a system that people can trust, based on real people seeing and feeling the benefits for themselves.
Fortunately, Gbiota beds are a simple and accessible way of growing gut food. Anyone with even a small patch of land can do it. It only takes a few weeks before the results become clear: the good bugs outbreed the bad bugs, food cravings settle, and we feel satisfied.
Those people can then tell their friends, who can try it and share their experience. Once enough people are interested, regenerative farmers—who want to farm sustainably—can begin growing gut food on a commercial scale so anyone can buy it and move towards better health.
You can start by reading The Gbiota Story to gain background on the project. You can learn how to make Gbiota beds in the “Growing” section of the website.
These are detailed documents for club leaders. If you just want to be an ordinary member, simply register via the menu. If you have any problems (for example, a cache error), refresh the page—and if that does not work, contact me (we are working on a temporary technical problem).
Right and Wrong
This is not just about profit—it is about right and wrong. If COVID has taught us anything, it is that most people still have a sense of what is right and are willing to act for the good of the community, not just for profit or self-interest.
Of course, there will always be self-seekers—it is just a pity they often work themselves into positions of power in governments and big business.
Comments and questions are welcome: contact me here.
The Gbiota club exists to improve health through nutritious food, with a focus on chronic disease such as diabetes and support for expectant and nursing mothers. Membership is open to anyone, but it relies on clear processes for sharing information responsibly.
Purpose of the Gbiota Club
The purpose of the Gbiota club is to help improve peoples health by nutritious food. This focus specifically applies to chronic diseases such as diabetes and also applies to expectant and nursing mothers.
Who Can Join
Anyone can join the Gbiota club, but various operating processes need to be followed. Membership may be revoked if these processes are not followed.
Sharing Information
Wide participation is important and the club is designed as a global operation. Members are encouraged to recruit new members by sharing information on the underlying principles of the technology.
Generally, information on the website is available under the Creative Commons system. Information can be shared freely, with the understanding that the source is acknowledged.
At the same time, experience shows that information on the web is prone to corruption and can be used for unethical commercial exploitation. For that reason, some information needs to be classified as club confidential and not shared outside the club.
When a specific technology has been tested by members and there is general agreement that it is solid, it may be reclassified and made widely available under Creative Commons.
A secure region of the website has been created for club members only. This area is password protected. Sharing practical ideas and experiences is encouraged, and members can email material for inclusion in the secure area, preferably as a Word document. The content can then be reviewed and, if needed, clarified before being posted for other members to access.
Files in the secure area are treated as living documents. They can change as new ideas emerge, or as failures and errors are identified. Failures are a normal part of experimentation, so members need a secure environment to discuss, correct, and if necessary retract information without it being misused or permanently misrepresented elsewhere.
Costs
Under the updated system, membership of the club is now free. However, produce sold on a commercial basis should be traded on the pickandeat.shop website, where a nominal commission applies. This commission covers the use of the pickandeat.shop platform, use of the Gbiota™ trade mark, and a license to use Gbiota technology know-how.
Many members already have strong expertise in growing plants and constructing systems such as wicking beds and Gbiota beds. However, in the area of soil and gut biology, and their interaction, there are still many unanswered questions. Proper investigation will require access to professional research laboratories, and testing will almost inevitably involve costs.
Trading of Gbiota Produce
Home growers using Gbiota beds for their own use can use the technology free of charge. However, the technology is confidential intellectual property and information should not be shared outside club membership.
Produce grown in Gbiota beds can be marketed as grown in Gbiota beds and the trade mark Gbiota™ can be used. Toxic chemicals suspected of damaging gut bacteria, specifically glyphosate, should not be used on Gbiota beds.
How to Join the Club
To join, send an email requesting membership and a password for the secure area will be provided by return email.
Questions or comments can be sent to: colinaustin@bigpond.com
Donations
If you wish to donate to support the cause, donations are welcome. Donations can be made via the PayPal icon on the website or by direct transfer to:
The Gbiota Club is a community-based response to the global decline in health caused by poor food quality. Chronic disease, obesity, and metabolic illness are driven by food that looks good but lacks nutrients and damages gut biology. The Gbiota Club exists to rebuild health by growing and distributing genuinely nutritious, toxin-free food through trust, community, and regenerative growing systems. It is not a business or a charity, but a shared effort to create a better food system that works for people, growers, and long-term health.
Colin Austin – June 2019
The Aim of the Gbiota Club
Over the last thirty years there has been a dramatic decline in human health, marked by a global epidemic of chronic disease. People are becoming overweight, tired, and sick, not simply because they eat too much, but because modern food is high in toxins and low in essential nutrients. The aim of the Gbiota Club is to grow and supply food that restores health and is widely available at a price people can afford.
The goal is not only to improve how food is grown, but to change how food is produced, distributed, and trusted. Gbiota beds, developed from wicking bed technology, already demonstrate that it is technically possible to grow highly productive, nutrient-rich food that supports gut health. The challenge now is to make this food accessible to everyone who cares about their health.
Our Guts – The Intelligent Control System
The human gut is not just a digestive pipe but a highly intelligent control system. Trillions of microbial cells communicate with each other and with the brain, regulating hunger, satiety, fat storage, and immune response. Hormones such as insulin, ghrelin, and leptin are only messengers; the real decisions are made by the gut biology, or Gbiota.
Our gut microbes are not truly part of us, yet we depend on them completely. They live inside us, feed on what we eat, and in return regulate our health. A healthy gut requires ecological balance, where beneficial microbes outcompete harmful ones. This balance cannot be achieved with pills or restriction diets, only by feeding the gut biology properly.
Why We Get Fat and Sick
Weight gain is not caused by eating too much; it is caused by the body being instructed to store fat. When gut biology is damaged, the body increases hunger to compensate for missing nutrients. Overeating is a symptom, not the cause. Attempts to override this biological control system inevitably fail in the long term.
Modern industrial food damages gut biology through chemical residues and nutrient depletion. This starves beneficial microbes and allows harmful ones to dominate. The result is widespread metabolic dysfunction affecting billions of people worldwide.
Feed the Good Bugs
The solution is simple but demanding: eat food that contains real nutrients and is free from toxic chemicals. Vegetables should be ideal, yet many are heavily sprayed, making them harmful despite their healthy image. What matters is not the type of food, but how it is grown.
Regenerative Farming vs Chemical Industrial Farming
Regenerative agriculture rebuilds soil biology and mineral balance, producing food that supports gut health. Gbiota beds were designed to flush nutrient-rich compost tea through the root zone while avoiding toxic inputs. This approach works, but it is more labour-intensive and therefore more expensive at the farm level.
Techniques such as mixed planting, dense cropping, and early harvesting reduce pest damage without chemicals. These methods are proven but require a food system that values health over appearance and volume.
Why the Food System Must Change
Consumers cannot judge food quality by appearance. Supermarkets reward looks and shelf life, not nutrition. In traditional communities, trust existed because people knew the grower. That trust has been lost in modern supply chains.
Home gardening helps but cannot provide the diversity needed for optimal gut health. A new system is required—one that reconnects growers and consumers through trust, transparency, and cooperation.
The Role of the Gbiota Club
The Gbiota Club is an internet-based community supported by local human connections. Members gain access to information on growing food for health and to a marketplace that connects them directly with regenerative growers.
My role is to develop the technology and provide free technical information through waterright.com.au. The pickandeat.shop platform brings growers and buyers together in a modern version of the village food system.
Trust, Community, and Feedback
The system relies on transparency. Buyers can comment on produce quality, encouraging growers to maintain high standards. This mutual dependence creates trust and accountability without certification bureaucracy.
The Economics of Healthy Food
Growing biologically is more expensive, but the current food system is highly inefficient. Growers receive only a small fraction of the retail price. By shortening supply chains and reducing waste, healthy food can become affordable.
The Power of Community
Humans thrive through cooperation. In my YouTube video, ‘Food for Gut Health – Society’ I argued that the success of the human species was much more than technology but the way we have learned to cooperate together as part of a community.
Local Gbiota coordinators are essential to forming groups, working with growers, and organising logistics. These coordinators are the backbone of the system.
Transport and Distribution
The traditional hub-and-spoke model is slow and wasteful. Gbiota uses a radial system where food is harvested only when ordered and delivered fresh. This reduces waste, transport distance, and food degradation.
Legal and Organisational Structure
The Gbiota Club is not a business or a charity. Growers and coordinators are fairly compensated, but the primary goal is community health.
Local groups may adopt legal structures if needed.
Final Comment
No one knows whether this system will succeed. Its success depends entirely on people choosing to participate as coordinators, growers, and informed consumers. The alternative is to continue with a food system that damages health while appearing efficient.
The Gbiota project is about one simple idea: growing food in biologically active soil to improve our gut biology, restore essential nutrients, and help prevent the chronic diseases now dominating global health.
The aim of the Gbiota Club is to share practical knowledge about how to grow food that actually makes us healthier. Anyone can take part—home gardeners who want better vegetables, or commercial growers who want to supply refurbishment food at scale.
The Gbiota system is built around growing in living, biologically rich soil. Healthy soil produces plants rich in minerals, phytonutrients, and the gut biology we desperately lack in modern diets. This approach has been pioneered by Colin Austin, also known for creating the Wicking Bed system.
In a very short period of human history, our patterns of disease have completely shifted. Infectious diseases once dominated. Now chronic diseases—diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, dementia—account for around 88% of deaths. Worse, although people used to live longer and healthier lives, today both lifespan and health span are declining.
Why Are We Becoming Less Healthy?
Modern food is high in energy but low in nutrients. It is engineered to taste good but often stripped of the biology and trace elements that support a diverse gut biome. Our gut biology evolved to help regulate appetite, mood, weight, and metabolism, yet modern diets disrupt those signals.
Our gut biome has evolved a highly sophisticated system to control appetite—it’s virtually impossible to override the hormones coming from our gut.
This means cravings are not a moral failure or a lack of willpower. The gut simply never evolved a mechanism to tell us which specific nutrients we’re missing. It just sends the message to “eat more,” which drives overconsumption of high-energy, low-nutrient foods.
Citizen Research and Citizen Action
The Gbiota project is not just research—it is practical action. Many people question whether citizen science can contribute anything meaningful, but the goal is not to replace professional research. Instead, it is to complement it by looking at the whole system from soil to gut, something highly specialised fields often overlook.
The internet now gives ordinary citizens access to world-class research. By combining that knowledge with hands-on experimentation, we can build a top-down understanding that drives real-world solutions.
We must start with the real problem: chronic diseases have skyrocketed while average age at death and late-life health have declined. Infectious diseases have dropped from 53% of deaths to around 3%, replaced by chronic illness.
The Three Causes of Declining Health
1. Reduction in Nutrients
Modern agriculture produces large quantities of food that is often low in minerals, phytonutrients, and enzymatic activity. Many studies confirm that nutrient density has fallen across vegetables, fruits, and grains.
2. Disruption of the Gut Biome
Modern diets feed the wrong biology. A diverse gut biome supports immunity, mood, metabolism, and appetite control. The success of faecal transplants in reversing obesity shows how powerful gut biology really is.
3. Appetite Signals No Longer Match Modern Food
Our gut biology evolved during periods of scarcity where food was low in energy but high in nutritional diversity. There was never a need to evolve a mechanism to signal which nutrients we were deficient in—just a general signal to “eat.”
Whether we like it or not, we end up overeating high-energy, low-nutrient modern foods because our gut biology can only send one message: eat more.
Food, Not Pills
Commercial probiotics and prebiotics often deliver underwhelming results and are expensive. But eating the right food can change gut biology dramatically—this has been proven in numerous global studies. Traditional diets rich in diverse plants and living soil biology produce healthier gut biomes than modern Western diets.
The number one aim of the Gbiota system is to improve gut biology through food. By growing in biologically active soil, we reintroduce the microbes, minerals, and phytonutrients missing from industrial food.
Supplementary Biological Food
We do not need our entire diet to come from Gbiota beds. Even adding a proportion of biologically active food can shift the gut toward beneficial species that regulate appetite and metabolism. Traditional diets were naturally balanced—low in energy, high in refurbishment. Today the balance is reversed.
Industrial agriculture excels at producing high-energy foods like wheat, rice, corn, and oats—essential for feeding billions of people. But the lack of refurbishment food has created a global metabolic crisis. Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease follow directly from this imbalance. Restoring gut biology is essential because it controls appetite. Mechanical dieting fails; biology succeeds.
Gbiota for Home Gardeners and Commercial Growers
Gbiota beds allow home gardeners to grow highly nutritious food with relative ease. But the system must also support commercial growers who can supply refurbishment food to the wider population. Many growers want to produce healthier food but find it difficult to compete with industrial farming and supermarket pricing.
For Gbiota to make a real difference, growers must be able to differentiate their produce and be rewarded for growing biologically active food. The Gbiota system offers that pathway.
The Three Stages of the Gbiota Project
Stage 1: Develop and Refine the System
A group of gardeners form the Gbiota Club, build their own beds, compare results, refine the methods, and monitor changes in their health and gut biology.
Stage 2: Spread the Word
Members share the benefits with friends and family, encouraging more people to grow biologically active food or purchase it from growers.
Stage 3: Commercial Adoption
Commercial growers adopt the system once demand is established and there is a clear way to brand and differentiate Gbiota-grown produce.
Bottom-Up vs Top-Down Technology
Despite all our technical sophistication, we have ended up with food that shortens our lives and undermines our health. This is because modern science is highly specialised and tends to miss the big picture.
Bottom-up technology looks at individual components—soil biology, gut bacteria, plant nutrients—but rarely integrates them. Top-down technology starts with the real-world outcome we want: healthier people. The Gbiota project is firmly top-down.
There are countless scientific articles on soil biology and even more on gut biology. But almost none explore the pathway from soil to gut to health. That is the Gbiota niche.
A highly recommended resource is a talk by David R. Montgomery exploring how individuals can improve health by changing soil biology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHy9Cf9IDGA
Why the Gbiota Club Exists
I am not ready to publish the full Gbiota system publicly. The club exists so members can test the system, refine it, and build confidence that it works for real people—not just in theory.
When the group as a whole is confident in the results, the system can be promoted more widely and help the public access genuinely healthy food grown in nutrient-rich living soil.
Anyone can join the club. Members simply agree to keep the technical details confidential during development, and to share their own learning experiences within the group. If you want to join—or if you have not yet received your copy of “Making a Gbiota Bed”—email me at colinaustin@bigpond.com.
Help us fight diabetes and the chronic diseases caused by modern diets. Spread the word, support growers, and share the benefits of food grown in living soil.
Why changing how we grow food may be the key to changing our gut biology — and our health.
This is an invitation to join the Gbiota Club. Why form a club at all? Because if we want to improve our health by improving our gut biology, we need a practical system — a top-down way of growing food in biologically active soil and seeing what actually works in the real world.
Why Gut Biology Matters
We’ve known for a long time that gut biology helps us digest food, but modern research shows it is far more than a fermentation tank. Our gut is an intelligent control centre made of trillions of cells communicating like a biological computer. It supports immunity, produces vitamins, regulates appetite, controls weight, influences mood, and affects chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, strokes, and depression.
We don’t simply “get fat because we eat too much.” Our gut sends hormonal signals — leptin, ghrelin, insulin — telling our body whether to store fat, burn fat, or keep eating. Why different people store fat differently remains one of the gut brain’s mysteries. But one thing is clear: if we want long-term health, we must manage our gut biology, not just our calories.
Why Science Isn’t There Yet
Modern medicine can give me a titanium knee that works beautifully, but when it comes to gut biology, we are still scratching the surface. We can identify thousands of microbial species, but we still don’t fully understand how they work together as a computer system controlling our health.
Thousands of scientists are working on it, but real breakthroughs may take decades — and I don’t have decades to wait. Like many older people, I am less philosophical and more impatient. So I turned to self-experimentation.
Self-Experimentation: What Happened
I read everything I could about gut biology, then bought commercial probiotics. What changed? Absolutely nothing. Bottle after bottle. No noticeable improvement in health or energy.
But when I switched to a diet of plants grown in biologically active soil — what I call a “wild ecosystem diet” — something finally happened. My gut behaved like an internal brewery. Noisy, active, alive. Fermented foods and garden-fresh plants triggered dramatic changes that I could feel, not just theorise.
Subjectively I felt better. Objectively, well, my pulse still increased when a pretty girl walked by, which was at least scientific confirmation that I was alive.
Why Modern Food Isn’t Enough
The explosion of chronic disease is recent. Something has changed. Yes, processed foods, sugars, refined carbs, and inactivity are part of the problem — but so is the way we grow our food. Our soils have been stripped of minerals, phytonutrients, and biology. Produce is cleaner, stored longer, and biologically emptier. Tribes living traditional lifestyles don’t suffer these chronic diseases. They eat wild food harvested from functioning ecosystems and have far richer gut biology than we do.
The conclusion is simple: we can improve our gut biology by changing our diet, but only if that diet contains both probiotics (the bugs) and prebiotics (the food the bugs eat). The best source is food grown in biologically rich soil — not sterile mass-produced supermarket vegetables.
Gbiota Beds: Phase 1
The first step is gathering people willing to grow biologically active food — Gbiota beds — and actually eat it to see what happens. This is citizen research. Not double-blind statistical trials, but practical case histories. If enough people notice improved health, we’ll know we’re onto something valuable.
Some eating habits may need to change: less sugar, fewer high-glycaemic carbs, maybe some intermittent fasting. And yes, red wine and chocolate remain exempt — life needs pleasure.
We can measure outcomes simply: energy levels, waist circumference, weight, blood sugar readings for diabetics. Enough real-world data can show whether this approach works.
Gbiota Beds: Phase 2
I made a mistake with Wicking Beds: I released everything freely, they went viral, but the technology was altered, misinterpreted, and complicated unnecessarily. Commercial growers lost interest because the system seemed too complex and expensive.
If Gbiota beds can genuinely help fight chronic diseases — especially diabetes — we must protect the system from corruption. That means protecting the name “Gbiota” and licensing the technology so growers can produce genuine Gbiota food and earn a fair return.
Commercial growers need a brand the public recognises for its health benefits. They also need confidence that the technology is robust, scaleable, and scientifically grounded.
The Gbiota Manual
The system will be documented in the confidential Gbiota Manual — a living document available to club members. Every member agrees not to share it publicly, helping preserve the integrity of the technology.
Members can contribute their own findings, and I will incorporate them into the manual. No one person can know everything about soil, water, microbiology, hydraulics, horticulture, and the vast array of plants with potential health benefits. But together, a group can.
Membership
There are two membership types:
Home growers — $20 per year, for private non-commercial use.
Commercial growers — $100 per year, licensed to sell food under the Gbiota name.
Citizen Research: Why Top-Down Matters
Scientific progress often starts with practical discovery, not theory. Agriculture came before genetics. Steam engines came before thermodynamics. Computing evolved from codebreaking before it became the science we know today.
Top-down technology shows a method is useful. Bottom-up science later explains why. We don’t need perfect scientific understanding before taking action. We only need evidence that something works well enough to pursue it — and refine it.
If improving gut biology can reduce chronic disease, we cannot wait decades for perfect science. We must learn pragmatically, like the Hadza, Pima, and Yanomami, whose gut biology adapts seasonally and thrives without laboratories.
Why Form a Club?
Because the stakes are enormous. Diabetes alone affects over a billion people. If Gbiota beds or “wild food” diets can help restore gut biology, the benefits are global. But the only way to know for sure is collective experimentation.
And on a personal note — forming this club is a way to pass on what I know before I reach my “final Wicking Bed grave,” where the worms may appreciate me more than the living world does.
If you feel the same urgency — the same “grandfather’s disease” of wanting your grandchildren to live healthy lives — then consider joining the Gbiota Club.
The Gbiota project shares practical knowledge on growing “refurbishment food” that supports gut biology and long-term health. The core idea is simple: modern diets are high in energy (sugar, fats, fast carbs) but low in minerals, phytonutrients, fibre, and living biology. That imbalance drives cravings and chronic disease. Gbiota beds focus on biologically active soil and mineral-rich inputs so home gardeners and commercial growers can produce nutrient-dense greens that help restore appetite control.
What the Gbiota project is
The aim of the Gbiota club is to share expertise on how to grow food that supports health. Anyone can participate, from people who want to grow a few trays or beds of greens at home, through to growers producing at commercial scale.
The Gbiota system is a way of growing food in a highly biologically active soil, with the specific goal of supporting gut biology and helping provide the phytonutrients and trace minerals that are essential for health. The system grew out of earlier practical growing innovations and is designed to be simple enough for experienced home gardeners, while also being economic enough to be used by commercial producers.
The real-world problem the project addresses
In a relatively short period of time, the pattern of human death—and more importantly how healthy we are before we die—has changed dramatically. Infectious diseases used to be the most common cause of death. Today, infectious disease is a small fraction, while chronic (non-infectious) diseases such as heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, and related conditions dominate. These chronic diseases now account for the great majority of deaths.
For many generations average age at death steadily increased. Now the warning signs are different: the “years alive” may not be the only issue. The bigger concern is that many people are less healthy in later years, and chronic disease is appearing earlier. This is not just a personal health issue; it is a societal systems issue.
Why we are becoming less healthy
The main drivers are not mysterious. They sit in plain sight, but they are often discussed separately instead of as one joined-up system. The root problem is a misapplication of technology: agriculture and food processing have become extremely good at producing cheap, high-energy food, while steadily stripping out what the body needs for repair, regulation, and resilience.
1) Reduced nutrition in modern food
The first driver is a reduction in the nutrition of modern foods. This is the easiest to discuss because nutrient content has been widely studied by many researchers. Across multiple lines of evidence, modern diets tend to be lower in trace minerals and protective plant compounds than traditional diets built around fresh, diverse, minimally processed foods.
2) Modern foods overload the diet with fast energy
The second driver is not only that food is less nutrient-dense, but that it is often loaded with added sugars, salts, fats, and fast acting carbohydrates. These combinations are highly palatable and easy to overconsume, and they create a diet that is rich in energy but poor in “refurbishment”.
3) Gut biology and appetite control are being disrupted
The third driver is the gut biome (gut biota). Modern food patterns tend to reduce the diversity and resilience of gut biology. The gut biome is not just passive “flora”; it behaves like an intelligent system that influences hormones, appetite, cravings, inflammation, and immune function. This is not a fringe concept—one of the strongest practical demonstrations is how dramatically metabolism can shift when gut ecology is altered in medical settings (for example, the well-known outcomes seen in faecal transplant research).
A key point is evolutionary: the appetite control system developed in a world where food was often lower in energy but higher in natural nutrients and living biology. There was little pressure to evolve a precise “mineral dashboard” that tells you exactly which micronutrient you are short of. Instead, the system tends to send a broad message: eat more. In a modern environment where cheap, high-energy foods are everywhere, that message can drive overeating.
Citizen research, and citizen action
The Gbiota project is more than citizen research; it is citizen action. Citizen research is often criticised because it cannot compete with specialist laboratories using electron microscopes and DNA sequencing machines. That criticism misses the point. The goal is not competition. The goal is complementarity.
The internet now gives citizens access to published research, clinical insights, and global experience. That access allows people to integrate knowledge “top down” and apply it “bottom up” in gardens, kitchens, and communities. This is how practical systems improve: by repeated trial, shared learning, careful observation, and honest reporting of what works (and what does not).
The first step is to define the real-world problem clearly: chronic disease has replaced infectious disease as the dominant health burden, and it is strongly connected to food quality, food processing, and the ecology of the gut. Once that is recognised, the next step is to act in ways that are practical, measurable, and scalable.
Food, not pills
Commercial prebiotic and probiotic pills do not appear to be consistently effective in real life for most people, and they are certainly not cheap. Food is a more powerful lever because it does two things at once: it introduces helpful biology and compounds, and it also feeds the beneficial organisms so they can out-compete less helpful organisms. This is the ecological principle of competition, applied inside the body.
There is strong evidence that diet can shift gut biology. Traditional diets in multiple regions show markedly different gut profiles compared with modern Western diets. The direction is consistent: diverse, fibre-rich, minimally processed diets tend to support a more diverse, robust gut ecosystem than diets dominated by ultra-processed foods.
The number one aim of the Gbiota approach is to improve gut biology through diet. Mineral and phytonutrient enrichment can help address deficiencies, but the core issue is ecological: improve the conditions so beneficial gut biology thrives.
Supplementary food: restoring balance rather than chasing extremes
A practical point: it is not necessary (or realistic) for most people to replace their entire diet overnight. The aim is to restore balance by increasing the proportion of biologically active, nutrient-dense “refurbishment” foods.
Food gives pleasure because hormones have evolved over millennia to motivate eating. Traditional diets tended to be lower in energy density but higher in natural nutrients and fibre, which helped appetite control operate smoothly. Modern industrial food systems have become exceptionally good at producing energy foods—especially grains and refined carbohydrates—at huge scale. This has helped feed a growing population, but it has also upset the balance by crowding out the foods that support repair, regulation, and gut ecology.
When the refurbishment and biology proportion falls too low, cravings rise, overeating becomes common, and chronic disease follows. Mechanical “eat less” advice often fails because appetite is not simply a conscious decision; it is heavily driven by gut-brain signalling. Improving gut ecology is a more realistic way to influence appetite over the long term.
What a Gbiota bed is designed to do
The Gbiota system grows plants in a highly biologically active soil. The aim is to produce food that supports gut biology and also delivers a stronger spectrum of phytonutrients and trace minerals. In practice, this includes building living soil, maintaining active microbial cycling, and using mineral inputs where needed so plants can build better “refurbishment chemistry” rather than just bulk biomass.
Gbiota beds can be used by experienced home gardeners, but the broader goal is scale: commercial growers can produce meaningful volumes of refurbishment food for people who do not want (or cannot) grow it themselves. This matters because the health problem is global and large. Home growing is valuable, but it will not reach everyone on its own.
Growers, economics, and the missing link
Many growers want to adopt regenerative, biologically based production. The obstacle is not belief; it is economics and market access. Modern supermarket distribution systems make it difficult for small growers to compete, even when they are producing higher quality food. If the goal is to combat diabetes and chronic disease, the contribution of commercial growers is essential—and the system must make it profitable for them to do the right thing.
The three stages of the Gbiota project
Stage 1: Build a practical knowledge club
Form a group of keen gardeners and growers with an interest in health. Set up Gbiota beds, share results, contribute improvements, and pool expertise to refine the system. Evaluate outcomes honestly—especially anything that seems to influence appetite, digestion, energy, and wellbeing. The goal is not perfect lab science; it is practical, repeatable outcomes combined with transparent learning.
Stage 2: Spread the word through real experience
Encourage members to share practical results with friends and local networks. The strongest message is not marketing; it is lived experience: better food, grown differently, eaten regularly, with clear and relatable benefits. People can be encouraged to grow some of their own refurbishment food, even if only a small amount at first.
Stage 3: Support commercial adoption
Encourage commercial growers to adopt Gbiota methods to supply people who are not growers. Growers will only adopt new systems if there is reliable demand and a clear way to differentiate their product. This stage is about market signals, relationships, and community-scale buying patterns that make “health-focused food” viable as a business.
Bottom-up push and top-down pull technologies
With all our sophisticated technology, it is reasonable to ask: how did society end up eating food that makes people less healthy as they age? One answer is that modern innovation is often highly reductionist and specialised. It optimises parts of the system (yield, shelf life, processing efficiency, marketing performance) while failing to protect the whole system (soil biology, nutrient density, gut ecology, and long-term health).
A key gap is the “soil to gut” pathway. There is abundant information on soil biology, and an even larger body of information on gut biology. What is rare are practical, integrated explanations that connect the whole chain: soil ecology → plant chemistry → food handling → gut ecology → appetite hormones → health outcomes. That missing integration is exactly where citizen action can help.
A recommended starting point
One highly recommended talk is by David R. Montgomery. It clearly explains how improving soil biology can connect to improved gut biology and better health outcomes. It is an inspiring introduction and helps frame why living soil matters for people, not just plants.
At this moment Gbiota is used by a pretty determined bunch who are prepared to the bother of making their own Gbiota beds and boxes. However, it is now clear that while there are many people who want to have the health benefits of eating Gbiota food the majority of people just want to have a box delivered to their home.
So now I am on a campaign of setting up a network of local growers, independent businesses using the Gbiota technology to produce Wickimix the specialist growing media) and Gbiota boxes.
This is described below, this is not a legal document just a lay description of what will be the basis for a formal agreement.
Background
The human body has an intelligent control system, of which the gut is an integral part. This regulated bodily functions, particularly how much and what food we want to eat.
This is referred to as the gut-brain which needs to be fed gut-brain food made up of beneficial microbes and phytonutrients.
Modern food, particularly, highly processed foods lacks these microbes and phytonutrients which traditionally occurr naturally in the soil.
Modern food relying heavily on chemicals does not contain these essential beneficial microbes and phytonutrients. This deficiency is sensed by the gut-brain which produces hormones which create food cravings resulting in overeating that leads to excess fat storage.
The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
While the food and pharmaceutical industries have tried to develop various pills to resolve this epidemic these have not provided an effective solution, certainly at an affordable price.
There is no real viable alternative but to eat natural food which contains beneficial microbes and phytonutrients.
However food grown in the traditional process, largely relying on natural fertilisers, like manure and compost can contain both the beneficial microbes but also pathogens which lead to infectious diseases.
Cohort International Pty Ltd is a company focused on intellectual property, rather than the manufacture of products.
They have developed a system of breeding beneficial microbes in the soil with careful control of the moisture and air levels in the soil, to breed the beneficial microbes while the breeding of harmful microbes of pathogens are controlled.
This is a two-stage process with the beneficial microbes being bred in Gbiota™ beds to produce a growing medium called Wickimix.
This Wickimix is then loaded in a container, called Gbiota™ boxes which can be used to grow plants, which contain the beneficial microbes, in homes and apartments.
This home growing is important as the beneficial microbes have a short life so it is important the plants are eaten shortly after picking, hence the name of the website www.pickandeat.shop.
These boxes can be supplied as clean skins, eg just the boxes and Wickimix ready-to-grow plants or as part of a swap over system where boxes with plants grown to the stage of being ready to eat and the boxes swapped over on an exchange basis.
Typically these boxes would be ordered online and delivered by the growing company.
Cohort International wishes to enter into a licensing arrangement with companies who can undertake all or part of the process. In many cases, these companies would already be in the business of supplying conventional vegetable fruit and vegetable boxes and the supply of Gbiota boxes would be in addition to their normal business.
For its part, Cohort International Pty Ltd would provide expertise and training in setting up and managing Gbiota bed and boxes. It would also undertake the promotion of the Gbiota system and the grower as an approved and licensed grower.
The grower would recognise the intellectual property of Cohort International, have the right to use the trade name Gbiota™ and would sell products under the Gbiota name.
For its part, the grower would agree to conform to set quality standards and to sell through the multi-vendor web site www.pickandeat.shop
A sales margin which is currently set at 15% would be charged on all sales.
In addition, the grower would register on the subscription site as a grower, which currently has an annual fee of $40 per annum which allows them to access the technology site www.gbiota.com.
They would also be invited to join the social media site www.gbiota.club a social media site which is free and can be used to communicate directly with customers.
This is the last article in this series where I get down to the nitty gritties.
Control systems
Every machine has a control system, even if it is a simple on /off switch.
The human body is no different except our control system in incredibly sophisticated and to be honest we have no real understanding of how it works, but work it does.
Our gut is an important part of that control system, it is a real brain powered by trillions of cell communicating with each other, just like some super computer. We just have no idea of the code.
Go back a hundred years and there was an abundant supply of microbes, there were the good ones that powered our gut brain and the bad ones that made as sick or even killed us.
Swapping Infectious diseases for non-infectious disease
In fact the majority of people died from some infectious disease in early life, so the average age at death was low.
But with all our modern technology, our medical and food systems, sewage, clean water and an understanding of hygiene we largely solved the problem of infectious diseases - that is until Covid came along.
But our battle against these harmful bugs meant we also wiped out much of our beneficial microbes, so our control system was not working - leading to an epidemic of chronic non infectious diseases - over weight, diabetes, heart attacks, dementia etc.
Good bugs versus bad bugs - Eco balance
This is near the top of the list of challenges facing humanity, how do we control the bad bugs which make us sick without killing of the good bugs which power our intelligent control system.
This is what Gbiota is all about and it is not as difficult as it may seem, if you control the conditions the good bugs will out breed and out compete the bad bugs. What we call Eco balance.
We have the technology, we know how to do it but how do we make this technology available to the wide population?
The fringe group
It is true that we have a small group of followers who are quite happy recycling waste to breed the beneficial microbes that power our gut brain, but this a minute proportion of the total population - so how do we set up a system where the population has access to a healthy gut brain?
We have a number of problems to overcome.
The biggest is that these beneficial microbes have a short life.
You can buy some wonder plant, broccoli, kale or whatever from the supermarket but by the time it has passed from farm, to warehouse, to supermarket to your fridge the beneficial microbes will have died.
Changing our food system
This means a fundamental change in our food system from a highly centralised system, which is the most efficient and beloved by our mega food companies, to a local system.
This is not going back to the old system, that would mean going back to infectious diseases, we need local growers who understand Eco balance.
But for this to really work we have to change the way the system operates, instead of harvesting the plants and selling plants it means customer would buy a box with live plants still growing which they would pick and eat while really fresh, before the microbes die.
A journey of a thousand steps
We have already started, we have the technology and we have a group of dedicates supporters who are growing their own gut brain food, for themselves in their own home.
Mums pass on their gut biota to their babies at birth and from their breast milk.
But mums, even though they love their babies, are typically to busy and stressed out to grow their own gut brain food.
But is is likely that these new mums would have parent, who are equally dedicate to the future of their grand kids and who have the time, resources and skills to produce Gbiota boxes.
All mum has to do is to water, pick and eat.
This benefits mum and her baby but is the next step I establishing a local gut brain food industry of local growers.
So why not join the Gbiota social movement and change the world for the better.
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.
‘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.
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
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.
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.
A dumb drunken driver in control of a Lamborghini is a dangerous combination.
Our gut brain is the controller for our appetite.
A gut biome which send out hormones to make us crave sugars and fats is equally dangerous and has led to the modern epidemic of heart disease, strokes, diabetes, dementia etc.
If the Lamborghini crashes or we have a leg amputated from diabetes it is not the fault of the Lamborghini or the sugars and fats it is the fault of the control system which makes us crave sugary fatty food.
We evolved to have an effective control system.
We need a healthy gut biome which will send out the right hormones so we want to eat the right amount of the right sort of food and not crave sugary fatty foods which will make us fat and sick.
We can change our gut biome in about four weeks simply by diet and the results are obvious by the food we want to eat, peoples genes do vary but we can shift the odds of living a long and healthy life.
A healthy gut biome starts in the soil and the creatures that live in the soil, they enter the plants we eat and are fed by the fibre in the plants which are natural pre and pro biotics.
Microbes breed rapidly but also die rapidly so the plants need to be eaten shortly after harvesting.
This is well understood by thousands of home gardeners who breed the beneficial microbes in their soil and eat the plants shortly after picking- but this is only viable for a limited number of people.
There are eight billion people and they all need a healthy gut brain - how do we make this happen for all those people?
The Gbiota system was developed so all people can have access to plants growing in nutrient rich living soil full of beneficial microbes even if they live in an apartment with no garden, time or growing skills.
Experienced growers breed the microbes in organic waste to create Wickimix which they put into Gbiota Wicking boxes so people can have plants, ready to harvest, growing in their own home.
Gbiota – what is it all about
The last few years have seen an amazing improvement in our understanding of Gut biology. Gbiota is just short for Gut Biota.
Just read the medical literature and you will see many papers from leading medical researchers like Drs Tim Spector, Andrew Jenkinson, Will Bulsiewicz and many more.
They all tell us the same story, our gut and head brains work together to control our bodies which is now understood as critical to living a long and healthy life.
I am not directly involved in the massive area of research into gut biology, I just read the literature and see what they are saying. My interest is in practical solutions.
They all say the solution is to eat a wide variety of plants but just going to the supermarket and buying a bunch of vegetables is simply not enough. The beneficial biota come from the soil and creatures in the soils and our modern industrial chemical system are low in the critical biota even when just harvested but the critical issue is that the biota breed and die very fast so by the time the plants are actually eaten they are deficient in both living biota and key minerals.
This is where I come in, my interest is in how to grow plants which will enhance gut biology.
The most effective solution is to have people growing plants in biologically active nutrient rich soil in their own home so they can pick and eat.
If you are just looking for some magic pill to enhance your gut and are not interested in growing plants then this is not the web site for you. This web site is all about how to grow plants that will act as natural pre and pro biotics.
Gbiota wicking boxes enable people particularly those living in apartments to have plants growing at home which can be eaten while alive but this is only effective if the growing medium in the wicking boxes is teaming with the beneficial life and essential minerals.
The Gbiota system is a two stage process, experienced growers breed the beneficial microbes in organic waste in a balanced ecosystem so the beneficial microbes out compete and suppress the harmful biota which are always part of an ecosystem.
This generates the growing medium we call Wickimix which is placed directly into the Wicking boxes for their local community, either as a side hassle or a business.
There are many people who want to enhance their gut by eating plants that act as pre and pro biotics but you simply cannot do that in regular soil, you need a soil which is teaming with all sorts of creatures from the most minute viruses to the larger creatures like worms and larvae which have guts just like us and where the critical microbes we need can breed up. You really need Wickimix where all the creatures are happily breeding.
We really need local growers who can produce this Wickimix, this has to be a local operation so the Wickimix can be loaded straight from the Gbiota beds where the creatures are breeding and into the Wicking boxes.
If you have an interest in becoming a Wickimix grower please read the technical articles starting with the welcome message and contact me and we will see how we can help you set up as a Gbiota grower.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Gbiota project is about enhancing our gut microbiome by eating plants grown in a living medium (Wickimix) where beneficial microbes breed and support gut health. It connects dedicated growers and everyday consumers so more people can access genuine pre- and probiotic food at home.
At this moment the members of the Gbiota club are largely dedicated gardeners with land who are prepared to spend the time and energy learning how to manage the total process of growing both Wickimix and plants.
But everyone has a gut which acts as an automated control system subconsciously managing critical functions such as appetite and the immune system.
To make the benefit of the Gbiota technology more widely available we have split the technology into two separate parts.
Growers can produce Wickimix for their local community members who can grow plants at home, in the upgraded Gbiota box system. This requires very little attention so they are convenient for flats, balconies, patios etc with minimal space.
These plants are natural pre and probiotics – a system which has been tested over millions of years until the advent of chemical industrial agriculture. Many modern diseases like diabetes, obesity, heart attacks and dementia are the consequence of our modern highly processed food system which has led to a reduction in gut health.
Consumers will need a regular supply of Wickimix with its living microbiome which they can buy from approved local Wickimix growers – Gbiota provide all the training and technical support for the growers but local consumers need to locate a willing grower to be trained.
Local groups can also supply advice on what are the best plants to grow in that locality at the various seasons. This web is really three webs in one. The mother web gbiota.com is for technical information, gbiota.club is a private social media site aimed at forming local groups of both consumers and growers to exchange both products and information, and pickandeat.shop is an optional multi-vendor trading site for Gbiota products.
You can contact me directly for more information at
colin@gbiota.com (yes I am a real person).
Growing plants as pre and probiotics for gut health
The focus of this web site is how to grow pre and probiotic plants to enhance gut health using Gbiota Wicking beds.
Growing plants as natural pre and probiotics is the most effective and cheapest way of enhancing gut health and has been tested over millions of years.
I started to promote Wicking beds almost thirty years ago. The initial aim was to be able to grow crops when water was in very short supply.
There is no loss of water by either surface evaporation – as the top of the soil is dry – or by loss of water below the surface. This could reduce water use to as little as a third of conventional growing.
I then learned that as there was no loss of water below the root zone there was also no loss of nutrients so they were much more productive than conventional above-ground watering.
I then began to learn about the importance of our gut microbiome to health.
For many years our gut microbiome did not receive much attention from researchers as it was thought of as just a way of finishing the digestion process.
Then we learned that the gut was actually intelligent, communicating with our head brain to form part of our intelligent control system.
It was realised that our gut brain was critical in controlling our appetite and poor gut health was part of the chain that was leading to the widespread increase in people being overweight with all the attendant health issues such as diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
The recent epidemic taught us that our gut microbiome was critical for our immune system.
We now know that the head and gut brain communicate to affect our moods and the wave of depression and inertia is again influenced by our gut microbiome.
It is very clear that our gut microbiome is critical to health.
It is also evident that our modern food system, which may be highly effective in producing large volumes of energy food, is deficient in both the pre and probiotics which lead to a healthy gut microbiome.
Wickimix is the key – this is a type of soil which is full of both living beneficial microbes and essential minerals which will enter the plant roots to create plants which are both pre and probiotics.
Wickimix can be produced by enthusiastic home gardeners but is probably best produced by community or commercial growers.
Watch this video
https://youtu.be/-tdfT_0xttM This is loaded into the latest version of Wicking boxes which have two separate compartments – the lower compartment is simply filled with fresh water which slowly wicks up to the upper compartment by rope wicks.
This maintains the soil layer at the ideal Goldilocks moisture level – not too dry or wet but just nicely moist.
The upper compartment can have high walls so it can be used with certain plants as a terrarium for germination and to protect the plants from insect attacks.
A system is being set up where people with no time or space for gardening can buy a Gbiota Wicking box from a local grower and have fresh plants full of active beneficial biota for gut health growing even in a flat or apartment.
Food cluster
We help people form a food cluster – that is a group of people comprising consumers (people who want to access food that will make them healthy) and growers.
Growers may be home growers for their own use, community growers who are happy to have a paying hobby and commercial growers who want to set up a business supplying food focused on providing health.
Customers buy food directly from the growers while we provide the support and technology on how to grow food for health. This is done under a subscription service which works out at about $AU5 per month per customer.
We are based in Australia but the scheme is open to anyone wherever they are in the world.
Go to community to register.
Getting started
Here are some links to get you started.
Overview, as the name suggests, gives an overview of the technology and links to a range of articles for easy reading.
The menu item Food is a blog area containing many articles on food and health arranged in chronological order. We are writing new articles on a regular basis but some of the older articles are really important which is why they are highlighted in Overview.
The menu item Gbiota news contains the latest news on the Gbiota movement for health through food.
The menu item Growing is where we provide the technical information on growing food for health. Unlike the rest of the site which is free this is a subscription area.
Community is a social media area primarily aimed at linking customers and growers but where people can exchange information.
Shop has been set up to provide an online way for people in a cluster to buy and sell online – should they so wish.
Please note this is a dynamic site which is changed on a regular basis so it pays to check on what is new. Most of our visitors are returning visitors.
Any questions? Just email me at
colin@gbiota.com
It varies a bit from person to person but about 80%, certainly the bulk, of the food we eat is just burned off as fuel for energy or warming. All food contains carbon and hydrogen and we just burn it off as fuel, and we produce energy food in vast quantities – enough to feed the expanding population for years to come.
Energy food
Unless you are a lizard, in which case you need to sit on a rock in the sun, your body will automatically control your temperature for you without you having to think about it.
White, black, yellow, red, green or purple, living in an arctic igloo or tropical rain forest hut, our bodies are automatically controlled to within a fraction of a degree. Unless some nasty bug gets past your immune system, when it will turn up the thermostat to roast it.
A lot of energy is used by our head brain which runs on glucose, but our heart keeps on beating away, we keep on breathing and occasionally we may reach out for the remote, or even more spectacular get up and walk to the fridge for another packet of chips and all this takes energy and all this takes fuel in the form of food.
All food contains carbon and hydrogen and we just burn it off as fuel and we produce energy food in vast quantities – enough to feed the expanding population for years to come.
Replacement food
But our bodies are also wearing out, and we are much smarter than our cars as we can repair ourselves, but this does take a different sort of food, full of complex chemicals, minerals and vitamins.
Our track record here is not so good, the content of these complex chemicals in our food has sadly declined but not to worry, modern technology gives us a very good understanding of what we need so if we have the money we can just buy a few bottles of pills – not very economic but it works (sort of).
Not exactly a world shattering disaster but certainly not in the good list.
Brain food
If you can’t tell the difference between a jellyfish and a human then sadly you are a jellyfish. Let’s face it, jellyfish are pretty stupid – they just wobble around in the water eating what happens to come along.
People are very different – we have brains – two sorts of brains.
The conscious brain which enables you to read this and take decisions – this is interesting, I will keep on reading to get to the punch line which I anticipate will come (and you are right) or no, this is boring, I will put on the TV (and miss the punch line).
Then there is the subconscious brain which I call our intelligent control system which manages our bodies for us without us even thinking.
I talked about our temperature control system, we have no control over that. We can try by running around trying to get ourselves hot but our bodies just say – “that won’t work, look how I make you sweat”, or the other way around, if you get cold it will just turn up the furnace, burning up a load of fat (actually special brown fat for the purpose) and if that does not work set up your muscles in some giant and uncontrollable shiver.
Some parts of our body we may have a bit of control over – our body has a very sophisticated system controlling the oxygen level in our blood stream. We can try and show our dominance by holding our breath – but for how long? A minute or two then it wins and we end up panting away.
Every function in our body is managed by this intelligent control system, evolved over millions of years to keep us alive.
Take our immune system – the air we breathe is full of microbes – most harmless but some really nasty (have you forgotten about the virus already). Every time we take a breath our immune system leaps into action and says you’re a goody, you can live – or you’re a baddy – bong, you’re dead! (hopefully).
The same with our food, natural food is full of microbes, some bad – bong, you’re dead! But some not just good but absolutely essential. These are the microbes which form our gut brain which together with our head brain forms part of our automatic intelligent control system.
World shattering disaster? Yes or no.
World shattering disaster may be a bit extreme but it is certainly seriously bad. We have been so busy, using the state of the art technology to produce energy food, nice hygienic energy food, sterile and wrapped up in clean plastic bags that we have forgotten that we really need those good microbes that form part of our intelligent control system which has evolved to keep us healthy and alive.
Just look at a couple of the side effects – our immune system and the virus. Sadly many people caught the virus and died but also many people caught the virus which had little or no effect on them. There is close association between people eating a diet which gives them a healthy gut and their ability to fight off the virus.
The numbers are certainly big but are dwarfed by the main player – appetite and obesity. Getting a bit of a wobbly tum or bum may not seem a big deal but the side effects certainly are – they lead to a whole range of non-infectious diseases – particularly diabetes. Every eight seconds someone has a limb amputated from diabetes. Not good at all.
Now if you think I am prattling on about a few bugs then you should read Tim Spector’s book Diet Myth. Tim, a professor from Imperial College, is a world-renowned expert on the gut micro-biome and spent many years experimenting with twins working out what is hereditary (determined by our genes or how they are activated – epigenetics) or from the environment. He talks, from a strictly medical viewpoint, about how our guts control so much of our bodily functions.
But his book also reviews the work of experts across the field so if you want an unbiased appraisal of the current state of the art then Tim’s book is about as good as you’re going to get.
So we can be pretty sure that our gut micro-biome is crucial for our health.
But that may be interesting, the real question is: what can we do about it?
What can we do about it?
There is a saying: for every complex problem there is a simple solution – which does not work (Lincoln, I think).
But in this case there is a solution which at least is not too complicated. You see, for thousands if not millions of years we have been evolving a healthy gut, the microbes in our gut have become totally dependent on us – if we die they die – that is real mutual dependence.
Experts in the field have studied the gut micro-biome of the remaining hunter gatherers and people living in the blue zones where people are fit, healthy and active up to a ripe old age.
So what is their secret? No magic plants that can be bottled and sold at exorbitant prices – nothing much in common at all except that they were eating lots of fresh plants grown in soil teaming with microbes and minerals.
The lucky ones
So why can’t we do that? Well some people can, the lucky ones with the time, land, skills and energy to learn how to breed microbes in the soil and the knowledge to grow beneficial plants.
And that is what most of the current members of the Gbiota club are doing right now.
Harassed mums and the Gbiota wicking box
But in the real modern world not many people have that luxury, they live in cities, possibly in a flat with no garden and in any case may just not have the time. Unfortunately the single mum with two kids and three jobs trying to keep up with the excessive rental, forced to eat inert highly processed foods lacking essential nutrients, is no longer a rarity.
I realised that a conventional wicking box was not really meeting these people’s needs so I developed the Gbiota Wicking box, not as some miraculous technical innovation but as something that was really simple and did not need a lot of looking after.
We live in a world of complex things and are surprised when (and if) they actually work. I like simple things that actually work.
It has two containers: one for water, the other for soil.
Flat dwellers can have a few of these boxes near a window, even in winter, which is enough to grow gut brain food, while those with a bit more space can have more boxes and grow a bigger variety and quantity of plants.
Too good to be true
How many times have you bought something thinking it would make your life so much better only to find there is a snag.
Well, sorry, Gbiota Wicking beds may be great and give almost everyone access to healthy food which will enhance their gut and hence their health.
The snag is the growing media – what people used to call soil. Much of our modern food is grown in something that looks like soil but is really dead and inert.
Plants will grow great in a synthetic growing media with the right chemicals. Given the right chemicals plants will grow great without all that complex chain of creatures that make up natural soil. They may well grow faster and better than plants grown in real soil and they are certainly great for providing that 80% of energy food that we all need.
But they will be dead and inert and won’t have all that complex life form that makes soil and eventually give us a healthy gut.
Good news and bad news
The good news is we know exactly how to grow this soil (not make as in a factory but grow) full of the living biota and essential minerals – we have been doing it for years. We call it Wickimix.
We just breed them in a mix of organic waste and minerals with a bit of inoculant in Gbiota beds.
It is not that difficult – it just has to be done right if you want the healthy biota which will enhance your gut and not the E. coli biota which will have you sitting on the toilet emptying your gut.
The bad news is that these microbes are in a monster hurry. They can be breeding within a few hours of being born, and will breed like crazy (and you thought modern teenagers were randy) creating trillions of offspring, but – and here is the snag – they also die quick.
And that means we don’t want to be hanging around – we want local growers who can supply Wickimix to our mum with two kids and three jobs.
The big snag
But here is the big snag: setting up lots of local growers to supply single mums with two kids and three jobs living in a flat is just not the sort of thing that turns mega multi-national food companies on.
So if she wants to have a healthy gut micro-biome it’s a do-it-yourself project.
And that just won’t work – but here is what will.
What will work
Now here is the plan – I have set up a social media web site (actually gbiota.club but it can be accessed from the parent site gbiota.com from the community icon).
She can register and set up her own icon on the Geolocation map. This says “I am here and I am a customer (or biofoodie)”.
She can then search for other biofoodies nearby but as this is a project we are just getting under way she probably won’t be in luck. But not to worry, she can send out from the site invites to her friends and contacts who she may think would like a healthy gut biome.
Now of course everyone has a gut and would benefit from a healthy gut biome but a lot of people just don’t care – but that is their problem not mine.
But with a bit of effort she can build up a group of local people and actually form a local group on the site which will attract more people to join.
Having got a group together it is now time to locate someone – maybe just someone with a bit of a garden, a gardening club, tree changers, or local farmers who may be interested in becoming community growers.
It takes a community
It is no good just one person trying to recruit a grower. One grower can produce enough Wickimix to supply many biofoodies so there has to be a group so it is worthwhile for the grower to set up a Gbiota bed.
Having found a grower it is now my job to train this grower in the art of breeding microbes which is not an issue as microbes breed up themselves without any help from me.
The trick is to breed the right sort of microbes which will lead to a healthy gut and not E. coli and give everyone a rumbly tum or worse.
That is just a question of getting the conditions right – food and water – and the microbes are perfectly capable of breeding themselves without any external advice (just like teenagers).
Whose in control?
Why bother when you can just go to the supermarket and load up your trolley? There is plenty of choice – you can buy food full of sugars, fats and synthetic flavouring which may be addictive in a nice red plastic box or you can buy food full of sugars, fats and synthetic flavouring which may be addictive in a nice environmentally blue cardboard box – plenty of choice.
And everything is controlled by some friendly global mega corporation who prioritises your health ahead of profits – how comforting.
By setting up a local food community consumers are taking that control away from these mega corporations and working with local growers to produce the soil and hence food that will make them healthy.
What a lot of trouble, so instead of having an ocean of fat wobbly bums and tums we have lean, fit and healthy people who can expect to have an increased health span. Is that really worth all that trouble of setting up local food groups?
Is it really worth having local growers running businesses supplying their local community and growing real living soil when we know perfectly well we can produce all the food we need with dead inert soil so our grand kids and great grand kids can have a reliable source of healthy food. After all they may not be born yet so why worry about them.
Well that is a decision for you the people to take. I am a great grand dad now and she is just a cute little baby and I will be dead long before she grows up. I would rather like to think she is going to grow up into a fit and healthy person rather than be fat and sick and inflicted by some epidemic.
But that is just the babbling of a doddery old man and I would hate to influence you – BS.
I should not joke about this; soil degradation (amplified by climate change) is one of the major threats to our species.
Who pays
There is no such thing as a free lunch so who pays? In conventional social media and other so-called free services the operators collect customers’ information which they can sell to advertisers. Perfectly legal but not the way I thought this project should be run.
I got into this because my wife, a qualified medical doctor, became diabetic, her foot started to turn black and they wanted to chop her foot off. That is what got me started and led me to the wonderful world of the gut micro-biome which is really at the heart of so many of our current health problems.
Every eight seconds someone has a limb amputated from diabetes and that is largely avoidable if people focused on improved gut health.
To my mind this was pretty close to being world shattering. But I can’t change the world myself but what I can do is at least try and create an organisation which is self-financing and can carry on long after I have gone to that magic compost bin in the sky.
So while using the web site is free there are charges for training the growers on how to breed beneficial microbes and grow Wickimix which obviously they sell.
Any questions email me at colin@gbiota.com
Our gut brain, made up from trillions of cells and thousands of species, which communicate with each other and has real intelligence, is one of the truly amazing systems on this earth. Yet we have, unknowingly, set out to destroy it – why? Now here is a story that needs to be told.
What is our intelligent control system?
We know we have an intelligent control system which automatically and often unconsciously manages how our bodies work. For example, it controls our body temperature to very precise levels by controlling how much fuel (food) we burn and we never think about it.
This intelligent control system manages our appetite and how much and what sort of food we want to eat – hence our weight. It manages our immune system – in the recent epidemic there were people who just never got sick – and it also produces hormones which control our mood, so we are grumpy or happy.
This intelligent control system is made by a combination of our head and gut brains with trillions of cells communicating with each other to form our internal super computer.
Our head brain is determined by our genetics and the epigenetics which turn specific genes on or off. We can’t do much to change that. However, we can change our gut brain by what we eat. Changing our gut brain can be truly dramatic, making fat people skinny and skinny people fat. We have no idea of how the code works that drives the supercomputer in our gut but we can obtain empirical correlations with various species, although we still have no idea of the code or mechanisms.
Evolution
Our gut brain is the result of millions of years of evolution – there were microbes on this earth before any other living creature.
They paved the way for larger creatures to evolve by digesting food and so led to the bewildering range of creatures from tiny shrimps to the giant dinosaurs.
But they really began to evolve into brains with the first tiny shrew-like warm blooded creatures. We may like to support the underdog but there is really no match between a tiny shrew and a giant dinosaur, yet the shrew survived by hiding in the day and going out to forage at night.
They survived as warm blooded creatures which could operate at night when the cold blooded creatures had no power to operate. Then a meteorite hit the earth making it too cold for the cold blooded creatures, so the warm blooded creatures became dominant.
One of these creatures learned to control fire and cook, which gave them an enhanced supply of readily digestible food and they developed big brains and their stomachs shrunk.
That’s us.
Hunter gatherers
There were very few people, around a million over the entire globe, all those thousands of years ago so people could move around to where the soil and climate were good.
We do know that modern hunter gatherers and particularly people in the blue zones where they are fit and healthy to a ripe old age have much more diverse gut biota than people eating a modern inert diet.
The key was eating fresh plants grown in soil teaming with microbes and nutrients and this went on for hundreds of thousands of years with little change.
Agriculture
Then we developed agriculture and cities and things really began to change. We may have had a more secure food supply but in the crowded unhygienic conditions we were ready victims for disease and epidemics which would dramatically reduce the population which was still in the millions rather than billions.
I may be old (83) and was not alive then but have a pretty good feel what it was like from my grandparents. They had a well in the backyard and a bucket toilet which they emptied on the garden veggie patch.
Death was common, but not the way the statistics portray. The average age at death was 32 but very few people died at 32. The death rate among kids was horrendous – some three in five babies would die before reaching the age of 5 and another would die in their teens.
But if you lived to thirty you were likely to live a long life into the classic three score year and ten.
Then there were the epidemics like the black death which would wipe out a significant proportion of the population.
They were the good old days – baa humbug.
Control of infections
Then around 1850, when my grandparents were alive, we began to get on top of infections. We built sewage systems, improved the water supply and general hygiene and the global population began to increase and went through the billion mark.
When I was born infection was still a major issue. As a kid I can remember the parties we were taken to so we caught whatever the infection of the day was – chicken pox, mumps, measles etc.
I look on 1950 as a turning point, antibiotics became available together with widespread vaccinations and generally better health control.
In my lifetime the global population has trebled – which is pretty staggering when you think about it.
The real and fake food crisis
For good reasons this population explosion was seen as a coming food crisis – how were we going to feed all these people?
Throughout the history of agriculture we have faced various crises largely from the degradation of the soil. Some civilisations just moved to areas which still had good soil, other civilisations just disappeared (the history books are full of ex-civilisations that are no more) and some managed to develop a system of sustained agriculture by recycling anything and everything – which was fine as long as you did not mind a bit of shit.
Western technology focused on technologies like fertilisers, irrigation and genetics which undoubtedly have been supremely successful in producing abundant calories – the food industry seem obsessed by calories.
The success cannot be doubted, we are producing enough energy food or calories to feed the entire world for years to come (as long as we solve the distribution and equity issues).
But what we forgot was our poor old gut bugs which form part of our intelligent control system, which has led to a new set of problems which really stem from our intelligent control system not working as it should and largely stemmed from the excess storage of fat.
This is purely the result of millions of years of evolution with our intelligent control system, our head and gut brain trying to protect us by saying there is something missing in your food – go out and eat.
Our gut microbes are just being protective by flooding our bloodstream with hormones which make us hungry and it is pretty difficult to resist these hormones for any length of time.
Four years ago I could have confidently said that we have swapped infectious disease for non-infectious disease. The current epidemic has shown that some people are relatively unaffected and this is associated with gut health. We know that the bulk of our immune system lies in our gut which just increases the urgency of improving gut health.
But how?
This is a combination of technology and social change.
What my granddad knew about the gut micro-biome
Actually my granddad knew nothing about the gut micro-biome but what he was doing was working well. But can we apply the same technology to modern society?
Nothing surprises me in this modern world – but the idea of someone on the fifteenth floor of an up-market block of flats in the centre of Sydney collecting all his shit in a bucket, then carrying it down in the lift to dig into the token garden bed at the front to grow some beetroot to boost his immune system seems a little bit over the top.
Maybe in some permaculture village hidden away in some mountain slopes – but not in the city centre.
So why not just take a few pro-biotic pills? That seems to be duplicating the mistake we made with our current food system. Fifty years ago we had little understanding of the gut micro-biome and went ahead developing a food system of chemical industrial agriculture which led to the deficit in our gut biome.
With modern DNA sequencing we have learned a lot about the gut biome and found correlations between certain species of microbes and weight loss. But we really have no understanding of the code that drives our supercomputer, let alone how all the thousands of species work together to give a healthy functioning gut brain.
Maybe we will one day, but at this moment it is just a hunch it may work and the tests to date are not that promising.
Surely the better approach is to see what we can learn from the thousands of years of evolution and try and implement that in a system appropriate to a modern society.
Breeding and growing
We may initially get our gut micro-biome from our mum when we are born – but where did she get her micro biome from? The answer is from the soil.
This is a two-step process (although it may appear to be one at first sight). The first step is breeding the beneficial microbes in the soil. The second step is growing plants in that soil when the microbes enter the plants which we eat and act as natural pre and pro biotics.
This is a system which has been working successfully for hundred of thousands of years but how can we apply this to modern society?
Breeding the microbes in the soil is not a difficult process – microbes are randy little creatures and will breed up at super high speed given any opportunity – they make modern teenagers look like ageing nuns by comparison.
But it is not simply the microbes breeding in the soil; a healthy soil is full of macrobes – the larger creatures like worms – which have guts like us and where it seems that much of the microbes that will end up in our gut start their life.
The issue is that there are also harmful microbes which are equally keen to breed.
Which group (the goodies or the baddies) are the successful breeders depends on the conditions – obviously food and inoculants are important but moisture is the key critical issue.
We need that magic Goldilocks moisture – not too dry and not too wet – just right.
We know how to do that – this is the whole point of the Gbiota in-ground beds – to breed the beneficial microbes by controlling the moisture levels.
Back to the flat
Let us get back to the flat but not necessarily to some upmarket block in the centre of a major city but where the majority of people now live.
Let us think about a single mum with three kids, working two jobs to pay the exorbitant rents that seem to be a feature of modern life.
She is no more able to breed beneficial microbes in her flat than the trendy (but dedicated) young man in the city centre.
We can break this deadlock by splitting the process into two stages with two groups of people. We have one group of people with a bit of land and the time and skills to breed the beneficial microbes in the ground in raised garden beds to produce the growing medium we call Wickimix which can be placed into Gbiota Wicking boxes.
This is full of beneficial microbes and essential trace minerals which are often lacking in our modern diet.
This can then be placed into Gbiota Wicking beds which provide genuinely fresh food full of microbes.
People in the city can then be eating fresh plants growing in their flat which they can pick and eat directly.
This is important as these microbes not only breed incredibly fast but they also die incredibly fast so people need to be able to pick and eat without the delay involved in our current food system.
The aim of the Gbiota project is to breed these beneficial microbes in the soil, grow plants then eat while genuinely fresh.
Developing the technology
I have been developing this technology for many years and have a manageable number of dedicated home growers using this technology.
However, for the majority of the population, this is simply not viable so I developed a system where dedicated growers can grow the soil (called Wickimix) which can be put into Gbiota wicking boxes so people living in apartments or without time or space can have plants growing at home which they can eat fresh.
This does require consumers to link up with the dedicated growers. I have started to promote this idea and I now have responses from thousands of people who want the Gbiota wicking boxes at home.
Last time I looked in the mirror there was just one of me, a fit and healthy 83 year old but still 83. I simply cannot manage to link up consumers and growers when we are looking at thousands of people but I can provide the technical support for the growers to set up the in-ground beds to breed the beneficial microbes.
I do this because I see how, in our modern society, the negative health outcomes of a lack of good gut health – diabetes, overweight, heart attacks, dementia etc. – which are largely avoidable. I believe we need to change this – but the harsh fact is there is still just one of me and as yet I have not developed the technology of cloning or reversing ageing.
The community site
I have set up a community site for growers and consumers to link up and participate in local forums but this still needs a lot of work to make it refined to the level I would like – but I am busy working on it.
I suspect that many people who have signed up for the project were expecting that everything would be handed to them on a plate – that is just not the case. They will need to put the time and energy in building up their local gut food community.
Just to explain there are really separate sites. Gbiota.com is the parent site which is essentially for exchange of information. Gbiota.club is where growers and consumers can find each other and form groups and forums to exchange information, ideas and products.
I have been growing for many years and either end up with surpluses or shortages and would often want to swap some of my surpluses with other growers’ surpluses. It just makes practical sense.
The third area is pickandeat.shop which is a site where growers and consumers can buy and sell.
I am suggesting that people who are already registered on gbiota.com (the technical site) also join the community site which is where the social action is.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Colin
Better gut health starts with living food grown in biologically active soil.
Better gut health from food
Microbes
All life is totally dependent on microbes. They break down the minerals in the soil, forming complex chemicals essential for life. They are part of our bodies, particularly in our gut where they form a real brain with intelligence which controls much of our bodily function, particularly appetite. We need the good bugs.
But there are bad bugs which make us sick or kill us so we try and kill them first. But we also kill off the good bugs on which our lives depend.
Our great challenge is to find a way of breeding the good bugs, on which our lives depend, while controlling the bad bugs.
Our intelligent control system
Our bodies are smart – deficiencies lead to food cravings and getting fat and sick.
Modern diseases, like diabetes, dementia, cancer and heart attacks have increased with our modern food.
These are related to the amount of fat in our bodies. The now obsolete view was that weight could be controlled simply by eating less and exercising more.
Medical researchers at the forefront of medical science now understand that our bodies have a set point for weight and will adjust our appetite and energy expenditure to maintain that set point. Extreme diet may reduce fat in the short term but raise the set point so in the long term lead to an increase in body fat.
The new thinking is that deficiencies (such as lack of beneficial microbes, gut and brain food, essential minerals, omega 3, etc.) in our modern food system lead to a rise in the set point so we end up fatter and sicker than ever.
The modern approach, which is slowly being accepted, is not simply to cut down on food intake but to ensure that our food contains all the essential ingredients so the set point is naturally lowered. This is the new approach of “avoiding deficiencies”.
Fresh is more than not gone bad
The solution sounds easy – eat food, freshly picked, grown in soil teeming with beneficial microbes and nutrients – Gbiota food.
This is what our ancestors did (without knowing it) and how we have survived to date.
This is fine for people with a garden and the time and expertise to grow some of their own food. We know how to grow food in soil full of essential nutrients and beneficial microbes and many people have already set up their own Gbiota beds for their own use.
Watch these four videos:
https://youtu.be/Zk2JGGxqwkhttps://youtu.be/4jXdusOYLFYhttps://youtu.be/xccG5Zq3CNQhttps://youtu.be/0BOnJUXSyTU
These home gardeners have the benefit of being able to pick and eat their food without delay, before the beneficial microbes die.
Society has changed
But what about people living in flats or who simply do not have the time to grow their own Gbiota food?
Go to any supermarket and you can’t help but be impressed by the vast array of foods from all over the world. You may also notice the number of wobbly bums and tums and think that all these people are simply overeating. They may well be – but the issue is far from simple.
We measure energy by calories and carbon by grams
It is now common to use calories as a measure of the amount of food we eat. Calories are a measure of the amount of energy that the food is potentially capable of generating when eaten. But calories give no idea of the chemical composition of the food. That requires us to look at the number of grams of specific chemicals in our food.
The 80%, 15% and 5% balance
The bulk of the food we eat is purely for energy. Food contains carbon and hydrogen which is simply burned off to provide energy – it is just fuel to deliver calories as heat or mechanical energy.
Some eighty percent of the food we eat is simply burned as fuel for energy. Our modern food industry has done an incredible job of providing us with low cost, readily available and tasty fuel.
But we also need food containing complex chemicals to replace our body parts as they wear and age. Farmers are very good at using fertilisers to provide just the right amount of nutrients to grow plants but we humans are much more complex than plants, so a plant may be very healthy and look great on the supermarket shelves but still be missing some key nutrients that we as complex humans need.
This is not a technical problem but one of economics and selling. A customer has no idea of the nutrients in a plant at the supermarket so the supermarket focus is on having good-looking fruit and vegetables for sale.
We don’t need a lot of these complex chemicals and only about 15% of our diet is used for replacing body parts.
But we also need to feed our brains, both of them – the one in our head – and the other in our gut. Our gut brain is particularly important as it controls our appetite and hence largely how much food we eat.
Why our intelligent control system is so important
Of course we do have will power and can go on a diet but our intelligent control system is incredibly powerful and persistent and eventually most people fail to override their food cravings.
This food for our gut brain may only be some 5% of our total diet but is incredibly important.
In the past there was no problem in getting enough gut food. People were simply eating fresh fruit and vegetables, picked and eaten straight away before the critical microbes died. Then we changed our food production system with a long delay from when the plants are harvested to when they are eaten.
We changed a system that was working (for money)
Our diet naturally contained an adequate supply of pre and probiotics which kept us healthy but then we changed the system so it no longer worked.
Of course there are some exceptions – frozen peas which are frozen straight after picking would still have beneficial microbes still alive but frozen, ready to be thawed and eaten.
We don’t have to change the entire system back to pre-industrialised agriculture – there are simply too many people on earth – but we do have to make the change so just a small percentage of our diet acts as natural pre and probiotics.
Changing the system (to one that works)
And that is where our couple of plastic boxes come into play.
In the system I have been developing there are two players, the customer and the grower.
The customer
The customer probably lives in a flat, with a couple of kids and a full time job and has no time for messing about growing plants even if they had a garden.
She will probably order online a box of living plants, ready to be harvested.
The grower will deliver the box and normally pick up an old box – plus hopefully a bag of waste food and organic waste.
At home the customer actually has another box which is the water container. She fills this with water and places the soil box on top.
The soil box has pieces of rope dangling down which go into the water, which will then wick up into the soil box.
The bottom box is simply filled with water and may contain enough water to last for much of the plants’ life but it is sensible to check the water level just once a week.
The simplest (and often the best) system is to use the tipping method. The tips of the plants are trimmed and can be used to make a green smoothie, or the tips are simply used as accoutrements by sprinkling onto the meal.
When the plants are reaching the end of their lives she simply orders a replacement box from her grower.
Now the customer can have access to fresh plants which they can pick and eat straight away.
Dead simple and convenient. The key point is that the plants are full of nutrients and beneficial microbes and act as both pre and probiotics which are genuinely fresh as they are just picked and eaten.
It probably works out cheaper than buying already harvested plants from the supermarket and all that is needed is a balcony, verandah or windowsill with sunlight.
If the box has a transparent lid it can be used to make a micro greenhouse in winter or to give some protection from pesky flies in summer.
The top box is filled with what looks like soil but we call Wickimix and it is full of beneficial microbes happily feeding away on the nutrients in the soil, which brings us to the role of the grower.
The grower
But now comes the tricky bit – where does all this Wickimix come from?
Making Wickimix is the prime job of the grower. It is true that you can get all the nutrients we need from chemical fertilisers. The fact that much commercial food is lacking in key trace elements is simply that the customer has no way of knowing if the produce contains these critical trace elements – the plants look fine and healthy – but it costs extra money to include those trace elements.
But what you don’t get from a bag of fertiliser is the beneficial microbes. We need these for two reasons – the first is that the microbes (particularly the fungi) are needed to break down the minerals into the complex and soluble chemicals we need and secondly those microbes in the soil find their way into our gut to form our intelligent gut brain.
So where does Wickimix come from? The answer is simple – a local grower who has set up Gbiota beds to recycle waste organic material by breeding the beneficial microbes.
Making Wickimix
So what goes into Wickimix? A bit of clay makes a really good base as the fine particle size of clay gives a large surface area for nutrients to cling to.
But then we need organic waste. People who are into composting, which can become a bit of a cult culture, know full well that to get a good high-temperature compost requires very careful balance of carbon, nitrogen and air for the compost to work so they are very selective about what goes into their compost.
Then we need the critical minerals and an inoculant.
Low and high temperature composting
Gbiota beds are very different; they use in-ground composting which is a much slower process but virtually any organic waste can be used. It does not use high temperatures but relies on the mass of creatures which live in the soil. There are just an incredible number of different sorts of creatures and there will be some creature which will process any organic waste.
Ultimately microbes will finish off the process but these may be the microbes inside their guts, with the creature, whatever sort it is, starting the first phase breaking down and feeding on the organic material.
Just go and ask my friends the ants and termites who have got this down to a fine art.
People often ask me where the microbes which end up in our guts come from. The answer which most people don’t like to think about is from the guts of creatures living in the soil.
It is a long chain, from the soil creatures, to their guts, to the soil then into the plants we eat and finally into our guts.
I am sure there are many advertising executives who would baulk at the idea of selling worm pooh or bug pooh as a health food, even if indirectly, but it is simply the way the world works and has worked for millions of years.
Breeding microbes
The purpose of a Gbiota bed is to breed beneficial microbes while controlling the harmful microbes. This is done by creating the conditions where the beneficial microbes simply out compete the harmful microbes.
The key tool is to control the moisture level so the mix is moist but not too wet. This is achieved by a subsurface irrigation system and allowing the water to spread by wicking action.
A certain amount of local soil, hopefully clay, is mixed with organic waste, minerals and inoculant to start the process. They look like a conventional raised bed but with the gap between the beds filled with the raw materials and just left to compost, when the Wickimix is dug up and put into the Gbiota boxes.
Typically the local grower would load the Wickimix into the boxes and grow the plant to the stage where they are ready to eat and collect the old boxes when the plants get old, with possibly a bag of food waste for recycling back into Wickimix.
The local grower system is really the way to go. The Wickimix can be loaded into the box and delivered fresh and relatively cheaply locally. This means a change in thinking about how a small proportion of our food is managed.
From centralised to local
The question is how to bring about that change? Well it is simply a fact of life that we have to implement major changes in the way the world works. The days of mass central production are numbered as this is the only way humans will survive when there are over eight billion people on this earth.
The days of extracting raw materials from finite resources will disappear into the history books and we will live in a world based on local recycling.
We can see this already happening in many areas of our lives, just look at electricity where mega coal mines and massive power stations are being replaced by local electricity produced by wind or solar power.
The message that we need to get out is that this is the way to have a prosperous, wealthy and sustainable society.
And that message will come from individual people seeing the need for change and getting our politicians and leaders of big business to be part of implementing this change.
Making change happen
It is never easy to change a system, particularly if it appears to be working. But it is not. Every eight seconds someone has a limb amputated from diabetes which is largely the result of our modern food system.
But humans are the dominant species on earth for a number of very simple reasons. We are intelligent and cooperative, adaptable and willing to change if needed.
But change does not just happen; it starts with a handful of people, the pioneers who see the need for change and make it happen. Maybe on a small scale and against serious obstacles – but they make it work. Then other people see it working and follow suit until it becomes mainstream with just a few people bucking the trend.
And that is how I see the change to a local gut food system happening.
These pioneers may be consumers who want change and persuade local growers to provide Gbiota boxes or it may be growers who see an opportunity for change to create a business while making the world better able to handle the inevitable food crisis.
But it will be individual pioneers who will start the process of change.
If you want to be part of this process of making the world both sustainable and prosperous please contact me at colinaustin@bigpond.com.
Avoiding deficiencies: gut biology, weight control and the Gbiota food solution.
Preface
For many years now I have been promoting the importance of gut biology and how we can simply and cheaply improve our gut biology by growing plants in soils teeming with beneficial microbes and nutrients.
These are not just my views but are based on studying many leading researchers in the field. Unfortunately we live in an era full of promotion of magic solutions, mostly pills based on weird plants from odd corners of the world. These are the modern version of the snake oil salesmen.
My contribution is the development of the Gbiota bed and box system to breed the beneficial microbes and to make this technology widely available at an affordable price.
So I thought I would write this blog showing where I have gleaned much of my information.
The basics
Modern diseases like diabetes, dementia, cancer and heart attacks have increased with our modern food.
These are related to the amount of fat in our bodies. The now obsolete view was that weight could be controlled simply by eating less and exercising more.
Medical researchers at the forefront of medical science now understand that our bodies have a set point for weight and will adjust our appetite and energy expenditure to maintain that set point. Extreme diet may reduce fat in the short term but raise the set point so in the long term lead to an increase in body fat.
The new thinking is that deficiencies (such as lack of essential minerals, omega 3, beneficial microbes, gut and brain food etc) in our modern food system lead to a rise in the set point so we end up fatter and sicker than ever.
The modern approach, which is slowly being accepted, is not to cut down on the food intake but to ensure that our food contains all the essential ingredients so the set point is naturally lowered. This is the new approach of “avoiding deficiencies”.
Our bodies are smart – deficiencies lead to food cravings and getting fat and sick – and we know how to grow food in soil full of essential nutrients and beneficial microbes.
Recent videos
This video shows how a young medical student, Nana (who by some fluke just happens to be my granddaughter), is aiming to set up local food clusters to create a marketplace for food grown in soil rich in nutrients and beneficial microbes and is creating a trial to provide confirmation of this “avoiding deficiencies” approach. Watch:
https://youtu.be/0BOnJUXSyTU
And if you are interested in participating in this important project please contact me. These three videos explain more:
https://youtu.be/Zk2JGGxqwkshttps://youtu.be/4jXdusOYLFYhttps://youtu.be/xccG5Zq3CNQ
Save my foot
I will start my story with my wife, Xiulan, a medical doctor, who some ten years ago became diabetic. We were told by our medical adviser that “diabetes was a chronic disease, meaning long term, there was no cure, it would just get progressively worse needing stronger and stronger medicines, eventually insulin injection and that she could expect to die young from some side effect of diabetes”.
Now this was not some guy in the pub but our professional health adviser relaying what was the current medical view.
But the story gets worse, her foot started to turn black and the doctors started to talk about amputation and how good modern prosthetic limbs were.
Where were the wonders of modern technology that would save her foot? See save my foot.
I am pleased to say my wife changed her diet and still has both her feet. But there are some 400 million people formally diagnosed with diabetes, and a much larger number of people, in some areas half the population, are overweight and probably pre-diabetic.
This is an epidemic that is new. There have always been some people that are overweight and diabetic but not on this scale.
Something has gone seriously wrong. We need to find out what and fix it so we can be happy, healthy, wealthy and wise.
How to fix things
Thomas Edison, one of the world’s most prolific innovators, laid out the process of innovation: “study everything that has been written about a subject then put it to one side and start from scratch”.
So I started reading. I just checked my library records – 3,728 books plus countless technical articles and papers on the web. Most were just a waste of time but below are some of the critical ones.
Then we have to put them to one side and start from scratch to find out how to fix things.
These are just some of the books I studied – and the answer slowly emerged.
Why we get fat
The basic laws of conservation of mass and energy are totally valid for a biological system. If we eat too much and do not burn it off we get fat.
In addition to these laws of conservation there is a measure of the quality of energy (entropy). We take in food which has a high quality of energy and breathe out carbon dioxide with a low quality of energy.
This is generally controlled by a totally subconscious type of control system. For example our temperature control system is totally subconscious – we cannot change our body set point temperature which is set at 37°C.
Neither can we control our heart rate, but we have some limited control over our breathing rate, and even that only for a short period of time.
With food we have a little more control. Our body may try and control our food intake by sending out hormones to tell us whether to eat more or stop eating to maintain the set point. We may try and override or change the set point by how much we eat but that is not easy – our intelligent control system has evolved over millions of years and is highly effective.
That is the real reason why so many people are overweight.
We may be eating more than enough to power our body but if we miss out eating food that will feed our gut brain, which forms part of our food control system, or our diet is deficient in key nutrients we will still feel hungry and eat far more than needed.
This is the prime reason why so many people eating in a modern food system are overweight. It is called the food deficiency effect – we eat too much of certain foods and not enough of the critical foods.
There are of course many reasons why we overeat: leptin intensity (leptin is the hormone that makes us feel full), a lack of food in our past history which makes our body crave food, features of our DNA which make us crave food, or bad habits we picked up when young which show up later in life.
Professor Roy Taylor – Reversing type 2 diabetes
I will start the review of critical thinkers in this field with work done by Professor Roy Taylor. In his book Roy explains that diabetes is really about fat. There are really two stages to diabetes. The first stage is when the body becomes resistant to the insulin which controls our blood sugar level but many times people are just unaware as the pancreas simply makes more insulin to cope.
(That is why there are far more than the 400 million people with diagnosed diabetes – we could be talking billions of people.)
Then in the second stage fat enters the pancreas which can now no longer produce insulin. His solution was simple – go onto a low calorie diet.
So it was all about fat and no one really wants to be fat and waddle about like a duck so fat was a much broader problem than diabetes – just go to any shopping centre and about half the people are fat and overweight.
Ruben Meerman – Big Fat Myths: when you lose weight where does the fat go?
But this is where the story gets interesting. Ruben Meerman, a science physicist and writer, wrote a book challenging the conventional wisdom of focusing on calories.
His point was simple – we don’t eat calories, we eat food which we measure with kilograms, not calories. True, food can be burned to produce energy but it is the carbon and hydrogen in the food that makes us fat.
We can simply turn this carbon and hydrogen into carbon dioxide and water which we can breathe out. So his solution was the classic “eat less, exercise more”.
He did make the point that it is much easier to prevent getting fat than to lose fat later, which is really saying that we should be teaching our kids about how we get fat.
Our kids at school should be learning about this, even if most are still skinny. It is all to do with the number of fat cells. If you have a lot of fat cells that are not yet filled you will still be skinny but will explode in later life as the fat cells fill.
We may get fat because we eat too much but the real question is why do we eat too much?
Dr Andrew Jenkinson – Why We Eat (Too Much): The new science of appetite
Basically he said “wait a minute – we have to ask why people eat too much and get fat”. He said our bodies have a natural control system which determines how much we want to eat, it decides on a natural set point, what it thinks is the ideal weight, and however much you try to lose weight by going on fancy diets you will certainly lose weight in the short term but will gain it back in the long term as your automatic control system wins the battle.
In fact he said just restricting the amount of food so you are continuously hungry makes your control system raise the set point so you go through a period of yo-yo dieting, getting fatter and fatter on each cycle.
He put forward the argument that we get fat because of deficiencies in our diet which are sensed by our control system, raising the set point which makes us hungry.
His argument is that we should eat more, not less – well not quite – we should eat more of the food which supplies us with the range of nutrients that we need and then we will naturally want to eat less.
He did point out there were many reasons why we get fat; we could be leptin resistant (leptin is one of the hormones that makes us feel full and stop eating) or lack the sensors to respond to leptin.
Mariette Boon and Liesbeth Van Rossum – Fat: The Secret Organ
These two doctors are from Holland which is interesting because this is where there is real world experience of what happens when people were starved as they were at the end of the war but when food became available they tended to put on a lot of weight.
This is important because it shows our bodies are not some dumb donkey but have real intelligence and are doing a lot of work in our subconscious brain deciding how much and what sort of food we should eat.
Tim Spector
I could mention hundreds of scientists who talk about gut biology but Tim Spector’s book Spoon-Fed – Why almost everything you’ve been told about food is wrong, and The Diet Myth have such good titles and his work with identical twins as part of the nature vs nurture battle, so I have selected him as my gut biology guru.
The key point is that our gut, with its trillions of cells working and communicating together, forms a real brain. We know a great deal about the species of microbes that inhabit our gut and how they change with what we eat but we really have no idea of the code that makes it work.
The point is that we do have an intelligent control system and our gut, with the trillions of cells communicating with each other, forms a genuine brain which cooperates with our head brain to form our intelligent control system.
We have no idea how our gut brain works but we do know that our head brain (which forms part of our intelligent control system) is continuously learning and changing – so what we want and how much we want to eat is influenced by our experiences from birth.
We may not know much about how our gut brain works but for that we may have to look at books like Swarm Intelligence by Marco Dorigo and learn how it works from studying interesting things like slime moulds, ants and bees.
But we do know for sure that our gut brain is a critical part of the equation.
Dr Elaine Ingham
But if we want to understand where our gut microbiome comes from, the answer is from the soil – and there the one person whose work is so prolific is Dr Elaine Ingham.
We do know that the soil microbes move into the plant roots by osmosis so the plants become natural pre and probiotics.
But she does make some remarkable claims that it is possible to continuously harvest crops without applying any additional minerals.
This I debate. The effect of adding additional minerals to depleted soils is just an experimental fact. But her key point that minerals need the microbes to make them available is very valid and important.
The species of microbes in our gut may be the critical issue but our intelligent control system can sense any deficiencies in the minerals in our food and make us hungry.
Defining the problems
We can understand the problems we have to solve. From a purely technical viewpoint we have to ensure that our gut brain is working properly by ensuring a healthy gut biome and we have to ensure that our head brain, which we know is continuously learning, is well trained to eat the right sort of food. In practice this means a diet which is rich in plant foods that act as pre and probiotics, and is rich in essential minerals and vitamins which are commonly lacking in our modern diet.
This, of course, is what the Gbiota project is all about and is described – and the information continuously updated – on my web site www.gbiota.com.
But solving the technical problem is actually the easy bit and just the start of the problems. There are two other much more difficult problems to overcome.
Problem 1 – Logistics
The first could be called logistics – which is a rather boring word for an emotional topic. It means ensuring that the solution is economically acceptable – people have to be able to afford the food that will make them healthy.
There is an immediate logistical issue that the microbes that are needed for a healthy gut biome only have a short life so the plants which act as pre and probiotics must be eaten shortly after being harvested – preferably within twenty four hours – which is just not possible with the current food distribution system.
The Gbiota bed and box system allows the beneficial microbes to be bred in the beds, then the soil transferred to a box to grow fresh food in people’s houses or flats.
This is probably a cheaper system than the conventional warehouse-style distribution system, but it is different, which means people accepting change.
We also have to consider the global logistics. In days gone past people would eat food that was grown locally in soil that was naturally fertilised by waste organic matter. People then had good gut health. The modern poor gut health arose from the switch to the modern industrial-chemical food system which arose from the economic benefits (to the mega food companies) which gave much higher production per unit of area.
We have to achieve similar productivity per unit of area but without destroying the microbiome.
We can do this locally but we also have to be able to feed the eight billion (and rising) population in a sustainable way in potentially an even smaller area.
The problem of global food production has been considered by many writers – I list some of the key thinkers here.
David Montgomery – Dirt: The Erosion of Civilisations
If we want to talk about minerals who is better to study than a geologist with a burning desire to ensure we survive on our planet.
His argument is that all sorts of creatures have been on this earth for millions of years without getting needlessly fat. Having fat level out of control is just not normal. Many animals, like bears, get fat before they hibernate but it is a controlled increase in body fat.
Gary White – The Worth of Water: Our Story of Chasing Solutions to the World’s Greatest Challenge
George Monbiot – Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet
All these authors are well respected scientists in their own right and are just a small sample of the research that is being conducted. I have tried to show that if we look at the evidence from all these people we have the technology to counter one of the great threats to our health.
Now we need to ask if this is both economically viable – i.e. will people buy or grow the food that will make them healthy – and if it is sustainable in the long run.
So we need to look at whether the solution can be applied when virtually all available land is being used and the resources are stretched to the limit with the eight billion people on earth.
Problem 2 – Persuasion
Will the solution be accepted?
We live in the digital era where we are subject to a mass of information (or what is portrayed to be information). We simply do not have the time to work out what is true or false and what makes it even worse is the level of sophistication of modern manipulative marketing.
This is the major issue in creating change to our food industry – here is a list of the many books on the topic.
Brad McKay – Fake Medicine: Exposing the Wellness Crazes, Cons and Quacks Costing Us Our Health
Naomi Oreskes – The Merchants of Doubt
Brad Smith – Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age
Peter Scott – Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change
David Grimes – The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World
Patrick Alley – Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption
Ron Gonen – The Waste-Free World: How the Circular Economy Will Take Less, Make More, and Save the Planet
Niall Ferguson – Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
Peter Lewis – Webtopia: The World Wide Wreck of Tech and How to Make the Net Work
Simon Hammond – Brutal Truths: Surviving in a World of Lies, Taboos & bullsh#t
Philip Lymbery – Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat
Sinan Aral – The Hype Machine
David Sumpter – Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter Bubbles – The Algorithms That Control Our Lives
John Yudkin – Pure, White and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It
Peter Wohlleben – The Secret Network of Nature: The Delicate Balance of All Living Things
Edison’s formula for innovation
OK we have worked our way through the first part of Edison’s formula: study everything that is known about the particular subject, then clear the bench and start afresh.
We can be more than sure that the basic laws of physics – the laws of conservation of mass and energy – are still working.
So if we put more carbon into our mouths than we eject from our bodies by breathing out as carbon dioxide, pooping, peeing or sweating, then we will put on weight.
But we can be equally sure that it is not as simple as telling people to eat less and exercise more because our intelligent control system will override our willpower long term.
I am not a medical doctor. I was initially trained as a mechanical engineer – the type of engineer that makes machines – and every machine has a control system, even if it is a simple on/off switch.
But my very first job was working for a company that made industrial process controllers so I know how important the control system is and how the classic proportional–integral–derivative controller works.
But much later in life I became immersed in computer software and at one time I wrote some software for irrigation control which I called self-learning software but we now may call artificial intelligence, where we use the software to learn the characteristics of the system – in this case how much water the plant was using under current conditions – then use that knowledge to predict how much water to apply based on weather forecasts. A sort of anticipatory control system.
Like, if you see a hot head in a yellow ute doing wheelies then steer clear because he is going to do something stupid – not logic, just anticipation.
If we just go out telling people to eat less and exercise more we can expect a high failure rate; there are very few people with the determination to override their intelligent control system.
Don’t believe me? That approach has been tried for years – now just take a walk around the local shopping centre and count the number of wobbly bums and tums.
It has not worked – and as they say you don’t make a new hole in the right place by continuing to dig an existing hole in the wrong place.
While it may be true that the key to weight loss is to lower the intake of carbon and increase the expulsion of carbon (eat less, exercise more) we have to change the intelligent control system so we want to eat less and exercise more.
The first step is to change our gut biome. There is no issue that changing the gut biome leads to weight change – but it is not clear whether this is just correlation or causation.
If you bring up a kid on ice cream it will have a gut biome that feeds on ice cream and will send out signals to eat more ice cream and the kid will get fat.
If you change the kid’s gut biome (by feeding him fresh green peas) the gut biome will change, which will change the way the intelligent control system works so (eventually) the kid will stop craving ice cream and start craving green peas.
Whether that shows there is causation between gut biome and being fat or just a correlation is a debate for scientists with nothing better to do – the simple result is that the kid stops craving ice cream (well a bit anyway) and loses weight.
So the solution to excess weight is to ensure the diet contains the required pre and probiotics and also the required essential minerals and nutrients missing in a modern diet. That will change the gut brain. It will also help if we train the head brain to prefer food that contains the microbes and nutrients – which means starting young and keeping at it.
So we know what we need to do – we have the technology in the Gbiota system – now we have to make it happen which means a head-on battle with the billions of dollars the food industry spends on manipulative advertising.
Tough job but it could mean millions of feet not being chopped off and billions of people enjoying happy, healthy, wealthy and wise lives.
Even tougher with no money or support from a major institution.
But we do have the model of a little kid in Sweden who sat out in the freezing cold (not exactly the ideal conditions for promoting climate change) with a cardboard plaque saying ACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE.
How did that happen? She only influenced a handful of people directly – but those people influenced a second tier of people who in turn influenced a third tier. A few fires and floods helped and now I see the figures are that some 70% of the population now believe climate change is real and action is needed.
This little kid did not influence billions of people directly – it was a wave effect.
I have to adopt the same strategy. I just have to convince a handful of people that eating a diet rich in pre and probiotics and critical nutrients and eaten fresh is something they should both adopt and act on to convince other people.
I don’t have fires and floods to help convince people but I do have the fact that every eight seconds someone has their foot amputated – and who wants to waddle around like a duck?
So if you want to help in this social action contact me at colin@gbiota.com.
Grow gut brain food in living soil and restore genuine food health.
Half the western population is suffering from some chronic or long term illness. The ultimate cause can be traced back to poor gut health, driven by our modern chemical industrial food system. This system produces vast quantities of cheap, convenient energy food but kills the microbes which should end up in our gut.
Our gut microbiome originates in the soil, which should contain thousands of different species of beneficial microbes that move into plants and then into us.
We can go to the supermarket and buy a cabbage wrapped in plastic, or we can grow beneficial microbes wrapped inside a cabbage by breeding those microbes in the soil first.
This site shows how – but in this digital age many people hope to solve complex problems with a simple slogan. Let me save you a lot of time by saying that if that is what you are looking for, you are on the wrong site.
There are many posts here, but just two describe how we can establish communities who enjoy better health by feeding their gut brains: Food for Health and Community food. Read these to see how we can modify our food system to make us healthier and more resilient in a changing climate.
Grow gut brain food
In the last eighty years the global population has trebled and we all have to eat.
The modern food industry has increased the production of energy food 40% faster than the increase in population.
There is ample energy food, which is really just fuel. The fact that there are millions of people starving is not because of a lack of energy food but due to inequality, politics and distribution failures.
Some 80% of the food we eat is simply burned for fuel, but we also need food to feed our gut brain, which controls how our bodies work and supplies the complex chemicals to replace our body parts as they age and wear.
Sadly that is lacking in our modern food system. Read Food and the Gut biome here.
This has led to a massive supplement industry to supply all those chemicals and, more recently, microbes which are essential for health.
Taking pills to make up for deficiencies in our diet is an expensive and not very effective way of correcting these problems. It is far cheaper and more effective to grow plants in nutrient rich, biologically active soil so they naturally contain those complex chemicals and microbes.
That is what this web site is all about – we do not sell anything; we supply information on how to grow food which will make us healthy.
I accept that there is a mass of information on this web site which can be confusing for new readers.
How this site is organised
This is how I have organised the web. There are three areas – food, Gbiota news and videos – which contain many articles. These are published under the Creative Commons system. They are totally free and can be copied and reproduced without further permission; the only requirement is that the original source (for example www.gbiota.com) is acknowledged.
Posts are arranged by time with the latest up front so you can easily read the latest posts by clicking on the relevant links.
Some posts may be older but are critical to understanding food, so I have set up links to these important posts here, here and here. Once I have published a post I generally do not like to change it; however, the post Key Points is dynamic and updated regularly, so it is worth checking.
We do not sell anything but we spend a lot of time and money experimenting on how to grow food that enhances health. This is a public service site – everyone should have access to food that keeps them healthy. To help cover costs, the section on growing, which contains the nitty gritty of how to grow food that will make us healthy, is a subscription area. Please subscribe to see what it is all about – you can unsubscribe at any time.
I am focused on how to grow food that will enhance our health, specifically plants that act as pre and probiotics to enhance our gut brain and increase our health span.
The Internet is one of the great innovations of our time, giving people access to information in a way never possible before. It is also a treacherous place, with information that may be well intentioned but wrong, and sometimes just fake information designed to get your money. If you are thinking about joining the Gbiota healthy food movement, go to Key Points and decide if you agree with our analysis of food and health.
If yes, please join the Gbiota food movement so we can all enjoy a food system that makes us healthy.
The calorie obsession
The conventional food paradigm is focused on calories – trying to manage the number of calories we eat – yet you only have to walk through the local shopping centre and see the number of wobbly bums and tums to realise that it has been a total failure.
More scientifically you can look at the statistics on chronic or non-infectious disease which are at epidemic levels. Every twelve seconds someone has a limb amputated from diabetes. It is not just older people – our kids are getting fatter and sicker.
Our gut brain has evolved over millions of years to be the intelligent control system for our bodies. We need to change the food paradigm to focus on feeding our gut brain – our intelligent control system.
This is how the web site works.
Latest posts
Most of my readers are returning readers, so here are links to my latest posts:
Wicking-soaker beds describes a much simpler version of the original flood and drain beds which I introduced in 2015 and so are more suited to the home grower. They were also designed to better cope with the current weather extremes of floods and droughts.
Coming posts
I am in the speculative research business – undertaking those apparently daft projects which challenge the conventional paradigms and are unlikely to be financed by conventional research organisations.
Naturally such projects have a high failure rate – sometimes because the technology just does not work but more often because it is not acceptable to the community.
I publish these posts so my readers can comment. While I can undertake trials to see if the technology is sound, it is very difficult for me to know if it is acceptable.
It seems that my regular readers are willing to pass on their views on whether an idea will fly or sink.
Food and floods looks at what we can do to grow food with the current wave of flooding which is so damaging to current food production and could cause major shortages of fresh fruit and vegetables.
It is simply much more challenging to grow food in waterlogged soil than with a simple water shortage, where there are established techniques to grow at least some food.
Welcome to new readers
We welcome new readers but there are things that need to be said upfront. We live in the information age where we seem to expect a simple solution to any problem. Let me tell you there is no simple solution to working out how to feed some eight billion people food that will keep them healthy and increase their health span.
While the population has trebled over the last eighty years, our production has increased 40% faster. We have been highly successful in increasing our production of caloric food but have created a disaster in producing food that will feed our intelligent control system.
This has been a disaster for young and old alike. Now I am ancient – a genuine oldie – so I can tell you what it is like being old. You accept that you are going to die – it is just a reality – but what you want is to stay fit and active until it is time to crawl into your compost bin and die.
What you really want is to stay fit and active until that time. But that is just not happening with our modern food system. Who wants to stay fixed in a wheelchair, dribbling into the blanket, peeing your pants and having no idea of the names of your grandchildren who come to visit you?
We made some bad decisions on food. There are hundreds of articles on food and health on this site and if you are a new reader you would find this totally overwhelming.
So this is what you can do:
I have made a post called Key Points which gets to the essence.
Then go to No Dumb Donkeys and read the handful of articles I have selected as giving a good overview of what we are banging on about.
If you want to find out a bit about me then read My Story.
Crazy world gives a bit more history and is worth a look.
Health span and The plan are also good reads.
We don’t sell anything, we just do a lot of experimentation and write lots of articles on growing food for health. All this costs money so we are a subscription site. To access all the information you will need to register, but you get fourteen days free.
If this site is not for you then just cancel and you will pay nothing, but we will mail information to you on new posts for the next three months, after which you will not be bothered.
Welcome aboard if you decide to stay – and have a good life if this is not for you.
I have been on this earth for 83 years. I have had a great life that many would envy, I have always had access to healthy food, I am fit and healthy and I may not be an elite athlete but go for a walk of several kilometres in my local nature reserve which calms me from the stress of life and I see the lizards, birds and duck doing their thing.
I see the ducks waddling along and it reminds me of the many overweight people in the shopping centre who walk in the same way and that is all to do with soil and modern food.
I am now a great grand dad, I want my grand kids and their kids to have a good life like me but I look at the world and worry about the future. We can certainly produce food on a grand scale but it is making us fat and sick and destroying the planet and eight billion people can’t follow Elon Musk and zap off to Mars.
But I have spent many years studying how to grow food that makes us fit and healthy without destroying our planet – but how do I persuade people, many people, to change the way they eat so they are fit and healthy living on a sustainable planet.
It is pointless prattling on about it – it needs hard evidence and many people committed to making the change. That is what TheTrial is all about.
Scientific trials
Randomized double blind placebo control (RDBPC) studies are considered the “gold standard” of epidemiologic studies. They are clearly the way to go if the object is to test some particular feature – say a new drug. But this is not the way to trial for this project where an observation trial is simply more practical.
Just make changes and sit back and watch anything and everything that happens.
But we do have to control the changes that are made, make sure we have a representative number of people in the trial and have some idea of what we are looking for but still be prepared to notice things that are not on the items to be observed.
Controlled changes
Please watch my video https://youtu.be/0BOnJUXSyTU which explains the basic concepts. We want to incorporate into our diet food that has been grown in nutrient rich, biologically active soil. (For shorthand I call this Gbiota food). But the bulk of the food that we eat is simply burned off for energy so we only need to replace a proportion of our current diet with the Gbiota food – at a minimum just 5% but preferably some 20%.
People in the trial will choose what and how much they change in their diet. We just ask that they tell us.
What we are looking for
Ideally we would like to know if people on this diet live a long and healthy life (life span) and are fit and healthy until a ripe old age (health span). It is just a reality that we don’t want to wait for half a century to get the answer so we look for indicators.
The first and most important is appetite (actually food cravings). Our modern diet is deficient in both beneficial microbes and key minerals, our intelligent control system senses these deficiencies and makes us hungry, really food craving. So we want to know if these food cravings disappear.
This is purely subjective – do you feel satisfied or are you continuously craving more food?
In the scientific world it is nice to have things we can measure – put a number on – and the critical items we can measure are weight and waist measurement.
Perhaps even more important – but still subjective – is how well do we feel?
Do we feel full of energy and life is fun and worth living or do we just want to slouch on the couch.
Soil – Food – Health
The benefits are obvious – in the recent pandemic there were various studies which showed that people eating healthy food were less affected by the virus and recovered faster.
But health is more than the lack of disease – it is about having energy and a zest for life and you can’t talk about energy without mentioning two words – fat and sugar (or rather glucose).
Our muscles and brain run on glucose, which actually is a rather low grade energy but very mobile so can easily be turned into energy very quickly, but fat is the way our bodies store bulk energy which it can readily turn into glucose to provide immediate energy.
Without fat we die – the simple but brutal truth – but too much fat can lead to a spectrum of diseases – diabetes, heart attacks, cancer, dementia and more.
Fat comes from the food we eat so how can we grow food that will ensure we have just the right amount of fat?
And that is when the fun starts.
The calorie myth
For years we have been accustomed to the calorie myth – we can simply control our weight, and hence fat levels, by simply controlling the number of calories we eat.
It is totally ingrained in all the advice we are given – eat less and exercise more. Sounds sensible – easy to apply – but it just does not work.
We can certainly lose weight by going on a diet but unfortunately the weight just does not stay off – it slowly creeps back on.
So what is going on?
Our bodies are much more intelligent than we give them credit for – we have two rather smart brains with a mind of their own.
Two brains
We have two brains, one we all know about in our head (and read the text books and they will tell you that there is the hypothalamus in our brain which controls our weight).
But we also have another brain in our gut, which is made up of trillions of cells which talk to each other to form a super computer.
Both brains talk to each other and decide how much fat we should store by regulating the amount of food we should eat.
We may think that our head brain is just controlled by our DNA that we were born with but we now know that there is epigenetics which can turn off or on part of our genetic code.
But when it gets to our gut brain we can expect (and get) some weird effects.
We may not be able to change our DNA but we can certainly change the microbes in our gut, simply by what we eat. And if we change our gut micro-biome it will work in a different way and give us different answers.
We have no idea
And what makes it really bad is we have no idea how our gut brain actually works, let alone how our gut and head brain work together.
But we do know they have been evolving together over millions of years with just one aim – to keep us alive and breeding – and they do it very well.
They are powerful
If our brains notice that it is getting cold then they will send out messages to store more fat. If you just happen to be a brown bear reading this and are smarter than the average bear (and with internet access) then you know when it gets cold your body will automatically store massive amounts of fat and you will settle down to a mega snooze until the warm weather comes.
This is totally automatic and beyond your control so sleep well.
It is the same with us humans – if our brains jointly decide to store more fat then that is what will happen. We may try and fight it but they will just go on making us more and more ravenous with food cravings we cannot resist and slow down our bodily mechanism so we really are a couch potato.
We may fight it for a bit by going on and sticking to a tough diet but eventually our brains will win.
Cutting calories just does not work long term and may even work against us.
Our brains may decide we need more fat so we cut down on calories which may make our brain really panicky about not putting on weight so they will step up the action so we get even fatter.
Experts talk about changing the set point meaning the amount of fat our brains decide we need to store.
Avoiding the deficits
In many cases our brains, what I call our intelligent control system, will sense some deficit in our diet. It is unlikely to be a simple lack of calories – our food is just full of calories.
But it could be a deficit in the minerals we need – like magnesium, iron, zinc or selenium – so it sends out the “eat more” signals.
It may be a lack of omega 3. We evolved to have a high ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 so it sends out messages to eat more greens.
It is even more likely to send out “eat more” messages if we are not feeding our gut the sort of food we need so we end up with sugar-craving monsters inside our gut.
Satisfying the deficits to keep our brains happy is the most effective way of reducing the amount of fat they decide to store.
Things can go wrong
But things can go wrong, there is this magic hormone called leptin which is produced by the fat cells and tells our brains that there is plenty of fat so stop sending out food craving signals.
Sometimes our bodies just fail to produce leptin, and at other times we become resistant to leptin so we just don’t get the message and get fat.
It can work the other way too. We cannot change our DNA but we can train our brains and if we give them bad food experiences they may just decide not to eat at all – or hardly at all.
I read that there are some six hundred chemicals produced by our fat cells – we have no idea what they do or how they work. We just have to accept that our bodies have been evolving over millions of years to produce a highly sophisticated machine which is intent on survival of the species.
Keeping our brains happy
We may not fully understand how our brains work but we can make sure that we avoid any deficit by eating fresh food grown in nutrient rich biologically active soil and avoid scaring our brains so they go into emergency mode and tell us to store all the fat we can.
Crazy diets, restricting essential food components, are a great way of scaring our brains.
The new paradigm of avoiding deficits
If our intelligent control system senses a lack of critical nutrients it will make us hungry and eat more and we will get fat. What I did not tell you is that the eating patterns we establish when young will affect us for the rest of our life.
To get the essential nutrients, grown fresh in our diet, we need to establish food clusters with both growers and consumers.
Growing the food
The technology of growing food in nutrient rich, biologically active soil is the easy bit. I have been working on this for years – there is a mass of information on the web and I am set up to support growers via email or teleconference.
While I have a good knowledge of the principles of growing healthy food there is an issue with local climate and soils and I cannot be expected to know how to grow every plant in every climatic condition. This requires local expertise which I will talk about in clusters or local groups.
Who should participate in the trial?
It is important to have a representative selection of people in the trial. I already have a good following of what I call home growers – people who have their own garden and have already set up Gbiota beds.
Don’t get me wrong – I am very happy to have these people as part of the trial but they are already probably eating a healthy diet and are therefore not really representative of the population as a whole – but they can play a key role as ambassadors for the trial and also they may consider becoming community or commercial growers to supply other members.
We really want people who are not eating a good diet and probably have some health problems – even if it is just a bit of a tum. These people are unlikely to be actively looking for a solution but the home growers can provide a critical service by inviting their friends and contacts (real and virtual) to join the trial.
Schools and the education system
The most important group we should focus on is our kids through the school system. Dietary preferences are formed early in life but the effect may not be evident until later in life when they are more difficult (but not impossible) to change.
Health is not just about managing sickness, it is about being full of energy and active with a zest for life. Our kids are bombarded with advertising for highly processed food which will leave them like waddling ducks in later life.
We accept that sport is a critical part of the school curriculum, we should place a similar emphasis on healthy eating.
Many schools are well set up to grow the foods needed for a healthy gut with their own grounds or if the school does not have grounds then cooperative parent groups who can grow this food.
But we should not forget the influence that kids have on their parents who are at the age when the effects of poor gut health become evident.
Educating the kids may be the most effective way of educating the wider population.
Mechanics and organisation
The key challenge is to get people who are not – as my grand kids would say – into gut health, to join the trial. That is where existing home growers can play a critical role.
And then – when they have decided to join – how do we give them access to Gbiota food? And as an important footnote fresh – the sooner the plants are eaten after picking the better. (This is the big weakness of our modern food system.)
I see there are three groups:
those who just want to buy fresh Gbiota food (customers)
those that have a garden and would be happy to set up their own Gbiota beds (and become home growers)
those that would be happy to have a Gbiota box (probably flat dwellers) so they can have plants growing at home ready to be picked. They just need access to growers who can supply either the nutrient rich biologically active soil (I call Wickimix) to put into Gbiota boxes or Gbiota boxes ready to go.
Clusters or local groups
There are people who can grow and eat their own Gbiota food without any external help.
But there are many more people who need access to either fresh Gbiota food or Wickimix (the nutrient rich biologically active soil) to use in their own Gbiota boxes. This is a much larger group (in fact the bulk of the population) and a group that would most benefit from eating Gbiota food.
At this moment there is no established infrastructure to solve this problem so we have to solve it ourselves.
We can do that using social media to connect people. However there is no such thing as a free lunch and the whole basis of social media is that although it appears to be free it is a simple but devious way of collecting information on individuals which can then be sold to advertisers which would include those organisations selling junk food or pills of dubious benefit.
It must be recognised that devious promotion is a prime factor in our health crisis.
This would certainly put many people off from participating in the project.
I have therefore set up a private social media site where people can communicate with each other and trade among themselves in a secure and private environment.
First step
The first step for anyone interested in joining this project is to join this social media group (labelled Community in the menu).
They can register as either:
just interested,
a potential customer (e.g. hoping to join a group in their area)
a home grower (which means they want to make contact with like-minded people in their area)
a community grower (which means they would be willing to supply either Gbiota food, Gbiota boxes or Wickimix to other members – they would expect to be paid but more as a social contribution, in essence a paying hobby)
a commercial grower (which means they are running a commercial business supplying either Gbiota food, Gbiota boxes or Wickimix to other members for profit)
Money
A project like this costs money to run and is a community run and financed project (meaning there is no external funding).
However fortunately this is not an expensive project to run – actually only about $5 per month. Customers do not make a direct payment but they are expected to buy their own Gbiota food.
Home growers are expected to pay $5 per month directly for technical support.
Community and commercial growers pay a fee for technical support and to cover promotion costs. This would be recovered by sales to customers.
It is important to maintain integrity so I have trade marked the name Gbiota and growers paying their membership fee (and correctly applying the technology) are automatically entitled to use that name.
Let me get personal here – I have financed this project myself up to date, something I am very happy to do because I have had a fortunate life, particularly as a leading innovator which has generated money in the past.
But I have made the great mistake of growing old – my attempts to find that magic switch to turn off the ageing process have failed. This is my legacy project for my own and other grand kids and I want this to be a viable operation long after I have climbed into my compost bin to make my final contribution to the soil.
If you want to contact me just email me at colin@gbiota.com.
We are living longer — our life span is increasing — but our health span, the years we remain fit and active, is decreasing. Why?
The answer lies in our gut brain. Modern food has changed the species of microbes in our gut.
Gut microbes and health
We have long understood that our gut processes food so our bodies can use it. With DNA sequencing we learned that the species of microbes in our gut have a major effect on our health.
Early research showed we could turn a fat mouse into a skinny mouse, or a skinny mouse into a fat mouse, simply by changing the species of microbes in their gut. With mice this was simple — they eat each other’s droppings. Humans required a faecal transplant, but the effect was the same.
The gut as an intelligent control system
We then learned that the trillions of cells in our gut work like a super-computer, partnering with our head brain as an intelligent control system. Without conscious effort, this system manages appetite, ensures we eat the right amount and type of food, manufactures the chemicals needed to repair our bodies, and trains much of our immune system.
Why we overeat
If our gut brain senses missing nutrients, it sends signals such as the hunger hormone ghrelin, urging us to eat more. If the food lacks those critical nutrients, the signals continue — we keep eating, gain weight, and become sick. The problem is not greed; it is a biological response to nutrient deficiency.
Our gut brain also requires specific “gut food” to function properly. Without it, it malfunctions and creates cravings for the wrong foods.
Health begins in nutrient-rich soil
Our gut brain evolved over thousands of years while we ate fresh plants grown in nutrient-rich, biologically active soil. Microbes in the soil entered the plants, and eating these plants acted as natural pre- and probiotics.
Modern diets lack key nutrients
Today’s diet lacks these essential nutrients and microbes. Many people try to compensate with supplements, but pills are expensive and not very effective.
The simple, proven solution is to eat plants grown in nutrient-rich soil filled with beneficial microbes. This approach is inexpensive, natural, and backed by thousands of years of practice — though it lacks modern advertising.
The purpose of Gbiota
Gbiota technology is not about growing cabbages or specific vegetables. It is about breeding beneficial biota in the soil, which is then packaged inside plants to support and restore gut biota.
Any skilled gardener can grow gut food, but many people do not have gardens, time, or the skills to establish Gbiota beds.
Even more important: beneficial microbes begin dying soon after a plant is harvested. The plant may look fresh, but the microbes diminish quickly. To gain the benefits, plants must be eaten shortly after picking — as our ancestors did.
Gbiota boxes
Skilled growers can set up Gbiota beds to breed nutrient-rich soil full of beneficial microbes. This soil is placed into Gbiota boxes and delivered to people who cannot grow their own gut food. Customers only need to water the boxes and harvest the plants. Boxes can be kept on patios or even indoors with adequate light.
This system allows people to extend their health span by eating genuinely fresh food, while growers earn income and support community health and local food security.
A community-based food system
This is not a corporate project. It is my personal project. For people to access healthy food, we need a community-based system that puts health before profit.
To make this work, I need to connect growers with customers. If you share this vision, please email me at colin@gbiota.com with your location so I can introduce you to others interested in establishing a community gut food project.
Many people are using Wicking beds as self watering pots - nothing wrong with this but they are missing the real benefit.
Wicking beds can be modified to breed the beneficial biota in the soil, which enters the plants then our gut brain using the plants as natural pre and pro biotics (as we have done for thousand of years before modern chemical industrial agriculture).
Your gut brain and long-term health
Our gut brain is really important for our health but has sadly deteriorated over time leading to an epidemic of chronic (long term) diseases. Our gut brain acts as an intelligent control system which makes us want to eat the right amount of the right sort of food.
Enabling conditions versus real causes
Think about it this way;-
A car travelling at 180kph is involved in a major crash killing many people and injuring many more - who's fault is it?
Could it be the car manufacturer - they could easily have fitted a lawn mower engine giving a maximum speed of 20kph or could it be the fuel company supplying high octane fuel rather than water which would limit the speed to 0kph. Either of these would have avoided this terrible crash.
These are what we call enabling conditions - you need a high performance engine running on high octane fuel to get those speeds and cause a crash but they are not the real cause of the problem - it is the driver who controls the car who is to blame.
Food is similar, there are all sorts of bad foods - sugars, fats, addictive flavourings etc which have enabled a major health crisis - but they are not the real cause.
Empty calories and failure to feed the gut brain
We have evolved, over thousands of years, an intelligent control system which decides how much and what sort of food we want to eat, produces many of the complex chemical needed to replaced our body parts as they age and wear and host much of our immune system.
Some eighty percent of the food we eat is just for energy - it is fuel and is very easy to produce in large quantities. Over the last eighty years the population has trebled but the food industry has increased the supply of energy food some forty per cent faster than the increase in population - an incredible technical achievement but not necessarily good for us people.
80% of the food we eat we just burn off for energy - often called empty calories.
But modern chemical industrial scale food production is just not suited to growing the foods our gut brain needs to flourish.
It fails to supply food to feed our gut brain - our intelligent control system and it is the failure of our control system that has led to widespread health problems - that is the real cause of the modern epidemic.
Goldilocks moisture and living soil biology
Plants must be grown in nutrient rich biologically active soil with the right moisture level - not too dry (or nothing breeds) or too wet (or the harmful biota out breeds the beneficial biota). Goldilocks moisture is needed — and Wicking Beds can achieve it.
This is really important for the health of the community - every eight seconds someone has a foot amputated from diabetes and dementia and heart attacks are increasing. The real cause can be traced back to not feeding our gut brain.
Fortunately breeding the beneficial biota and food for a healthy gut brain can be readily undertaken by home and local growers where plants can be eaten shortly after harvesting before the beneficial biota dies. Plants act as natural pre and pro-biotics.
A working home eco-system
My garden is just a regular block: the lawn captures carbon to make grass clippings for the in-ground beds, the trees take up nutrients and excess water from deep in the soil, the in-ground beds breed biota and grow plants that transfer the biota to our guts, and the boxes grow herbs and speciality plants. A functioning eco-system.
Learn how to grow natural pre and pro-biotics
To find out how to grow these natural pre and pro-biotics using a Wicking bed you can contact me directly from my web site www.gbiota.com. I am a real person - not some mega corporation trying to sell you something. Any competent gardener can do it but it does need to be done right.
I started to write this as a welcome message for people joining the Gbiota social movement but it got a bit off track, but I had fun writing it and you may have fun reading it so I am sticking with it.
Pretend you are some creature from way out there in space and had never seen water—if a three-year-old kid can pretend, then so can you.
You are welcomed into some friendly human’s house and invited to a cup of coffee (despite you being bright purple with a single eye waving about on a long stalk). They take some black powder out of a jar labelled Nescafe and some white powder out of another jar labelled sugar and put it into a cup.
They take some funny clear fluid from a pipe, pour it into a jug, heat it until it bubbles, then pour it into the cup. Suddenly you see one of the greatest magic tricks of all time—the black and white powders just disappear. You look under the table for false chambers or tiny holes, but no—those powders have just vanished from this decidedly odd planet.
The friendly humans explain that they haven’t disappeared—they have simply gone into solution. Molecules break down into bits that react with other molecules, and that’s how food works: dissolving what we eat so our bodies can use it. That’s why water is essential for life on this planet.
The humans explain that giant oceans cover the Earth. The sun heats the oceans, turning the water into invisible vapour that floats around with the wind. High up in the sky it cools, reforms into tiny droplets, and becomes clouds—massive floating storage tanks of water.
Eventually these droplets join together, become heavy, and fall as rain.
Over millions of years this rain soaked into the Earth until the ground became saturated with billions of tonnes of water. When it can hold no more, the excess runs off the surface in what humans call rivers.
For hundreds of thousands of years humans lived beside rivers because they cannot survive without water.
Then people invented pumps—great fun at first—sucking water out of the ground and splashing it everywhere, perfect for growing crops and feeding more and more people.
But that fun didn’t last. The soil deteriorated, people became fat and sick, and diseases appeared that had never been major problems before.
Then along came an oddball guy—slightly OCD about water—who said that if humans were going to keep having fun, they needed a better way of using water and growing food. And so the Gbiota social movement was formed.
So welcome aboard—and let’s have some fun growing real food using this weird and wonderful thing called water.
I started writing about water in 1995 when the web first opened up. My first website was www.waterright.com.au, followed by www.wickingbed.com.
The web was very different in those days. Search engines barely existed. You simply found a website and followed links to another and another—each night a completely different adventure.
It was a friendly era of the internet.
There weren’t many websites, so www.waterright.com.au became very popular. I keep it alive because there are still many useful articles for anyone with the patience to explore.
My focus back then was environmental: humans were pumping water from ancient aquifers that took millions of years to form, and it was clear they would eventually run out.
Excess irrigation caused salinity. Chemical agriculture destroyed soil biota—the very creatures that create new soil. But environmental issues rarely inspire action. People assume the magical “them” will sort it out.
By 2015, however, I realised something even bigger—gut biology. Our intelligent control system. The root cause of a global health epidemic. So I set up www.gbiota.com to focus on growing food in nutrient-rich, biologically active soil to feed our gut.
But by then the web had become commercial and toxic—full of manipulation, misinformation, and hostility.
So I created www.gbiota.club, a private social media site, and www.pickandeat.shop—a marketplace without pressure selling.
I learned how to link these independent sites so users can move between them seamlessly through the menu—community for gbiota.club and shop for pickandeat.shop. The only confusion is logging in, because each site has its own login area.
The bigger challenge, however, is the old enemy—paradigms and money. The belief that population growth created food shortages and therefore industrial chemical farming is essential.
This is wrong. Food production is rising faster than population. Starvation is caused by inequality and distribution failures—not food shortages.
But chemical farming is extremely profitable—so the paradigm remains.
We must shift the paradigm so the focus is on feeding our gut brain—the intelligent control system that regulates appetite, immunity, and health.
Paradigms are hard to shift. But if you want to see how, read the plan.
On my home page I said –
“In the last eighty years the global population has trebled and we all have to eat.The modern food industry has increased the production of energy food 40% faster than the increase in population.There is ample energy food, which is really just fuel - the fact that there are millions of people starving is not because of a lack of energy food but due to inequality, political and distribution failures.Some 80% of the food we eat is just burned for fuel but we also need food to feed our gut brain which controls how our bodies work and supply the complex chemicals to replace our body parts as they age and wear.Sadly that is lacking in our modern food system.”
Fortunately it is relatively easy to grow plants in soil that is teaming with beneficial biology and full of essential minerals - that is what the Gbiota technology is all about - any home gardener with a bit of land can set up beds for their own use.
But technology is no use if people don’t have ready access and there are many people who simply do not have a garden, the time or the skills to set up their own Gbiota beds.
It is in every ones interest that people have access to healthy food. Even at the most mechanical level the cost of ill health from a poor diet puts an enormous strain, both financially and in terms of resources which means that people eating a healthy diet are paying more for the health service and may find it more difficult to access should they need medical support.
But I would hope that people would feel that even if they are fit, healthy and wealthy that they should contribute to the society from which they benefit even if there is no immediate benefit for them. There is that old saying ‘what goes around comes around’ meaning that you may help person, who in turn helps another so it goes around until someone will eventually help you.
So how can we improve the diet and hence health of our community as a whole?
So here is the plan.
I am just one person, and like all people I am good at somethings and not so good (eg bad) at others. Now without wanting to appear a big head I am good at technology (just read My Story - I have the track record) but I am pretty useless at marketing and when it comes to social media I am just incompetent - nothing against cute cat videos but it is just not my scene.
But what I can do is help all those people with gardens set up their Gbiota beds. Then I can hope that many of these growers will simply feel better in themselves - just fitter and healthier. This is not a black and white issue as our health is determined by a combination of our gut health and our DNA. Some people are just born with a DNA which means they will be skinny throughout there lives while others will always have a tendency to put on weight. What we do know is that if our gut brain is not fed the right sort of food it senses a deficiency in the diet so sends out signals to eat more. I explain this in detail in Food and the gut biome.
So while eating a healthy diet does not guarantee a long and healthy life span it certainly shifts the odds in favour.
Now all I can hope for is that many of the people I help set up Gbiota beds will read these articles and recognise that almost everyone benefits from a healthy diet and say yes I can help my community by simply telling their friends about the articles I write on our gut brain and health, over a cup of coffee or on line if they are into that.
And perhaps some of these will say I can become a community grower and not just grow gut food myself but gut food for my friends and contacts. This is not a charity and they can expect to get paid for this gut food. That is stage 2 of the plan.
And if that works we can move onto stage 3 which is a bit more difficult. Most people buy their food from the local supermarket. That food is grown on mega farms to produce food as cheaply as possible. It is certainly lacking in certain trace mineral essential for human health but not needed by plants.
But the real issue is that even if the plants were to be grown in soil teaming with beneficial biology by the time they have been transported and sat on the shelf these microbes will have died.
The only solution to this is to modify our food production system so some of our food is grown locally and available for rapid consumption after harvesting. I say some food because if you read my articles you will understand that the bulk of the food we eat is just fuel which we burn off to control our temperature and provide energy.
These local growers will be commercial growers and will be totally dependant on the support they receive from their community. I can only hope that people see my pun about the old advert that oils aint oils being copied by my slogan Kales aint Kales.
Another factor in this local food argument is reliability of supply which could probably have more impact than the health issue. In my article on Food and floods I explore what steps can be taken to ensure reliable food supply against the threat of floods.
At this moment this is very much a hot topic here in Australia with shortages and escalating prices. At this moment we really don’t know if this is just a flash in the pan or an indication of major threats to our food supply from climate change.
What we do know that is that it is much easier to protect a small local farm from floods than the modern mega farm.
I see creating this local food system as the end goal but I can’t make this happen myself - it will only happen if enough people in the community decide that this is a worth while project and take action to spread the word.
Colin
Has the world gone crazy? Wars, food shortages, floods and droughts, prices through the roof, epidemics, the internet - one of the most important innovations of our era has sunk to become the home of mass manipulation to sell us things that don’t work or we don’t need, just to make some mega corporation or wealthy individual even richer.
Have we turned into a race of dumb donkeys to be led unthinkingly to some catastrophic end?
I can’t do anything about most of these problems, but there is one I can do something about - food that will make us healthy.
Man made
The facts are simple - we evolved to have a gut brain which controls our body - it makes us want to eat the right amount, of the right sort of food. It has been working fine for millions of years, then, just to make more money we changed our food system so that our gut brain stopped working as it should. Now we have an epidemic of chronic diseases - diabetes, dementia, heart attacks etc.
What sort of society are we that puts profits ahead of the health of the population? In this web site I show how we can stop being dumb donkeys and grow food that will actually keep us healthy.
Every twelve seconds someone has a limb amputated from diabetes - this is man made and just plain wrong. So why not join me in my campaign for food that makes us healthy.
No dumb donkeys
We live in the digital age where we seem to expect that any problem can be solve by a few minutes search on the internet. If you think this is the way to feed eight billion people food that will keep them healthy (so they don’t get fat and sick and have their legs chopped off from diabetes) and all in the middle of climate change with floods and droughts and a global political system which is decidedly wobbly, then you are wrong and this is not the site for you.
Life wasn’t meant to be easy.
But I have prepared a series of posts which analyze the key issues, to develop a plan and appropriate technology to solve this horrendous problem.
Key points
When I am creating a project I find it useful to make a list of the key points. I have done this with the Gbiota project but I asked myself why keep this hidden so I am publishing this here.
No Dumb donkeys
This is where the action is so read here
Colin Austin tells it straight about Wicking Beds
Read My Story
To find diamonds you have to shovel a lot of dirt, but this is where the diamonds are.
In 1995 I started to promote Wicking bed. I did not invent them, but I did puzzle out how they worked. You can see them all over in the dry desert regions of Australia. They starts with a spoon shaped clay pan. That fill up with what is technically know as stuff - sand, silts and debris blown or washed in.
In the rare event of rain water will filter down to the clay layer and form an underground water source and voila you have a natural Wicking bed.
There is one about a hundred metres from my home but they are everywhere.
And they just took off and people are making them across the globe. But like many things in our modern world they got more complicated and just degenerated into self watering beds, good and saves time and work but missed the key point.
That took me the best part of twenty years, to 2015 to puzzle out.
Way back at the start of the Wicking bed story I was totally unaware of gut biology - I just got hungry and ate - pretty simple.
But then I began to learn the importance of gut biology and our micro-biome and the amazing job it does.
It is a real brain with the trillions of cells communicating with each other just like in a super computer.
It controls our appetite, the manufacture of the complex chemicals to replace our body parts as the age and wear and host much of our immune system.
I learned that you simply cannot be healthy without a healthy gut biome. But I learned more - our gut biome comes originally from the soil and creatures of the soil, they enter the plants which we eat which are effectively natural pre and pro biotics.
And the conditions they like is with the soil moist but not wet - which is exactly what we get in these natural Wicking beds and the people with the healthiest gut biome are those eating plants from these natural Wicking beds.
Unfortunately our modern food system kills of these beneficial microbes but anyone with a bit of a garden can grow their own pre and pro biotics.
This is even easier with the Wicking-Soaker bed.
Grow your own gut food at home
We know, from research conducted by our top brains at many or the worlds respected research institutions that our gut is incredibly important to health. It contains trillions of cells which act as a brain, communicating with our head brain, to control our appetite, manage the production of the complex chemicals needed to replace our body parts as they age and wear and trains much of our immune system.
We know from studies of the gut of people living a traditional life style, the few remaining hunter gatherers and from the blue zones Okinawa, Sardinia, Nicoya, Ikaria, and Loma Linda where people lead a healthy life right up to a ripe old age that they have a far healthier gut than people eating a modern diet - yet they do nothing other than eating plants, just after picking, and grown in biologically active nutrient rich soil.
They may live longer but what is truly remarkable is their health span, fit and healthy till the end.
All these people have very different diets, what they have in common is they are eating food grown in soil which has been developing by microbial action over millions of years. It is the difference between dirt and soil.
We are a warm blooded creature that evolved from the tiny animals could burn food at night to keep them warm and active to hunt at night when the ferocious dinosaurs had no energy.
Some 80% of the food we eat is simply burned to provide energy and to keep us warm, some 15% is used to replace our body parts as they age and wear and only a tiny amount, may be just 5%, is used to feed our gut brain.
We know that our modern food system aims to provide energy food. It is based on chemical industrial agriculture and involving long distribution chains has killed of the beneficial microbes, is low in critical minerals and had led to chronic diseases like obesity, heart attacks and dementia. This has created a multi billion dollar supplement industry.
Would it not be healthier, and certainly a lot cheaper just to eat healthy food full of the beneficial microbes and essential minerals.
But how to grow this food in a modern society where we have been destroying the soil microbes and worse how do we do this with the extremes of weather, the floods and droughts, we are now experiencing. This is the great challenge of our era.
It is simply a question of feeding the microbes and maintaining the required moisture level - not too dry and not too wet - Goldilocks moisture. This is the challenge taken up by Colin Austin a world leader in fluid flow.
Colin pioneered the use of computer to solve complex fluid flow problems. He built up Australia leading exporter of technical software, a world leader in its field and was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of the top one hundred innovators and was globally recognised as a leader in fluid flow.
He went on to pioneer Wicking beds to provide a more effective way of watering plants when water is in short supply. He has now extended the Wicking bed technology to breed the beneficial microbes which enhance our gut biology and our health.
And where so we start? Not the corporate farm just interested in profits but the home gardener, happy to turn dirt into soil for the benefits of a longer health span.
This is a simple technology which enables any home gardener to grow plants which act as as pre and pro biotics for gut health.
You can learn how you can do this yourself in your own garden by subscribing to the Gbiota web site. It cost a fraction of what you would pay for pro-biotic pills and uses the technology perfected and tested over thousands of years by nature.
This gives access to hundred of articles Colin has written over time but the key ones are the five article about growing gut food.
The first article looks at how food affects our health. Our modern food system is deficient which we try and compensate for by supporting a massive supplement industry rather than just eating healthy food.
The second article looks at the peculiar properties of water and how it moves through the soil and into the plants - taking the beneficial microbes with it. Life is totally dependant on water - you can’t drink oil or eat mobile phones.
The third article looks at how to get that magic Goldilocks moisture level, moist enough for the beneficial biota to breed but not too wet for the harmful bugs to be a problem.
The forth article gets down to the nitty gritty of how to build and operate a classic Gbiota in ground bed to grow pre and pro biotics.
The fifth article looks at the latest technology the Wicking Soaker bed
The next article will look at how to build a Gbiota box. While in ground beds are preferred people living in flats simply do not have access to a garden but a Gbiota box provides a practical alternative.
This is a technology that’s on the move and further articles are planned to keep people up to date on important issues such as how to grow plants with the current weather extremes and what plants are best to grow for gut health.
In addition to these technical articles you get a Newsletter telling you about the latest developments and can get support by email or video conference.
With this support you can grow you own plants as pre and pro biotics, a method tested over thousand of years by nature and at a fraction of the cost.
A gbiota bed or box box enables people to grow gut food at home to enhance their gut biota.
We now know just how important our gut brain is - it controls our appetite, the manufacture of the complex chemicals to replace our body parts as the age and wear and host much of our immune system.
It is a real brain with the trillions of cells communicating with each other just like in a super computer.
Modern DNA testing gives us the ability to monitor the thousands of species in our gut - from that we learn how dramatically our gut health has declined with our modern food system. Hunter gathers tribes, natives in the blue zones where people live to a ripe old age and people from a traditional life style have a far healthier gut than us.
These have very different diets but they have two things in common - they eat plants that are freshly picked and are grown in biologically active nutrient rich soils.
We can try and offset the disadvantages of our modern diet by spending a lot of money on supplements which may or may not work but would not it be better just to eat the right sort of food.
This has been the focus of Colin Austin, selected as as one of the top one hundred innovators by the Institute of Engineers.
Twenty five years ago he started to promote Wicking bed - he then developed Wicking beds to grow gut food by breeding beneficial biota in nutrient rich organic waste. He called these Gbiota beds.
The original version worked very well were somewhat complicated involving pumps and timers and, although automated, needed skills and time to operate properly.
So he has now introduced a simplified manual version which virtually anyone can use to grow their own gut food at home.
He does no sell any physical product - he just provides the technology and support for people to set up their own beds.
Read more here or go to food in the menu - all this information is free.
To access information on how to make Gbiota beds go to "growing" in the menu.
We don't sell anything so we have made this a subsciption area to recover some of the cost of experimention, but there is a fourteen day free trial.
Any problems just email me here. I am not some mega corporation - but a real person who thinks that people should have access to food that will make them healthy without being manipluated by deceptive advertising.
You can read my story here but essentially I had taken a life changing decision to move to focus on water, which I saw as a totally critical resource.
In 1995 I started to promote Wicking beds, I did not invent them they are natural phenomena and totally amazing. There is a clay pan which gets filled with stuff that just blows in. Any rain that falls is captured over a wide area, seeps down to the clay where it flows to form an underground water reservoir. Water wicks up to feed a green and verdant oasis in the middle of a dry and barren landscape. They are very water efficient with little loss from evaporation or leakage past the root zone.
They took off like wildfire - not as I intended to ensure our future food supply but to save work as a self watering pot. There are many articles in Wicking beds and a video on this site.
Much later, in 2015 I learned about the importance of gut biology and how it was possible to breed the beneficial gut biota in the soil in a modified Wicking bed I called a Gbiota bed. This was based on the partial flood and drain system using what I called a leaky dam which would partially flood the bed then allow the water to drain away.
At that time we were in the middle of a long dry period and there was not issue with water logging which breeds the wrong sort of biota so they worked very well.
Then the weather changed with La Nina and flooding and water logging of my beds. It hit me like a ten tonne truck that we have technology to deal with droughts, increasing the efficiency of water use (Wicking beds may use a third of the conventional usage) and amplifying rainfall by concentrating the rain over a large area into a much smaller area but where was the technology to deal with floods?
That’s when I developed the Wicking Soaker bed system. This can happily deal with rain that falls on the beds themselves but it is necessary to protect the beds from external flow. There are two type of floods those that flood backwards from some choke in the natural river systems (which we can’t do much about) and water flowing at speed from uphill catchments (which with a bit of site planning we can do something about).
Unfortunately you can only test these methods when there is a major flood which make experimentation and verification a bit of a problem.
Flooding is clearly a major threat to the worlds food supply leading to food shortages and price hikes.
Life span and health span
But we don't want just any food - we want food that will make us healthy.
Life span has been increasing steadily over the years due to a combination of medical services, hygiene and sanitation.
By contrast health span has been reducing, even kids are showing reduced health, particularly from chronic, non-infectious diseases.
Information and vested interests
These issues on health were not widely understood. We may live in the information age but we are saturated with information - some right some wrong. Vested interested have shown they are willing to manipulate the truth if it means making more money.
It started at scale with the tobacco industry, and was adopted by the fossil fuel and food industries. They don’t lie directly jut select the facts that suit their argument.
Climate has always changed (correct fact) fossil fuels are not causing climate change (invalid implication).
Sugar is essential (correct fact) energy bars are healthy (invalid implication).
Selected information
We are flooded with information, so much that it is possible to find facts that support any particular view point. We live in an age of information silos it where it is difficult to stand back and take a holistic view of a particular problem.
Yet this is the only way we can develop a valid view on complex issues.
This is the great weakness of the information age - expecting simple answers to complex problems. “For every complex problem, there's a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” H.L. Mencken.
Valid and relevant Information
The key purpose of the Gbiota movement is to make valid and relevant information on how food affects health widely available. We do not make or sell anything - we just supply information for others to implement.
Paradigm busting
Colin Austin (that’s me) was a pioneer in the use of computers to solve complex engineering problems (Computer Aided Engineering). The company I formed (Moldflow) became Australia’s leading exporter of technical software and world leader in its field.
I was selected as among the top one hundred innovators by the Institute of Engineers.
Have no doubt this was not because I was spectacularly brilliant but because I looked and challenged the conventional wisdom, the current paradigm, and was prepared to say this is just wrong.
But I decided that my real interest lay in soil and water which were critical to human survival so I sold my company to see if the paradigm busting attitude could give results in this critical area.
But my wife became diabetic and we are told this was a chronic disease with no cure. When it looked as though she would need to have her food amputated when it turned black it was time to put all my paradigm busting abilities to work.
It would be wrong to say she cured her diabetes but by changing here diet it became very manageable and she still has her foot.
The conventional food paradigm was simply wrong.
Global population
In the last eighty years the global population has tripled (simply staggering). This has created an equivalent pressure to increase food production which has been well and truly met by the food industry. In fact food production has increase 40% faster than the global population but the food balance is wrong.
The Calorie Paradigm
The food industry is obsessed with calories. That is not wrong - it is just a restricted view about what food actually does. We are warm blooded creatures so we need food as fuel to keep us warm and provide energy - some 80% of the food we eat is just burned as fuel.
Calories matter but they are only part of the story.
An even more important part is our gut brain.
Jelly fish and our gut brain
Humans are not like Jelly fish flapping aimlessly around. We are a highly complex organism which needs an intelligent control system - that is a combination of our gut and head brains.
This intelligent control system manages our appetite so we want to eat the right amount of the right sort of food, it manages the production of the complex chemical to replace our body part as they age and wear and it hosts and trains much of our immune system.
Our very complex gut brain
There are trillions of cells of thousands of different species in our gut. They communicate with each other, just like in a supercomputer, to take real world decisions.
The simple fact is that we have no idea how the code in this supercomputer actually works.
But we do know that we can change the species of microbes in our gut by simply changing our diet and that as we change the species the decisions it takes are very different. It can change us from being fat or skinny, timid or risk taking and in fact our whole personality.
The species we have in our guts is key to our health.
The great food paradigm shift
We need to replace the current food paradigm which is obsessed with calories to a new food paradigm that focused on the food we should be eating to feed our gut.
From soil to gut
For millions of years creatures, including the early hominids, have been eating gut food with the beneficial microbes breeding in the soil - they never thought about it or took any decisions - it just happened.
The beneficial microbes bred in the soil and in the guts of creatures that lived in the soils, they entered the plants which the creatures ate packed up in the plants which act as pre-biotics so they can survive the journey to our gut where they act as pro-biotics.
A totally natural process tested over millions of years and we never paid any attention to it - it just worked.
What we forgot
But we just forgot about it or never even thought about it - with the tripling of the global population we were just obsessed with getting enough calories.
The result
It is a sad result - we simply do not have the healthy gut that protected previous generations had so we endure epidemics of both chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and dementia but also infectious diseases.
Our poor gut does not cause these problems - it just enables them to turn into epidemics.
Two things to do
First we have to work out how to grow the beneficial microbes in the soil - that is the easy bit and something I have been working on for years.
Secondly we have to solve the problem that faces every innovator, how to get adoption eg setting up a system of growing gut food at scale and getting people to eat gut food.
Innovators are rarely able to promote their own innovations - for that they need early adopters who are prepared to pioneer a new technology.
Early adopters and the Wicking-Soaker bed
The most favoured early adopters are likely to be home growers - they are the group who will benefit most from having a healthy gut from home grown gut food.
I developed the Wicking-Soaker bed to make it as easy as possible for these home growers to grow their own gut food in their garden.
Kales and Kales
The challenge we face now is to get the message out that there are Kales and Kales. Kale may be a considered a wonder food by some, but if it is grown in dead inert soil without life and the critical minerals it is pretty useless as gut food.
The message is simple - get the soil right and everything follows on.
Why not join the Gbiota movement
The Gbiota movement is not some operation run by some mega global operation - it is a grass roots movement of those weird people who have failed to be convinced that as long as there is food in the supermarkets now everything is fine and dandy.
We are not dumb donkeys but think ahead for the future of our grandkids.
We live in the digital age where we seem to expect that any problem can be solved by a few minutes’ search on the internet. If you think this is the way to feed eight billion people food that will keep them healthy (so they don’t get fat and sick and have their legs chopped off from diabetes) – and all in the middle of climate change with floods and droughts and a global political system which is decidedly wobbly – then you are wrong and this is not the site for you.
Life wasn’t meant to be easy.
But I have prepared a series of posts which analyse the key issues to develop a plan and appropriate technology to solve this horrendous problem.
This first article discusses food and the gut biome. The simple fact is that people eating fresh food grown in soil full of minerals and teeming with beneficial biota (such as the few remaining hunter gatherers and people living in the blue zones) have a far healthier gut biome than modern man does eating a conventional diet.
But, and there is always a but, in the last eighty years population has trebled, and there is just no way we can feed the current population in these traditional ways.
But let’s stick with the facts – while the population may have trebled over these eighty years, our production of food has increased some 40% faster than the population has increased.
There is no “absolute” shortage of food; the problem is that there are big holes in our food production and distribution systems with a surplus of some foods – like fuel – and not enough of the critical foods – like gut brain food.
Despite any opinions you may have of our global leaders, we are not cold-blooded lizards but warm-blooded creatures – and we need food as a fuel to keep us warm and power our bodies.
Some 80% of the food we eat is just fuel, and as long as we can burn it off it does not matter what sort of food it is – it is just fuel.
So don’t panic – we have been incredibly successful in producing vast quantities of food for fuel to feed the eight billion people on earth.
What we have missed is that we have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly how much and what we eat. It is a combination of our gut and head brains, and for this intelligent control system to work properly we have to feed it the right kind of food – gut food.
It may only be a small percentage of the food we eat but if we are to avoid getting fat and sick and having our limbs chopped off from diabetes, we must eat the food that feeds our gut brain.
How did we miss this? We may have amazing capabilities in technologies like DNA sequencing yet we have no idea how the coding in this super-computer gut brain system actually works.
It may be a bit difficult to get excited about water – it is just everywhere and we are so used to it that we fail to appreciate just how weird it is. But we all understand it is essential for life so, before we go off on some wild campaign to change the world, I’d like to take a bit of time to explain how this weird stuff actually works, how it moves through the soil and why it is so important for our gut brain.
Whether we like it or not, we live in a state of ecological balance. It is true that I can go to my local supermarket and I really don’t have to worry that I am going to be eaten by a tiger.
Tigers, sharks and rhinos kill very few people but bugs do. They live in their own very tiny world of ecological balance – basically trying to out-breed each other – and that depends very much on moisture. Too wet and the bad bugs win and then us humans have problems. Too dry and the good bugs that we need can’t breed, so again we have problems.
So how can we grow our food in soil with this magic Goldilocks moisture? We need to understand water and how it moves around the soil.
This may help give us the technology of growing gut food – that is the easy bit. We now have to actually get the change to happen and that means understanding how the real world – particularly the world of innovation and adoption – works.
The real world
The real world is driven by a lust for profits and power, and fortunately for humanity a desire by a few to do the right thing for society.
But the reality is that the mega corporate giants are not going to suddenly set up giant facilities to grow gut food until they see a demand. And that demand needs to be generated by the few prepared to do the right thing.
Choices – grow gut food in your back yard, which is pleasant, or have your leg chopped off from diabetes – which is not so pleasant.
This choice falls to individual people, probably home growers, who want to grow gut food for their families.
Here we hit yet two more technical problems to resolve:
The early Gbiota technology was developed thinking it would be adopted by technically sophisticated organisations – yet we are now looking to home growers to be the early adopters, and they want things to be simple.
We also have climate change and these extreme weather events – the floods and droughts – which are going to make any sort of food production that much more difficult.
So I did more development work, ending up with the Wicking Soaker Bed – dead simple and providing a level of protection against floods.
Making it very easy for home growers to become early adopters.
In the world of new technology and innovations the actual innovators typically find it very difficult to get their ideas accepted. Then along come the early adopters – hopefully in this case the home growers – and they, not the innovators, drive the process of adoption.
Then a second wave comes – in this case we are looking for community growers – not exactly commercial growers but people growing for their local communities. They can expect to get paid for their efforts thus leading to the third stage which is the commercial growers who now see there is a genuine market.
nb We don’t sell cabbages or anything for that matter; we survive as a subscription site which you can access for free for fourteen days. If not your scene just please cancel.
An online community where groups can chat and exchange information – particularly on preferred plant species which are suited to the locality and season.
You can share information on plants, food and cooking with people from the same locality or further afield.
A safe, non-commercial space to network and find like-minded people.
Our gut controls our body – it needs to be fed gut food
The Gbiota local food movement
Our focus is how to grow plants to enhance our gut brain – breeding beneficial biota in the soil is by far the most effective and cheapest way of enhancing our gut brain and has been tested over hundreds of thousands of years.
What’s a Biofoodie
A Biofoodie is someone who wants to enhance their gut brain by ensuring that at least some of their food is grown in soil that is full of living biota, organic matter and minerals which lead to a healthy gut brain.
Our webs
Our web is in three parts. Here (gbiota.com) we focus on the technology. Community is a social area where people can exchange information on anything of interest – what plants grow well in this area, speciality plants, how to prepare and cook food. Shop provides a system where Biofoodies and growers can trade among themselves.
We do not make, buy or sell anything but we try to bring like-minded people together for mutual benefit.
Much of the site is open but some areas require you to log in – for details read here.
We humans need energy – and where does that come from? Literally out of thin air.
The sun shines and plants take carbon dioxide from the air and water, and break these down by photosynthesis to make chemicals containing carbon and hydrogen – full of potential energy.
We eat the plants (or animals that eat the plants), turn the chemicals back into carbon dioxide and water and bingo – we have a supply of energy, lots of it.
As plants take energy from the sun and carbon from the air, they exude sugars to attract and feed the soil biota and eventually die to further feed the soil biota.
Modern chemical industrial agriculture produces more than adequate supplies of energy food, but is often low in essential minerals and normally lacking in living biota.
But things are never as simple as they seem. We need to regulate the supply of energy. If we do not have enough energy food we feel tired and fatigued, and conversely if we eat too much energy food we get fat and unhealthy.
So we have evolved a system – our gut brain – to regulate how much food we eat by making us feel hungry or full. Trillions of cells in our gut communicate with each other like some super computer which regulates our bodies.
Our gut biota breeds inside us depending on the food we eat but it originates in the soil.
The biota enters the plants’ roots
We eat the plants to create trillions of cells which act as a second brain.
Our bodies need more than energy – we need a whole range of minerals to make and replace our body parts as they wear. Again these come from plants which make phytonutrients which we eat.
These phytonutrients originally come from rocks or rock dust in the soil. Rocks are not soluble, but there are micro-organisms in the soil which break down the rocks into complex chemicals which are soluble so the plants can absorb them to produce the phytonutrients we can eat.
Growing plants in nutrient rich, biologically active soil is essential for a healthy gut.
Why we need gut food
Our gut brain regulates what and how much we eat, replaces cells as they age and hosts our immune system.
Our gut brain is critical to our bodies, but to do its job it needs food – gut food – which is not the same as the food we may eat. If we don't feed it the right gut food the wrong sort of biota will breed in our gut, and the gut brain will not work as it should.
Time tested
While we were evolving over hundreds of thousands of years, the soil was young and full of both minerals and the living biota which made the system work well.
Our modern chemical industrial agricultural system may be very efficient in producing energy food but is relying on synthetic chemicals to feed the plants rather than organic wastes which are produced naturally. Our soils are becoming inert, lacking the available minerals and biota we need for our health.
We may try to correct for this by supplementing our diet with pills, which may work to a degree but they do not have the diversity of natural biota, are expensive, and still do not give us the healthy gut brain which has looked after us naturally for hundreds of thousands of years.
We all need to eat
While our focus may be on the technology, we want everyone who wants a healthy gut brain to have ready and affordable access. Continue reading to see how we make the technology widely available at an affordable price.
Because we don’t spend money on advertising healthy gut brain food, it is often cheaper than branded food – you can help spread the word by letting your friends know of the Gbiota local food movement.
A local grower breeds beneficial biology in a mix of organic waste and minerals
The Gbiota growing system is a way of growing plants in soil with a high nutrient content from organic waste, manures and minerals, and careful regulation of the moisture level so the biota can breed.
Local growers produce this biologically active soil, load it into Bioboxes and seed with either a green manure crop or food plants which are grown to the stage of being ready to start eating.
Boxes are delivered to the customer typically with plants ready to harvest – often using the tipping method where just the tips are harvested and are allowed to regrow.
Food waste and minerals may be added through the compost tube to continuously feed the soil and its biota.
These nutrients are flushed into the box during watering.
The Gbiota Biobox
The Gbiota Biobox is a system where growers can produce soil with the living biota and minerals, load this soil into boxes with the Gbiota moisture control system. They can be planted so that almost anyone, even if they have no gardening or growing experience, can eat freshly picked fruit and vegetables.
Instead of buying already harvested plants, Biofoodies buy plants still growing in the Bioboxes and harvest at home just before eating.
They often use the tipping method where just the tips are harvested and the plants are allowed to regrow. This is a very healthy and cost-effective system.
Food waste and minerals may be added through the compost tube to continuously feed the soil and its biota.
At the end of harvest
When the soil is depleted, the boxes can simply be swapped for a fresh one with plants already growing or the soil can be topped up with new young soil.
The beauty of the Gbiota Biobox system is that almost everyone can have the health benefits of genuinely fresh food grown in nutrient rich biologically active soil.
Gbiota food simply tastes better.
[mailpoet_form id="4"]
I am a real person
I am a real person – not some computerised zombie. I am lucky, I have had a long and good life and seen many changes in the world.
When I was a kid I had a weekend job on a chicken farm – bluntly shovelling shit – but I earned enough to buy a bike. But I learned that our food system was based on manure.
Take a fat mouse and feed it the poo of a skinny mouse and it too will become fat. Take the poo of a skinny mouse and feed it to a fat mouse and it will become skinny too.
And it works with humans too.
It is not just about being fat or skinny – our whole body and temperament changes with gut biology.
In the wonderful world of food the established paradigm, based on chemistry, has been incredibly successful. In my lifetime, we have increased food production by a factor of 4.3 – just totally stunning. At the centre of this success is nitrogen – we learned how to capture nitrogen from the air to make fertilisers and whoom! food production just went through the roof.
Feeding our gut brain by eating plants grown in natural wild biologically active nutrient rich soil is not new – we have been doing it for millions of years so it is well tried and tested.
The Gbiota technology is based on studying the natural process and learning how to apply the lessons in a modern setting – see overview of Gbiota Bioboxes here.
An online community where groups can chat and exchange information – particularly on preferred plant species which are suited to the locality and season.
You can share information on plants, food and cooking with people from the same locality or further afield.
A safe, non-commercial space to network and find like-minded people.
Our gut controls our body – it needs to be fed gut food
The Gbiota local food movement
Our focus is how to grow plants to enhance our gut brain – breeding beneficial biota in the soil is by far the most effective and cheapest way of enhancing our gut brain and has been tested over hundreds of thousands of years.
What’s a Biofoodie
A Biofoodie is someone who wants to enhance their gut brain by ensuring that at least some of their food is grown in soil that is full of living biota, organic matter and minerals which lead to a healthy gut brain.
Our webs
Our web is in three parts. Here (gbiota.com) we focus on the technology. Community is a social area where people can exchange information on anything of interest – what plants grow well in this area, speciality plants, how to prepare and cook food. Shop provides a system where Biofoodies and growers can trade among themselves.
We do not make, buy or sell anything but we try to bring like-minded people together for mutual benefit.
Much of the site is open but some areas require you to log in – for details read here.
We humans need energy – and where does that come from? Literally out of thin air.
The sun shines and plants take carbon dioxide from the air and water, and break these down by photosynthesis to make chemicals containing carbon and hydrogen – full of potential energy.
We eat the plants (or animals that eat the plants), turn the chemicals back into carbon dioxide and water and bingo – we have a supply of energy, lots of it.
As plants take energy from the sun and carbon from the air, they exude sugars to attract and feed the soil biota and eventually die to further feed the soil biota.
Modern chemical industrial agriculture produces more than adequate supplies of energy food, but is often low in essential minerals and normally lacking in living biota.
But things are never as simple as they seem. We need to regulate the supply of energy. If we do not have enough energy food we feel tired and fatigued, and conversely if we eat too much energy food we get fat and unhealthy.
So we have evolved a system – our gut brain – to regulate how much food we eat by making us feel hungry or full. Trillions of cells in our gut communicate with each other like some super computer which regulates our bodies.
Our gut biota breeds inside us depending on the food we eat but it originates in the soil.
The biota enters the plants’ roots
We eat the plants to create trillions of cells which act as a second brain.
Our bodies need more than energy – we need a whole range of minerals to make and replace our body parts as they wear. Again these come from plants which make phytonutrients which we eat.
These phytonutrients originally come from rocks or rock dust in the soil. Rocks are not soluble, but there are micro-organisms in the soil which break down the rocks into complex chemicals which are soluble so the plants can absorb them to produce the phytonutrients we can eat.
Growing plants in nutrient rich, biologically active soil is essential for a healthy gut.
Why we need gut food
Our gut brain regulates what and how much we eat, replaces cells as they age and hosts our immune system.
Our gut brain is critical to our bodies, but to do its job it needs food – gut food – which is not the same as the food we may eat. If we don’t feed it the right gut food the wrong sort of biota will breed in our gut, and the gut brain will not work as it should.
Time tested
While we were evolving over hundreds of thousands of years, the soil was young and full of both minerals and the living biota which made the system work well.
Our modern chemical industrial agricultural system may be very efficient in producing energy food but is relying on synthetic chemicals to feed the plants rather than organic wastes which are produced naturally. Our soils are becoming inert, lacking the available minerals and biota we need for our health.
We may try to correct for this by supplementing our diet with pills, which may work to a degree but they do not have the diversity of natural biota, are expensive, and still do not give us the healthy gut brain which has looked after us naturally for hundreds of thousands of years.
We all need to eat
While our focus may be on the technology, we want everyone who wants a healthy gut brain to have ready and affordable access. Continue reading to see how we make the technology widely available at an affordable price.
Because we don’t spend money on advertising healthy gut brain food, it is often cheaper than branded food – you can help spread the word by letting your friends know of the Gbiota local food movement.
A local grower breeds beneficial biology in a mix of organic waste and minerals
The Gbiota growing system is a way of growing plants in soil with a high nutrient content from organic waste, manures and minerals, and careful regulation of the moisture level so the biota can breed.
Local growers produce this biologically active soil, load it into Bioboxes and seed with either a green manure crop or food plants which are grown to the stage of being ready to start eating.
Boxes are delivered to the customer typically with plants ready to harvest – often using the tipping method where just the tips are harvested and are allowed to regrow.
Food waste and minerals may be added through the compost tube to continuously feed the soil and its biota.
These nutrients are flushed into the box during watering.
The Gbiota Biobox
The Gbiota Biobox is a system where growers can produce soil with the living biota and minerals, load this soil into boxes with the Gbiota moisture control system. They can be planted so that almost anyone, even if they have no gardening or growing experience, can eat freshly picked fruit and vegetables.
Instead of buying already harvested plants, Biofoodies buy plants still growing in the Bioboxes and harvest at home just before eating.
They often use the tipping method where just the tips are harvested and the plants are allowed to regrow. This is a very healthy and cost-effective system.
Food waste and minerals may be added through the compost tube to continuously feed the soil and its biota.
At the end of harvest
When the soil is depleted, the boxes can simply be swapped for a fresh one with plants already growing or the soil can be topped up with new young soil.
The beauty of the Gbiota Biobox system is that almost everyone can have the health benefits of genuinely fresh food grown in nutrient rich biologically active soil.
Gbiota food simply tastes better.
[mailpoet_form id=”4″]
I am a real person
I am a real person – not some computerised zombie. I am lucky, I have had a long and good life and seen many changes in the world.
When I was a kid I had a weekend job on a chicken farm – bluntly shovelling shit – but I earned enough to buy a bike. But I learned that our food system was based on manure.
Take a fat mouse and feed it the poo of a skinny mouse and it too will become fat. Take the poo of a skinny mouse and feed it to a fat mouse and it will become skinny too.
And it works with humans too.
It is not just about being fat or skinny – our whole body and temperament changes with gut biology.
In the wonderful world of food the established paradigm, based on chemistry, has been incredibly successful. In my lifetime, we have increased food production by a factor of 4.3 – just totally stunning. At the centre of this success is nitrogen – we learned how to capture nitrogen from the air to make fertilisers and whoom! food production just went through the roof.
Feeding our gut brain by eating plants grown in natural wild biologically active nutrient rich soil is not new – we have been doing it for millions of years so it is well tried and tested.
The Gbiota technology is based on studying the natural process and learning how to apply the lessons in a modern setting – see overview of Gbiota Bioboxes here.
Well, it is pretty simple. This is my great-granddaughter Elowen. She has no idea what gut biota is, but she knows instinctively that she needs a good old suck to build up her gut biota from her mum, my granddaughter.
But she will grow up and ask herself, “What sort of world have my parents, and their parents and their parents created for me to live in? Did they do a good job—or were they just obsessed with getting a private jet, a yacht, or a Lamborghini?”
I am not one of those people who go on about the good old days. My very first memory—only a bit older than Elowen—is being carried down to the air-raid shelter during the Blitz. Searchlights sweeping the sky, flashes and bangs everywhere, and houses simply disappearing. But that’s not why I remember it—I dropped my teddy and they wouldn’t go back for it.
I never actually went hungry, but I do remember the fight for food: digging up the lawns to grow vegetables, keeping chickens for eggs, and collecting their valuable manure—really the main source of fertiliser that kept us alive.
Now I wonder: what sort of life will baby Elowen have? And to understand that, I look back on my own life—during which technology has changed more dramatically than in any other period in human history. The big question is: are these changes truly for the better? Especially as I have been part of that revolution.
When I left university—studying engineering—I saw plastics as an exciting new material. Learning how this material behaved seemed like a great opportunity for a young engineer.
Later, still early in life, I encountered computers—back in the era of punched cards, which most people today have never even heard of. But I could see immediately that computers would totally transform engineering, allowing us to calculate things we used to guess, and leading to better products with fewer materials.
I taught myself computer programming and eventually solved the incredibly complex problem of how plastics flow inside moulds. That led me to build a company that grew into a multinational, multi-million-dollar operation—the leading exporter of technical software from Australia.
This made a lot of money for the venture capitalists (and much less for me), but I was selected as one of the top one hundred technical innovators by the Institute of Engineers.
This could have been the pinnacle of my career—until I asked myself a simple but uncomfortable question:
“How much better is the world because of these innovations?”
The honest answer was not encouraging. Just look at the problems: climate change, pollution from plastics and chemicals, environmental collapse—and you cannot say with a straight face that technology has been an unblemished benefit.
So, what would I say to Elowen if I live long enough to explain all this?
I doubt she’d be impressed.
Technology can deliver enormous benefits—but only if those benefits flow to the community, not just to massive corporations or tech billionaires focused on profit instead of people.
So what is the biggest problem Elowen will face in her lifetime? Most people immediately think of global warming. But a couple of degrees of warming is not the real killer.
The true existential threat is the food crisis.
Not famine—we already produce more than enough calories. The real threat is the rise of what I call “plastic food”—food that is full of energy but desperately lacking in minerals, nutrients, and biology. Food that fills us, but does not nourish us.
It’s not just climate effects on crops—it’s the destruction of our soils. At the current rate, scientists estimate we have only about 60 years of topsoil left—well within Elowen’s lifespan.
Elowen won’t die from starvation, but without nutrient-dense food her body will lose resilience. She won’t be able to withstand whatever challenges the future brings.
The Gbiota technology—breeding beneficial biota in organic waste and rock dust—is one technical solution. But technology alone will not save us.
What we need is a community-based food system.
Growers and consumers working together. People understanding the biological principles behind gut health. People producing and sharing local, living food that genuinely nourishes us.
That is the foundation of the Gbiota system. If this resonates with you, then join the Gbiota club—learn, cooperate, and help build a real food system before Elowen grows up.
I believe everyone in our affluent world should have access to healthy food at an affordable price, specifically nutrient-dense food that improves gut health. The Gbiota system aims to make this a reality.
Why gut health matters
Our gut is one of the most important organs in our body. Made up of trillions of cells that communicate with each other, it has real intelligence – our gut brain – which controls much of our body’s functions.
You simply cannot be healthy without a healthy gut, and that means you have to feed it – that is what Gbiota food is all about.
Modern food is not good for our gut health. Full of sugars, fats and salt, it has led to a global health pandemic of chronic (non-infectious) diseases. We love sugary, fatty foods – they were in short supply when we were evolving, so we crave them. The modern food industry makes a lot of money from satisfying these cravings.
Many people are sick and die from these chronic diseases. There are far more people suffering from chronic diseases stemming from a poor diet than people suffering from Covid.
Gbiota beds
Gbiota beds were developed by studying the way soil is formed in the natural world, but the beds dramatically accelerate the process. Instead of taking decades to make healthy soil, it can be created in months in a relatively simple system.
We combine food and organic waste scraps with worms, manures, essential minerals and inoculants for the soil to create the optimum conditions to grow healthy soil and beneficial microbiota. We then grow food in this soil to feed our gut biology, so it is a natural source of pre- and probiotics.
Gbiota beds are already widely used by home gardeners. The technology is described in the growing section on this site and is the subject of continuous development and improvement.
What sort of people make up the Gbiota club?
People who just want to have a healthy gut by eating the right sort of food – Gbiota food.
The most important group are mums. Our gut biology starts with what mum eats before we are born, then we pick up a lot of biology during birth and from mum’s milk that she feeds us. Mums are probably far too busy to have time to grow their own Gbiota food, but they can access healthy food from the Gbiota community.
So we have growers – home and commercial growers. They grow soil full of the essential biology and minerals. Yes – we actually grow soil from waste food and organic waste, manures and minerals. Gut health starts in the soil.
The growers put this Gbiota soil into boxes, seed to grow plants until they are ready to harvest – then deliver the boxes to local people who want to pick and eat fresh Gbiota food, even if they know nothing about gardening or live in an apartment.
This site has the information needed to grow the soil and plants for a healthy gut.
Creative Commons
You don’t have to join the Gbiota club to access the many articles in the menu item “food”.
This is all free and in the public domain under the Creative Commons system – you can copy and reproduce the articles as you wish. The only requirement is that you acknowledge the source: Colin Austin from www.gbiota.com.
Subscription site
We have taken the decision that we do not want to make money from the sale of Gbiota foods or services – but we do want to create an ethical and sustainable organisation which can at least cover its operational costs.
We are not in the business of private jets or Lamborghinis, so we have set the site up so certain parts are subscription only. Hopefully we can be a viable entity now and into the future.
This means that you have to register and log in to access those areas.
Gbiota™ is a registered trade mark. If you are a grower and follow our recommendation for growing Gbiota food or providing Gbiota boxes you are entitled to use the name Gbiota™.
However, the name Gbiota implies that certain quality procedures are followed and, as a grower, it is in your and everyone else’s interest that you safeguard the Gbiota name.
We have several levels.
Consumers
You can become a consumer for free and this gives you access to the bulk of the site, which is all about gut food and health.
If you register and subscribe as a consumer we will endeavour to link you with growers (and other consumers) in your locality, and you will gain access to the entire site for information and interest on how Gbiota soil and food is grown, even though you may not be growing yourself.
You will need to register, which costs $5 Australian per year. You can also log in and click the notification button to receive automatic notification of new posts.
You can unsubscribe any time you want.
Private home growers
The next level is for people who want to grow their own Gbiota food for their own and their family’s use. They have access to all the information on this site for $20 (Aussie $) per year and can use this information to grow their own Gbiota food. You can automatically pay from anywhere in the world with a regular credit card.
Community home growers
The next level up is community growers. They are likely to be home owners with a bit of land but could also be a community garden – but they are amateur growers rather than commercial growers. They have access to the entire site for $10 a month, which they can easily recover from supplying Gbiota boxes with money to spare.
While this may not be a full business, we hope this enables growers to generate some extra income while providing a valuable service to their local community.
I am very keen to encourage community home growers.
Commercial growers
Finally, there are the commercial growers, maybe small-scale growers adopting a tree change – they pay $50 per month and hopefully can run a viable business.
Trade mark and Creative Commons
Gbiota™ is a registered trade mark for use by the Gbiota mob for genuine Gbiota food.
Our articles are generally published under the Creative Commons system which means they can be copied and reproduced without approval but the source must be acknowledged.
Our articles on growing Gbiota food are restricted to Gbiota growers and are not for re-publication.
Honesty and the modern digital society
We live in the internet era which gives ordinary people access to the world’s information – surely one of the great achievements of humankind.
It has, however, encouraged a certain subset of humanity to indulge in the manipulation of the truth. I see this as one of the great threats to modern society.
But I believe that most people are honest and willing to contribute to society now and for their grand kids.
I very much hope this becomes an established feature of the Gbiota club.
Colin Austin
PS: I am a real person and don’t have an avatar and am happy to chat and communicate with people with a similar view about what we need to do to correct our rather troubled modern world.
This video library covers the core ideas behind Gbiota—how microbes shape soil, plants, appetite, energy, and long-term health.
These short explanations help visitors understand why gut-brain food matters, how to grow it, and how communities can build a healthier future.
Understanding Health, Longevity & Appetite
We choose our lives
How to choose whether we live a long and healthy life or are fat and sick.
How your gut controls your appetite
Changing your gut microbes is much easier than you thought.
Fit or fat – gut microbes create the hormones
Store-bought plants often lack the beneficial microbes needed for a healthy gut.
Control appetite with gut microbes
How we need to change our food system to avoid overeating.
Why we get fat and sick
We get fat and sick because of deficits in modern food and missing beneficial microbes.
Ruminations – why at 85 am I still fit and healthy?
The long-term impact of breeding beneficial gut microbes.
Soil, Water & Living Ecosystems
Living soil
How eating plants grown in living soil improves health.
Living soil matters – it affects your health span
Soil biota improves gut biota, appetite control, and healthy longevity.
Living soil matters
The importance of mineral-rich, biological soils in human health.
No water – no food
How water movement in soil determines whether food heals or harms.
From soil to health
How improving soil biota enhances human gut biota and health.
How to Grow Gut-Brain Food
Your health your choice
How to grow plants in organic waste to feed your gut microbes.
Become a gut-brain food grower
Why we need local growers producing microbially rich plants.
Gbiota plants for gut health
How regenerative growers breed beneficial microbes in soil.
Growing plants to breed gut bugs
Practical guidance on microbe-rich plant growing.
Grow gut brain food — the starter
The simple first steps to begin growing gut-brain food.
The gut brain food cycle
Anyone with a patio or verandah can grow gut-brain food.
Grow gut microbes
How to improve health by breeding microbes at home.
Try it for yourself
Create living soil and eat fresh—judge the benefits firsthand.
Technology, Society & The Gut-Brain Food Movement
Taming the wild beast of technology
How technology can benefit communities instead of harming them.
A compassionate society
Why we need a gut-brain food industry.
Coordinators required for health project
Building community capacity for healthier living.
Creating a gut-brain food industry
How Gbiota technology ensures beneficial microbes out-compete harmful ones.
The Gbiota box story
The evolution of growing containers for microbe-rich food.
Growers for gut health
Calling for regenerative growers to supply the community.
Gbiota: Transforming Health Through Microbial Balance
A revolutionary approach to combating chronic disease.
Fake news, fake people and fake food
How fake food lacks the microbes that power our gut-brain.
Nutrition is one of the most controversial yet critical issues we face today—our food system is shaping an epidemic of chronic disease while also degrading the soils our future depends on.
The Nutrition War Zone
Nutrition must be one of the most controversial, opinionated yet critical topics on the planet.
Go online and you’ll find an ocean of confusing and contradictory views, fuelled by complex scientific data, dogma, and a tsunami of abuse.
It would be funny if it were not so serious. We are suffering from an epidemic of diabetes and obesity with associated heart attacks and dementia, which still dwarfs the deaths from the coronavirus. Even in the case of viral infections, people eating a healthier diet are far more likely to survive than those eating a poor diet.
At the same time, we are destroying the soils on which our future survival depends. This is serious stuff.
This blog is my attempt to change our food system from one riddled with misinformation driven by profit, to one focused on the health of the community.
It’s Personal for Everyone
If I come over as a bit extreme, it is because this is not some academic interest. My wife, a qualified surgeon and doctor, was well on the way to having her leg amputated as it turned black from diabetes—largely from misinformation from her medical colleagues.
The situation was only reversed by a serious change in diet, and thankfully she still has both her legs.
For anyone facing the consequences of a poor diet, this is personal, not just part of a statistic.
How Food Is Grown Really Matters
One key aspect of our food is how it is grown. There is an immense literature on the benefits of certain vegetables—kale comes immediately to mind—and this can be true when they are grown in nutritious, biologically active soil.
However, no vegetable grown in tired soil lacking in nutrients and sprayed with toxic chemicals can truly be beneficial for our health.
A consistent theme throughout these blogs is that we must focus on the soils in which we grow our food. Health starts in the soil.
Our Gut Brain Is the Master Regulator
The first port of call for our food is our gut. Our guts are not just a dumb collection of trillions of cells. They communicate to form genuine intelligence—the gut brain—which regulates our bodies: how much and what we eat, and much of our immune system that protects us 24/7 from harmful microorganisms.
Eating a diet that leads to a healthy gut biota is the key to our health. Health may start in the soil, but it grows inside our gut brain.
The earliest diets were nutrient-dense and gut-supportive, but low in energy.
Benefiting Us All
The Gbiota system is a powerful technology for improving our food supply, our general health, our immune system, and the management of fats and insulin. But a technology, however good, is not going to benefit anyone if it is not widely available to everyone at a price people can afford.
This widespread availability is not going to be achieved by a massive advertising campaign run on a for-profit basis. There is already excessive promotion and manipulation of the truth in the food industry.
People need to know that the food they are eating is authentic, and the best way to do that is to buy from a grower they trust. Technically this is easy in the age of the internet and online buying, but we still need to create local groups that work together as a social movement.
People power is far more effective than multi-billion-dollar advertising campaigns. Ideas spread virally when people talk to each other or share on social media.
We can even learn from the coronavirus. At first just one person was infected, and in a very short time it had spread across the world.
It is a very simple message to spread: we need beneficial biology in our guts, and we get that from eating food grown in nutrient-rich, biologically active soil. This is not about profits; it is about creating a better world for everyone, where we all have access to clean air, clean water, and healthy food grown in a sustainable way. Do it for your grandkids.
Read more about alternative food here
More information: colinaustin@bigpond.com
This is my blog site on how to grow plants to improve gut biology. Gut biology is part of our intelligent control system and has a major role in our health. I only publish when I have something meaningful to say, so I suggest you click “Notify me of new posts by email” at the bottom of each post. Constructive comments welcome.
Our intelligent control system
Modern food production is incredibly efficient. It delivers energy-dense food that tastes good and is convenient. But while energy food keeps us going, it is not enough. We also need food to replace our body parts as they age and—most importantly—food to feed both our head brain and our gut brain. Our gut brain is made from trillions of beneficial cells that together form our intelligent control system, which manages our entire body.
Micro biology
We depend entirely on beneficial microbiology. These organisms were here long before us—breaking down barren rocks to create soil, enabling plants to grow, and eventually supporting human evolution.
This beneficial microbiology forms part of our guts. These trillions of cells communicate with each other like a neural network, creating intelligence similar to a computer or our head brain.
Our gut is a genuine brain which communicates with our head brain to form an intelligent control system. This system manages our heart rate, breathing, immune system, hunger, appetite, and more.
Why we feel hungry and overeat
Our intelligent control system evolved to tell us when to eat (hunger) and when to stop (feeling full). But the system is smart—it looks at all our nutritional needs, not just energy. If even one essential nutrient is lacking, it sends hunger signals even if we’ve already consumed enough energy.
In the past, food was low in energy but high in nutrients and gut food, so overeating rarely occurred. Modern food is the opposite—high in energy, low in micronutrients. The result is overeating, because modern food does not satisfy our intelligent control system.
Our bodies are complex
You can read books like Eat Your Vitamins by Mascha Davis to learn about the many vitamins and minerals we need—iron, chromium, selenium, iodine, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, and more. But what these books don’t explain is how we absorb them. We can’t eat scrap metal to get trace elements—biology must convert minerals into forms we can absorb.
An excellent book on gut health is Guts by Giulia Enders, but again, the critical link between soil health and gut health is barely mentioned.
Dr. Lisa Mosconi’s book Brain Food explores diet and brain function, but even she only lightly touches on how soil impacts brain health through food.
If you want science on the soil–gut connection, read: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31450753/
The facts are clear: **gut health starts in the soil.**
Where do the good bugs come from?
The short answer: the soil. There are more species of microorganisms in soil than inside us.
These good microbes enter plants, then enter us when we eat those plants. They also come from our mothers, from contact with other humans, through our skin, and even from touching soil.
Pro-biotics are the organisms entering our gut. Pre-biotics are the food these organisms need to survive. Plants grown in biologically rich soil are the most effective pre- and pro-biotics — far more beneficial than any pill.
The three key lessons
From traditional agriculture and natural ecosystems, three fundamental rules emerge:
Soils must contain abundant decaying organic matter to feed microbiology.
Microbiology (especially fungi) must break down rocks to release essential minerals.
Soils must remain aerobic, creating conditions where beneficial organisms dominate over harmful ones.
To these we add one modern rule: avoid toxic agricultural chemicals that damage gut biology.
This is the foundation of the Gbiota system.
Technology for human benefit
Our technology is extraordinary — facial recognition can scan thousands of faces in seconds. Yet a microscopic virus brought global systems to a halt. Technology must be used wisely and in harmony with biology.
Modern food systems have contributed to falling life expectancy and rising chronic disease: diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and dementia. We need to redesign technology to work with nature, not against it.
Benefiting us all
The Gbiota system is a powerful technology for improving food quality, health, immune strength, and metabolic control. But technology alone is not enough — it must be widely available and affordable.
Mass advertising will not solve the food crisis. People need authenticity, trust, and a community-based model linking growers and consumers.
The message spreads naturally: **we need beneficial biology in our guts, and we get it by eating food grown in nutrient-rich, biologically active soil.**
Read about how evolution changed our food here
More information: colinaustin@bigpond.com
