The world is complex, and if we are honest, we only have a limited understanding of how we and our bodies really work.
But millions of years of evolution, with a brutal system of natural selection, can tell us what works and what does not. Gbiota has a strong foundation in studying how successful natural ecosystems work, and we know food is crucial to health.
But we need real-world experiments to test our ideas; many will fail right away, others will look successful, but the negatives will reveal themselves later, and a few will stand the test of time.
I’m running experiments continuously, and I think it is in Gbiota members’ interest to hear about my latest tests before the lengthy trial periods needed to grow food are over.
I am using this post to share these latest trials, and members can decide whether to try the latest technology or stick with the tried and proven.
What is new?
I currently have two key trials running: daughter beds and the leaky plug, both with major potential benefits. You can read the underlying theory in air and water and the practical application in daughter boxes
It has been over thirty years since I came up with the idea of Wicking Beds. The original idea was to use weeds’ amazing ability to extract nutrients from poor soil and create a layer beneath the root zone where a nutrient-rich solution would wick up to provide both water and nutrients to the plants.
The snag with this idea is that this nutrient-rich solution needs to be kept moving so it never becomes stagnant.
But the idea of watering the plants from below caught on and led to the widespread adoption of Wicking Beds using a subsurface reservoir of clean water.
But we are now suffering from a food system loaded with energy food, but low in nutrients and, most importantly, the microbes which form part of the intelligent system that regulates our bodies.
This makes supplying our bodies with nutrients and these beneficial microbes even more important, so I have been faced with the problem of how to develop a system, like my original Wicking beds, but solving the problem of avoiding stagnation and ensuring adequate aeration.
I solved that problem but hit a new snag – the concentration of all those nutrients led to the problem of reverse osmosis.
By good luck, the solution to reverse osmosis has led to a much more effective and lower-cost system, as I explain below.
Reverse osmosis.
In my previous articles, I have talked about how we use soil blood to supply nutrients and microbes for the next irrigation.
But if you don’t want your plants to suddenly die, there is an important fact I need to explain.
Plants take up water, nutrients, and microbes from the soil by osmosis, when the stronger solution absorbs fluid from the weaker one.
Normally, the solution in the plant root is stronger than in the soil, so the flow is into the plant, and all is well.
But the soil blood coming from the Gbiota boxes, with an abundance of reprocessed food waste, can be very strong, as we can see by a very dark, almost black colour.
If this soil blood is used directly for the next irrigation, it can be so strong that we get what is called reverse osmosis, where water is sucked out of the roots of the plants, and they die.
This can be very dramatic; one day the plants are growing vigorously in nutrient-rich soil, and the next morning they are all dead.
This may seem a major disadvantage, but we can turn it into a major advantage by creating a system of daughter boxes.
How daughter boxes work
I spend my life experimenting with Gbiota boxes, so it is a dynamic situation, but I will describe my current technique.
We have to think about this as an integrated system of mother boxes –
Gbiota worm boxes
the Gbiota worm boxes, which produce an excess of over-rich soil, soil blood, and beneficial microbes
Daughter boxes
and the daughter boxes, which can be very simple: virtually any convenient, inexpensive box that fully utilises these excess inputs.
The leaky plug
I have been trying a new method I call the leaky plug which is based on the well tried method of leaky dams I have been using in garden beds.
I drill a hole, about 20mm diameter in the side of the box near the bottom.
I partially block the hole with a piece of cloth, not too tight so it blocks the hole so it cannot drain but tight enough to hold in place.
I am trialling this against the well-proven method of swivel tubes I have been using for years to control the flow through the boxes, so they are well tried and tested.
The advantage of the swivel tube is that it gives manual control of the water level. The base of the box is saturated for a period while the water wicks throughout the box.
You set the saturated level by adjusting the swivel tube angle and the time the water remains in the box before draining.
This is fine for people from that fringe group like me who are a bit OCDish about growing their food, but everyone has to eat, and I want to develop a system that almost everybody can use.
My model is the nominally hypothetical single mum (but actually real) I call Mary, with two jobs and three kids, who is rushed off her feet.
She doesn’t have time for all this tech stuff, and the leaky plug may suit her. Just drill a hole in the bottom of the box, plug it with a piece of dishcloth and let the water slowly drip out over time.
These can be very simple, virtually any convenient, inexpensive box.
I spend my life experimenting with Gbiota boxes, so it is a dynamic situation, but I will describe my current technique.
I fill about one-third of the box with organic waste to act as the sponge layer. I fill the rest of the box with soil that has been well-aggregated so it stays porous.
If necessary, eg the soil is too dense, I will mix vermiculite in with the soil.
I partially block the hole with a piece of cloth, not too tight so it blocks the hole so it cannot drain but tight enough to hold in place.
I seed in the normal way.
Irrigation
Before daughter beds, I used to take my black-looking soil blood, dilute it until it was straw-coloured, and measure out enough to saturate the soil; then I watered the plants as usual with a watering can and rose.
Since daughter beds, I have changed my approach.
I use clean water to irrigate the worm beds, letting it flow through the bed to be caught in the drain.
Hopefully this is not too concentrated (shown by the dark rather than straw colour) and can be used directly on the daughter beds.
Since I adopted this full flow-through process, I haven’t had any problems with the soil blood being too strong, but if that ever happens, I would simply dilute it.
Soil
There is a similar issue with concentration in the soil. The centre box, where the worms are feeding on the organic waste, has very rich vermicast, which is too rich to use directly, so I mix it with available soil.
The much-despised clay can make really good soil if you have enough calcium ( I add dolomite and volcanic rock dust) and the microbes to aggregate the soil.
The mechanics of this may sound simple but are important.
When I water the surface, it wets the soil, with a flow front moving down the soil profile.
But soil is never perfectly uniform, and water will find a crack and flow down it without properly wetting the soil.
Eventually, it will reach the base of the box, but the cloth plug will restrict flow, so the base will become saturated.
The water will then, by a combination of wicking, evaporation and condensation, wet out the bulk of the soil.
Over time, the water will leak out from the leaky plug, and as the water leaks out, it will suck in fresh air.
The soil breathes, maintaining a balanced water-to-air ratio essential for breeding the right microbes.
There is a knack to packing the cloth plug just right. It should give a steady drip so the box fully drains.
Previously, I used taps to manually control the flow, but life being what it is, it is easy to forget and let the box stay saturated too long. The leaky plug system solves this human problem.
I am still learning, but it looks as though one Gbiota worm box can support up to 4 daughter boxes.
These daughter boxes can be stacked while the seeds germinate, so you can use more boxes in a restricted space, like a balcony. It looks like a very simple, effective, and inexpensive process.
However, in my experience with innovations, the good sides show up first (note AI), and the bad things show up later, so I am running a trial over time.
The future
Let me give you a picture of what this could mean for all those people who want to be food reformers eating metabolic food but only have a balcony.
They would need at least two Gbiota worm boxes. They need two so they can alternate, giving the worms time to produce Vermicast, which makes such nutritious soil.
This will be used in the daughter boxes, but it will likely be too rich, and we want Goldilock soil.
We take any suitable box for the daughter box; we dont want it too heavy unless your Tarzan so between 20 to 30 litres may be a good size. The depth depends on what plants we intend to grow, fast growing plants like baby Broccoli only need 200mm while hungry plants, like Tomatoes will need nearer 300mm.
We are going to make these into sponge beds which I better explain.
A wicking bed has a water reservoir that contains stationary liquid water. This water needs to be clean and free from nutrients so it does not go putrid.
In Gbiota boxes we want to include nutrients means that the water cannot be left stagnant and must be regularly recycled to incorporate oxygen from fresh air.
We may have dreams of living on acreage and being self-sufficient, but for most, that is just a dream. If it is any consolation, I did just that for many years, and let me tell you, it is really hard work.
Many people have a reasonably sized garden and can grow enough food to build a balanced diet, with careful trips to the Supermarket to buy the energy food we need, plus enough metabolic food to keep us healthy. (See following articles which explain metabolic food.)
But the reality is that most people now live in cities with either a very small garden or an apartment, hopefully with a balcony to enjoy a bit of fresh air, and limited space or time for growing any food.
But these city dwellers need healthy food just as much as people with large gardens in rural areas.
How can these people get the benefits of eating metabolic food while still expecting to live a long, healthy life? And let us add at a reasonable cost in terms of both time and money.
They will need at least two Gbiota worm boxes, but more is better.
In my home with four people, I have six worm boxes, but I am experimenting, so one Gbiota worm box per person may be a good starting point.
Next, we need to rethink food waste. We waste billions of tonnes of food each year, all containing valuable nutrients, most of which can be readily reprocessed back into fresh and healthy food.
We are the last generation that can live off ingredients extracted from synthetic fertilisers, most of which we get by processing oil.
But we can create a sustainable food supply with a three-stage strategy.
First, we can start by reprocessing the enormous quantity of waste food we send to the tip, which contains significant nutrients but ends up as greenhouse gases.
Secondly, we can change our attitudes to weeds. They may be a pain, but that is because they are highly efficient at extracting nutrients from the soil. They can grow in poor soils where our food plants cannot survive.
Instead of poisoning them, we can use them as a nutrient source in our Gbiota worm boxes. We just need to take advantage the natural recyclers – the worms, larvae and beetles who have been providing this service for free for millions of years – for free.
Thirdly, we can take advantage of volcanic rocks. They contain a wide range of nutrients; specifically, they are high in potassium, phosphorus, and magnesium. They contain useful quantities of magnesium, calcium, sodium and sulphur, plus trace amounts of manganese, zinc, copper and boron.
The two that are missing are nitrogen and iodine. We can capture nitrogen naturally from the air using legumes, and we can get iodine from seaweed.
The key point is that if we continue as we are, we will run out of essential nutrients within a generation, but if we change the way we grow our food by recycling and using the natural recyclers the fungi, bacteria, worms, larvae and beetles we will have a food system that is sustainable way into the future.
In the next article, ‘introduction’, I start to look at why our food is unhealthy.
It is fine to diagnose the problem but what matters is finding a solution to these twin problems of unhealthy and unsustainable food production. I explain my solution to these in the series of articles in the Why section in the menu.
Understanding Why Plants Are So Important for Our Health
Estimates suggest there are at least 30,000 edible plants.
Numerous large-scale studies by respected research institutions have shown, beyond any doubt, that people whose diets include a significant amount of plants are generally healthier and live longer.
But these are observational studies. They tell us that eating plants is beneficial, but they do not explain why.
The Importance of Understanding
In my younger years—and I am now 86—I learned a very important lesson: the importance of understanding.
My area of speciality was computational fluid flow. I wrote computer simulations of flow in pipes and could use them to run thousands of tests for next to nothing, allowing me to develop a genuine understanding of how these systems worked.
What I learned created a paradigm shift that changed an industry.
The conventional wisdom at the time was that if you wanted to increase flow, you should use a bigger pipe. It seemed obvious—but it was wrong.
I discovered that there is an optimum size for the pipe: what I called the Goldilocks size. Not too big and not too small—just right.
This created a furore in the industry. Many experts told me I was an idiot for suggesting that using a smaller pipe could improve filling—and yes, it did sound crazy.
Some people may not have believed me, but they were flexible enough in their thinking to say, “Let us conduct a trial and find out whether this idea really works.”
They set up their trials, and sure enough, it worked. The results proved the principle, and the paradigm shift followed.
Why This Became Personal
Let me share some personal information that I would not normally disclose.
My first wife died from a diabetic complication. My second wife, who is a qualified medical doctor and surgeon, also developed diabetes. Her foot turned black, and our medical advisers recommended amputating it.
You will understand that this was extremely traumatic for us both.
I read the scientific studies about plant-based diets, and we changed the way we ate. I am pleased to say that she still has both her feet.
It worked remarkably well, but I had no idea why eating Winter Melon, Broccoli sprouts, Passion fruit and other plants helped save her foot.
I therefore made it my purpose in life to understand why plants can be so beneficial for our health.
I knew the importance of understanding, so I made it my mission to investigate how a plant-based diet could improve health.
What I discovered often defied conventional wisdom and, at first, seemed ridiculous.
The Goldilocks Principle for Plant Nutrition
It seems obvious that we should apply fertilisers to plants so they grow as quickly as possible. How could that possibly be wrong?
But look at what happens when we develop a deeper understanding.
If there is a shortage of nutrients in the soil—like a pipe that is too small—the plants do not grow well.
If plants receive an abundance of nutrients from soluble fertilisers, they may explode in a flurry of growth. Surely that must be good?
But what happens if, instead of relying on expensive and increasingly scarce soluble fertilisers, we apply volcanic rock dust, which is inexpensive and available in enormous quantities?
The plants become short of readily available nutrients, so they respond by releasing some of the sugars produced through photosynthesis from their roots. These sugars attract and feed beneficial soil microbes.
The microbes help break down insoluble rocks, making nutrients bioavailable to the plants.
The plants can still grow well, but there may also be a hidden benefit. Some of these microbes enter the plants. When we eat those plants, the microbes may help enhance our gut biota.
These microbes display what we call crowd intelligence. They may help regulate our bodies so that we naturally want to eat the right amount of the right foods.
This is not about relying on harsh, self-imposed discipline. It is about naturally wanting to eat well.
Nor is it about starving plants or completely satisfying every need. It is about following the Goldilocks principle:
Not too much and not too little—just right.
Can Plant Pests Have a Purpose?
Consider another example: pests.
It seems obvious that pests are bad and should be eliminated at all costs. But is that always true?
Plants are masters of chemistry. They have to be because they cannot run away from predators. Instead, plants produce natural chemical compounds to deter pests.
In the right amounts, some of these compounds can be highly beneficial for our health.
Once again, the principle is not too little and not too much. It is the Goldilocks amount—just right.
Building a Healthier Food System
This is not a small issue. Producing healthy food for everyone is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity.
With climate change, soil degradation and the depletion of conventional fertiliser supplies, we are heading towards a serious food crisis.
If you do not believe me, look at the escalating price of fresh fruit and vegetables.
I cannot change the food system by myself.
That is what the Gbiota Club is all about. It is a place where we can continue developing our understanding of how a plant-based diet works, where people can test and verify these ideas independently of me and, above all, where we can build a social movement to help secure our future food supply.
You may think Gbiota is just about recycling your kitchen waste to grow vegetables and save a bit of money.
And yes, we do that, but it is a pea compared with a whale. It is about what sort of society we, and our grandchildren, want to live in.
So what is metabolic food, and why does it matter?
We can grow food in two ways: aim for maximum production, or produce metabolic food.
Most people aren’t really interested in how food works, but if they are, they will ask me to explain what Metabolic food is, why it matters, and how we grow it.
I will explain that, compared with other animals, we have a very small stomach and an excessively large brain, which takes a lot of energy; with our small stomach, we have little space to store energy, so we need to eat regularly.
How our bodies work
Think of our bodies like a car.
A car needs four things.
It needs fuel for energy. No energy – no go. Just like us.
We all need energy, and we get it from the sun. Right now, humans don’t do photosynthesis; in the future, we may evolve to replace our hair with leaves, but for now we depend on plants, algae, or plankton that can.
Secondly, it needs a structure. This comes initially from the car manufacturer, but later we will need to buy bits and pieces as they wear.
Our bodies are much more complicated than a car, and they have one very clever feature. When bits wear, we don’t have to take it to a garage; our bodies continuously replace body parts as they age and wear, and we don’t even have to think about it or ring up the garage to see if they have the needed parts in stock.
Our bodies regenerate even while we sleep.
Pretty neat, but we do have to feed it the right food to replace the parts; that is a job for metabolic foods.
Third, a car needs a mechanical way to control it: a steering wheel and at least two pedals, one to speed up and the other to slow down.
Our bodies have a similar arrangement, which we often call the gut-brain axis. We see this in our bodies producing both electrical signals, which stop us from touching a hot stove, and chemical signals, hormones, that make us feel hungry so we eat when needed and stop when full.
Fourth, a car needs a driver; even in the age of self-driving cars, they need a person in charge to say where to go.
This driver needs intelligence, even if it’s only to look at the fridge, see you are out of milk, and drive to the supermarket to buy more. The driver needs a learning period, even if it’s just to know we need milk and where the Supermarket is.
Our bodies need the equivalent of this driver that has to learn. Some people say this learning starts before birth, but certainly at birth learning begins, even if it’s only to find mum’s nipple.
And it continues throughout life. Even an older person like me is still learning, even if I need my granddaughter to show me how to use a mobile phone.
Why we need to feed our gut-brain
In our bodies, the equivalent of the driver is our brain, which continuously receives electrical signals from sensors throughout our bodies, processes them, learns from them, and sends signals back to the appropriate recipient.
A particularly important recipient is the intelligent microbes in our gut. When they receive the instruction, they manufacture hormones that make us feel hungry so we eat, and feel satisfied when we have enough food.
It may not seem like a particularly glamorous job, but if our bodies didn’t do it, the human race would have either starved to death because it didn’t know it needed to eat or got so fat that we couldn’t run away from a lion that understood it was hungry and needed to eat.
Energy and Metabolic food
Energy food is chemically very simple: just carbon and hydrogen we get from the air or rain without any difficulty, and it makes up the bulk of our food.
But the human body is actually very complicated, and we need Metabolic food.
It needs many minerals: magnesium, iron, zinc, manganese, selenium, iodine, etc. But we can’t just go and chew on an old wrecked car to get our iron. Apart from breaking our teeth, the iron, or whatever minerals we are interested in, has to be combined with other chemicals, free radicals, to become soluble and bioavailable.
Then we need a whole range of vitamins, maybe in very small quantities but still essential.
Next we need phytonutrients, specialised chemicals produced by plants. A single tomato has over a thousand separate phytonutrients. There are over thirty thousand edible plants. So I can be a boring sort of person, and I haven’t even got to the complicated bit.
We need microbes to form the intelligent control system that regulates our bodies; without them, we would be little more than jellyfish.
If I am going on a bit about phytonutrients, then wait until I get going on the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies. You see, I am an engineer, and I started my first job in 1958, most likely long before you were born, working for a company that made industrial control systems, and these can get pretty nifty.
Self-learning systems
Over time, they can learn how a particular machine works and fine-tune themselves to control complex machines to a fraction of a degree. Engineers have been developing these self-learning control systems for years, long before anyone had even heard the phrase Artificial Intelligence.
The human body is a remarkable self-learning system. Let me give you an example. When you were born, you had no idea how to ride a bicycle, yet not long after turning three, you could be zooming around with an apparent complete understanding of self-correcting gyroscopic forces.But the truth is that at three you have zero understanding of self-balancing gyroscopic forces. Still, your remarkable self-learning, intelligent control system learned by trial and error (yes, you had to fall off a few times) the operating characteristics of your bicycle, which baffles many engineering undergraduates.
But this all depends on you eating the right metabolic food.
Growing metabolic food
My job at Gbiota is to walk you through this complex area so you can grow your own metabolic food without me breaking any records for being the most boring person ever.
So if a few worms don’t put you off, and you don’t mind the other creepy crawlies that turn dirt into soil and grow metabolic food, then why not join the Gbiota club and enter the fascinating world of self-learning intelligent control systems that nature evolved to give us the edge over the jellyfish.
The Gbiota club is not a gardening club; it is a social movement to create a society worth living in, where food is grown for people’s health and sustainability.
Mention sustainability, and you are branded a green woke, but I reply: look at Nauru, which once had the highest income per capita in the world but, when the guano ran out, became one of the poorest. We cannot extract resources ad infinitum; we have to learn how to create a circular economy.
But health is the short-term goal.
So what am I asking you to do?
The world’s food industry is dominated by mega-corporations with immense resources, operating in a neo-monopoly.
Making grotty cardboard placards and marching in the street is pointless; it will have minimal impact.
We need to be smart and use the power of the wallet.
I realised many years ago that we needed technology to grow metabolic food. I was a pioneer of computer-aided engineering and was recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators. I felt it was my role in life to develop technology to grow metabolic food sustainably.
Grow your own metabolic food
You don’t have to grow all your own food; that’s impractical, but it is practical to grow the metabolic food your body needs, which is only a fraction of your total food consumption.
The bulk of the food we eat is energy food, just fuel.
Right now, we have a viable technology that lets virtually anyone, even people living in an apartment, grow their own metabolic food.
That has been my project for the last thirty years.
But technology by itself is useless; it has to be applied, widely used, and proven viable. Then it develops a life of its own and grows naturally.
That is the point of the Gbiota club: have lots of people grow their own metabolic food, showing that food cravings are satisfied and people feel healthier.
They show their friends, and soon the idea that food should be grown purely for profit is replaced by the idea that food is a community benefit and should be grown sustainably.
Then we will have a society that is worth living in.
I am busy reworking this web; it will be in two parts: metabolic food, then how to grow it. In the meantime, you can contact me directly at colin@gbiota.com.
I am updating my website to explain how to grow metabolic food that feeds our metabolism and breeds the microbes that regulate our bodies and control our appetite.
This is for people concerned about their health, even if they live in an apartment and have no experience growing food or with microbiology.
This will take about a month, and during this period, I’ll make the website open access. If you have any questions, contact me directly at colin@gbiota.com. I’m a real person, not an avatar or a mega corporation.
Grow Metabolic food
We need food for energy; it’s fuel made from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and rain from the atmosphere, plus a few essential minerals.The bulk of the food we eat is fuel.
Modern technology has dramatically increased fuel production, and we now have a surplus, with an abundant supply available from Supermarkets.
We also need food to build and replace our body parts as they wear and age. It comes from the minerals, vitamins and phytonutrients in our food.
We also need food that contains microbes that regulate our bodies, along with the nutrients to feed them.
These foods are generally referred to as Metabolic foods, and are only a small proportion of the food we eat but are essential for health.
While the production of energy foods has increased dramatically, the production of metabolic foods has not increased in proportion, meaning our current diet has a surplus of energy foods and a shortage of metabolic foods, leading to a less healthy population.
We do this by breeding beneficial microbes in the soil. These microbes break down minerals in the soil, making them bioavailable to plants. If the soil lacks sufficient minerals, we add volcanic rock dust, which is sustainable and inexpensive.
We control conditions so beneficial microbes outbreed and outcompete harmful microbes.
These microbes enter the plants, and if we eat them fresh, they form part of our gut biome, which regulates our bodies, particularly producing the hormones that regulate our appetite so we want to eat the right amount of the right sort of food.
Dinosaurs v humans
Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 165 million years; we have dominated it for only 4,000 years. No doubt, humanity has a long road ahead; the choice is whether we take the hard way or the easy way.
Look at the facts. When I was born, the global population was about 2.5 billion; now it is over 8 billion, and in just one lifetime. This has never happened before in the history of the world.
When I was born, food was grown the way it had been for thousands of years, – in soil.
Soils vary across the globe; some, like those evolved from volcanic rock are full of a broad spectrum of minerals, other soils are lacking key minerals but it is easy enough to move volcanic rocks to these soils. There are literally mountains of rock that will last us for many years.
But these are insoluble, so they are not available to plants. But a system has evolved. Plants capture energy from the sun and use it to make sugars, which they exude from their roots.
This attracts microbes, which break down the rock and make the nutrients available to the plants. This isn’t some new invention; it started billions of years ago and is how life started on Earth.
And while the human population was small, it worked incredibly well, but we, particularly the kids, died from infectious diseases, so the population remained small.
Then, being smart creatures, we learned about hygiene and medicine and saw spectacular population increases. All those extra mouths had to be fed, so we developed a new way of growing food, combining fertilisers with the development of more productive species.
And it worked: food production increased faster than the population, and we produced enough food to feed the entire world, with some to spare.
True, many people are still starving, but that is because we don’t rank fairness of distribution highly.
But there was a snag. This food contained ample energy and the minerals essential for growing plants. But we need many minerals that plants do not, so there is no incentive for the grower to add these nutrients to the soil, and hence the food.
The result is deficiencies in our modern diet. Deficiencies in minerals, vitamins, and, by far the most important, the microbes that regulate our bodies.
A healthy body senses when nutrients are low and sends out signals for our microbes to produce hormones that make us feel hungry; conversely, when it senses we have the nutrients, it sends out signals to say you are full – stop eating.
An unhealthy body may decide we are short on nutrients, or that we need to store more fat because we can’t absorb nutrients as we age or because of a history of food deprivation, and send signals for our microbes to produce hormones that make us want to eat more.
We aim to restore the balance between metabolic and energy foods, which is needed to improve the community’s health.
We hope to achieve this by creating a social movement focused on community education.
So simple yet so difficult
We know how to grow metabolic food. I have been experimenting with technology to grow metabolic food for over thirty years, and let us not be overly modest. I have been recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators for my pioneering work in Computer-Aided Engineering.
The real challenge is educating the general population so they understand the importance of growing metabolic food.
We hope to achieve this by creating a social movement focused on community education.
That is what the Gbiota club is about; why not join us?
You hear it all the time: life is tough; we have food, health, climate, housing, migration, poverty or some other crisis. We are all doomed unless we do x, y or z.
There is no doubt we need to innovate to survive, but how do we get the right innovation?
Now, I am not a builder, so I cannot help with the housing crisis, but I have been involved in growing food for most of my eighty-six years, so I do know a bit about how to grow food.
Victory gardens
As a toddler, I was used as child labour in one of the great innovations of the time: Victory gardens, which are sadly one of the great forgotten triumphs of innovation and change.
It was crisis time, and sometimes it needs a crisis to sweep away old thinking and allow change to occur. People, almost exclusively women who had no experience in growing food, were given crash courses in growing food and were let loose in groups to dig up any available land where grass was growing, verges, lawns and, Donald Trump, please note, even golf courses.
And it worked, and soon much of the fresh food was being produced by these female land armies.
It was a time of crisis, and people responded, changed how they operated, and were victorious.
Today’s food crisis
We are now in another food crisis. We may not see it, as the shops are full of food, but look at the people in the shops, count the number of people who are overweight, the number with a diabetic amputation; there are actually eight million diabetic amputations a year, and each amputation costs about $40,000.
Multiply 8 million by $40,000, and you get a big number with lots of zeros. Now you and I are paying for this through our Government taxes, and it is due to food. Now tell me there is no food crisis and there is no need for change.
Human beings are highly successful for two reasons: we are intelligent and naturally cooperative. All our great creations happen because we work together as united teams, and no one likes to upset the apple cart by saying we are doing it wrong.
So let me stick my neck out and say our food system is wrong, and we need to change it before we are in an even deeper crisis.
Innovation is a process
Now I have been in the innovation business for a long time and have been recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators. Still, sadly, innovation is seen as some act of extreme brilliance, but it is not. It is a process and a skill that has to be learned, just like playing a violin.
One of the great innovators, Thomas Edison, laid down the rules of innovation over a hundred years ago.
The first stage is to study everything that is known about the topic, then put the books down and define what the problem actually is.
Almost certainly, there are preconceived ideas or paradigms that are widely accepted but wrong.
These old paradigms, or ways of thinking, need to be replaced by new paradigms that work.
Innovation is not about some brilliant idea that comes by magic, but by changing paradigms; the way we think and getting people to change the way they think is the biggest challenge any innovator faces.
The calorie paradigm
Let me give you one example of a paradigm that is firmly entrenched, but it’s just plain wrong.
Virtually every book on diet says people get fat because they eat more calories than they burn. It sounds so obviously true, so how can it be wrong?
It sounds convincing because eating more than we burn is the mechanism that people get fat, but it is not the cause.
The cause is failure of the intelligent control system that regulates our bodies and decides how much fat we should store. It sends signals that make us feel hungry, and then we eat more than we burn.
Are you looking for evidence? Look at the number of people who go on a diet, loose weight then a few months later they are as fat or even fatter than before.
A total failure.
GLP-1 and our intelligent control system
I am not a proponent of GLP-1, but look what happens when you start using it.
GLP-1 is a hormone our bodies naturally produce that stops us from feeling hungry; it is part of the natural, intelligent control system that regulates our bodies.
But take this as a synthetic hormone and people stop feeling hungry and eating and turn into broomsticks.
Our bodies naturally exude GLP-1 for a short time but the synthetic versions are long term.
Why people should want to be broomsticks and whether it is healthy to be a weak and wobbly broomstick is another question.
Still, it shows that people get fat and sick because of instructions from our intelligent control system and not simply because we eat more than we burn.
The innovation business
Innovation is never a pleasant business.
Many people resist change; there is an old saying that science advances one funeral at a time.
Most people are happy to wait and watch, but a few pioneers with vision understand the importance of change and are willing participants.
These pioneers are more than welcome into the Gbiota club because they will help create the change.
But the food industry’s structure is dominated by giant corporations whose financial strength rivals that of a nation, and they operate on the principle of maximising profits for their shareholders.
As you may read in the article on energy and metabolic foods, they have a vested interest in promoting energy food over metabolic food.
The basic inputs for energy food are simple – sunlight, carbon dioxide from the air and rain, which are free or involve minimal management costs.
By contrast, metabolic food is complex and requires skill.
But these giant corporations are not responsible for what economists call externalities. If you need to have a foot amputated, they are not held responsible even though deficiencies in their products were the underlying cause.
Something, apart from the pioneers, would rather not think about.
How to get going
You can read a few articles on metabolic food for free in the header Why metabolic food, then decide whether to join.
If you join, you get access to articles on how to grow metabolic food under the heading growing metabolic food.
I have written hundreds of articles over the last thirty years, which you can access in the library. There are also many videos which you can watch directly from my YouTube channel ‘Gbiota’ or the more relevant ones from the section on videos.
And yes, I may be old but I am real person and always pleased to hear from like minded people so you can always email me.
Our aim is to enable people to enjoy better health and lifestyle by creating a social movement focused on community education.
That is what the Gbiota club is about; why not join us?
I am updating my website to explain how to grow metabolic food that feeds our metabolism and breeds the microbes that regulate our bodies and control our appetite.
This is for people concerned about their health, even if they live in an apartment and have no experience growing food or with microbiology.
This will take about a month, and during this period, I’ll make the website open access. If you have any questions, contact me directly at colin@gbiota.com. I’m a real person, not an avatar or a mega corporation.
Grow Metabolic food
We need food for energy; it’s fuel made from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and rain from the atmosphere, plus a few essential minerals.The bulk of the food we eat is fuel.
Modern technology has dramatically increased fuel production, and we now have a surplus, with an abundant supply available from Supermarkets.
We also need food to build and replace our body parts as they wear and age. It comes from the minerals, vitamins and phytonutrients in our food.
We also need food that contains microbes that regulate our bodies, along with the nutrients to feed them.
These foods are generally referred to as Metabolic foods, and are only a small proportion of the food we eat but are essential for health.
While the production of energy foods has increased dramatically, the production of metabolic foods has not increased in proportion, meaning our current diet has a surplus of energy foods and a shortage of metabolic foods, leading to a less healthy population.
We do this by breeding beneficial microbes in the soil. These microbes break down minerals in the soil, making them bioavailable to plants. If the soil lacks sufficient minerals, we add volcanic rock dust, which is sustainable and inexpensive.
We control conditions so beneficial microbes outbreed and outcompete harmful microbes.
These microbes enter the plants, and if we eat them fresh, they form part of our gut biome, which regulates our bodies, particularly producing the hormones that regulate our appetite so we want to eat the right amount of the right sort of food.
Dinosaurs v humans
Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 165 million years; we have dominated it for only 4,000 years. No doubt, humanity has a long road ahead; the choice is whether we take the hard way or the easy way.
Look at the facts. When I was born, the global population was about 2.5 billion; now it is over 8 billion, and in just one lifetime. This has never happened before in the history of the world.
When I was born, food was grown the way it had been for thousands of years, – in soil.
Soils vary across the globe; some, like those evolved from volcanic rock are full of a broad spectrum of minerals, other soils are lacking key minerals but it is easy enough to move volcanic rocks to these soils. There are literally mountains of rock that will last us for many years.
But these are insoluble, so they are not available to plants. But a system has evolved. Plants capture energy from the sun and use it to make sugars, which they exude from their roots.
This attracts microbes, which break down the rock and make the nutrients available to the plants. This isn’t some new invention; it started billions of years ago and is how life started on Earth.
And while the human population was small, it worked incredibly well, but we, particularly the kids, died from infectious diseases, so the population remained small.
Then, being smart creatures, we learned about hygiene and medicine and saw spectacular population increases. All those extra mouths had to be fed, so we developed a new way of growing food, combining fertilisers with the development of more productive species.
And it worked: food production increased faster than the population, and we produced enough food to feed the entire world, with some to spare.
True, many people are still starving, but that is because we don’t rank fairness of distribution highly.
But there was a snag. This food contained ample energy and the minerals essential for growing plants. But we need many minerals that plants do not, so there is no incentive for the grower to add these nutrients to the soil, and hence the food.
The result is deficiencies in our modern diet. Deficiencies in minerals, vitamins, and, by far the most important, the microbes that regulate our bodies.
A healthy body senses when nutrients are low and sends out signals for our microbes to produce hormones that make us feel hungry; conversely, when it senses we have the nutrients, it sends out signals to say you are full – stop eating.
An unhealthy body may decide we are short on nutrients, or that we need to store more fat because we can’t absorb nutrients as we age or because of a history of food deprivation, and send signals for our microbes to produce hormones that make us want to eat more.
We aim to restore the balance between metabolic and energy foods, which is needed to improve the community’s health.
We hope to achieve this by creating a social movement focused on community education.
So simple yet so difficult
We know how to grow metabolic food. I have been experimenting with technology to grow metabolic food for over thirty years, and let us not be overly modest. I have been recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators for my pioneering work in Computer-Aided Engineering.
The real challenge is educating the general population so they understand the importance of growing metabolic food.
We hope to achieve this by creating a social movement focused on community education.
That is what the Gbiota club is about; why not join us?
You hear it all the time: life is tough; we have food, health, climate, housing, migration, poverty or some other crisis. We are all doomed unless we do x, y or z.
There is no doubt we need to innovate to survive, but how do we get the right innovation?
Now, I am not a builder, so I cannot help with the housing crisis, but I have been involved in growing food for most of my eighty-six years, so I do know a bit about how to grow food.
Victory gardens
As a toddler, I was used as child labour in one of the great innovations of the time: Victory gardens, which are sadly one of the great forgotten triumphs of innovation and change.
It was crisis time, and sometimes it needs a crisis to sweep away old thinking and allow change to occur. People, almost exclusively women who had no experience in growing food, were given crash courses in growing food and were let loose in groups to dig up any available land where grass was growing, verges, lawns and, Donald Trump, please note, even golf courses.
And it worked, and soon much of the fresh food was being produced by these female land armies.
It was a time of crisis, and people responded, changed how they operated, and were victorious.
Today’s food crisis
We are now in another food crisis. We may not see it, as the shops are full of food, but look at the people in the shops, count the number of people who are overweight, the number with a diabetic amputation; there are actually eight million diabetic amputations a year, and each amputation costs about $40,000.
Multiply 8 million by $40,000, and you get a big number with lots of zeros. Now you and I are paying for this through our Government taxes, and it is due to food. Now tell me there is no food crisis and there is no need for change.
Human beings are highly successful for two reasons: we are intelligent and naturally cooperative. All our great creations happen because we work together as united teams, and no one likes to upset the apple cart by saying we are doing it wrong.
So let me stick my neck out and say our food system is wrong, and we need to change it before we are in an even deeper crisis.
Innovation is a process
Now I have been in the innovation business for a long time and have been recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators. Still, sadly, innovation is seen as some act of extreme brilliance, but it is not. It is a process and a skill that has to be learned, just like playing a violin.
One of the great innovators, Thomas Edison, laid down the rules of innovation over a hundred years ago.
The first stage is to study everything that is known about the topic, then put the books down and define what the problem actually is.
Almost certainly, there are preconceived ideas or paradigms that are widely accepted but wrong.
These old paradigms, or ways of thinking, need to be replaced by new paradigms that work.
Innovation is not about some brilliant idea that comes by magic, but by changing paradigms; the way we think and getting people to change the way they think is the biggest challenge any innovator faces.
The calorie paradigm
Let me give you one example of a paradigm that is firmly entrenched, but it’s just plain wrong.
Virtually every book on diet says people get fat because they eat more calories than they burn. It sounds so obviously true, so how can it be wrong?
It sounds convincing because eating more than we burn is the mechanism that people get fat, but it is not the cause.
The cause is failure of the intelligent control system that regulates our bodies and decides how much fat we should store. It sends signals that make us feel hungry, and then we eat more than we burn.
Are you looking for evidence? Look at the number of people who go on a diet, loose weight then a few months later they are as fat or even fatter than before.
A total failure.
GLP-1 and our intelligent control system
I am not a proponent of GLP-1, but look what happens when you start using it.
GLP-1 is a hormone our bodies naturally produce that stops us from feeling hungry; it is part of the natural, intelligent control system that regulates our bodies.
But take this as a synthetic hormone and people stop feeling hungry and eating and turn into broomsticks.
Our bodies naturally exude GLP-1 for a short time but the synthetic versions are long term.
Why people should want to be broomsticks and whether it is healthy to be a weak and wobbly broomstick is another question.
Still, it shows that people get fat and sick because of instructions from our intelligent control system and not simply because we eat more than we burn.
The innovation business
Innovation is never a pleasant business.
Many people resist change; there is an old saying that science advances one funeral at a time.
Most people are happy to wait and watch, but a few pioneers with vision understand the importance of change and are willing participants.
These pioneers are more than welcome into the Gbiota club because they will help create the change.
But the food industry’s structure is dominated by giant corporations whose financial strength rivals that of a nation, and they operate on the principle of maximising profits for their shareholders.
As you may read in the article on energy and metabolic foods, they have a vested interest in promoting energy food over metabolic food.
The basic inputs for energy food are simple – sunlight, carbon dioxide from the air and rain, which are free or involve minimal management costs.
By contrast, metabolic food is complex and requires skill.
But these giant corporations are not responsible for what economists call externalities. If you need to have a foot amputated, they are not held responsible even though deficiencies in their products were the underlying cause.
Something, apart from the pioneers, would rather not think about.
How to get going
You can read a few articles on metabolic food for free in the header Why metabolic food, then decide whether to join.
If you join, you get access to articles on how to grow metabolic food under the heading growing metabolic food.
I have written hundreds of articles over the last thirty years, which you can access in the library. There are also many videos which you can watch directly from my YouTube channel ‘Gbiota’ or the more relevant ones from the section on videos.
And yes, I may be old but I am real person and always pleased to hear from like minded people so you can always email me.
Our aim is to enable people to enjoy better health and lifestyle by creating a social movement focused on community education.
That is what the Gbiota club is about; why not join us?
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Microbes are easy to breed. They are a hardy lot and, within twenty minutes, are hard at it.
Sound good news? The harmful microbes that make us sick, and can even kill us, breed just as fast.
No one wants to be responsible for breeding harmful microbes, so the approach with modern food has been to be as sterile as possible. But we also need beneficial microbes to regulate our bodies; they produce hormones that make us feel hungry or full, so we eat and/or stop when needed.
So the challenge is: how do we breed the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful ones?
We do that by controlling conditions so beneficial microbes outbreed and outcompete harmful ones.
We do this with a system of flood and flush.
Water is attracted to good (hydrophilic) soils, so it does not readily move through the soil. We first need to saturate the soil so it is properly wetted, then let it drain, which is why we need to aggregate the soil so it is porous and drains easily.
As it drains, it sucks fresh air into the soil so it breathes.
But we don’t use pure water, since it has no nutrients; instead, we use what we call soil blood, which is full of nutrients.
The concentration of nutrients in the soil blood is critical. If the soil blood lacks enough nutrients, the plants will not flourish. Plants absorb nutrients through osmosis, when water moves from a weak solution to a strong one.
But if the soil blood is too concentrated, reverse osmosis occurs, pulling water from the plants and causing them to die.
This is how it works.
We catch the soil blood from the previous irrigation. This may be very dark, almost black, which indicates that it is too strong.
We need to dilute it until it is straw-coloured, a deep yellow.
We measure out the water needed for a single irrigation; there must be enough to saturate the soil, with enough left over for drainage. We learn this by experiment, but in a standard Gbiota box it is 5 litres.
We pour this onto the soil surface, typically with watering can with a rose.
This will flood the soil surface so the top layer of soil is totally saturated.
This will slowly soak down through the soil, which will absorb some water. It is like a wave of soil blood that gets progressively smaller as it moves through the soil but is large enough to reach the bottom of the box.
We may like to think our soil is nice and uniform, but in the real world it never is. There is always some channel the water can leak through without properly wetting the soil.
In a large garden bed, we use what we call a leaky dam. It prevents the water from escaping quickly, so the soil gets wetted and then drains slowly, so it drains properly.
We use the same ‘leaky’ principle in the box, but this time we make a hole in the base and plug it with a cloth, letting the soil drain slowly and thoroughly wetting the soil in the process.
This is the soil blood for the next irrigation, as it is full of nutrients, microbes, and soil creatures.
This is a Gbiota box for breeding beneficial microbes. It has 3 zones. The top zone is for growing plants that contain beneficial microbes, which we will eat, and the microbes will enter our gut.
The middle zone is where we breed the microbes.
The bottom zone is used to circulate the soil blood, which we will circulate throughout the box; it does the same job as our blood.
The sump
The sump is where we collect the soil blood. It is water that contains oxygen, nutrients and microbes just like our blood.
We will cycle the soil blood, first to the growing layer to feed the plants, then through the breeding layer to collect the microbes and nutrients.
The box breathes and pulses just like our heart and lungs.
Soil blood
Soil blood can get a bit yukky, so it is a good idea to use a piece of dishcloth to keep the tap from blocking up.
If it does block up, then unscrew and flush it out with clean water.
The breeding layer
The breeding layer is where microbes breed. We will fill it with organic waste, minerals, and nature’s great recyclers, the worms, larvae, beetles and, of course, a dose of microbes to start the breeding process.
The box has holes in the base so the soil blood can rotate through the layers. But the holes will let particles drop through to the sump.
The Wicking bed
Gbiota boxes work on the same principle as Wicking beds.
You can use a piece of towel to stop the worms falling through.
But it is also absorbent, so water will evaporate from the sump and condense on the cloth, where it will wick up to the upper layers.
Once the seeds have germinated, we don’t have to be watering all the time, just a periodic top-up.
The breeding area
All living creatures need energy, which comes from the sun and is captured by photosynthesis by plants, algae, and plankton.
Humans don’t do photosynthesis, so we become part of an ecosystem.
We add organic waste as our energy source to power the breeding. This is where beneficial microbes breed, but we need to control the process so we breed beneficial microbes, not the harmful ones that make us sick or kill us.
Kitchen waste
Kitchen waste is initially labile compost containing microbes we don’t want.
You can put waste straight into the Gbiota boxes, but if you can, it is better to collect the waste over time so you can fill the breeding layer in one go.
Even better is to have two bins (or polythene bags) to start the recycling process.
It will speed the process.
Wickimix
Wickimix obviously contains the initial beneficial microbes but it also contains natures great recyclers, worms larvae and beetles.
But it also contains a broad spectrum of nutrients in the form of volcanic rock.
These are not soluble, so we rely on the microbes, particularly fungi with their enzymes and ultra-fine hyphae, to break them down.
In the natural world, plants exude sugars to attract and feed these beneficial microbes, making these nutrients bioavailable to the plants and, eventually, us.
In our modern food system, we apply synthetic fertilisers to feed the plants.
This is cost-effective but does not attract the beneficial microbes we need for health.
Creatures of the soil
In a natural ecosystem, a complex array of creatures ensures an ongoing supply of beneficial microbes.
It’s no coincidence that we find the same microbes in our gut as in the soil.
It is normal; it is only since we stopped feeding the beneficial microbes in the soil that our gut health has declined and we now have an epidemic of chronic diseases.
Controlled conditions
There is no known way to kill harmful microbes without harming beneficial microbes.
But we can create conditions that favour beneficial microbes, which will then outcompete harmful microbes.
These conditions are food, water and oxygen.
We start by surface-watering the initial seeds until they are established. We may even start seedlings in a separate box.
Or we even buy seedlings from a local grower.
But once the plants are established, we start the flood-and-flush process, which is at the core of the Gbiota process.
We apply enough soil blood (typically 5 litres) to saturate the soil. This expels stale air from the soil.
General guide
As a guide, I typically fill the 700cc bucket on a Gbiota box and irrigate the top surface. This keeps the topsoil moist for germination without making the soil below too wet.
When the seeds have germinated and reached a height of about 20cm (eg have developed a reasonable root system), I switch irrigation and drain the box into a bucket, top up with water to about halfway (about 5 litres), make sure the tap is turned off, then gently and uniformly apply the water to the surface.
This will soak down, and I can check I have not overwatered by looking for any overflow from the bottom (reservoir) layer.
I also check that the middle (breeding) layer has enough organic waste so the middle and upper layers stay in continuous contact.
The box now functions as a Wicking bed with water wicking (or evaporating and condensing) from the reservoir up to the upper surface.
I aim to irrigate with a complete flood and flush, at least once a week, more frequently in peak drying conditions.
After a time, soil blood will thoroughly wet out the soil and drain back into the sump.
As it drains out, it will suck in fresh air into the soil. Oxygen gives beneficial microbes the edge, allowing them to outcompete harmful microbes.
But we wait longer for the plants to use the soil blood. Just before the moisture level drops too low, we recycle the soil blood with a significant (5-litre) irrigation.
To grow metabolic food, we need real soil, water, air and seeds.
What do we mean by ‘real soil’?
You don’t actually need soil to grow plants; you can grow them hydroponically or, more commonly, use soil to hold the plant upright and provide the nutrients it needs with fertilisers, and the plants will grow well. In fact, if you just want to create energy food, it works very well and is highly profitable.
The snag is that we humans are more complex than plants, so we need additional nutrients and vitamins, but more importantly, we need the microbes that live in our gut and are part of the system that regulates our bodies.
We would be very lucky if real soil were readily available without any effort on our part, so we have to make it, or rather grow it, ourselves.
Making soil.
Does that sound highly technical? Well, it’s been happening for billions of years, so a good place to start is studying the natural process of producing soil.
It starts with what is available locally. Volcanic rock dust contains a broad spectrum of minerals, pretty much everything needed to make good soil. Chalk, on the other hand, forms from animal deposits in the sea and is full of calcium, an essential mineral, but it lacks a wide range of nutrients.
In fact, most soils lack some critical minerals.
But this isn’t an issue for us; we have mountains of volcanic rock we can readily add to our local soil.
But volcanic rocks, even when converted to rock dust, are insoluble, but evolution has solved that problem for us.
Plants capture energy from the sun and combine it with carbon from the air to make sugars.
Soil microbes
They exude these sugars from their roots, which attracts and feeds microbes. These microbes, particularly fungi, can break down minerals and make them bioavailable.
But, and this is a big but, these microbes enter the plants and then our gut if we eat the plant fresh. These microbes are part of our control system, which regulates our bodies. They are the driver in my previous car analogy.
We need to eat the plants while fresh because Microbes have a short life. They may appear to be the same microbes, but they are descendants of the original microbes living in a state of neutral equilibrium, with the young replacing the old, like my grandkids will soon replace me.
This is a key component of the Gbiota technology.
Another key component is the balance between water and air.
Goldilocks water
It may seem easy enough to get the right balance between water and air; just add the right amount of water.
But water is a most peculiar substance.
It is a liquid but has tensile strength like steel. People often think water reaches the top of big trees by surface tension, but that force is weak.
It is the tensile strength of water that pulls it to the top of the tree as it evaporates from the leaves.
Surface tension is the force that attracts water to the surface of the soil particles. Even if you apply exactly the right amount of water to the soil, it will not distribute itself uniformly throughout the soil.
We solve that problem by thoroughly wetting all the soil, then letting the excess water drain off, a process we call flood and flush.
This is a second key element of the Gbiota technology.
Aggregates
For this to work properly, we need soil that is porous and has a large grain size. Clay may be full of nutrients, but its particle size is so small that it doesn’t drain properly.
We solve this problem by using microbes in the soil to aggregate it into larger particles.
This is the third key component of the Gbiota technology.
Seeds
Next, we need seeds. Over 300,000 plant species exist, and at least 10% are edible, but we usually eat only a few: wheat, corn, rice, and soy, and, of course, the grass that feeds the animals we eat.
But most of our medicines were originally derived from plants, and numerous herbs and spices are widely used for health and flavour.
In the next article, I show how to make all this happen in the real world.
Sadly, at 86, I can no longer supply any hardware, but I have associates, like Seedmart Australia, that I work with who can supply you directly
If you want to make a significant improvement in something, whether it is an old car or the world, you really need to understand how it works.
It may be quicker, easier and cheaper to use AI to trawl its databases, but real advances come from understanding.
But that understanding can come by serendipity. Let me tell you the story.
For many years I was a natural pig; I loved food and trying the different culinary skills from around the world. As a result, I ended up on the operating table undergoing a triple bypass heart operation at the age of 60.
It is like having a milk crate crushed into your chest, definitely something you don’t want for a hobby, and you don’t have to be an expert in statistical theory to suspect a link between my natural tendency to be a pig and the resultant heart attack.
But even such a starkly obvious correlation is not an understanding of the underlying mechanism, so I have now spent many years of my life trying to understand this mechanism.
I described the approach in my last article on Metabolic food, and statistically it looks like sound evidence: for years I ate like a pig, I suffered a heart attack, changed my diet and twenty-six years later, at the age of 86, I was still fit and healthy.
But I am an engineer; I like experiments with real results that can be measured without the threat that correlation is not causation.
And then the opportunity came along in a rather unpleasant way.
I like most 86-year-old men had a swollen prostate, so I decided to undergo green light therapy in which a laser is used to bore a hole through the bloated prostate – a very common and reliable process.
I was released from hospital with an electronic prescription for antibiotics. I did not think it wise to drive, so the next day I walked to the local chemist, which I do regularly and which takes about 40 minutes each way.
But I was not my normal self, and it took much longer than usual; by the time I returned, I was exhausted.
The next day I was clearly seriously ill, and my family decided this was no time for delay. They rushed me off to the local emergency hospital where I was diagnosed with an infected urinary tube.
I was put on an intravenous antibacterial drip. After a few days, I was allowed home, obviously not in any immediate danger but far from my normal healthy state (for an 86-year-old).
If you have read any of my articles on food and health, you will be aware that a key part of my thinking is that our bodies have an intelligent control system that naturally regulates the body. The gut has crowd intelligence and responds to signals from the subconscious brain to produce a combination of electrical and chemical signals (hormones) that are the final stages in this control system.
This is why we need metabolic food and why we need to learn to grow metabolic food.
This is why we need a paradigm shift in how we think about food; paradigm shifts come from the collective responses of active but small groups of dedicated people, and that is what the Gbiota club is all about.
It may seem that my little health crisis is a bit of a block to this process, but it actually gives me an opportunity to reconstitute my body and document the entire process.
There is no guarantee of the final result, which is why we call it speculative research.
I plan to provide regular documentation of this speculative research to members of the Gbiota club. If you want to be an observer in this project, or, even better, conduct your own metabolic food project then why not join the GBiota club here.
Why is it that ancient older people like me keep on telling young people how to live their lives?
Look at my granddaughters and their skill on mobile phones; their little fingers are a high-speed blur, while I still haven’t worked out how to do a bulk delete of messages, despite watching every video I can find on YouTube.
One by one I have to delete them, the advert from Temu offering half price on pants. I don’t care; I buy my pants from Vinnies at a tenth of list price. OK, bright red pants covered in white spots may not be the height of fashion for an 86-year-old man, but I don’t care; they do the job of stopping people perving on my bare bum.
I will tell you why we try and give benefit of our many years – because we have stuffed up our lives doing stupid things and we want to stop them repeating our goofs.
If you happen to scrape a pass mark in your ancient Egyptian calligraphy exam, there is no point in sulking for the following week – it doesn’t matter a shit.
We are old and have learned the very valuable lesson that life is short, so don’t waste it – enjoy it.
There is Wodhouse’s famous quote: giving up wine, women and song does not make you live longer; it just makes it seem longer.
Now, I run this website to tell people about food, but I am not going to prattle on and on about calories and which plants will lead to a long, healthy life; no, it is about enjoying the special time we have because we only get one go at life.
We may live in our cities of concrete and steel, but we are totally dependent on the Earth’s Ecosystem to survive.
Our energy comes from the sun captured by photosynthesis from the plants, plankton or algae. Our nutrients come from rocks, broken down by fungi, while the system of digestion and natural replacement is powered by the microbes.
But the microbes do more than that, they communicate with each other in our gut, creating natural intelligence which regulates our appetite, how much and where we store fat.
Sustained life is not possible without microbes, yet our modern food system has decimated the natural microbes and led to a worldwide crisis of chronic diseases, yet it is so simple to resolve.
Forget about thinking you can just go and buy a bag of microbes from your local chemist’s shop or online.
Microbes have a short life of around a day. They breed and die rapidly, typically in a day, in a state of dynamic equilibrium.
Of the microbes you think you are buying as probiotics, some may just survive if they are kept cold enough, but the real solution is to breed them yourself.
It is better and cheaper.
No, don’t think you need a Ph D in microbiology to breed microbes, they are a randy lot and breed like crazy with a little help from us. We just need to control the conditions so we breed the beneficial microbes and not the harmful ones that make us sick or even kill us.
This is not some wonder new technology; ancient hunter-gatherer tribes had a healthy gut biome, as do the few remaining hunter-gatherers. Their gut biome has been extensively researched, so we can be sure of that.
True, it can be a delicate process but I have experimented to find the easiest way so virtually anyone can breed their own gut microbes and have the benefit of a healthy gut.
Here’s how.
Containers
The easiest way, particularly if you live in a flat with no garden or growing experience, is to grow the beneficial microbes in containers, or more correctly, container sets.
You will need several to provide the volumes and reliable supply that you need, but let us just start with a single container set.
You will need two containers, which you can buy from any hardware shop.
Eventually, I suggest you buy a number of small containers rather than one big one. Technically, it allows much better control, and in practice, they are heavy.
I use 20-litre containers.
Most containers nest neatly inside each other, but some are designed so they can either stack or nest. Both work fine, but you need them in the nesting position.
You will need to drill a drainage hole, at least 15mm in diameter, in the edge of both containers, but preferably at the opposite end of the boxes, so the water has to flow through the boxes.
The top box
Fill the top box with any good potting mix and seed in the normal way.
The potting mix will not contain the beneficial microbes that you need in your gut biome, but we will come to that later.
Plants exude sugars
Plants use sunlight and carbon from the air to create sugars. They exude some of these sugars to attract and feed the microbes into the root zone.
Plants need these microbes to process the nutrients for the plants.
This is one of life’s greatest synergistic relationships, and without this relationship, you would not be here to read this article. It is the result of a billion years of evolution. Nature may take its time, but it produces incredible results in the end.
Different plants exude different sugars to attract different microbes. Gbiota distributors supply seed kits containing the needed spectrum of species to grow baby greens; the easiest and quickest plants to grow to breed gut microbes.
The bottom box
The bottom box is where most of the breeding action occurs. This is fuelled by organic waste, which you might otherwise throw into the green waste bin, at least if your local council is environmentally sensitive.
Put a piece of dishcloth over the hole so the waste does not fall out and make a mess.
You may need to poke the cloth with your finger from time to time so it does not silt up.
But this organic matter is not waste; it is a highly valuable resource which is part of the process of leading you to a long and healthy life. Pretty valuable!
But you can’t just throw in a load of kitchen scraps; the flies may be happy, but you will not be happy.
You will also need to add an inoculant kit to the bottom box. This contains the starter microbes but also a variety of creatures of the soil, the great recyclers which break down organic waste for the microbes to digest and have guts like us.
It is no coincidence that the microbes in our gut are also found in the soil. Put it simply that is where they came from in the first place.
If you live in Australia you can sign up as a home grower when you will automatically receive a Gbiota inoculation kit in the post. Delivery does have to be arranged as the kit contains living creatures which must be put into the Gbiota box as soon as it is received so they don't die.
You need the aid of the recyclers, that myriad of creatures which recycle waste into something that is valuable.
There are many recyclers, each doing the job they are best suited to.
Worms are at the front of the list, but they don’t have teeth to break down tough waste, but they do have a very active gut biome, which can process their own weight in a day, but they do need the help of the other recyclers.
Soldier fly larvae do a great job here, but they won’t win any beauty competitions.
Beetles (not the musical Beatles, who have a good beat, but no beet) are also a critical member of the team.
But recycling is a team effort with many and varied species involved. Ask any soil micro-biologist and they will talk for hours about the world of recyclers.
But you don’t need to become a soil microbiologist; that is the job of the Gbiota breeders who supply the Gbiota distributors the material to make the kits, which consist of a combination of both the seeds and the inoculant.
All you have to do is buy the kits from your distributor.
Preferential breeding
Labile compost
If you just watered the top box, you would have two boxes: the top box growing plant in the conventional way. They will grow quite happily, but they will not be the beneficial microbes you need.
The bottom box is teaming with what is commonly called labile or young compost, meaning that some microbes will be the beneficial microbes you want, while others will not be properly processed as yet. Labile rhymes with nubile, which implies young
That is why you need two boxes.
Creating the conditions
But now comes the critical part, which is creating the conditions so the beneficial microbes will out compete and out breed any less beneficial microbes.
This may sound tricky, but in practice it is very simple - it is just a question of creating the right balance of air and water.
If the soil is too wet, the harmful microbes will breed; if the soil it too dry, the beneficial microbes won’t breed.
Goldilocks moisture
We need that magical Goldilocks moisture.
If you are one of those sorts of people who like to read long, boring technical articles, such as mine on how water moves through the soil and hydrophilic and hydrophobic soils, then please go ahead - but you don’t have to.
All you have to understand is that most soils love water and will hang on to it in a deep embrace and not let it go. Romantic but a bit of a pain.
So what we have to do is to thoroughly wet the soil until all the soil is saturated, then let the water drain away.
When the water saturates the soil, it will expel all the stale air, and when it drains, it will suck in fresh air.
Flood and flush
That is how we get the Goldilocks moisture, and it is just so simple and is actually less work than dribbling water in every day.
It is so simple. Take the drainage from the bottom box and add enough water to completely flood both the upper and lower boxes.
If you are using 20 litre containers, that may be about 5 litres, but you can easily tell, water needs to drain out of the bottom box and if it does not, then next time use more.
Soil blood
Unless you are wearing exceptionally dark sunglasses, you cannot help but notice that the so-called water is not clear water, but a dark brown.
If you are that sort of person, you may look at this under a microscope, when you will see that it is full of wriggly little creatures. Unless it is a very powerful microscope, you may not see the microbes themselves, but you will see that it is just full of life.
Where there is life, there is microbes, so you can be sure that when you pour this liquid over your plants, they will be covered in microbes.
We call this liquid soil blood because it is doing the same job as our blood - distributing air, water, nutrients, and other essentials around our bodies and among those essentials are the microbes that we need to regulate our bodies.
Does it work
Right now, I can’t tell you that it will extend your health span or life. It should, but now I don’t know for sure, you will have to wait a few more decades until you are really old, when it will be a bit too late.
But you can very quickly tell if it is working, maybe not right now but within a month or so.
You don’t need any complicated piece of scientific equipment to see if your appetite and food cravings are reduced. They should be, but there are some people who suffer from a genetic permutation that makes them continuously hungry, but that is very rare.
The most common cause of excessive hunger or getting fat is the wrong microbes in your gut.
You can also tell if you feel better. But if you want to be a bit more scientific, you can measure your weight or waist dimensions.
Risks and balances
But life is a question of risks and balances.
What are the benefits?
A longer health span and generally feeling better.
What are the costs? Apart from a bit of cost in setting up, the cost of the greens are a lot lower than buying decidedly non-fresh vegetables from the supermarket.
Apart from misreading the instructions and pouring raw sewage directly onto your plants, there is minimal risk from eating fresh home grown vegetables, certainly less risk than much commercially grown fruit and vegetables.
So what is the final conclusion?
In plain Aussie, just give it a go and see what happens.
The wrong fat in the wrong place is at the core of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.
Three out of four people now die from a chronic disease, which is crippling our health system, leading to 8 million people a year suffering from an unnecessary diabetic amputation, and is a direct result of misapplication of modern technology.
There are some who say that modern technology will lead to the extinction of our species. Most people dismiss this as alarmist, green woke talk.
But who is right?
I am in the hot seat. I was a pioneer of Computer Aided Engineering and have been recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators. The company I formed became Australia’s leading exporter of technical software, a multi-million dollar company that changed an industry.
Am I an evil creature leading to the extinction of my species, or can I become a leader to a better society where people not just survive but thrive?
The answer is simple: technology should be developed for the benefit of the community and not for greed or profits.
But what is the technology we need to develop so we thrive?
For the first three billion years, the Earth was a dead rock with no life.
Then microbes appeared, probably from an asteroid.
They broke down the rocks to create soil, plants followed, then life exploded, leading eventually to us.
But not all microbes were beneficial: others were harmful microbes which made us sick or killed us, so only a few people lived to their natural life span.
But humans, ever inventive, developed technologies to combat these harmful microbes.
We initially increased our life span but that plateaued and our health span declined.
Our life span increased dramatically, and all looked good until we realised that we had also decimated the beneficial microbes on which life depends, and our health span, how long we remained fit and healthy, was dropping dramatically with an epidemic of chronic diseases - overweight, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, cancer and dementia.
We were slow to appreciate that the beneficial microbes did more than transform rock, recycled organic waste and digested our food. The microbes in our gut communicated with each other to create genuine intelligence, which formed part of the intelligent control system which regulated our bodies, particularly our appetite and where and how much fat we stored.
The wrong fat in the wrong place is at the core of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.
The answer is obvious: we need the technology of breeding the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful microbes. It had to be simple and inexpensive, so everyone could benefit from it and not limited to the laboratory.
So that is why I developed the Gbiota technology, so we can not just survive but thrive.
Interested? Join the Gbiota movement. Start here and sign up for our Newsletter, then act.
If I am honest, you will probably find my website overwhelming and at first confusing, with over 300 articles and videos.
Solving the world’s greatest health crisis is not trivial and requires a change in thinking from focusing on bio-chemistry to thinking about homeostasis and understanding the basics of control theory, which is an engineering rather than a medical technology.
But don’t give up, we are not some mega corporation focused on profits, but real people trying to save the people from the obsession with power and money.
When you are ready to take action to start growing your own beneficial gut microbes just drop us an email telling us a bit about your situation and we will direct you in the best way that suits your needs.
The theory may seem overwhelming but anyone can grow plants in living soil. People have been doing it for ages before our obsession with profits.
There is a saying that bad things happen when good men stand by and do nothing.
Right now, bad things are happening, so we need good men (and women) to act. I will tell you how later.
The state of the world
But for now, just look at the state of the world. Decent, ordinary people, women and children, are being slaughtered in bulk with the aid of modern arms.
Bad, but things get even badder.
Mis and dis information are destroying the structure and confidence in our society.
Bad, but things get even badder.
Refugees across the globe are escaping from their native countries, looking for security, damaging both the countries they leave and try to migrate to.
Bad, but things get even badder.
People need a home where they feel safe and secure. We know how to build homes, but our political system blocks our ability to build at scale.
Bad, but things get even badder.
We all need to eat food that leads to a long and health life, yet we have a food system full of sugars, fats and salt but deficient in essential microbes and trace minerals and which makes us fat and sick and creating the modern epidemic of chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, cancer and dementia.
The scale is overwhelming, three out of four people die from a chronic disease, diabetes is the fastest growing of all diseases with eight million people a year suffering from a limb amputation.
It is true there have been remarkable improvements in diabetic drugs but the first approach should be to avoid becoming diabetic is the first place.
This is not expensive, it actually costs less than buying highly processed food.
The emphasis should be on prevention using simple and inexpensive technology that works rather than complex technologies, that at best, reduce the damage when disease becomes established.
Sadly, there is little reward for prevention while cure is highly profitable.
Microbes - essential for life
But worst of all, it is destroying our ability to produce the critical components needed to grow our food, such as the right amount of water and nutrients, but in particular, the microbes which recycle nutrients and also live in our gut and control our bodies.
We know how important these microbes are. For three billion years, there were no microbes and no life on Earth. Then, a billion years ago, microbes appeared, leading to the proliferation of life and eventually us.
Life cannot exist without these microbes. But there are beneficial microbes that are essential for a healthy life, and those that make us sick or kill us.
We have proved very effective at killing microbes, but we need the technology of breeding beneficial microbes, without breeding harmful microbes.
That is where the Gbiota technology comes in.
Capability profiles
Everyone has their own capability profile; some people are good at many things, while others are very good at some things and pretty useless at many others.
I fit into the second category. I am a natural innovator, I have been recognised as one of the top leading innovators by the Institute of Engineers, but I am pretty useless at many other things, including marketing.
Breeding beneficial microbes
I set myself the task of creating the technology of breeding beneficial microbes by recycling organic waste, but without breeding the harmful microbes.
A critical technology, but useless if not widely applied, which means bringing a new technology to market.
Technology, useless without wide adoption
I, like many people, am suspicious of the honesty of many marketing companies, but after much frustration, I found a marketing company that clearly understood ethics and the need for food that keeps people healthy.
Gbiota - a social benefit organisation
Gbiota is a social benefit organisation, our prime focus is to benefit the community by ensuring a healthy food system, but like any organisation, we need to generate money to pay the bills.
I therefore asked Mediamortar and their associate company, Explanate, to prepare a report on how we could best make this technology widely available.
In the spirit of openness, which is part of being a community benefit organisation, I have decided to make this report available to those interested in participating in the social benefit project.
You can read it here.
At the start I said I would tell you what I am asking. In this era of mis and dis information and marketing hype, people naturally distrust anything they are told, particularly if it is on their screen.
But people do believe what they hear from a trusted friend, so I am asking people to try the system and eat food produced using the Gbiota system, see for themselves that it actually works and then tell their friends.
Why are some people fat and others skinny?
Do fat people live longer than skinny people?
Does it matter anyway or should we just enjoy life?
Can we do anything about it?
I can’t answer all these questions, all I can do is give you the facts as I understand them.
We need to store some fat, that is what our bums are for, and it is healthy to store some fat in our bums.
But the wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases.
For the individual, this means a shorter life span and, probably more important, a much shorter health span.
Globally, this is the world’s biggest health cost to our health system.
I think these matters and is why I run this website. There is a lot of information here, but this is the essence.
For a long time, we were told that people got fat because they consumed more calories than they burned. This is not the reason why we get fat. It is true that to get fat we do have to consume more calories than we burn, but it is not the reason why we get fat.
We get fat because we have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies.
If we consume more calories than we consume, then our intelligent control system is perfectly capable of disposing of the excess in our pooh.
If it decides there are deficiencies in our diet it will generate hormones which will make us crave food that will overcome that deficiency.
If it decides that there are no deficiencies, it will create other hormones that say you are full, stop eating. We can override those hormones, but that is our decision.
Modern biochemistry has advanced rapidly in the last few years, so we understand all the complex chemicals we need and, on average, how much of each we need. We have the tests to reveal any deficiencies and can readily buy supplements to correct those deficiencies
But, our intelligent control system is continuously monitoring our bodies, can detect any deficiency and learns (or more precisely, we can train it to learn) which foods will correct for that deficiency.
But our intelligent control system does this far more effectively.
But, and this is the crux of the matter, for our intelligent control system to work effectively, we need
1) The right microbes in our gut, which is an integral part of our intelligent control system. This is easily fixed by eating the right food
2) We need to regularly feed our gut microbes so the beneficial microbes prevail
3) We need to train our intelligent control system, which we do by eating the right food from the minute we are born and onwards
All simple and inexpensive. You just have to take your health into your own hands and do it.
Here we show you how.
Obvious - but wrong
We are told that if we want to live a long and healthy life and avoid the dangers of the modern epidemic of chronic disease, we should eat less and exercise more, but it does not seem to work. People who go on strict diets seem to end up fatter, while people who eat what they fancy seem to be perfectly healthy.
What is going on?
The calorie balance theory says that if we eat more calories than we burn that we will get fat. It sounds so simple and obvious - how can it possibly be wrong?
It may be true of a water tank, if you put more water in than what you take out, the tank will eventually overflow, the equivalent of getting fat.
But we are much smarter than a dumb water tank. We have a highly sophisticated control system that regulates our bodies.
It is not just one organ but a collection of our gut, which has
- microbes which communicate with each other to form intelligence,
- our subconscious head brain, which learns that a slice of cheesecake will lead to a rush of dopamine in our bodies, which makes us feel good,
- our conscious brain, which decides whether to stretch out our arms and scoff the cheesecake,
- a complex array of sensors throughout our bodies
- a communication system of hormones, manufactured by our gut brain and an electric communication system.
See, quite an upmarket system.
If it decides that we need to store fat, for example, if we have been deprived of food for any length of time, as in a war or from an extreme diet, it sends signals to our gut to manufacture hormones to make us crave food.
We get fat because our intelligent control system decides that we need to store more fat not because we are little piggies and stuff ourselves.
If we want to avoid getting fat and avoid becoming yet another statistic in the chronic disease epidemic we have to do three things.
- make sure we have a healthy gut with the right species of microbes
- train our subconscious head brain so it knows what foods work for us
- make sure we eat enough of the right sort of foods so there are no deficiencies
Although it may seem obvious that the solution to getting fat and avoiding chronic diseases is to eat less that is just wrong.
We need to eat more, but not just more sugary fatty foods but foods which will ensure that our intelligent control system recognises that we have all the nutrients that we need when it sends out signals to out gut saying “body full - send out hormones to stop eating”.
Our intelligent control system is the result of a million years of evolution and is smart. Treat it nice and it will look after you and tell you what foods to eat - so simple - so effective.
Don't look after your intelligent control system and life will be short and miserable.
Change your gut microbes
Gbiota aims to help people change their gut microbes so they can expect to lead a long and healthy life and less at risk from the modern epidemic of chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
While genetics plays a small part, the microbes in our gut dominate whether we expect to live a long and healthy life or be fat and part of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.
We have known for a long time that it is simple to change the microbes in mice - they eat each other's pooh. We can make fat mice skinny or skinny mice fat.
We can change the microbes in humans but it is more difficult. We need to eat food which both contains the beneficial microbes and the nutrients that feeds the beneficial microbes so they continue to breed in our gut.
Breeding beneficial microbes is easy, they breed like crazy starting within twenty minutes of being created, but there are two problems we need to overcome.
The first problem is that we have to breed the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful microbes which make us sick. We do this by carefully controlling the conditions so they favour the beneficial microbes so they out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.
The second problem is that while microbes breed very rapidly, they live in a state of what we call dynamic equilibrium. The microbes appear to be the same but they are the children or grandchildren of the original microbes.
They breed and die equally rapidly, so you need eat plants containing the beneficial microbes shortly after harvesting.
That means you have to grow the plants yourself and pick and eat.
I am sorry about that but that is just the way of the world.
We solve both of these problems with the Gbiota bio-boxes which control the conditions to favour the beneficial microbes and make it easy for people to grow the plants themselves, even if they have no garden or growing experience.
We can’t do it for you, you have to do it yourself. It is your body and you make the choice.
What we can do is show you how to do it and supply living starter soil in which the beneficial microbes are already breeding.
Our intelligent control system
We all want to live a long and healthy life.
Our health depends on the intelligent control system that regulates our bodies, and the microbes in our gut are a critical part of this system.
But they are not us, we have a synergistic relationship with them. They keep us alive, and we keep them alive.
If we get fat, it is not simply because we eat too much. Our gut microbes, rightly or wrongly, decide that we need to store more fat and create hormones which make us crave food, so we overeat and get fat.
The wrong fat in the wrong place is the cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases, obesity, heart attacks, diabetes and dementia, so I suggest that you read the following story about the history of gut microbes.
No microbes - no life
For the first three billion years on Earth, there was no life and no microbes.
Just a dead rock whizzing around the sun.
No microbes - no life. Pretty simple.
Microbes appeared
Then, a billion years ago, microbes appeared, maybe from an asteroid, and life exploded.
The microbes broke down the rocks to produce soil, plants grew in the soil, then animals ate the plants, and other animals ate the animals that ate the plants.
Microbes breed incredibly fast, and the children of microbes are not identical to their parents, so soon there were hundreds of thousands of different species of microbes.
We still have only a limited understanding of this multitude of microbes, but we do know, for sure, that there are beneficial microbes - the good bugs, which lead to a healthy life and harmful microbes - the bad bugs, which make us sick.
Humans arrive
Humanoid creatures evolved some million years ago. There were very few of them, so they lived in isolated communities, so the harmful microbes which make us sick, or kill us, were not too much of a problem.
Agriculture
Then we developed agriculture, which gave us a secure source of food, so we developed cities with people living in close proximity.
These created good conditions for the harmful microbes to breed, so disease and plagues were a major issue.
Modern technology
But humans are inventive creatures, pioneers like Janssen and Leeuwenhoek developed the compound microscope, leading to Louis Pasteur's understanding of microbes and how they can make us sick.
This understanding led to a wave of technology to reduce infectious diseases being developed. Some were clearly beneficial. Who can debate the benefits of clean drinking water, louse-free bedding, sewage systems, antibiotics, etc.
But as happens so often with technology, the benefits are immediately obvious, but the negatives appear later. I very much doubt that when Stevenson took that ride on the first commercial train, the rocket, he was too much concerned about climate change.
Similarly, our modern food system with its highly productive use of synthetic fertilisers and convenient, highly processed leading to supermarkets full of tasty food loaded with energy may seem a wonder.
The unexpected result is a degradation of the microbial distribution in our guts.
Microbes matter
Microbes play a critical role.
They breed in the soil and break down the rocks to make the nutrients bio-available for the plants that we eat.
Some microbes enter our gut, where they continue to breed. They communicate with each other to create real intelligence, our gut-brain, which regulates our appetite.
Working with our head brain, they learn which foods are beneficial and supply critical nutrients.
If we are deficient in these nutrients, the gut-brain will create hormones so we crave the food that supplies those nutrients and if we are satisfied, it will create hormones so we feel full and satisfied and stop eating.
In ages past, we had no idea about microbes. By random chance, some of the food we ate would contain the nutrients and beneficial microbes, but harmful microbes bred profusely so most people died before reaching their natural life span.
But we learned about the harmful microbes and changed the conditions, improved the way we grew our food, better hygiene with sewage and clean water systems and increased our life span.
But we had not only killed off the harmful microbes but had killed off the beneficial microbes which regulate our bodies. We lowered our gut’s ability to regulate our bodies.
Our intelligent control system recognised the deficiencies and sent out hormones for us to eat more. We accumulate excess fat and as the wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of chronic or non-infectious diseases, we created the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.
We now need to enter a third stage where we learn to control the conditions so the beneficial microbes out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.
This is what Gbiota does, we show people how to control the conditions in both the soil and in the food we eat so the beneficial microbes triumph.
Learning how to do this has been a long and expensive road. But we are a community benefit company, our aim is to benefit the community, not to make unjustified profits at the expense of the community.
Neither are we a charity so we need to cover our costs. Much of the information we supply is free for anyone with an interest to study how food works in our bodies, but we do charge for the more detailed information on how to control the conditions.
If interested you can read about Community benefit companies in the article ‘Changing the system’.
I may be a woke greenie concerned about the communities well being, but I read a lot.
One morning I was having my after breakfast read, this time “I’m So effing hungry” by Dr. Amy Shah when I was hit by a bomb shell if you are a pessimist or a light bulb moment if your are an optimist.
You see, for years I have been working on the problem of chronic disease, or more specifically, why eight million people a year have a limb chopped off from diabetes.
I thought I had the solution pretty much sorted out from a technical viewpoint, which is my skill set, but I was failing miserably to get the message out to the wider public. I understood that I may have a good technical record, after all, I was selected as one of Australia’s leading innovators, but I was no marketing guru.
Yet here I was reading a book that said pretty much what I had been trying to get out to the public. So I decided to ask my friend, Dr. Google, how successful Amy was in getting the message out.
And what did I find out, she was a rip-roaring success with millions of followers, she was a fully qualified medical doctor, but unlike most doctors, she started by studying nutrition, which is a cornerstone in combating chronic disease.
Yet despite her success, when I go to my local shopping centre, what do I see? I see a sea of wobbly bums and tums.
There is something going on there I need to understand.
Now I admit to being a dull, boring engineer, and engineers have a role in life to study the best available science and work out how to apply it for the benefit of the community and maybe make enough money to keep on doing our job.
But we have one phrase we keep on asking, we may study all the leading science and work out how to apply it but then we ask a simple question “Does it work”.
The theory may seem unimpeachable, but when it comes to practice, there is always the fear of that hidden snag.
One of my favourite sayings is that
“Science is the art of managing truth, engineering is the art of managing ignorance”.
There is something here that we are missing, and I had to find out what.
The story I have been telling
We all want to live a long and healthy life.
No one wants to be fat, have a limb chopped off from diabetes, die of a heart attack or inflict the suffering on our carers.
These are the costs of the modern epidemic of chronic disease which is by far the biggest health problem across the modern world.
Naturally, it has received a massive amount of research, and it was very quickly understood that they were caused by the wrong fact in the wrong place.
Initially, scientist and indeed much of the population dismissed this as people eating too much and the slogan “eat less, exercise more” was promoted.
It totally failed and has largely been abandoned, apart from that handful who cling to outdated ideas.
But there are plenty of open-minded scientist who studied and experimented until they had a clear, and now well accepted view, that we have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies
Our gut is an integral part of this intelligent control system with individual microbes in the gut communicating with each other and our head brain.
If this intelligent control system decided that we needed to store more fat the gut would produce hormones which would control our appetite, telling us to stop eating if we were full or crave specific food if our bodies need certain nutrients.
The spectrum of species of microbes in our gut played a critical part in this decision. Basically there are gut bugs that make us fat and other gut bugs that make us skinny.
This was first demonstrated in mice by feeding the pooh of skinny mice to fat mice when they became skinny and vice versa.
Later this was demonstrated beyond doubt on humans by the faecal transplant. Graphically if you poked the pooh of a skinny person up the bum of a fat person they would become skinny and vice versa.
There is no doubt that the science is correct - the species of microbes in your gut determines whether you are fat or skinny.
This has led to a multi billion dollar industry of pre and pro biotics, which as anyone can see by a visit to their local shopping centre and viewing the array of wobbly bums and tums has failed miserably.
So what went wrong
We need to understand three concepts.
The first concept is dynamic equilibrium. The gut bugs we have today are not the same as the ones we have tomorrow. Microbes have a very short life span so they are continuously breeding and dying so tomorrow microbes are the sons and daughters of today’s microbes. They may be similar but are not identical to today’s microbes.
Our gut microbes are slowly but steadily changing.
The second concept was given to us by Richard Dawkins in his selfish gene story. A gene in a living creature will struggle to preserve its nature. It may die along with the animal it lives in but the gene will fight to keep the gene family intact.
The third concept is that the food we eat contains microbes.
Microbes breed in the soil. If the conditions favour microbes beneficial to us they will be the dominant species of microbes, they will enter the plants, if we eat them fresh, just after picking we will benefit from these microbes.
If we eat them later we will be eating different species of microbes, the longer we wait the less beneficial they will be.
If the conditions in the soil do not favour beneficial microbes we will be eating plants containing harmful microbes.
If we do not eat plants with beneficial microbes and eat highly processed foods we will not be gaining the benefits of the beneficial microbes, but some other microbes.
Microbes breed incredibly fast and will breed until they fill all available space. In our everyday world, there is no such thing as microbe free, it is just a question of whether we eat beneficial, harmful or neutral microbes.
The microbes we have in our gut are the result of an ongoing battle for space between the various species of microbes. Who wins is dominated by the food we eat.
What does this all mean in the real world?
It means that the microbes in our gut are dominated by the food we eat. We can eat all the pro-biotics we like or have all the faecal transplants that we can bear but ultimately the species of microbes will be dominated by the food we eat at every meal.
What is Gbiota all about?
Showing people how to grow and eat the food that will lead to a beneficial gut biota.
How do you get started? First job is to sign up for a free Newsletter and check for new posts so you become part of the world of ever-changing gut microbes.
We all want to live a long and healthy life, free of disease. That depends very much on the food we eat.
Energy food
We need food for energy. Our modern food system provides us with abundant energy food.
Replacement food
We need to build and replace our body parts as they age and wear. This requires many complex chemicals, which need a broad spectrum of nutrients and vitamins. Our modern food system barely scrapes a pass here.
Gut-brain food
We need food to feed and replenish the microbes in our gut. Our modern system fails completely here.
Our guts do much more than digest our food. The individual microbes communicate with each other to create intelligence, which regulates our bodies, particularly our appetite.
Having a system with an abundant supply of energy but no control system is like having a high-performance car with a drunk at the wheel - a formula for disaster.
The modern epidemic of chronic disease
And disaster we get in abundance with the modern epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases.
Three out of four people now die young from a non-infectious disease, and over half the population is overweight or obese.
Diabetes is the most rapidly growing disease, with over eight million people a year suffering from a diabetic amputation.
Heart disease is the most common cause of death.
Dementia must be one of the cruellest diseases for the carers.
The root cause is the failure of our control system, which regulates our bodies and leads to the accumulation of the wrong fat in the wrong place.
Where to point the finger
Don’t point the finger at people who overeat, point the finger at the food system which fails to feed and replenish out gut-brain which regulates our appetite.
Glaringly obvious
The solution to not feeding your gut-brain is so glaringly obvious that people seem to have problems believing the solution - feed your gut-brain.
Thousands of people are already doing precisely this, and it is so simple that most people don’t even know they are doing it.
Beneficial microbes breed in the soil, as long as we don’t kill them with toxic chemicals.
The microbes enter the plants. If we eat the plants while they are fresh, microbes have a very short life, we receive a fresh supply of beneficial microbes and if we feed them with fibre which comes naturally from the plants, they will continue to breed inside us, so we can look forward to a long and healthy life.
I can hardly believe that I have to spend my time writing this when it is all so obvious and easy to resolve, so I have to ask myself why?
The answer lies in the way communities work.
Self sufficiency
The was a time in my life, when I was a lot younger, that I thought I would become self-sufficient in food.
Yes, it may appear possible to be self-sufficient, grow potatoes, cabbages and grains, and keep a few chickens. A lot of hard boring work, but not really self-sufficient.
You need a spade, and for that you need a steel works and that needs an iron ore mine. Total self sufficiency is a myth we all depend on a community.
Humans are the dominant creature on Earth because we are both intelligent and naturally cooperative - we just have a bit of a problem in organising our naturally cooperative spirit.
The invention of companies
One of the great, yet widely unrecognised human innovations is the development of companies, a legally recognised entity which can be treated at law as a separate entity from the humans that create and run the companies.
But what about the rules, formal and informal which regulate how a company operates? There are the formal rules set by Government and enforced by law and the informal rules set by the society and the power of the wallet.
In Law, the companies have an obligation to protect the interests of the shareholders but for a period there was an understanding that companies also had obligations to the employees and the community at large.
Later it was also recognised that companies also had an obligation to protect the natural resources and environment on which we all depend.
This may have worked for a period when there was a multitude of competing companies in close contact with their customers and communities and subject to the power of the wallet, but that all changed with the rise of the multi-national megacorporations and neo-monopolies.
The rise of the Mega food corporations
The food industry is not the only industry where multi-national mega corporations have developed but they certainly are the industry which has had the most impact on the well-being of the community.
They have reverted back to the minimum legal requirements that their role is maximum profits for their shareholders, and with stock options being the norm that has meant the top layer of management.
Their social obligations have been discarded in the name of profit.
Their monopolistic power has increased by a combination of the effectiveness of Neo-monopolies to avoid the wrath of Governments together with the monopoly power of technology and manipulative marketing.
The health bar
Take the example of the so-called Health Bar. There is nothing healthy about it at all. It is full of fats, sugars and salts carefully blended to create the bliss point which is bad enough but worse is the incorporation of highly addictive artificial flavouring.
Is it no wonder that we have a health crisis resulting from overeating.
Hot under the collar
There are many people getting hot under the collar about the gross injustices I am just talking about but that does no good. A few critical words on my website are not going to have any effect whatever on these mega-corporations.
So what can I do that will make the world a better place to live in for me and my great grand kids? Create a social movement. This has three components.
The action plan
The first step was to create a legal entity Cohort International Pty Ltd which acts as a social benefit organisation.
It is not a charity, it operates as a regular company that pays its way, but our aim is not to prioritise the share-holders but to provide benefits to both the community and the environment on which we all ultimately depend
This is the legal entity behind the Gbiota movement which aims to provide the social benefit of people all people having access to food that will keep them healthy.
The second step was to develop a technology which would enhance and feed their people's guts which controls their appetite.
I have had the good fortune to have an innovative mind, which led me to become a pioneer of Computer Aided Engineering and a recognised world expert in computational fluid flow which has proved invaluable in understanding how water and nutrients move through the soil.
The third step was to make this information widely available which I try and do on my website gbiota.com.
I have a firm believe that technology should be for the benefit of the community. But not everyone has the time or inclination to become technical experts so I have to consider the most effective way of making this technology available as widely as possible.
My inoculation kits are an example. Breeding from scratch the beneficial microbes that form the intelligent control system in our gut is not something that many people would consider but the inoculation kits enable virtually everyone to breed beneficial microbes at home.
Life is good, we are living longer and the supermarkets are full of healthy food.
Sounds great but is it true?
My daughter, when she was about seven taught me a valuable lesson. She said she believed in Father Christmas because if she stopped believing she may not get any presents.
But the other kids around her told her that Father Christmas was not real and it was mum and dad that bought the presents so she stopped believing.
But I realised that this applied to the bulk of the population. People tend to believe what is convenient to believe and what other people believe.
I am an innovator, my job is to identify problems and find solutions and there is a very real problem with our food.
We may be very proud of our technical achievements but the human body, the result of millions of years of evolution is incredibly sophisticated. It has formed a relationship with the microbes in our gut that digest our food.
These microbes monitor the types and amount of food in our bodies and if they sense a deficiency they will send out a complex family of hormones to make us crave the foods we need. Every time we eat it learns about that food and that information is stored in our head-brain ready for use when needed.
If it senses that we have all the foods that we need it will send out other hormones to say stop eating.
This is truly a remarkable system.
But we need to feed, train and replenish our gut microbes - something we have done naturally by eating plants that have grown in soil full of living creatures with beneficial microbes living in their guts.
This has been happening for millions of years but then we changed our food system so we stopped feeding and nurturing our gut microbes. The result was that it no longer sent out those essential hormones so we overeat and get fat and sick.
This is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
This is well understood by scientists working for drug companies who have developed synthetic hormones to stop food cravings. They do work, at least for a period until our smart bodies learn about these hormones so they are no longer effective.
But my job as an innovator is to find an effective solution and that is what I have done by creating a system where people can breed the beneficial microbes that create the natural hormones, at home, even if they live in a flat with no garden.
But as is common, developing the technical solution is the easy bit of innovation, the difficult bit is getting people to adopt the solution and that is where the lessons from my seven year old daughter come in.
It is no good running some monster advertising campaign to try to convince everyone. For a start the bulk of the people don’t want to admit there is a problem and even if they do they don’t want to feel out of place with their daily contacts.
That does not work - it has to be taken in steps.
There are always a few people who are willing to admit there is a problem and be pioneers in adopting a new solution.
But here comes another problem. The epidemic of chronic diseases is a huge problem causing much misery to the sufferers and costs to the health system.
It is natural to think that such a difficult problem requires a highly sophisticated solution like synthetic hormones which is undoubtedly a sophisticated solution.
By contrast, the solution of people breeding beneficial microbes, that create hormones naturally, at home is just so simple and low cost.
It is unbelievable to most people that such a simple low-cost solution could possibly be effective - so they don’t believe it.
How do we solve that problem? Not by more and yet more scientific studies and reports, that do not convince people.
What will work is finding those entrepreneurial pioneers and supporting them to use the system for themselves. Even these pioneers may not be convinced by scientific arguments but if they try it for themselves and it works for them they will form the nucleus that leads to societal change. I have written many articles on creating paradigm shifts, the latest is Innovation is a Funny Business which you can sign up to read for free along with many other articles.
And if you see yourself as one of those pioneering spirits willing to change the society they live in for the better then email me here.
Warning
Bertha Benz ride through the German countryside may not have seemed particularly significant at the time - but look what happened.
A few pots breeding beneficial microbes may not seem particularly significant now but the global population needs a gut-brain food industry if we are to be healthy.
Failures in the development stage are part of life. When it comes to the early stage of adoption failures could kill any hopes of developing a viable industry.
Success is in the hands of a few visionary pioneers - we must get this right hence the need for an effective support structure.
Our gut-brain is highly sophisticated - evolved over millions of years to keep us alive and healthy for as long as possible.
All we have to do is to feed and train our gut-gut brain. It will then do its job with no further effort from us.
It monitors our bodies, sensing what sort of food we may need or whether we are full. It sends out a complex array of hormones so we want to eat the food we need or to stop eating.
The microbes start life in the soil, or more precisely in the gut of the creatures of the soil, enter the plants that we eat and then our gut.
These microbes have a very short life, living and dying in dynamic equilibrium. This means the plants must be eaten shortly after harvesting.
In our modern chemical industrial food system, there are few microbes in the soil and they will have all died by the time we eat the plants the microbes will have died.
This is the underlying reason for the modern epidemic of chronic diseases obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
This is easily resolved, even if you live in an apartment by growing plants in a basket with special soil. It is effective and literally dirt cheap.
Our job is to show you how.
Breeding beneficial microbes in the soil is a natural process which which has been going on for millions of years. However breeding the microbes at home in organic waste depends on the flood and flush system so the soil breathes and the soil blood never becomes stagnant. This needs to be done correctly so we restrict access to members registered with a valid email address who will receive regular newsletters.
We offer technical support by email and video conference so you can do it right.
You can start by signing up for our weekly Newsletter and reading the many articles on our website. This is free - just register. Later you can upgrade to become a consumer, buying the boxes from our licensed grower, or if you feel you have the gardening skills and space a home grower or a licensed grower running a profitable community company benefiting your local community.
Colin Austin 27 March 2025. Published under the Creative Commons System, This may be reproduced without further permission, just acknowledgement of source.
Food and health
Let us look at the story of food and health.
In the past, and that means going back a million years to the first humanoids there was no epidemic of chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart attack and dementia.
These are all caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place and we had evolved a very effective system in which our gut would sense if there were any deficiencies in our diet and send out a hormone complex so we craved the needed food. When satisfied it would send out other hormones saying stop eating you are full.
For convenience, let us call this our gut-brain.
Evolution at work
Our gut-brain is an incredibly sophisticated system that has evolved over millions of years. But evolution is never after perfection just survival, so there are millions of creatures, from cockroaches to crocodiles, which have survived for millennia but are far from perfect - like us.
So although there were isolated cases of chronic disease, there was no epidemic.
Then, about fifty years ago, we changed our food system and the epidemic of chronic disease has been growing steadily ever since.
The great human intelligence
So what did we humans, with our great intelligence and innovation skills, do to reverse this epidemic? If ever there was a $64,000 question, this is it.
We understood the cause of the epidemic. Our gut-brain stopped working in the way it has done for the last million years.
Our gut-brain is in a state of dynamic equilibrium with individual microbes breeding and dying rapidly but with the system staying in equilibrium.
This depends on feeding and replenishing them from the food we eat.
Increased population and food demand
As our population increased, we changed the way we grew our food so instead of eating fresh plants grown in living soil teeming with beneficial microbes, we changed it to growing plants with synthetic fertiliser, which is debatable, but far worse is we changed the food distribution system with extensive delays from harvest to eating.
Net result - poor gut health and poor control over our appetite - we got fat and sick, and the epidemic grew and grew.
Ask a seven-year-old kid for the solution, and they would say we need to invent a box so people can grow plants, full of beneficial microbes, on their windowsill.
This would have been a great solution as our subconscious brain would have continued to control our appetite as it had done for the last million years.
Eat less exercise more
But being highly intelligent and sometimes overly logical creatures, we ignored the advice of the seven-year-old and decided we had the technology to manage our diet.
So we developed sophisticated diets and pills measuring calories and nutrients down to the last microgram.
People thought this would solve all the problems and we had catchy advertising programs like eat less, exercise more which sounded great but were a total failure - we just got fatter and sicker.
Subconscious and conscious intelligence
To understand why these catchy advertising jingles fail, we need to understand the differences between conscious and sub-conscious intelligence.
The fact is that subconscious intelligence eventually wins.
To make the point, let me refer you to one of my favourite characters - the kid on the bike.
A three-year-old will soon learn how to ride a bike and will be outpacing mum or dad. That is because the kid is using her subconscious brain which is highly perfected.
If dad had never seen a bike before and I tried to explain how it stays upright by talking about self-balancing gyroscopic couples he is likely to have no idea what I am talking about and certainly no better idea how to ride a bike than when I started.
It is the same with food. We may know, in our conscious brain, what we should eat but what we want to eat (our subconscious brain) will win in the end.
Back to the boxes
OK, our seven year old has the idea of breeding the beneficial microbes, and their food, in a box. She will probably love playing with all the worms and creepy crawlies but will need a bit of adult assistance to get everything working properly.
That is where we are now, but that is just the start. There is this conception that all you need to be an innovator is to have this great idea.
I have been having so-called great ideas all my life. 80% fail because they don’t work.
Another 15% fail because they don’t do anything useful that people want.
To turn the remaining 5% into a useful product or service requires a lot of grunt work.
The marketing myth
There are internet advertising gurus who will try and convince you that they can run an internet campaign and you will be an overnight success - and nothing is further from the truth.
Let us get back to the box which does have the potential to combat the chronic disease epidemic - but there is a long way to go.
Growers
It is fine to have all these wonderful concepts but they are useless without a product. A very old-fashioned idea I know but innovations need products that work and do the job and people have confidence that the product works.
That means setting up what is a new industry which requires on one hand growers who can produce the boxes but also the marketing, legal and commercial infrastructure which requires a spectrum of skills.
We may know how to do that but is still has to be done.
Changing the way we eat
Now comes the difficult bit. Persuading the bulk of the population they should have a box on the balcony growing plants which they cut and chop up to make a garnish for their main meal.
The Internet marketing gurus will tell you how they can run this brilliant marketing campaign on the web with flashy web pages, social media, video clips etc the whole shebang.
The net result will be they will end up richer, you poorer with no advance to the cause.
How innovations happen
I have spent my life in the innovation business, with my fair share of ideas that did not work, ideas that worked but no one wanted, two that worked and now the last one which is by far and away the most important. Broadly food that makes us healthy but more specifically breeding gut microbes that will create the hormones to tell us to stop eating when we have had sufficient.
There are three steps in this process.
Step 1 assembling the skill set
No one person has all the skills to generate the social change that a major innovation involves.
This requires the formation of an inner circle with a range of skills, technical, marketing, communications and understanding of how societies work and change.
This is where we are now, forming this inner circle - are you interested in changing the world for the better - let me know, we need you.
Step 2 the pioneers
There are eight billion people on Earth and we are all different. We are a social animal and being part of a group is incredibly important to us.
But there is a small minority of people who are prepared to go against the conventional wisdom and replace it with a better wisdom - the paradigm shift.
But they won’t do this based on logical augments alone, they have to test it first for themselves.
I know this very well. Fifty years ago I was travelling the world telling people about my innovation in the area of Computer Aided Engineering which challenged the conventional wisdom.
Not a nutter
Most people wrote me off as a nutter, but a few thought I may have a point. In no way were they convinced by my logic but they thought it worth their while to test for themselves.
Fortunately for me, it worked, an essential requirement for any innovation, and then they became convinced. It was not my logical or miserable marketing skills that convinced them - they had to try it and prove to themselves that it worked.
This group then became the disciples, they were often people of influence and when other people saw that people were using this technology they became the message bearers and we entered the third stage.
Step 3 Acceptance
When it became clear that there was a group, even if it was a small group, people felt more comfortable about making the change. Again they had to go through the process of trying it for themselves before they made the change but eventually, the change became the norm and the paradigm shift occurred.
Back to the box
This is the process we need to follow to get the box accepted.
We need this small group with the spectrum of skills needed.
Recruit the growers to produce the boxes so people can try it for themselves.
Make contact with the pioneers who will become the first wave of acceptance
Finally, be able to satisfy the demand as this becomes the accepted norm.
Interested
Interested in becoming part of a global change for the better - contact me
For the first few billion years the earth was just a barren rock.
Then microbes appeared, they broke down the rocks and made soil which led to plants flourishing.
Next came animals that ate the plants which were full of microbes so some microbes ended up in the guts of these animals
These microbes digested the animal’s food, manufacturing the spectrum of complex chemicals the animals needed and, most significantly regulating appetite, sending out specific hormones to make the animals hungry for that food when they were low in a particular food and yet other hormones so they would stop eating when full.
Microbes make life possible
We need the microbes to power the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies.
Without these microbes we don’t live a long and healthy life we overeat and get fat and sick.
Our modern food system is a highly sophisticated industrialised chemical process relying on synthetic fertilisers and toxic sprays which have eliminated the microbes.
This has led to the modern epidemic of chronic diseases which is causing so much personal suffering for the population and so much cost to the Governments in charge of our health system.
Obesity affects much of the population.
Diabetes is the fastest growing of all diseases with over eight million people a year having a limb amputated.
Heart attacks are the most common cause of death.
Dementia must be one of the most heartbreaking conditions.
All these stem from not having the beneficial microbes in our gut that regulate our appetite.
Solution - breed microbes at home
But we can solve this problem.
Microbes breed in organic waste which makes breeding microbes easy and naturally move into plants. But they also die very quickly which means they must be grown and eaten shortly after picking, in practise - as most people now live in apartments or have little garden, this means in special breeding containers at home.
This is cheaper than buying aged plants from a supermarket but it does mean a change in behaviour, like having a breeding container on your balcony if you live in an apartment.
Microbes have a short life.
We already have the technology of breeding beneficial microbes. Gbiota basket-boxes breed beneficial microbes in organic waste under controlled conditions to grow the plants which contain the beneficial microbes.
This is straightforward but we need to create a social change where people grow that critical part of their diet - gut brain-food - at home rather than relying on the centralised industrial chemical food system.
For that, we need a food social movement.
The community has to be educated about the importance of our gut microbes and shown that they can grow these microbes at home, even if they have no garden or growing skills.
Local gut-brain food industry
We need to create a new industry where people can buy everything they need - the soil, boxes, seeds etc from a local supplier and if needed, get the critical support from a suitably qualified dietitian who understand how the gut microbes act as the control system for our appetite.
How do we create this societal change? We need to create a team of people with a range of skills who understand the benefits to the community of the gut microbes in regulating our bodies.
We need a team because no one person can have all the skills needed, these skills include a spectrum of knowledge, not just the obvious skills of diet, of how gut microbes control our appetite, but a knowledge of how communities work, internet marketing, communication and business skills.
If you feel that you could be interested in becoming part of this team then I suggest you have a look at the many articles on my website gbiota.com then contact me directly here.
Colin Austin 17 March 2025 Published under the Creative Commons system so may be reproduced without further permission, just acknowledgement of source.
The third mega-change
If you think the world is going through a difficult period you are right. We are going through our third mega-change and managing this change is not going to be easy.
But we can learn from looking at the two previous mega changes.
Mega change no 1 - Fire and cooking
The biggest change was the use of fire for cooking over a million years ago.
The results were dramatic - more nutrients led to bigger brains and smaller guts.
Fire changed us humans creating a new, very different creature.
Humans became the dominant creature and changed the planet forever. No fire and we would have remained an insignificant ape.
Mega change no 2 - Agriculture
The next biggest change was the development of agriculture which had some surprising side effects. It led to us living in close proximity in cities where infection could easily spread.
Natural selection meant that those with a stronger immune system survived better - so again humans changed. We became smaller than our hunter-gatherer ancestors but with a stronger immune system.
This led to the age of colonisation, the history books may talk about significant battles won by the colonisers but in truth, these were just a formality, the people of the colonised countries had been decimated by the introduced diseases.
The world changed yet again.
These changes were not planned by some evil master brain, we can leave that to some Netflix video and were only well understood after the event.
Mega change number 3 - Technology and Industrialisation
We are now in the midst of a third change which is neither planned nor understood - it stems from the new technologies we have developed.
The simplest, and easiest to understand is climate change which is leading to a steady but progressive change to our planet and also has led to a strong activist movement.
Related and even more significant is the industrialised food system.
Let me explain why this is so dramatic.
How life started
For the first few billion years the earth was just a barren rock, nothing, no Netflix, Facebook, nothing not even TikTok.
Then one day microbes appeared, probably from an asteroid that crashed into Earth.
These microbes were hungry so they broke down the rocks and made soil which led to plants flourishing.
Next came animals that ate the plants which were full of microbes so some microbes ended up in the guts of these animals where again it was nice and warm with plenty of food so they flourished.
Evolution leads to the most amazing results. It was in the interest of the microbes to keep the animals alive as long as possible.
So they adopted the role of digesting the animal’s food, manufacturing the spectrum of complex chemicals the animals needed and, most significantly regulating appetite, sending out specific hormones to make the animals hungry for that food when they were low in a particular food and yet other hormones so we would stop eating when full.
We are only just beginning to appreciate the sophistication of this system which is the deal of the millennium.
Microbes make life possible
It is just a fact that life on this planet is only possible because of the microbes.
Without the microbes, our planet would still be a dead rock with no soil to grow plants to feed the animals.
But having food is not enough, we need the microbes to power the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies.
Humans goof
But there was one funny animal that decided to stop feeding the microbes.
That animal was of course us and that is why instead of living a long and healthy life we overeat and get fat and sick.
Why did we stop feeding the microbes?
This was not because of some evil person worthy of being the central character of a Netflix film. It was because we did not understand the sophistication and benefits of this natural intelligent control system and it was a lot cheaper and more convenient to use synthetic chemicals to grow our food rather than rely on the natural process of microbes making nutrients bio-available.
This was among the biggest goofs that humans have made and has led to the modern epidemic of chronic diseases which is causing so much personal suffering for the population and so much cost to the Governments in charge of our health system.
Fixing the goof
So how do we fix this goof? We need two things, the technology and a change of attitude.
The technology is easy. Microbes are a randy lot and are happy to breed in organic waste which makes breeding microbes easy. But they also die very quickly which means they must be grown and eaten shortly after picking, in practise - as most people now live in apartments or have little garden, this means in special breeding pots at home.
It is still cheaper than buying aged plants from a supermarket but it does mean a change in behaviour, having a pot on your balcony rather than going to the supermarket.
This does take a bit of training for the non-gardener so the right microbes are bred. They also need to be able to buy their pots and particularly soil from a local grower.
But these are simple problems to resolve.
Creating social change
The overriding problem is how to create the change by creating a social movement.
Just as climate change requires climate activists food requires food activists.
The motivation is there, in most developed countries over half the population are overweight.
Diabetes is the fastest growing of all diseases with over eight million people a year having a limb amputated.
Heart attacks are the most common cause of death.
Dementia must be one of the most heartbreaking conditions.
Two ways to look at food
Visit a dietitian and you will get a clear picture. Highly processed foods full of fats and sugars are not healthy and you should be incorporating plants grown in living soil, full of nutrients and beneficial microbes and eaten fresh into your diet.
The amount of research being undertaken in research labs across the globe into food and our gut biome is staggering. Thousands of peer-reviewed papers are published every year and they conform to a common theme.
You will learn the importance of microbes and how they regulate our appetite so we naturally want to eat the right sort of food in the right amount.
We know what sorts of food we should be eating.
Now walk out of the office and enter the commercial world we live in.
The supermarkets are full of highly processed foods supported by multi-billion dollar advertising campaigns claiming how healthy they are.
The fresh fruit and vegetable myth
You may not be convinced so you go to the fruit and vegetable aisles expecting to find healthy products. You see row upon row of identical and almost perfect-looking produce.
How wonderful you may think - just what I am looking for - healthy fruit and vegetables, my search is over.
But wait a minute, how did they manage to grow such magnificent-looking produce? By a highly sophisticated industrialised chemical process relying on synthetic fertilisers and toxic sprays which have eliminated the microbes you have been told are essential for health.
And worse - any beneficial microbes will have died in the time from when the plants were harvested to when they are eaten.
Microbes have a short life.
The great divergence
There is a clear divergence between what the science-based community are telling us we should eat and what the commercial mega corporations are offering.
The deficiencies in the current food system are seen as an opportunity for another industry, the supplement industry to create good profits by providing pills.
But pills are not the solution, we need to fix the problem at the source and eat healthy food.
‘Real food not pills’ is a good motto.
Gbiota role
Gbiota is not trying to duplicate the massive research effort which is being carried out in respected research institutions across the globe. We are taking that as a given.
We are facing the challenge of how the community as a whole can access the food which is accepted as healthy.
When I say the community as a whole I mean the whole community. There are many dedicated home growers who are using organic style approaches to produce food which is genuinely healthy. No arguments here.
But the reality is that the majority of the population now live in apartments or houses with very small gardens. They don’t have the area, time or the skills of the dedicated organic home grower so they need an alternative to access the healthy food they need.
The first part of the problem, the technical part has been solved by the development of the Gbiota boxes which breed the beneficial microbes in organic waste to grow the plants which contain the beneficial microbes.
This is straightforward.
The difficult part is to create the social change where people grow that critical part of their diet - gut brain-food - at home.
For that, we need a food social movement.
How to create the food social movement
The pressure is there but how do we make it happen? How do we create this social movement?
This problem is made worse by the misinformation and disinformation which now dominate the web and the marketing power of the food and drug industries.
One person, (particularly if he is 85 like me) is not going to be able to do this, it needs a team of about a dozen people with a range of skills, not just technical but marketing and communications and an understanding of how communities work to form a team.
My immediate aim is to build this inner sanctum of a dozen or so people, committed to the ‘food for health’ cause.
Local gut-brain food industry
Once we have this inner sanctum in place we can move onto the next stage - creating a local gut-brain food industry.
The bulk of the population cannot do everything from scratch - they need to be able to go and buy the soil, boxes, seeds, and everything they need from a local supplier.
It has to be local as microbes have a short life.
Going Viral
In the current age of disinformation, people may have become sceptical about what they are told but they believe what they see.
When they see so many wobbly tums and bums at the shopping centre and while there are other people who are fit and healthy from eating a different diet they will change their views and see the need for change.
Death of the Deniers
We can learn from that other and closely linked need for change, climate. For decades climate deniers who benefit directly from the current system have been able to create doubt so they could block the needed action.
But when people experienced for themselves the increase in floods, droughts and storms they began to question what they were being told and now the bulk of the population has accepted the need for change.
The deniers, often in positions of extreme power are still able to block the change.
In my younger days, I fought a similar reluctance to change from deniers. I accepted that it was impossible to change their attitude but then I was young and knew they would die and be replaced by younger people who were more accepting of change.
It will happen with climate change and it will happen with food change.
Younger people have this odd habit of growing up into older people in a position of power.
The future of our species lies with the fresh minds of the young and they will create the change and our species will not just survive but thrive.
At my age, I will not be around to see it but I am happy to have been part of the process of change that enables our species to thrive.
Invitation
If you feel that you could be interested in joining this inner sanctum then I suggest you have a look at the many articles on my web gbiota.com then contact me directly here.
The community needs you. There may be a lot of selfish pricks in the world but our future lies with those who are not selfish pricks. Labelling them woke greenies won’t stop them.
Colin Austin 12 March 2025 Published under the Creative Commons system so may be reproduced without further permission, just acknowledgement of source.
Fighting the chronic disease epidemic
Across the globe, we are facing an epidemic of chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
Whether we approve or not what happens in the real world is that people just carry on with their normal life until their health deteriorates to the point where they need to go to a doctor who tries to cure them.
This is at great personal burden to the individual and financial cost to our health system. Chronic diseases inflict the most damage to community health and are a major financial cost.
Prevention is better than cure.
Prevention depends on understanding the root causes of the epidemic.
Changes in our food production system
One of the best videos explaining the changes in our food system is by David Trood of The Weedy Garden
Organics is an unfortunate name as the underlying principle is how all food has been grown for over a billion years, until we changed it.
A complex array of soil creatures, microbes and fungi break down the rocks to make them bio-available for plants and then animals that eat the plants.
These microbes end in our gut, they communicate with their neighbours to create real intelligence and work with our head brain to form the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly our appetite by creating the hormones which make us feel full or hungry.
The hormones work at the subconscious level and are extremely powerful.
Our sub-conscious brain is what enables us to do amazing things like catch balls and ride a bike.
We may try and control what and how much we eat by going on a diet but this is at the conscious level and is typically only effective for a period of time, our hormones almost always win.
The change in our food system to relying on inert fertilisers has resulted in a loss of the beneficial microbes that form our gut-brain and is the underlying force behind the epidemic of chronic diseases.
This is why we need to change our gut biota - by diet - to combat the epidemic.
Our intelligent control system
At the core of all chronic diseases is the wrong fat in the wrong place. Our gut has trillions of cells which communicate with their neighbours to create genuine intelligence which then forms part of the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies.
If our intelligent control senses deficiencies in our bodies it will send out hormones to make us hungry so we overeat, and alternatively, when it thinks we are satisfied, it will send out other hormones so we feel full and stop eating.
This is a very powerful system operating at the sub-conscious level; we have no control over it and attempts to override this in our conscious brain are rarely successful long term.
We have to work with, rather than against, our intelligent control system.
Prevention super clinics
I am suggesting setting up a network of prevention super clinics.
Prevention super clinics would be run by a qualified dietitian, following the existing protocols but integrating a much wider range of services.
They would certainly have close working relations with a suitably trained grower to breed the beneficial microbes in soil containing both organic and mineral waste using the appropriate protocols.
This soil is referred to as Wickimix and can be sold directly to keen gardeners but is more likely to be incorporated into growing baskets for wider use.
These baskets, with growing plants, may be bulk delivered to a place where the clients may visit regularly such as a gymnasium or health food cafe or store.
It needs to be recognised that the life span of the beneficial microbes is short so the plants need to be consumed shortly after picking.
While these may be separate businesses they need to follow protocols, and the dietitian has both and integrating and supervising roles.
Making organic style food widely available
I think there is no debate that organic food, rich in nutrients and microbes, is beneficial for health however, it tends to be expensive and the microbes only have a short life after picking.
The Gbiota basket/box system means that people, even if they live in an apartment, can have organically grown plants growing in their home at minimum cost ready to harvest.
Personal anguish and money.
Before you reject the idea that this is adding an extra expense to the system, this would save a great deal of personal anguish and money.
The basic cause of chronic disease is deficiencies in our diet, specifically beneficial gut microbes and trace minerals.
With the appropriate protocols, you can breed beneficial gut microbes in organic waste at a relatively trivial cost.
Growers can have a truckload of volcanic rock dust, a waste product from quarries, delivered to their door at about $10 per tonne. This contains all the trace elements needed, it just needs the soil microbes to make it bio-available in our food, which costs a fraction of buying pills and contains a wider and better-balanced spectrum.
Further information
My website gbiota.com contains many articles and videos on food and health. there is a special section for health professionals accessed from the home page and you can contact me directly at colin@gbiota.com
Surely the aim for any community is for its members to live a long and healthy life.
Yet we are not doing that well with over half the population suffering from some form of chronic disease, maybe just a bit podgy, maybe in fear of having a limb amputated from diabetes or worse of all dementia, sitting in a chair, covered with blanket to hide that you have just peed your pants and wondering who those pesky kids are who keep on calling you granddad.
But the frustration is we know exactly how to fight this epidemic, if you take 5 minutes out of the whirlwind of modern life and look at all the expertise that is available then we have all the knowledge needed, but everyone is just too busy beavering away they never have time to lift their head and look at what all the other beavers are up to.
It is not that we are not cooperative, the two features that have led to humans becoming the dominant creature on Earth are that we are both intelligent and cooperative.
It is just that we all have different skills and our current system and work pressures make it difficult to communicate with a fellow human with a different skill set to you.
I know this too well. I look at my granddaughter’s skills on their mobile phones. Their fingers and thumbs are just a blur of high speed activity making me look like some monster from the pre-dinosaur age.
Yet ask them to help clean out a blocked gutter and their interest and skill level is well into the negative, yet to me, it is just a routine part of the chore of being a householder.
So how are we going to coordinate all the skills necessary to battle the epidemic of chronic disease?
The motivation is there, no one wants to be fat or have a leg chopped off from diabetes and it costs trillions of dollars to the world economy.
And believe me the skills are there, I don’t have a job description so I spend my time in anyway I want and that is chatting with Mr Google and following up on the leads to chat further twith the specialist in all the relevant fields. I have also been recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators and conduct experiments that no sensible grant agency would even consider - but good ideas come from doing things that seem daft and learning from the failures.
So what is the next step? It is no good just talking about the integration of skill sets, we have to show that it really works and to do that we need to set up pilot operations. One is good but three or more would be so much better particularly if they are in different parts of the world, this is a global issue.
So how do we set up these pilot projects? A must-have is a coordinator, someone with the skill set to bring a range of different skill sets and people with very different backgrounds to work together.
What is the required profile for a coordinator? They must have a conviction of the importance of fighting the epidemic of chronic disease and they must be comfortable with working with a variety of people from researchers, growers and maybe highly stressed members of the public facing some pretty horrible predictions.
Do they need any specific qualifications? I am not sure they do, I think motivation that this is a highly socially important project is the key but if I had to pick a particular skill it would be a dietitian.
And who are the other members of the group?
There must be members of the public who are motivated about their health and they must be willing to learn about how we all have an intelligent control system, a combination of our gut and head brains which regulate what we want to eat and also control what happens to the food that we eat, burned for energy, rebuild our body parts, stored as fat or out at pooh.
We need organisations who are prepared to carry out this education. The lead organisation here would be the Government Health Departments which are carrying the cost of the epidemic.
This is not as simple as it seems as there is a well-recognised time gap from the leading edge of research to when this knowledge becomes the norm. In the medical field, which has requirements for caution, this time gap can be twenty years.
For these projects, we must apply the latest thinking.
We need growers who are going to breed the beneficial microbes in the soil which will eventually become part of our gut biota. There are many regenerative growers with a good knowledge of soil biology who can readily acquire the specific skills of breeding the beneficial microbes.
The growers need a supply of organic waste for breeding the microbes. Local Governments have a key role to play here.
So what is the next step? First step is to have a look at the section for health professionals on my web gbiota.com then if you feel you would like to be part of these pilot projects (note the plural) email me indicating whether you see yourself in the coordinator or participant roles.
I have created this section for health professionals.
This may seem a little odd as I have no medical qualifications apart from being married to a medical doctor, who became diabetic, her foot turned black and our medical advisers were talking about amputation, but we changed her diet and she still has both feet.
But I am not a drongo, I am an engineer I was selected by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators for my pioneering work in Computer Aided Engineering.
I, like many of my fellow engineers, may lack the sophistication in articulation of many professions but I don’t rank too badly in understanding how things work.
I was what is often called a code cutter, I wrote software and that included intelligent or self-learning software for intelligent control - which works by monitoring what needs to be controlled, making changes, observing the effect of these changes to develop an understanding of how that system works which eventually leads to very effective control of that system.
Even though I am an engineer I can read, which I do with great intensity, trying to understand how food affects the health of our bodies and recognise the sophistication of professionals in that area.
I see an almost universal belief among health professionals that modern ultra-processed foods are harmful to health while diets centred on plants are beneficial.
Yet, despite this overwhelming evidence the consumption of ultra-processed food increases but plants-based food does not, or at best marginally.
As an engineer with expertise in control theory, I ask myself why?
It is not that people are not informed, they know full well that this ultra-processed food is harmful to their health and plant-based foods are beneficial but the majority of people continue to eat an ever-increasing amount of ultra-processed foods.
Why do people do things that are bad for them knowing full well that they will cause harm? And being an engineer what can we do about it?
Humans are notorious for doing things that are harmful to other humans and themselves so I thought I would ask Mr. Google if he had any ideas.
As usual, I was surprised.
I anticipated to be told that humans were the most destructive creatures to their own species, after all just watch the news and it is dominated by humans using their great skills in technology for the sophisticated killing of other humans.
We humans can be a violent species, with stories of war, murder and terrorism frequently hitting the headlines. Yet the record went to those cute and cuddly Meerkats who put our bloodthirsty tendencies to shame with 20 per cent of the cute critters being slaughtered by their own species.
Animals unquestionably kill members of their species, all the time. Male lions slaughter all the cubs when they join a new pride; rival ant colonies of the same species fight bloody wars; chimpanzees have been shown to kill each other at similar per capita rates to humans.
Hippopotamuses, Hamsters, Crab spiders, Cane toads, Praying mantis, Black widow spiders,Polar bears and many snakes are going to have to improve their game to win a Nobel Peace prize.
This may all be interesting but it does not answer the question why the bulk of people eat food that is bad for them, while knowing it is bad for them. That is why understanding how our intelligent control system works is so important and what this website is about.
Colin Austin 6 March 2025 published under the Creative Commons system. It may be reproduced without further permission - just acknowledgement of source.
Why is it?
Why is it that some people are fit and healthy, enjoy a long health span with hardly a visit to the doctor while despite the sophistication of modern medical research does the epidemic of chronic diseases continues to increase causing a great deal of personal grief and costing health systems trillions of dollars?
Why is it that some people are slim, fit and healthy and others are fat and sick?
Maybe it is time to take a moment out of the rush of modern living and have a deep think.
Who the (?) are you?
Let me start by saying that I have no formal medical qualifications, I am a successful innovative engineer and was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators for my pioneering work in Computer Aided Engineering.
Innovation requires more than developing new technologies, important as that is, but it also requires challenging long established views often held by experts in the field - not a pleasant process.
However, among all those well respected experts there are those free thinkers, the technical entrepreneurs, who see the need for a new way of thinking, pick up the baton and lead the charge for a new way of thinking.
Change is often born when an isolated individual, often outside the field, without the burden of the conventional paradigms rethinks an issue.
But that isolated individual rarely makes the change. That happens when a few entrepreneurial thinkers within the field see the need for rethinking and lead the charge.
Our intelligent control system
We have a wealth of perfectly valid science helping us understand the biochemistry of our bodies which has led to the development of the so-called wonder drugs like Ozempic based on glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1).
This is based on a naturally occurring hormone which our bodies produce to tell us to stop eating. Development of such drugs is highly sophisticated and valid technology which we must respect.
But the question we need to ask is - "This is a naturally occurring hormone which our bodies produce, why is our body not producing this hormone to stop us getting fat and sick?"
This is the question that the entrepreneurial free thinkers within the health profession should be asking.
The answer lies in understanding how our intelligent control system works.
The change in thinking we need right now is to recognise that our bodies have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly what and how much we eat and try and understand how this intelligent control system works, why it sometimes does not work and then how to fix it.
Intelligent control software
One of my activities was writing intelligent or self-learning control software for irrigation control.
This is of course nothing to do with how our body’s intelligent control system works, but understanding the methodology of how human generated intelligent control system works gives us an insight into how our natural intelligent control system works.
Irrigation is a complex problem as the weather is changing, the plants are growing and have different water requirements throughout their lives.
By continuously monitoring soil moisture, past evaporation and rainfall and anticipated evaporation and rainfall it is possible to learn how the ever-changing system works and predict how much water should be applied at the next irrigation to cater for anticipated needs.
Chronic disease
I say I have no medical qualifications but I am married to a medical doctor who is also diabetic, her foot started to turn black and our medical advisers were talking about the necessity of amputation.
However, I did learn that chronic diseases have a basic cause of the wrong fat in the wrong place, in the case of diabetes fat in the pancreas. (nb she still has both feet.)
Out of the Silo
So I asked myself, as an engineer, what is the basic cause of the wrong fat in the wrong place.? The classic answer from the viewpoint of biochemistry is overeating, but as an engineer knowing how intelligent control systems work it seemed that the more valid answer is that it is a control problem.
Why do we overeat?
Swarm intelligence
We know that the gut contains trillions of cells with each cell being able to communicate with neighbouring cells to create swarm intelligence - which is well understood.
We also know that the gut is in continuous communication with the cerebral brain to create an intelligent control system for our bodies.
This is a remarkable system but as it operates in our subconscious brain we are not aware and have no control over its operation.
Subconscious control
But it is still remarkable, it can control our temperature over a range of conditions to a fraction of a degree, it controls our heart and breathing rate to ensure that there is adequate oxygen for our muscles.
But perhaps some of the most remarkable achievements occur with a combination of our subconscious and conscious brains.
We can walk upstairs, carrying a cup of coffee while talking on our mobile phones. Even a three-year-old kid can ride a bicycle which requires the skill to apply the mechanism of self-balancing gyroscopic couples - truly remarkable.
Equally remarkable is the control of appetite. For the last billion years, all animals (and despite our intellect when it comes to scoffing down slices of piazza and cheesecake we are all animals) have been able to manage their appetite knowing what and how much to eat to thrive.
So I suggest that when we face the very real problem of the epidemic of chronic diseases we expand our thinking from the science of bio-chemistry and diet to include the thinking of a control engineer.
Three critical issues - intelligent gut, deficiencies, learning
It seems there are three critical issues where we only have partial understanding, at least at the theoretical level but where we have indisputable, even if empirical evidence.
There is a saying that science is the art of managing truth while engineering is the art of managing ignorance.
Maybe to combat the epidemic of chronic disease we need to learn to manage our ignorance.
Intelligent control system
Unfortunately, we do not have a proper understanding of how our intelligent control system works, at least at the code level but there are certain experimental observations which are indisputable and important.
We have known for many years that we can make fat mice skinny and skinny mice fat by changing their gut biota and that is equally true with humans, (although we have not adopted the habit of eating each other pooh).
Specific deficiencies
Empirical evidence shows that the human body is far more sophisticated than the simple calorie theory. Our bodies can detect specific deficiencies, and when it does it will create hunger hormones so we eat more, not just more but more of the specific food it has learned will satisfy that specific deficiency.
If we don’t eat the specific food it will keep on sending our hormones until we do - a somewhat random process which results in overeating.
Again the understanding at the scientific level is limited but at the empirical level, there is no doubt as anyone who has dug their garden on a hot summer day experiences.
Sweating on a hot day leads to a loss of salts which, if our self-learning process has worked, will normally create a craving for salty food - often beer and crisps but not cheesecake.
But again our body will keep on pumping our eat more hormones until the deficiencies are filled.
This is not a new concept, homeostasis was first proposed over two hundred years ago.
Training and long-term memory
We know that from birth our intelligent control system is monitoring the specific food we eat and associating this with our feeling of following satisfaction.
If there is a serious deficiency it will decide that it needs to operate with a higher safety margin for food - a long-winded way of saying the intelligent control system decided we need to store more fat.
We have known this for over eighty years, people who suffered severe starvation in the war became obese when food was later available.
Three-pronged solution
Changing the gut biome of eight billion people
Changing people’s gut biome is already a well-established technology, the issue is how to viably and economically change the gut biome of the eight billion people on Earth. Now there is a challenge.
There is no difficulty in breeding gut microbes, the issue is how to breed the right sort, the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful ones.
We have to step outside the confines of the lab and think on an industrial scale recognising that a healthy gut biome may have over a thousand different species of biota.
The solution, which can operate on an industrial scale is based on the principle of ecological balance, creating the conditions that favour the beneficial microbes so they out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.
This is not a medical or even a biological issue, it is a straightforward engineering problem - largely based on fluid flow.
By luck I was a pioneer in computation fluid flow and when younger was recognised as a leader in this field. The solution is technically straightforward and well within the capacity of an experienced grower.
But there are two obstacles.
The first is with the scientific community in getting them to accept a simple, pragmatic solution when the underlying science has not matured.
The second is with Governments. It does mean creating what is a new industry of gut-brain food. This really needs Government support, just waiting for economics and the profit motive will not lead to a rapid solution.
But there needs to be a sense of urgency with eight million people having a limb amputated every year and the ever-increasing increase in obesity, now creeping into the younger generation.
The second problem of specific deficiencies is automatically resolved by this technology as breeding the beneficial requires a supply of the trace minerals to feed the microbes.
The third problem of training our gut-brain is more difficult. For years the standard promotion of ‘eat less exercise more’ has become ingrained into the system.
As we learned from wartime starvation a simple restrictive diet aggravated rather than resolves the obesity problem.
Changing the paradigm within a profession which has a duty to be cautious is not going to be easy. That can be resolved by pilot plant style demonstrations working on the show me don’t tell me basis.
The punch line
The health of billions of people and controlling the trillions of dollars spent on trying to manage health care costs depend on recognising the importance of our intelligent control system.
I may have developed technology to power our intelligent control system but I cannot create this change myself, this has to come from the entrepreneurial free thinkers within the health profession.
This is a decidedly different post. I have just had my eighty-fifth birthday. Very nice party - but a time for reflection.
I was thirty-five when I formed Moldflow pioneering my career in computer-aided engineering. This involved a lot of paradigm busting, brushing away old ways of thinking and replacing them with the new ways that computer simulation enabled.
But this was a battle to change thinking between engineers and I am an engineer so I was fighting on my home turf.
Tough Battle
This was a tough battle, and although I am still fit and healthy you don’t have to be a brilliant mathematician to see that eighty-five is a lot bigger than thirty-five.
Gbiota, at its core, is still about paradigm shifting but the scale of the battle is just so much bigger. Chronic diseases are the biggest health problem across the globe.
Being overweight is everywhere, don’t bother about statistics just go to the local shopping centre.
Diabetes is the most rapidly expanding disease with eight million people a year suffering from a limb amputation, heart attacks are the most common cause of death and at eighty-five dementia is a real threat - sitting in a wheelchair, peeing your pants and wondering who those pesky kids are who keep calling you grand-dad.
If you are one of that diminishing minority that thinks human suffering matters this is an immense challenge.
If you are one of that rapidly expanding majority that thinks the only thing that matters is money then the global health costs are measured in the multi-trillions.
The battle over paradigms
Again the battle is over paradigms.
The old way of thinking is that chronic diseases are a medical issue which will be solved by medical technology.
The new way of thinking is that chronic diseases may appear to be a medical problem but they will be solved by food technology.
Wrong fat in the wrong place
It is simple. The underlying cause of chronic diseases is the wrong fat in the wrong place and that, quite correctly, stems from overeating.
But we overeat because we are not feeding the intelligent control system which regulates our appetite.
The microbes in our gut communicate with their neighbours to create swarm or group intelligence which, together with our head brain, regulates our appetite.
It does this by manufacturing hormones which make us crave specific types of food which we have learned about from our accumulated experience of eating food over our lifetime. That information is stored in our head brain which works at the subconscious level - we have no conscious control over what our sub-conscious brain does.
Food not pills
Our modern food system does not feed our gut-brain so it generates hormones to make us hungry.
We may be able to override our hunger cravings for a while but they will always win in the end. That is why telling people to eat less and exercise more does not work long term.
The solution is to feed our gut-brain which includes enhancing the microbes which live in our gut and drive the process.
We know exactly how to do that - breed beneficial microbes in soil which includes both organic waste and a spectrum of minerals, which is the food for the microbes.
Three snags
But there are three big snags.
The first snag is that it is incredibly inexpensive. Yes, you read that right, inexpensive. Breeding beneficial microbes can be done for next to nothing by collecting organic waste and incorporating this into a special soil and growing plants in this soil.
So why is ‘inexpensive’ the problem?
Because of snag number two which is that it must be done right to breed the beneficial microbes and not the harmful microbes which are equally keen to breed.
This is a catch-22. Because there is no expensive product to sell there is no money to promote and teach people how to feed their gut-brain.
Companies selling drugs like Ozemic, which costs about a thousand dollars a month have plenty of money to promote their expensive pills.
Snag number three is that we live in an age of disinformation. The web is saturated with very effective, manipulative advertising so that no one (or at least no one with a basic thinking capacity) believes anything they see on the web.
But I do know that people will listen to and follow real people (no Avatars thanks) they trust.
Don’t sit in the corner and rock
Now before we sit in the corner and rock, or hit the bottle or whatever is your method of coping - there is a solution.
In theory, it is simple but in practice not so easy.
We have to form a small group, not the entire population of eight billion people - so how many? This small group needs to change their gut biota to show what happens.
Eating gut-brain food and showing that this really does curb appetite and avoids food cravings is hard evidence.
Forming a lead group
How many people should be in this group?
Robin Dunbar may have the answer. He suggested that the maximum number of people we can effectively communicate with is 150.
But there is a little twist to the story which I discovered when I gave a talk to the local organic growers association. They were not that motivated by my talk, which was a little frustrating until I looked at the audience of about fifty people.
They looked a similar age to me (eg old) but they all looked fit and healthy and were certainly very different to the people I see at the shopping centre.
We have to work with the people that need help.
Diabetics
We need to focus on a group that needs help, and there is no group that needs help more than diabetics. The standard procedure as soon as someone is diagnosed as diabetic is to start medication of some, sort, typically Metformin.
If that may be proved essential later but the first action should be diet. But it is no good just telling people if their hormones are telling them differently so the first action should be to change the way their gut works so they want to change their diet.
The magnificent dozen
So my thinking is that we should aim for a small core group of about a dozen people. They may not need help themselves but can be leaders of a group again of about a dozen, who are at risk of suffering from a chronic disease.
How do we find these dozen people to act as group leaders? I have no idea but I do believe in the power of ‘group think’ so if you have an idea how to create this group of group leaders please, let me know.
Look around you, we humans don’t have giant claws or big teeth, we can't run very fast and unless you are an old lady with a black cat, pointed hat and special broomstick we can't fly.
So how do we survive? One word - intelligence.
But it takes a long time to grow our big brains - some twenty-five years for them to fully mature and just brute intelligence is not enough - our brains must be trained.
For that, we must be part of a tribe with older people who can accumulate and pass on information to the next generation.
This big brain and the ability to accumulate information over time is how we have become the dominant creature on Earth.
But it meant that we needed enough people to be fit and healthy to an old age to pass on information. Being alive was not enough - we needed a long health span.
Along with elephants and an odd species of tortoise, crocodiles, and jellyfish we have evolved to be among the longest-living creatures on earth.
We have two brains, the one in our head which we all know about but we have a second, subconscious brain in our gut. The trillions of cells communicate with each other to create intelligence which regulates our appetite, what and how much we eat.
The sort of food we eat and particularly how it is grown is critical to feeding both our brains and achieving a long health span. We need to eat gut-brain food.
Gbiota does not sell food, we show how to grow food for a long health span and if you don’t want to grow yourself we aim to link you to a local grower.
We provide documentation and support by email and video calls - it is not rocket science but must must be done right.
If this is of interest then start by reading the overview article Taste, Hunger and Health span. It is quite long but you are not going to achieve a long health span from a three-word slogan, it does take a bit of effort.
Having read this article you can decide if this is for you and subscribe but if you feel you need more information we can set up an email or video chat.
This is a members only site for people who are serious about gut health - and recognise that the trillions of microbes in our gut have swarm intelligence and form an essential part of our intelligent control system which regulates our appetite as described below.
They recognise that this is more complex than popping a few pills and takes some effort to successfully improve overall health.
You must be logged in to access this site. Login here or read the overview and if you feel you can commit then register at the bottom of the page.
Extend health span
by enhancing your gut-brain
Health Span
We have amazing medical and food science - we should all be fit and healthy and enjoying a longer health span, but we are not - we have such powerful technology which should be working for the benefit of the community - but it is not, why and what can we do about it?
That the question we examine on this web. It is not trivial so we take it in stages.
The Gbiota movement
The Gbiota movement is based on three core principles.
Our gut-brain is intelligent
Our gut is generally thought of from the viewpoint of bio-chemistry. It is true that our gut digests our food and manufactures a range of chemicals essential for health.
This is true but only a partial truth.
Our gut contains trillions of cells of thousands of species. They communicate with each other to create swarm intelligence, which together with our head brain controls our bodies.
This operates as our subconscious brain which can override our conscious brain.
Our subconscious and conscious brains must work in unison. We can manage our subconscious gut brain in three steps - ensure we have the right species feed and enhance them - train them.
Modify our food system
Our food system is dominated by mega-corporations that focus on profits by giving people what they want which is highly processed food which is cheap, convenient and tastes good.
They crave this food because our current food system is deficient in the food which powers our gut-brain.
We need to create a new industry of gut-brain food.
Creating a gut-brain food industry is a key objective of the Gbiota movement.
Food Honesty
The Internet must be among the greatest innovations of our era, giving people access to information which would not otherwise be readily available.
Unfortunately, it has become the home of manipulative advertising for profit.
All businesses need to cover their costs and make a profit, that is fine, but if they abuse the power of manipulative advertising without considering community benefit and the sustainability of human life on earth the future for the human species looks bleak.
The way to combat this manipulation of the truth is to have an informed public.
Cooperating with concerned individuals, organisations and Governments to inform the public is a key objective of the Gbiota movement.
Join and support the Gbiota movement our future depends on it. The Earth has been spinning around the sun for over four billion years and as far as we know will still spinning around the sun for another four billion years.
How long humans will enjoy a viable existence on earth depends on the decisions every individual takes.
Register now and join the Gbiota movement. Below are our various levels of membership.
This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means it can be copied and reproduced without further permission but the source Colin Austin of Gbiota must be acknowledged. Colin Austin 20 Feb 25
This document addresses one of the major health issues - diet, health span and the epidemic of chronic diseases. Comments and suggestions welcome. Email me here.
Zonked
Eighty fifth birthday party
I have just had my eighty fifth birthday, I have a menagerie of grand kids in the young adult stage and two great grand daughters.
One of my grand daughters, Candy came up from Brisbane for my party and to stay for a few days and bring me a birthday cake.
I usually go for a walk around Baldwin Swamp in the morning so I asked her if she wanted to come along but she said I am zonked.
Zonked
I am a native English speaker but young adults like my grand kids seem to talk a different version of the English language but I did learn that Zonked is a pseudo medical term meaning exhausted from the stress on modern living.
So what happens if you are zonked? Obviously go to the doctor.
Haem iron
If you are female, the doctor will look at the blood test, see that your iron level is low, and probably won’t prescribe that you go down to the local scrap yard and munch away on a few cylinder heads but will give you a short lecture on haem iron and prescribe the appropriate pills.
Zinc
If you are male, the doctor will suspect that you have been having to much hanky panky which exhaust you supply of zinc, make some comment about lucky you and prescribe some zinc pills as one good hanky panky can exhaust your supply of zinc.
Nothing wrong with this, the doctors are just doing their job but across the globe, we are suffering from an epidemic of chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
The doctors do their best to treat these illnesses but wouldn’t it be better to find a way of avoiding these illnesses in the first place?
Out numbered
In my family, I am outnumbered. My wife is a medical doctor while my two granddaughters are studying medicine in Brisbane and I am just a humble engineer.
But I think like an engineer which means I like to understand how things really work so when my wife became diabetic and her foot started to turn black and the doctors were talking about amputation I was not at all happy and wanted to understand what is the real cause.
The wrong fat in the wrong place
It turns out that the cause of all chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia is the wrong fat in the wrong place.
In the case of diabetes, it is fat in the pancreas which can no longer produce enough insulin.
So she went on a diet, largely of fresh home grown vegetables and the good news is she still has both her feet.
Motivated
But is did make me highly motivated, eight million people a year have a limb amputated from diabetes, heart attacks, often related to fat in the arteries, are the most common cause of death while dementia, fat in the brain must be one of the most heart-wrenching diseases.
Chronic diseases are the world's biggest health crisis well overtaking infectious diseases.
But I am just an engineer what could I do about it? Understand how our bodies work in the way that an engineer understand how a machine works.
Every machine has some sort of control system so I have had to understand how our body's intelligent control system works.
We have been here before
We have been here before with infectious diseases. It is not that long ago that infectious disease were the big killer, three out of five babies would die before the age of five, another in their teens while most of the adults would never reach their natural life span.
Of course medical science made a great contribution to fighting infectious diseases but the real impact came from prevention.
Engineers built sewage and clean water systems, hygiene was dramatically improved, the humble bed with clean sheets and washing machines removed the source of infections.
Modern day prevention
Now we face the new problem of chronic diseases. Medical science is making great strides but the real solution will come from prevention.
Prevention is more effective and costs far less then trying to resolve the diseases when it has become established.
So how do we prevent chronic disease? By focusing on the underlying cause.
The short, simplistic and wrong answer is to tell tell people to eat the right amount of the right food.
The slogan “eat less, exercise more” has been around for donkeys keys and has not worked because it is not addressing the fundamental cause.
We have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particular our appetite, how much and what we eat. It is called homeostasis and we have known about it for the best part of a couple of hundred years.
Let us take an example of our intelligent control system at work with a young kid riding a bike.
I am an engineer and can explain how a bike stays upright by talking about self balancing gyroscopic couples.
Is that how I taught my kids when they were three years old to ride a bike - no way.
They just got on the bike, fell of a few time but soon got the knack without knowing anything about self balancing gyroscopic couples.
That is because their intelligent control system works in the their subconscious - it is high speed, very powerful and easily overrides our slow and clunky conscious of logical brain.
If we are going to use a strategy of prevention which is the only effective way of combating the epidemic of chronic disease then we must work with our subconscious brain and not just yell at people to eat less and exercise more.
That is a waste of time and energy.
Abstract
We don’t get fat and sick simply because we eat too much.
Our gut and head brains form an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies. If it decides we need to store more fat it will send out hormones which make us feel hungry so then we overeat and get fat and sick.
This happens when we do not feed our gut-brain the right sort of food. Our modern food system is not feeding our gut brain which has led to a global epidemic of chronic or non-infectious disease which is reducing our health span and is modern societiy’s greatest health challenge.
Before our modern food system we ate food that fed our gut-brain with beneficial microbes but we also bred many harmful microbes which led to infectious diseases and much of the population dying before their natural term.
Our modern food system has reduced the harmful microbes but also the beneficial microbes. The great technical challenge is to breed the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful microbes.
We need to create a new industry of growing gut-brain food, here we show how.
Success requires the successful development of technology, where as a successful innovator I have spent much of my eighty-five years but it also requires a social movement where dedicated community-minded people try it, see if their appetite and food cravings are reduced then tell their friends and contact to create a movement of public awareness.
The essence - Creating the new gut-brain food industry
Chronic disease caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place
Chronic or non-infectious diseases have now far overtaken infectious diseases and are now our major health threat.
Chronic diseases are caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place.
Our bodies have an intelligent control system
Our bodies have an intelligent control system which decides and then regulates by hormones where and how much fat we store.
This intelligent control system is made up of our head and gut brains communicating and working together.
Our gut is an integrated system of trillions of cells consisting of thousands of different species. Each cell can communicate with neighbouring cells to create swarm or group intelligence.
How our gut-brain works depends on the overall integrated system rather than a few specific species.
Our gut-brain dominated by the food we eat
Our gut brain is initially populated by our mum at birth; after that, it is dominated by the food we eat, although contact with other creatures has an effect.
Our gut-brain works in our subconscious brain which is far faster and more effective than our conscious brain in determining what we eat - it is what we want to eat that matters.
Conscious and subconscious brains
It is not effective to tell our conscious brain to eat less and exercise more. We have to manage our subconscious brain so we want to eat the right amount of the right sort of food.
The combination of our gut and head brain has memory and can be trained.
The food we eat contains a spectrum of microbes which come from the soil, particularly the creatures of the soil who have guts like us.
Microbes have a short life - dynamic equilibrium
Microbes have a very short life but breed incredibly fast. Our gut is in a state of dynamic equilibrium with individual cells dying and being replaced by this rapid breeding.
To breed the cells in our gut they must be fed with gut-brain food.
Modern food - high in energy low in gut-brain food
We need to enhance our gut-brain with a steady supply of fresh microbes in our food.
Historically food was grown locally and eaten shortly after harvesting which naturally provided us with gut-brain food.
Our modern food has changed what we eat. It contains an abundance of energy food - sugars and fats - but is deficient in gut-brain food and microbes. It is largely inert and any microbes that may have been in it will have died from the extended time from harvest to eating.
We need to create a new industry of gut-brain food
We need to create a new industry of gut-brain food.
This industry will be based on the underlying principle of controlling the conditions so the beneficial microbes out-breed and out-compete the harmful microbes - the principle of Ecological balance.
Ecological balance
Beneficial microbes need a balanced combination of nutrients, water and air.
Nutrients can be provided from recycling organic waste which has the added advantage of being sustainable.
Circulate Soil Blood
This can be achieved by circulating the soil blood (the mixture of water, dissolved nutrients and microbes) in a regular flood and flush cycle so the soil and plants receive a regular supply of nutrients, water and air without the soil blood ever becoming stagnant.
Skilled growers already exist but they need a market
There are an adequate number of skilled growers who are fully capable of producing gut-brain food but they need a market to create a sustainable business.
Need for major educational program
This requires a major educational program from the relevant organisations, particularly Governments who have responsibility for their community health.
This education is challenged by the level of disinformation on the Internet and the marketing power of the current food industry, which is dominated by mega, multinational organisations that are extremely skilled in manipulative marketing.
Must make the effort
Despite all these obstacles if we are to thrive as a species we must make the effort. In the first instance, this will fall on the shoulders of a few dedicated individuals.
Taste, hunger and healthspan
Preface
Extinction
Is humanity in danger of extinction? Probably not.
Is our modern comfortable lifestyle in danger of extinction? Definitely yes and it is happening right now.
Can we do anything to avoid this? Yes - but it takes a bit of effort to understand the problem and do something about it.
What is the biggest problem? Food - there is plenty of food - that is not the problem - modern food is making us fat and sick. We need food that will lead to a long and healthy life.
Is this a technical problem? No - we know how to grow food that will make us healthy.
So what is the problem? Persuading people to eat healthy food when they are bombarded with manipulative advertising and food that is deliberately made addictive.
Will that happen? It is up to you with the power of the wallet.
Deciding what we eat
Modern science has given us a good understanding of what we should eat to lead a long and healthy life. We understand this at the conscious level.
That is the easy bit.
But our body has an intelligent control system which makes us want to eat too much of the wrong sorts of food - and it almost always wins.
That is the difficult bit.
Intelligent control
Without taste and hunger, we would soon be dead so it seems a pretty good idea to see how they work and how we can use this understanding to increase our health span - how long we are fit and healthy.
It starts with our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies which is formed by cooperation between our gut and head brain.
Our gut contains trillions of cells of thousands of species and we often talk about our gut as having swarm intelligence and compare it to flocks of birds, swarms of ants and bees and not to forget the wonder of slime moulds.
This analogy may not be strictly accurate as these have many identical items with each item communicating with its neighbour so the entire system has a collective intelligence.
However, our gut has thousands of species of microbes which can have very different behaviour so it might be better to talk about group intelligence.
And what animal is spectacularly successful at group intelligence? Well, what about us.
In fact, we are so good at it that we never bother to think about it and study how it works. Let us look at that at work in building a house.
Group intelligence and building a house
Our bodies are complex and difficult to understand so it may be useful to look at an everyday occurrence which we can understand - building a house.
It all seems so simple but no one single person knows everything about building a house.
It starts with a soil engineer who examines the load-bearing capacity of the soil and designs a system of foundations.
Then an earth-moving specialist may come along and drill holes for a concrete specialist to fill.
Then a framework designer will design a structure which a tradesman skilled in wood or steel builds to be later encased by a bricklayer, or other tradesmen.
Along comes further specialists to install the internal, plumbing, electricals, air conditions, internet, phone and satellite connection etc.
A project manager may coordinate all these activities but won’t understand the details of every speciality.
If he sees that the electrical work is falling behind he won’t recruit more bricklayers. Instead, he will try and recruit more electricians - which won’t be easy if the house is being built in Bundaberg. (Believe, me I know).
Combining a multitude of skills comes naturally to us humans that we never even recognise it is happening.
Group intelligence and our bodies
Our intelligent control system faces similar, but much more complex problems.
For a start we need oxygen so we need lungs to suck in air and to transfer oxygen to our blood, then we need a heart to pump it around our arteries and deliver it to our muscles.
The speed has to be controlled to match demand and the air will almost certainly contain some harmful microbes so an immune system is needed to identify and deal with these harmful intruders.
This all works automatically, controlled by our subconscious brain, and we never bother to think about it but I needed to set the scene for the big issue that I want to talk about - “Food”.
The Big Food Control Myth
We like to think that we decide what and how much we want to eat in our conscious brain.
It is true we do have the benefit of some intelligent and conscientious dietitians who will tell us we need so many calories, so many grams of carbohydrates and proteins and so many milligrams or micrograms of a whole range of minerals and vitamins.
Now let me be clear, I am not saying they are wrong they may well be perfectly correct down to the last micro-gram of B12 but it is not the way our intelligent control system (our gut-brain) works now or has worked for the last million years or so.
Our gut-brain works in our subconscious brain deciding whether we have enough of the right sort of food.
Feeling satisfied
Our subconscious gut-brain asks “Do we have the right amount of the right sort of food?”
If yes it will create hormones so we feel satisfied and not want to eat.
If no it will create hormones to make us feel hungry. But it does much more than making us feel hungry and want to eat, it knows what sorts of food we need.
It has been learning from the first suck on mum’s breasts what food makes us feel good and associate that with a particular taste.
So, depending on the learning experience, we may crave a slice of cheesecake, a giant steak or a vegetable curry.
We are not born craving cheesecake or vegetable curry and enjoying the taste, we learn over a period to time and associate the particular taste with feeling good and satisfied.
What tastes good to me could well be revolting to you, taste is learned from what makes us feel good and satisfied.
Conscious v subconscious - the battle
We may learn from our dietitian that eating a specific diet is the most healthy for us and will lead to a long and healthy life but if our subconscious brain is saying no, don’t eat that go stuff yourself with this - then we have a conflict.
Whether our conscious or subconscious brain wins that conflict depends a bit on willpower and it is possible that we will eat the dietitian-created diet for a period, but the odds are that eventually the subconscious brain will win.
Don’t believe me? Go to the local shopping centre and see the number of wobbly bums and tums.
Training our subconscious brain
But we can adopt a different strategy of training our gut-brain so it sends out signals to eat the healthier diet.
There are three steps to this.
Full spectrum of microbes
The first step is to ensure we have the right spectrum of microbes in our gut.
This is more complex than taking pro-biotics containing a few species we need a full spectrum.
Just as in building a house, it is pointless recruiting more concreters if we are short of electricians.
Feed the microbes so they breed
The second step is to feed the microbes so they breed. Microbes breed like crazy, but they need food so we need to eat food that will enable our microbes to breed inside us.
But that is not enough we also need to eat food that contains a fresh supply of microbes with a full spectrum to ensure our gut maintains a full spectrum.
Train the gut-brain
Our subconscious brain has intelligence and is continuously learning from the first such on mum’s breasts.
We have to use our conscious brain to expose it to a variety of foods so it learns.
Feeding our kids ultra-processed food is condemning them to a life of being fat and sick. They need to be exposed to what I call Gbiota food meaning plants, grown in living soil and eaten fresh.
That includes spices and herbs which add a bit of flavour to what could otherwise be a very bland food.
Part 2 Solutions Technology and Social
Technology
This is not a manual, that is separate, this is just an overview.
The aim is to grow food containing a broad spectrum of beneficial microbes.
Before I describe how to do this I need to talk about three essential concepts.
Ecological balance
Breeding microbes is more than easy, it is almost impossible to stop. Just leave anything organic, meat veggies food scraps, prunings, dead logs, grass cutting, whatever and some microbe will come along and use it as food and once fed it will breed like crazy.
The problem is that a lot of these microbes are harmful so how do we breed the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful ones?
I should add a foot-note - on a scale to feed eight billion people at an economic price.
The answer comes from nature and has existed for billions of years - Ecological balance.
It is why we have polar bears in the Arctic but no Antelopes but no polar bears but plenty of Antelopes in Africa.
It is simply a question of carefully controlling the conditions to preferentially favour the beneficial microbes.
Plants need five things - sunlight and carbon dioxide which they get from the air free of charge.
They also need a balanced ration of nutrients, water and air (technically dissolved oxygen) they get from the soil.
All we have to do is to manage the ratio of nutrients, water and air in the soil to preferentially benefit the good microbes.
The flood and flush system is a practical way of maintaining this air to water ratio.
Goldilocks moisture, not to wet and not to dry - just right.
Soil blood
A second basic concept is soil blood, a term I made up thinking about how our bodies work.
All our organs need oxygen which they get from blood which contains dissolved oxygen via our lungs.
This is how fish and soil life works.
In the Gbiota technology, we are consistently circulating water containing both nutrients and dissolved oxygen.
Dynamic equilibrium
There is another basic concept I must introduce before I describe the mechanics.
Look at the major cities of the world that have existed for thousands of years, but the characteristics of their citizens have remained relatively consistent over generations.
It is the same with microbes in the soil, plants and our gut - given stable conditions they are consistent over a long period of time. But change the conditions and the microbes will change very rapidly.
Microbes may breed like crazy but they also die very quickly, we are talking about a half-life of less than a day. When we harvest a plant we cut off the natural supply of nutrients so the microbes in the plant, which will later form our gut biota will change (from good to bad).
Plants need to be eaten while fresh, and fresh does not mean ‘not gone rotten’.
Gbiota beds
Gbiota beds are the most direct way of growing plants to enhance our gut biota.
They are generally raised beds, preferably not enclosed, to avoid the soil becoming saturated in times of heavy rain.
Ag pipes (slotted drainage pipes) are laid on the base and feed into a sump (by a leaky dam as described in the support articles).
They are filled with a mixture of organic waste, soil with a fine particle size, minerals and initially inoculants and soil creatures.
Beneficial microbes do breed in the soil but they also breed in the gut of the creatures of the soil, worms, beetles, larvae, nematodes etc.
These creatures play a key role in breaking down the organic waste.
We need to grow a spectrum of plants as each species exudes nutrients which attract specific species of microbes.
Plants can be seeded directly into the soil and the bed irrigated using a combination of flood and flush and spraying.
The water or soil blood comes from the sump using a pump.
The drainage pipes are used as subsurface irrigation pipes to flood the base of the bed but when the pump is turned off the soil blood drains slowly (via the leaky dam) back into the sump.
As the soil blood drains it will suck fresh air into the bed.
The same pump can be used to sprinkle irrigate. This has several advantages, the soil blood contains beneficial microbes which will enter the plant via the foliage, the soil blood will absorb oxygen by sprinkling and it also helps germinate seeds.
The limitation of the Gbiota bed is that the plants need to be eaten shortly after harvesting. This is no problem for a home grower but severely limits the market for commercial growers.
This problem is resolved by Gbiota baskets.
Gbiota baskets
Gbiota baskets are any suitable container with holes - supermarket baskets work fine and are light enough to carry.
Food plants are grown in the soil in the baskets and the microbes and the creatures of the soil enter the baskets and the irrigation, both subsurface and spray are spreading the microbes.
When the plants are ready to start harvesting they can be delivered and all the consumer has to do is to water and harvest, preferably by tipping (see documentation).
As the baskets, using tipping, may be productive for a month or more this makes transport more manageable.
The baskets can be placed in a box with a swivel tube so it works similar to a wicking box and allows the use of the flood and flush system to maintain the Goldilocks moisture level.
It also save time with less frequent waterings.
The box can be partially filled with water which will wick up to the plants, but it must not lie there stagnant or the wrong microbes will breed.
It need to be circulated using the flood and flush.
Gbiota boxes
Gbiota boxes are intermediate between beds and baskets.
They use compost tubes for recycling and are fitted with swivel tubes so can operate the flood and flush system as in a Gbiota bed.
They do need the special mix we call Wickimix to set them up and they do need replenishing after a time.
They may have a longer time between swapping but they require more skill and effort to manage than a Gbiota baskets.
Social
The Gbiota system may provide a technical solution to the epidemic of chronic disease but it does require a change in the way our food system works and social changes are never easy, particularly when the main players are multi-national mega companies seemingly beyond the control of National Governments.
So how do we go about creating this social change?
Functions of food
We need food for energy, we are thermodynamic machines so we eat food to power our bodies. Typically that energy comes from sugar and fats and if there is one thing that our current food system is good at is providing us with sugary fatty foods, laced with flavourings which are often addictive and promoted by highly skilled manipulative marketing.
Some 80% of the food we eat is energy food and our current food system is well geared to keep on supplying energy food on a massive scale.
We also need food to replace our body parts as they wear and age.
Modern technology has dramatically increased the production of energy food but the supply of the critical nutrients for replacement food has remained static so there is an issue with trace minerals and vitamins but at this moment it is not at a critical level.
Replacement food needs to be around 15% of our food intake.
The serious issue is that our modern food is deficient in food to feed and replace our gut microbes.
In an effort to get fed our gut microbes, who are at the wheel as our intelligent control system, send out signals for us to eat more in the hope of getting gut-brain food.
This may be only 5% of our needed food intake but this deficiency is at the core of resolving the epidemic of chronic disease.
The big challenge we face is how to educate the public that they need to be eating gut-brain food.
There will be no new gut-brain food industry if there is no demand from the public.
How do we do that?
Farther Christmas
My daughter, when she was about seven accidentally taught me a very valuable lesson.
Like all seven year old’s the world is full of wonder and discovery and those rather stupid, uniformed adults need educating about these discoveries.
She has found out the way of identifying real Farther Christmases from fake ones.
All you had to do was look behind their ears. If there was elastic holding up their beard they were fakes, no elastic and they were real.
After she had explained this major discovery to me I asked in the typical clumsy way of adults if she still believed in Father Christmas.
This was a big problem for her which required a long thought but eventually, she responded with a question “If I say I have stopped believing in Father Christmas, will I still get presents?”
That was a long time ago, she is now a grandmother but in the age of the internet and disinformation and manipulative marketing, people will believe in what is best for them and the truth plays only a minor part.
How to convince the public
I don’t think I am particularly weird in wanting to live a long and healthy life so have experimented on myself with many diets.
I am a natural pig so in my older years have developed a bit of a tum so I tried a strict calorie-restricted diet. I caught sight of myself in a mirror and was horrified to see the emaciated face, like from a feature film about the concentration camps, looking back at me.
That certainly made me question the value of simple calorie restriction and led me to investigate how the body naturally controls weight.
I know that the natural system works because if we had been fat back in our period of evolution we could not have climbed trees and swung from branch to branch to escape the ferocious beast below.
I have stopped worrying about calories, but ensure that I eat food that will feed my gut-brain and also contains the essential minerals and vitamins.
I am eighty-five, fit and healthy go for a long walk or bike ride most mornings so as far as I am concerned it has worked for me.
I don’t spend hours worrying about my diet, if my body tells me I am hungry I eat and if it tells me I am not hungry I don’t eat (or only eat a little).
Statistics and an n of 1
I know enough about statistics to know that an ‘n’ or sample size of 1 is next to useless and that you need a sample size in the many thousands with complex adjustments to correct for a range of factors to be scientifically valid.
But even then the public will be confused by the technical jargon of statistics and will still be unconvinced - unless - yes wait for it
that ‘n’ happens to be you.
Strategy for the Disinformation Age
Step 1 - Keen, health-conscious gardeners
I think we can assume that in this disinformation age that hardly anyone is going to believe what they see on the internet - unless it is from a real person they trust.
It is also unrealistic to go head to head against the might of the modern food industry who are very good at their job - which is making as much money as possible and manipulative promotion plays a key part and is something they are very good at.
But there are people who have that magic combination of being both keen gardeners and concerned about their health. Maybe only a minority of the population but they can play a critical role.
So we start by helping these keen health-conscious gardeners to set up their own Gbiota beds, get them to eat the gut-brain food they grow and see if their appetite is reduced.
They don’t have to do what I have done, wait until they are eighty-five and see if they are still fit and healthy.
If they feel that they are satisfied, stop craving food and naturally eat less then it is virtually certain that they have extended their health span.
Then, and this is the critical bit, persuade them of their community obligation to tell their friends and contacts.
Step 2 Set up a local gut-brain food industry
The epidemic of chronic diseases is global involving billions of people. It will not be resolved by home growers. We need to create a global gut-brain industry. But how?
There are many entrepreneurial growers who are potential gut-brain growers. As professional growers, they already have the technical base, so with a little training they can be effective suppliers.
But professional growers have to earn a living so how can this be turned into a sound and stable business?
Technically gbiota baskets and boxes are good products but there is a transport issue. We are not shipping plants but plants growing in boxes or baskets.
In practice this means they must be local suppliers but today so many people live in cities well away from the conventional farming areas.
However, it does not take a lot of space and most cities are surrounded by growing areas. In some cities areas have already been set aside for food production.
This is a problem where local Governments need to be involved.
Central Governments also need to be involved, particularly for public education. As they bear the brunt of the cost of the epidemic there is every reason for them to be motivated.
The modern internet resolves some of the problems with consumers being able to order and pay online.
But there is still the physical problem of distribution. An ideal solution would be to have some central location where consumers visit as part of their normal routine and baskets or boxes could be delivered in bulk.
Local farmers markets, health food shops and gyms come to mind.
Final note
Despite all these obstacles if we are to thrive as a species we must make the effort. In the first instance, this will fall on the shoulders of a few dedicated individuals.
I cannot create the change myself, I am just one person. But a group of dedicated people, who see the importance of creating a new industry of gut-brain food so we have a healthy community, can make this essential change.
At this moment the most important job it so spread the word to create an active community.
This document is published under the creative commons which means it can be copied and republished without further approval just acknowledgement of source.
So if you appreciate the importance of this project please tell your friends and if you really want to make an impact persuade your Government that they carry the responsibility for community health.
If you are serious contact me here and I can set up a video call, one of the good things of modern technology, and we can have a chat.
In option one we can live in a society dominated by marketing hype, where we buy health bars full of sugars and fats because they are promoted as healthy, where we spend a thousand dollars a month to take drugs like Ozemic in an attempt to get slim but find that after a year our bodies have acclimatised so they no longer work.
It takes little effort but costs a lot of money and we destroy the natural resources of the Earth.
In option 2 we live in a circular economy where we respect the Earth. We take advantage of creatures like a little fly that lays its eggs in mulch. The larvae that hatch out are so ugly that even their mother cannot love them and flies away.
But they excrete into the soil microbes which change our Gut Biota which controls our appetite so we don’t overeat, get fat and sick but instead live long and healthy lives.
It costs less than option 1 but it does take effort to understand how a sustainable circular economy works.
You will take this decision right now when you decide whether to skip away or make the effort to understand how a sustainable circular system works and the health and social benefits that result.
Where is the introduction?
When you write an article, give a talk or create a website it is normal to have a short introduction that tells people what is coming up.
I can tell you what I would like to talk about, how we can solve the challenge of our modern food system which is causing an epidemic of chronic diseases - overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia and how we can overcome the future challenges from climate change, degradation of our soils and running out of critical minerals - like phosphorous.
Well, I am not going to do that - at least not straight away, that will come later, for a very good reason-I need to tell you a little story to set the scene.
A long time ago
Many years ago, about fifty to be precise before I decided to devote my attention to what I consider the greatest threat to mankind - how we can sustainably grow food that will keep us healthy. At that time plastics had not become antisocial so I wrote a computer simulation of how plastics flow into a mould.
The conventional wisdom at the time was that if a mould did not fill then make the flow channels bigger. That was simple, easy and did not work.
I went around the world giving lectures saying that the solution was to make some flow channels smaller, specifically the flow channels feeding the easy areas of the mould to fill, which would then direct the flow to the more difficult areas to fill.
Nutter from down under
And almost everyone thought I was a nutter and I was booed and heckled.
But a few entrepreneurial engineers thought I might have a point, tried it and it worked.
They then told their friends, published scientific papers and soon the whole industry accepted this apparently crazy idea.
For this, I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators.
Simple, obvious and does not work
We now face a similar situation with food, but this affects everyone on Earth.
The simple and obvious solution to people getting fat, (and fat in the wrong place is the root cause of the epidemic) is to eat less.
It may be simple, obvious but does not work. We have been trying that for years and people are getter fatter and chronic diseases increase.
Every book on diet, every article you read and almost every expert you talk to will tell you ‘eat less exercise more’ but it does not work, at least long term and for a very simple reason.
Our body has intelligence
Our body is not a dumb collection of organs it has intelligence, largely in our head and gut and its tries to keep us alive by whatever means possible.
Now I ask you, if you were a brain and your job was to keep your body alive and you saw that your body was short of food what would your do?
You would probably think that the smart thing to do would be to store any and every bit of food that you could lay your hands (or teeth) on and that is exaclty what your smart body does.
We have ignored this for eighty years
This is exactly what happens and we have known this for some eighty years when people who were starved in WW2 later later became fat when food was available, we had trained out bodies to store fat.
We see it every day, rich people who have an abundant supply of healthy food tend to be slim, people struggling with excessive rent payment who can’t afford healthy food tend to get fat.
Eat more but of the right sort of food
Just as with my battle over flow channels when I said make some flow channels smaller but people heard make all flow channels smaller I am now saying forget about the old thinking of eating less I am saying eat more.
But I am not saying go out and eat a monster plate of hamburger and chips I am saying eat more of the right sort of food.
That food is gut-brain food which feeds out intellitgent control system which regualtes our bodies.
This website is all about how to eat more of the right sort of food.
Thanks for re-thinking
As expected most people hear 'your fat eat more' which is not what I am saying but all I can do is hope some entrepreneurial thinkers come along read and think about what I am saying, try it for themselves and then tell their friends and we start thinking about fat in a different, more enlightened, way.
Every year eight million people a year who have a limb amputated from diabetes and will be very grateful to these entrepreneurial thinkers who went out on a limb to change the way we think about food.
If you are one of these please email me at colin@gbiota.com I would love to hear from you.
Wonce a pone a tie’m
Nothing like a good yarn
Seems like my spell checker is not working too well but starting with "Once upon a time" is a way of saying story coming up - yes this web is a bit different.
We are suffering from an epidemic of chronic diseases, our food system is making us fat and sick.
We have to change the way we grow at least some of our food so we can enjoy a long and healthy life.
I think people would prefer to hear directly from a guy that is out there, living in the real world, getting his hands dirty experimenting with different ways of growing food rather than a marketing wiz kids living in a virtual world of marketing hype and Avatars.
Sorry if I offend but the truth can be nasty.
I tell this as a story because people like a good yarn and are put off by a lot of dull boring statistics.
Father Christmas and Fantasy land
The story starts many years ago when I was chatting with my seven year old daughter. When you are seven everything is new and exciting and obviously you have a duty to explain your new discover to your aging parents who may not be too enlightened.
She was explaining how to tell the difference between real Father Christmases and fake ones.
You look behind their ears. If there is elastic holding up their beard they are fake but it there is no elastic they are real.
Without really thinking I asked her if she still believed in Father Christmas.
A big deal
This was apparently a big deal for her because she thought about it for a long time and then asked “If I stop believing in Farther Christmas will I still get presents?”
This taught me a lot about human nature, what we believe is what is convenient to believe and the facts are only a very secondary issue.
Humanity faces many challenges, there is climate variability from the increasing carbon dioxide levels, the degradation of our soils, and the way we are rapidly exploiting the available resources of water and critical minerals like phosphorus.
These are a threat to humans’ ability to feed ourselves but don’t seem to be a big issue that people want to talk about.
Take climate change, I would have thought that the danger was pretty clear yet many young adolescent males totally deny there is a problem and insist on doing wheelies in giant V8’s totally denouncing any change to electric cars.
What is the driving force here (excuse the pun)?
The point is that doing wheelies is rutting behaviour. Humans don’t have the vocal capacity of a moose but we are the great tool makers and what better tool to make a lot of noise to show that you are ready for a bit of hanky panky, than a giant V8 at full throttle?
Don’t tangle with a rutting moose
If you learn anything from this website remember never to tangle with a rutting moose, (or rutting adolescent) they are focused on a bit of hanky-panky and any facts are irrelevant.
Unfortunately, it seems to attract more adolescent males than females but the smart males have worked out that a Harley Davidson bike is far more effective, maybe they are more noisy or maybe it is the attraction for the ladies of having a giant throbbing V twin between their legs.
We can avoid thinking about all the threats that we face but it does not make them go away. We can console ourselves that the Earth has been bobbing around the sun for the last 4.3 billion years so say happy birthday Earth.
Happy Birthday Earth
We should make a birthday cake to celebrate but it will have to be big for the 4.3 billion candles, about the size of Tasmania.
I say that to make the point that it is a really long time and in all probability, the Earth will be still bobbing around the sun for a few more billion years so we don’t have to worry about protecting the Earth, it will do fine without us.
How well we will survive is another question.
Dinosaurs lived on the earth for some 265 million years some thousand times longer than modern man.
The future is here now
But even if we put all those future concerns away as some left of centre city trendy worry about the future there is still the problem of what is happening today. Three out of four people now die from a chronic disease which is caused by our food system.
But even that is not the real issue, our health span, how long we remain healthy is declining again because of our food system.
Eight million people a year suffer a limb amputation from diabetes. We can’t pretend that is not happening, if you have a leg amputated you can’t suddenly pretend that you have a virtual leg and become a football star.
It just won’t happen.
You can take action
This website is about what action we can take to prevent chronic diseases, we know how to prevent chronic diseases, they are a modern man-made creation and man can reverse them just as easily as we created them.
The challenge is to persuade people to stop pretending and thinking that they will go away.
My daughter, when young, believed in Father Christmas and the Tooth fairy but at some point in her life she accepted that she had to stop pretending and accept the world as it is.
Stop pretending and accept the world as it is
With chronic diseases, resulting from our food system, we likewise have to stop pretending and accept the world as it is and do something about it.
That is what this web is all about so why not register and change the world?
The food industry is dominated by a small number of oligopolies who put their profits ahead of community benefit and even seem to intimidate our Governments whose job is to put the community first.
Getting fat and sick and having eight million legs chopped off every year is not the society that I or anyone wants.
It is only by a large number of people showing that the system must change that we will achieve change - so register and show you want change. It costs nothing but shows you care and it may be you that that is the person who avoids getting fat and sick and having your leg chopped off.
Welcome to my site
Welcome to my site. If you are expecting super-sophisticated marketing this is not the site for you.
Clever but manipulative marketing of fake food is not just reducing life span; worse it is reducing health span - how long we are fit and active.
Medical science has meant that our life span has steadily increased but has now plateaued and is even decreasing.
Modern food has meant that our health span, how long we are fit and healthy, has steadily declined.
The modern internet is saturated with dubious claims for magical health products. There is no way that you can say for sure that if you take this or that product in twenty years time you will be fitter and healthier. There is no way I can make claims about the future benefits of the technology I promote.
But there is one test that anyone can do. Just eat gut-brain food and see if your appetite is reduced. This makes it easier to eat less food and still feel satisfied which will increase the probability of a longer health span. There is no scientific proof but life is about managing risks.
But do not believe what they may tell you about the "good old days" - that is another myth, people died like flies from infection.
And don’t expect a thirty-second flash-through with three-word slogans will give you the answer - it takes time and thinking to ferret out the truth.
But if you are prepared to invest a bit of time and thinking welcome to my website.
I am an engineer and see the real world as it is - not some marketing guru who sees some fantasy world full of Avatars.
I am a real person email me and we can chat - real person to real person or better still sign up here and get the full story for free.
No water - no food. Water without flow - food that makes us sick.
Food that makes us healthy comes from understanding and controlling how water moves through the soil.
I am Colin Austin, recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators for my pioneering work on computational fluid flow.
Let me give you a brief explanation of what Gbiota is all about.
A very brief history of the world
Some 4.3 billion years ago there was a rock spinning around the sun.
It was dead, inert with nothing living and that went on for around three billion years.
The first life
Then, we don’t know from where but we think on an asteroid some microbes appeared.
They broke down the rocks and soon soil appeared, then plants followed by an incredible array of creatures. Some like the dinosaurs lived for 165 million years.
Humanoids appear
Then about a million years ago the first humanoid appeared - a puny creatures that barely survived until about two hundred thousand years ago the most important event in human history occurred - the management of fire for cooking.
Fire, cooking and the creation of modern man
This turned the puny creature into modern man. Cooking gave us ready access to nutrients and we physically changed - our guts shrunk and our brains grew and we became the tool maker.
Brains are very greedy, they need a large amount of food but they are also hungry for stimulation - they need entertainment and while other animals may be happy to sit and ruminate we need amusement and stimulation.
Tribes - fit and healthy
At first we lived in small tribes and were relatively fit and healthy but we were curious, continuously inventing new tools and the second major event in human history was the development of agriculture to provided a more reliable food system.
Agriculture, cities and disease
Again the effects on humanity were dramatic, we became smaller and living in dense communities suffered from infectious diseases.
Disease meant that only one out of five babies born would reach mature adulthood.
Just to maintain the population with two babies reaching adulthood women had to have ten babies.
Women became very valuable and we became a highly aggressive creature not just fighting over land but fighting to steal women.
The fight against infection
But being an innovative and creative creature we understood the problem and came up with solutions, we developed technologies for managing sewage and supplying fresh water, better beds so we were better protected from biting creatures which carry infections and of course we improved our medical services with innovations like anti-biotics.
Population explosion
The result was dramatic, the global population trebled every hundred years so in a period of just two hundred years the global population increased from under a billion to over eight billion.
All those mouths had to be fed and humans, the very innovative creature developed its agricultural technology at a faster rate than the human population expanded - an incredible achievement.
The dreaded side effects
But, as often happens with new technology there was a side effect.
The food was full of energy but was deficient in critical minerals and nutrients, which we tried to correct by developing a supplement industry but our food was inert, lacking beneficial microbes which formed out gut brain.
The supercomputer that controls appetite
We had not understood that all those trillions of cells in our gut communicate with each other to from genuine intelligence - like having a super computer in our tummies.
One of the critical functions of this supercomputer was to regulate our bodies, particularly our appetite.
Faced with a surplus of tasty energy food, which we love, and lacking an effective regulator for our appetite we began to overeat and get fat.
If this fat goes to where we evolved to store it, which is our bum, there is no serious problem but if this fat goes to the wrong place the results are disastrous.
The epidemic of chronic disease
Heart attacks, the commonest cause of death are typically caused by blocked arteries, diabetes - the fastest growing disease is fat blocking the pancreas and our muscles so we have the dreaded combination of not enough insulin and being resistant to the insulin we may produce.
But perhaps the most dreaded disease is dementia, where people are still alive but with no understanding of the world around them.
The current epidemic of chronic disease which kills three out of four people but perhaps worse living a life of poor health.
The solution - breeding beneficial microbes
But we are a creative and innovative creature and the solution is obvious, we need to have a food system which contains the beneficial microbes that control our appetite without the harmful microbes which have caused infectious diseases throughout human history.
We know how to do that. This is what the Gbiota technology is all about, preferentially breeding the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful ones by controlling the conditions.
Simple and inexpensive - but must be done right
This is a simple and inexpensive technology which could save millions of lives but as always there is a snag.
It has to be done right so we don’t preferentially breed the harmful microbes.
Eventually, this will change our food system but today’s issue is how to introduce this technology to the world in a controlled way.
The search for dedicate pioneers
For this we need dedicate pioneers who are prepared to commit their time to understand the technology and apply it correctly.
This is a subscription site for people concerned about our modern food supply which is making us fat and sick and are prepared to help change the system so we can enjoy living a longer and healthier life.
There are several levels of membership.
We are currently creating a series of YouTube videos which are bringing a stream of potential interested people to the site just wanting to find out what it is all about.
They can access much of the site for free while they decide whether this is something they want to become involved with but they do need to register when they will receive our newsletter and notifications of the new posts which we write on a regular basis.
If they decide this is not for them they do not need to do anything as membership is automatically cancelled for people who are not active on the site.
Should you decide that you want to be an active member then you have three option.
You can decide that you want to be a consumer and eat food which will enhance your gut health but don’t want to be involved in growing the food yourself in which case we will link you with a community grower.
They may like to look at articles on Food and Health
You can decide that you want to grow the food that will enhance you gut health just for you own use.
You may like to upgrade you subsciption to Private Grower and read the articles in Growing
Or you you decide that you want to set up a business to supply food that will enhance gut health by becoming a community grower in which case we will help you set up your business. You should email me so I can explain how we can help.
Gbiota technology controls the conditions in the soil so the beneficial microbes out-breed and out-compete any harmful microbes.
These beneficial microbes move into the plants that we eat and then into our gut.
The trillions of cells in our gut communicate with each other to provide real intelligence which regulates our appetite.
Skilled growers create Gbiota baskets with growing plants, consumers simply have to water the baskets then pick and eat the plants while they are still fresh before the microbes die.
This is an effective and economical way of combating the epidemic of chronic diseases caused by overeating leading to the wrong fat in the wrong places.
What is Gbiota?
What is Gbiota?
My aim for Gbiota is to create a thriving, sustainable society with a food system designed for long, healthy lives, emphasizing recycling over depleting Earth's resources and prioritizes community well-being over corporate profits. In essence, it envisions a society that is equitable and enjoyable to live in—both now and for future generations.
Gbiota is a social movement to create a society that is good to live in, with a food system that leads to people leading a long and healthy life, that is sustainable by recycling rather then exploiting the earths finite resources and which has a sense of equity that ranks community benefit ahead of short term profits for mega corporations.
A society that is just a good place to live now and in the future.
This is me - a real person - send me an email and say hi.
Colin Austin
Thinking, very much out of fashion
Modern society is high speed, high pressure with a few people making a lot of money while the bulk of the people are suffering from a health epidemic of overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
You may have heard that we get fat and sick because we eat too much and the simple solution is to eat less and exercise more.
This is a very short and snappy slogan which suits the food industry, it means it is not their fault as much of the population has suddenly turned into little piggies.
It is just part of the fake facts that dominate our society. We know how to grow food that will lead to people living a long and healthy life but it takes time to explain what the real problem is and more important what the solution is.
Here I explain why we are getting fat and sick and more importantly what we can do about it but it takes time and effort to understand the real reasons and AI cannot do the thinking for us.
So if you are into a bit of thinking welcome aboard.
How being simple and obvious can be wrong
Let me tell you a little story of how an idea can be simple and obvious but wrong.
Some fifty years ago, before plastics became anti-social engineers were having problems filling moulds. I wrote up a computer simulation which involved solving coupled non-linear differential equations, not a big deal any competent mathematician could have done that.
But the simple and obvious thinking at that time was the if a mould did not fill then make the flow channels bigger - how could that possibly be wrong.
But I was not happy with that simple and obvious thinking so dug a bit deeper and realised that the problem was that some parts of the mould were easier to fill than others and the solution was to make these flow channels smaller to divert the flow to the more difficult to fill areas - and it worked.
Now imagine standing up in front of an audience of experienced engineers and telling that the way to fill a mould was to make some flow channels smaller.
I was booed and jeered and still have scars on my back but a few, actually a very few engineers heard the argument and were may be not convinced but thought it worth while trying.
And it worked and they were convinced and they told other engineers and soon this became the accepted way of thinking.
I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators for my pioneering work.
But I realised that the biggest problem facing our species was how to feed the billions of people on earth with food that was both lead to us living a long and healthy life and be sustainable.
It was obvious there was a major health across the globe from chronic or non-infectious diseases. It was well understood that this epidemic was caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place which is correct.
The simple and obvious solution was to eat less, how can that be wrong you are getting fat so eat less. That was and still is the predominant thinking but like the thinking that to fill a mould by making the flow channels bigger did not work the thinking that we can solve the epidemic of chronic diseases by eating less, however simple and obvious does not work.
I am not a drongo, I have proved the power deep thinking and not being deluded by accepting the simple and obvious once and it is time to prove this again in an area that is much more important - food and the health of the global population.
So let us get started with a bit of deep thinking, even if it is unfashionable.
Three Types of Food
Think of your body as a thermodynamic machine, like your car.
Energy food
It needs fuel for energy. This comes from sugars and fats - which are abundant - our supermarkets are full of them.
They are made from simple chemicals like carbon and hydrogen which we burn with oxygen to produce energy.
Not a problem.
Replacement food
It needs a range of complex chemicals to replace parts as they age and wear. We may refer to them by the names of the elements, iron, zinc, magnesium, phosphorous etc. but those elements are useless for us, they have to be combined into complex chemicals which are bio-available.
That is done for us by plants that create phytonutrients - just eating fruit and vegetables provides all we need (but we can always buy pills if we live in Finland in winter).
Not a problem.
Gut-brain food
It needs a control system to regulate our bodies. This is done by a combination of our head and gut-brain. The microbes in our gut communicate with each other to create intelligence. It is like having a supercomputer in our gut.
One of the most important jobs is to regulate our appetite.
Microbes - the first life on earth
Since life first started on earth, over a billion years ago these microbes came from the soil, entered the plants we ate and hence into our gut-brain.
Nothing new here.
Beneficial and harmful microbes
But there were, and still are beneficial microbes which are essential for life and harmful microbes which make us sick from infectious diseases.
In the past, we mainly died from infectious diseases
For most of the time that humanoid creatures have been on earth, some million years we have died young from infectious diseases with very few of us dying a natural death from old age.
We innovated to kill the harmful microbes
But we are a smart creature so we created sewage and fresh water systems, better hygiene so we weren’t bitten by so many insects, startling medical advances like anti-biotics and above all a food system that was devoid of dangerous microbes.
But we killed the beneficial microbes as well
Sounds fantastic, and indeed it is, apart from the fact that we have killed off those beneficial microbes which control our appetite so we now tend to overeat and the majority of people now get sick or die from non-infectious diseases like overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
How can we breed beneficial microbes without breeding harmful microbes?
It was obvious what was needed, a way of breeding the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful ones that kill us.
There is no problem in breeding microbes, cells will start duplicating within twenty minutes and if you double anything every twenty minutes there are soon trillions of them.
The challenge is how to breed the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful ones.
Control the conditions
The answer to that is simple, it is why there are no polar bears in the Sahara desert and no Antelopes in the Arctic. It has existed since the beginning of life on earth and we now call it Eco-balance. Just create the conditions which benefit the beneficial species and they will out-breed and out-compete the harmful ones.
The term Eco-balance may sound like something from an inner city trendy but it has been the basis of life from the very beginning.
Gbiota’s aim breed beneficial microbes not harmful ones
Gbiota’s aim is to breed beneficial microbes which enhance gut health. The trillions of cells in our gut communicate with each other to create genuine intelligence. It is like having a supercomputer in your gut which we call our gut-brain.
Our gut-brain controls appetite
They control, among many other things, our appetite - what and how much we want to eat.
A healthy gut sends out hormones when we have eaten enough so we feel satisfied and stop craving food.
No gut-brain food - we overeat
If we do not have a healthy gut we don’t receive these hormones so we have food cravings and overeat which is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic disease, overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
Microbes start in the soil
These microbes start in the soil. There are trillions of them made up of many thousands of different species. Many are beneficial and keep us fit and healthy but others will make us sick or even kill us.
Microbes breed like crazy, there is no difficulty in breeding microbes. The difficulty is breeding the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful microbes.
Gbiota shows growers how
Gbiota shows growers how to control the conditions so the beneficial microbes out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.
Gbiota links growers and consumers
You can join the Gbiota movement as a grower - which involves learning how to preferentially breed the beneficial microbes or you can join as a consumer which is simple - all you need to do is to link up with a Gbiota grower.
Register and join the Gbiota movement
Join the Gbiota movement for gut health - register as either a grower or a consumer.
Gbiota enhances Gut Biota, which regulates your body, by breeding beneficial microbes in Wickimix – a special soil - then growing plants in this Wickimix which will transfer these microbes to your gut.
You can join the Gbiota movement in three ways
Consumer
You can join as a consumer for free to buy Gbiota boxes but you will need to link to a local grower.
We will try and link you to a local grower in your area but you will need to complete the registration form and tick the box -
Consumer (wants to link to grower to buy Gbiota boxes)
Licensed grower
You can join as a licensed grower to supply Gbiota boxes to consumers in your area, we will provide training and support on how to produce Gbiota boxes and link you to local consumers to run a profitable, social benefit business.
You can register your interest for free while we go through the process of establishing you as a licensed grower. Tick the box -
Local grower (offer Gbiota boxes for sale)
Home grower
If you want to grow Gbiota plants for your own use you can join as a private home grower. Click the box -
Private home grower (just grow for own use)
Register here
You can express your interest for free here and click on the appropriate box.
Watch this seven-minute video to see why changing the gut biota which regualtes our appetite is so important for health
This video give more information on the growing technology
Watch this six minute video to learn about real and fake food.
Fat or skinny
Gbiota - the new industry of sustainably breeding beneficial microbes in the soil to grow plants that will enhance our gut biota to keep us healthy.
Why are some people fat and others skinny
We have known for a long time that if we feed the pooh of a skinny mouse to a fat mouse that it will become skinny and vice versa.
Of course, humans are not in the habit of eating each other’s pooh but we can get similar results with humans by a faecal transplant.
Maybe something that we don’t want to think about but taking the pooh of a fat or skinny person and poking it up someone else bum will switch them from to being fat or skinny.
Changing our gut biota can switch us from being fat or skinny.
Newton
You have no doubt heard the conventional wisdom that we get fat and sick because we eat to much and the solutions is to eat less and exercise more - the calorie balance theory.
Similarly you will no doubt be aware that despite these words of wisdom that people across the globe are getting fatter and sicker.
The fundamental laws of conservation of mass and energy were given to us by Newton some two hundred years ago - how can we reconcile what appears to be opposing approaches.
What is the mechanism?
This raises many questions -
How does changing the gut biota change people from fat to skinny or vice versa? What is the mechanism?
Does it matter and how can we take advantage of this mechanism?
Well, it matters a lot. Skinny people are more prone to infectious diseases while fat people are more prone to non-infectious or chronic diseases. This has reached epidemic proportions and would probably rank as the top global health crisis - so it matters a lot.
We can answer that. Our gut has trillions of cells which communicate with each other to provide genuine intelligence, particularly in deciding what and how much food we want to eat.
These microbes need to be fed, so say before we had sugar-eating microbes and we changed the balance to more fibre-eating microbes. The remaining sugar-eating microbes would feel they are starving so would send out signals to make us feel hungry leading us to want to overeat and get fat.
See food not sea food
We can loose weight by going on a calorie restricted diet but we will suffer from food cravings. We can win for a while but eventually we will see food and eat it.
Our gut-brain almost always eventually wins so leading to the well know yo-yo eating.
To win long term we need to overcome these food cravings so we feel satisfied and that is much easier than you may think - just feed our gut-brain the right sort of gut-brain food so we have a beneficial microbes in our gut.
Will it work?
Science likes general laws which can be used to solve specific problems. Newtons laws are general laws which we all thought were universally true until Einstein came along and showed us that if we were zapping around near the speed of light that we needed a modified set of general laws.
The human body, particularly our gut and heat brains, are highly sophisticated with considerable variation between people so there bad news is that there is no law which is universally true but the good news is that it is a simple and inexpensive process to feed your gut-brain for say three months and then you will know for sure whether this will work for you.
I am sorry I can’t give you a general law, I didn’t design the universe, I just do my best to understand how it works.
So what goes?
So what can we do about it? We can’t just start eating each other’s pooh.
Many animals from mice to elephants will eat each others pooh to feed their gut biota but they have evolved an immune system which can cope with eating other creatures’ pooh without getting sick.
We lack that immune system so no doubt you will be pleased to hear that the recommended solution does not involve us becoming pooh eaters.
Understanding our gut biota
But we can study where our gut biota comes from and use this understanding to develop strategies to enhance our gut biota.
As a baby, mum transferred her biota to us during birth, and then after from her milk but where did mum get her gut biota from? From the food she ate.
Humanoid creatures have been on this earth for some million years and modern humans, like us for some two hundred thousand years.
Eating plants grown in living soil
Until very recently we ate plants that were grown in soil full of living creatures, some like the nematodes microscopic and others like worms and beetles large enough for us to see.
All these creatures would be busy pooping out living microbes. Also, the plants exude sugars to feed the microbes living in the soil, with each plant exuding different sugars to support specific types of microbes which would benefit that plant.
Eco-balance
This is a highly sophisticated Eco-system which would generally be in a state of balance with the beneficial microbes out-competing and out-breeding any harmful microbes.
But not always and it was not uncommon, if the conditions did not preferentially benefit the beneficial microbes, that the harmful microbes would gain the upper hand.
Historically this was not good for us humans with many, actually most, people dying young before their natural life expectancy.
The wrong technology
Humans, being technologically sophisticated, developed the use of chemicals to control any potentially dangerous microbes but the net result was that we killed off the beneficial microbes which has led to the current epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases.
That is why the Gbiota technology was developed, it is based on the principles of Eco-balance so the beneficial microbes can out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.
This is done in the soil, so the soil is teaming with beneficial microbes which will enter the plants and then our gut.
But microbes have a very short life so the plants must be eaten while fresh - shortly after picking.
Local growers
We can solve that problem by licensing the Gbiota technology to local growers who create the Eco-balance in the soil in permanent Gbiota beds.
But open mesh baskets, like supermarket baskets, are incorporated into these beds so the beneficial microbes can readily enter the baskets and hence the plants.
When the plants are ready to be eaten the Gbiota basket is then taken from the Gbiota beds, full of the Gbiota soil we call Wickimix, and delivered to the final customer who can then pick and eat the plants while genuinely fresh and hence enhance their gut biota.
Register your interest
If this is of interest, and of course, many people are put off by the whole business of creatures pooping away in the soil, but if you can handle that idea then please register your interest here.
When there are sufficient people in an area we will seek out and train a local grower so they can provide the local community with Gbiota baskets.
A new food industry for a healthy and sustainable future
Let us be clear this is creating a new industry with local growers supplying their local community, very different to the current industry dominated by global meg-corporations.
In some ways this is not new at all, microbes were the first living creatures on the earth going back billions of years and creating soil which led to an explosion of life on earth, but it was an uncontrolled process leading to epidemics of infectious diseases.
Microbes breed very easily, there is nothing new about microbes breeding what is new it controlling the conditions to create an Eco-balance so the beneficial microbes out-breed the harmful microbes.
Pioneering spirits
Preferentially breeding beneficial microbes in the soil means the creation of a new industry and new industries are not created by one person, certainly not me without help, but by a team of pioneering spirits with vision who can look into the future to see what needs to be done.
If you are such a pioneering spirit I would love to hear from you so why not email me here
Humans are successful because there is no other creature or AI machine which comes close to our ability to analyse and solve problems.
The population explosion
We all have a problem that in the last hundred years the human population trebled and in the hundred years before it trebled again.
One reason the population exploded was our success in overcoming infectious disease which killed four out of every five babies borne.
On a geological time scale, in a flash we have gone from a population of under a billion to over eight billion and we all have to eat.
Finite resources
The Earth has not got any bigger and virtually every piece of available land suitable for food production has been used.
Improved efficiency
We thought we had solved any food crisis by improving the efficiency of food production which has amazingly increased faster than the dramatic increase in population.
We produce enough food overall to feed the entire global population.
Creating technologies easier than changing society
There are people starving because we are not as good at creating equitable societies which contrast badly with our skills at developing technologies.
But progress is typically a two steps forward and one step back as we overcome snags with our new technologies.
Deficiencies in modern food
The snag with modern food is that it may be hygienic, triple wrapped in plastics, but it is inert lacking the microbes which form our gut-brain which regulates our appetite so we overeat and get fat and sick from chronic diseases - overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place stemming from overeating.
Why we overeat
Why do we overeat? Because of the lack of beneficial microbes in our gut. That regulate our appetite.
Modern food may be hygienic but it is deficient in the essential beneficial microbes.
Beneficial microbes come from our food
As these microbes live in our food and feed our gut which controls our appetite we can call this gut-brain food.
The good news is that we know how to breed these beneficial microbes - we have the technology which we we are very good at but lack the skills in creating societies which work for the benefit of the community.
Short life and dynamic equilibrium
These beneficial microbes, in gut-brain food, have a very short life, there may appear to be a stable population but they are continuously breeding and dying, what we like to call dynamic equilibrium.
Creating a new industry
This means we need to create a new industry of local growers breeding the beneficial microbes that go into gut-brain food.
This is not a technological problem, we know how to breed beneficial microbes, it is a social problem - changing the way our society works so the technology we develop works for the benefit of the community and not just a few mega-corporations.
Local versus centralised
The amazing increase in food production has, in part, come from centralised production with just a few mega corporations managing the bulk of food production whereas breeding beneficial microbes require a decentralised local industry of small scale growers.
This is not, in itself a major problem, there are many growers both organic and regenerative farmers who can grow the plants that contain the beneficial microbes.
Local growers already exist
They exist right now, we just have to change the way the system works to take advantage of their skills and dedication.
Changing the system is the difficult challenge not developing new technologies.
These are already highly skilled and dedicated growers who would welcome the opportunity to help their local community fight the battles against this modern curse of the epidemic of chronic disease.
Dedication does not pay the bills
They may be dedicated growers but they still need to pay their bills and it costs money and time to set up gut-brain food production facilities and for that they need paying customers.
I know how to promote the benefit of eating gut-brain food to the public who would certainly be willing to pay for gut-brain food so they don’t get fat and sick and have their legs chopped of from diabetes.
The chicken and the egg
But what is the point if there is no local growers where they can buy their gut-brain food.
We have a classic chicken and egg situation, how do we break that deadlock?
The solution - show you care
Here’s how and it is pretty simple.
I have set up on my website a registration page where growers can register to say they would be willing to set up gut-brain facilities as long as they could be assured there were enough local people willing to buy gut-brain food.
Simultaneously people who are are not keen on being fat and sick, or not that anxious to have a foot amputated from diabetes, can register.
Linking consumers and growers
Then I can start the process of linking growers with consumers and us humans can get back to what we are good at analysing problems and finding solutions.
We humans think we are the smartest creatures on the planet – and we are but we are dependent on the smallest creatures.
For the first few billion years the earth was just a barren, inert rock then some billion years ago microbes appeared, we don’t know from where but we think an asteroid.
The microbes broke down the rocks to release nutrients so they are bio-available to make soil. Life exploded with the most amazing and massive creatures.
Eventually, quite recently humans appeared but they struggled and died young from diseases. But they survived and developed technologies such as medical advances that enabled them to largely overcome these diseases so they lived longer.
The soil built up to massive depths, many metres in some places so there was an abundant supply of beneficial microbes but then humans developed a concept called money which deluded humans into thinking they could borrow wealth from the future and the past for immediate benefit.
This they did on a massive scale, they changed the climate and destroyed much of the soil but the costs lay in the future so, at first it was not an immediate worry. There was always time and the possibility of some new technology which would solve any problems.
But it turned out that the microbes which came from the soil did a very important job for the humans. They entered their gut and communicated with each other to create an intelligent system which regulated their bodies keeping them fit and healthy.
But without these beneficial microbes, there was no intelligent control system for humans. Hence they got fat and sick and died from an epidemic of non-infectious diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
This was not a cost in the future this is a ‘here and now’ problem with three out of four people dying from these non-infectious diseases.
Of course, they tried all sorts of solutions from sophisticated pharmaceuticals and complicated surgery but it never resolved the root cause of the problem – a lack of the beneficial microbes in their guts.
Of course, there was a simple solution that was so simple that it was just dismissed as too simple and that was to breed the beneficial microbes in the soil, then grow plants in this soil and eat the plants.
But there were just two snags that prevented this simple solution from working.
Snag number 1 the silo dwellers
The first snag was that they needed to breed the beneficial microbes in the soil without breeding the harmful microbes which causes so many problems with infectious diseases.
Microbes breed very easily but how to breed the beneficial microbes without the harmful microbes? The solution to that is simple - just create the conditions that favour the beneficial microbes so they out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.
This was given the name Ecological balance which while it works very well sounds a bit too much like coming from the green lunatic fringe for the specialist reductionist scientist living in the techno-silos.
But that is not so serious as if ideas work they are eventually adopted despite the initial reluctance to adopt.
Snag number 2 Microbes die fast
The second snag is more difficult to overcome. Microbes may breed like crazy but they also die fast with a very short life span.
We may see the same species of microbes but they are not the same microbes, they are the grandchildren of the microbes we saw a few days ago - a situation we call dynamic equilibrium.
It is like a big city, always teeming with people but not the same people.
But there is an easy solution to this.
Find local growers who can be trained to breed the beneficial microbes in the soil.
Take a container, like a supermarket basket with plenty of holes and drop it into a hole in the soil so the creatures of the soil can easily enter the basket.
Then grow plants in this living soil.
When ready lift out the basket and supply to a customer who just has to water and when ready pick and eat the plants while they are still fresh.
When the plants are all eaten swap for a fresh basket.
Any more snags?
Yes, we have to show that such a simple solution works. That is easy, persuade a number of people to try incorporating Gbiota plants into their diet and see if food cravings stop and they feel satisfied.
People overeat because of deficiencies in their diet, remove the deficiencies and the food cravings go away and people feel satisfied.
Then we have the problem of making people aware that this simple and inexpensive solution is available in an era of mass disinformation where no one believes anything they read on the internet.
This can be solved by the ancient process of people talking to people they trust.
Wickimix
The Gbiota technology breeds beneficial microbes in a special soil called Wickimix. Plants are grown in Wickimix and when eaten the beneficial microbes enhance our gut biota which regulates our appetite and hence wards of chronic of non-infectious diseases overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
This website describes how our intelligent control system works and how to prepare Wickimix.
If you want to study this process then follow the links on this site. If you just want to buy plants growing in Wickimix in Gbiota baskets all you have to do is to link up with a licensed grower who can supply you with the Gbiota baskets.
As the beneficial microbes have a short life this only works with living plants so you need a supplier who can supply living plants on a regular schedule.
To link up with a grower please complete the registration form here or below and enter ‘customer’.
If you are interested in becoming a licensed Gbiota supplier then enter ‘local grower’.
Why are some people fat while others are skinny, why do some people enjoy a long and healthy life while others are fat and sick?
We know from the study of twins that genetics play a part, but it is just a part, it is what we eat that matters the most.
We all know the old adage, eat less and exercise more but what really matters is what we eat rather than how much.
If we eat the right sort of food we feel satisfied and simply feel satisfied and naturally want to stop eating. If we don’t eat the right sort of food we get food cravings and overeat.
Our modern food system is high in energy food – fats and sugars but low in essential minerals and vitamins but above all low in the beneficial microbes which live in our gut and control our appetite.
The right sort of food comes from eating plants grown in soil full of beneficial microbes that reinforce our gut biota and break down the minerals to make them bio-available.
Microbes are easy to breed, they are naturally a randy lot, the skill is in creating the right conditions so the beneficial microbes out compete and out breed the harmful microbes.
This is a process of creating an Eco-balance to favour the beneficial microbes and is the key to the Gbiota technology.
The soil produced this way is called “Wickimix”.
It is not that difficult, an experience grower can learn to do this however for most people it is simpler and easier to buy a Gbiota box loaded with Wickimix and seeded so a spectrum of plants are already growing.
But buying Gbiota boxes is more than just buying a box from a store, it requires linking up with a grower who can provide a regular supply of Gbiota boxes on a swap over basis so the boxes are continuously replenished with fresh Wickimix which has a finite shelf life.
If you are interested in becoming a Gbiota grower, either just for your own use or to provide a beneficial and profitable service for your local community you should email me here.
Why develop the Gbiota technology?
Most of us now live in towns and cities. We buy our food from the local supermarket wrapped hygienically in plastic which we throw into the bin and it dutifully disappears.
The same with our human waste which we flush away without further thought.
We live in the age of technical marvels, we can video chat with a friend from the other side of the globe, we can search the internet for any obscure piece of information we desire, we can buy almost anything on line and have it delivered to our door.
If we are sick we can expect a pharmaceutical pill or a complex operation to cure us, and without doubt the advances in medical science is one of the wonders of the world.
We have also devoted the same technical expertise to developing the technologies for killing other humans on a mass scale. Why is one of the puzzles of this complex creature?
We can even jot down a few notes and have it turned into a polished article of any style we wish using AI. But not this article, this is written with human passion by me, a fellow human – but why?
Because, despite all our sophistication we are still are an animal and dependant on the Ecosystem. We will all die at some point so we, as a species, survive by breeding, which we have been doing with great success for the last million years or so – despite the lack of medical instruction manuals.
If we are to survive as a species we have to accept that we are an animal – maybe a highly intelligent animal – and the future of our species is dependant on us accepting that simple fact and coming to terms with the need to be in balance with the Eco-system on which we depend.
As a great grand farther I want to see by great grandchildren thrive and survive and indeed my species to thrive and survive way into the future.
That is what the Gbiota technology is all about, learning to adapt to the Ecosystem which supports us.
Welcome to Gbiota: Revolutionising Health through Soil and Gut Microbiome Science
Developed by Colin Austin, One of Australia's Leading Innovators
At Gbiota, we’re pioneering a healthier future by reconnecting humans, plants, and soil through cutting-edge technology.
Recognized by the Institute of Engineers as a trailblazer in innovation, Colin Austin has crafted a system that enriches both the soil and your health.
How It Works
Our Wickimix soil is teeming with beneficial microbes and nutrients, developed through a sustainable process that transforms organic waste into life-giving earth. Plants grown in this nutrient-rich soil become a natural source of gut-supporting microbes.
When consumed, these beneficial microbes enhance your gut biota, a key player in your body’s intelligent control system. This helps you regulate hunger, feel satisfied naturally, and avoid unhealthy cravings.
Why It Matters
A Different Approach: Forget restrictive diets that leave you hungry. Our method supports long-term health by tackling the root causes of chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart conditions, and dementia.
Healthy Fat Distribution: Proper gut health promotes balance, helping you achieve sustainable well-being.
Explore Two Paths to Better Living
Learn for Free: Dive into our knowledge hub, where articles about diet, gut health, and longevity are available under the Creative Commons license. Share, re-publish, and spread the word.
Grow and Thrive: For growers and entrepreneurs, learn to create Wickimix soil and produce Gbiota Boxes. These can be used for personal health or as a community-focused business. Subscriptions include technical support to ensure your success.
Be Part of the Solution
The journey to better health begins with the soil beneath our feet. Join us in creating a world where nutritious food supports thriving gut health, intelligent eating, and a long, healthy life.
We are living longer, thanks to major advances in medical science.
In the past people died, often when young, from infectious diseases now we die predominantly from chronic or non-infectious diseases with three out of four people dying from a chronic disease.
We are in the midst of an epidemic of chronic diseases overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and dementia.
Medical science may keep us alive for a long time but far worse is that we may live for a long time with poor health. Our life span may be increasing but our health span is not.
The mind and body are inseparable
We have a mind and a body, they are inseparable with our mind controlling our bodies, I prefer to call the part of our mind that controls our body our intelligent control system.
Chronic diseases determine whether we are fit and healthy or fat and sick. They stem from our intelligent control system not working properly.
A person may be obese because they suffer from food insecurity, this may have started in early childhood or in a war when food was scarce and is now firmly implanted in our mind or intelligent control system.
The person is obese because their intelligent control system has decided that it needs to store more fat so it sends out signals to both eat more and store the excess fat.
Going on a restrictive diet or taking appetite suppressant pills like Ozempic may appear to give some temporary benefit but is not facing the core of the problem which is food insecurity which may be hidden away in our subconscious so we are not even aware of it.
Some people are fat while others are skinny. It all depends on our intelligent control system.
If it decides we should be fat we end up fat and if it decides we should be skinny we end up skinny.
Finding out how our intelligent control system works
We need to understand how our intelligent control system works. Finding a cure once the chronic disease is well established can be very challenging.
For example, it is very difficult to cure blocked arteries which can cause death but it is relatively simple to avoid arteries becoming blocked in the first place.
Prevention is so much better than cure.
We are a communal animal, we cannot breed and thrive without our tribe. If we are suffering from a deep feeling of food insecurity we may find the solution is eating communally with sympathetic members of our tribe, often our family.
The support and understanding of our tribe which focuses on the underlying cause may be a far better solution than some restrictive diet which may make matters worse.
Fat in the wrong places
The underlying cause of these diseases is fat in the wrong place, in our tummies, pancreas, arteries and brain.
So what causes fat in the wrong place? It does not just happen.
Saying that it is because we eat more than we burn and the solution is to eat less and exercise may explain how we get fat, and has not been effective.
That is just restating the fundamental laws of conservation of mass and energy. It does not tell us why we get fat.
We need to understand why we get fat and the answer is because our intelligent control system decides we need to store more fat.
The big question
The big question is why does our intelligent control system decide we need to store more fat?
Every single person has an intelligent control system which regulates their bodies.
This system controls our temperature, heart rate, breathing and most importantly our appetite, what and how much we want to eat and how much fat we store.
If we are going to resolve the epidemic of chronic diseases we need to understand how our intelligent control system works.
We are living longer, thanks to major advances in medical science.
In the past people died, often when young, from infectious diseases now we die predominantly from chronic or non-infectious diseases with three out of four people dying from a chronic disease.
We are in the midst of an epidemic of chronic diseases - overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and dementia.
Medical science may keep us alive for a long time but far worse is that we may live for a long time with poor health. Our life span may be increasing but our health span is not.
This result from our modern food system which we need to change, but changes are never easy.
For the last thirty years, I have been working on how we need to change our food system so it is sustainable and leads to healthy people.
This requires a food paradigm shift - a different way of thinking about food.
As luck would have it I had spent the previous twenty years creating a paradigm shift in how engineers went about their design process.
This was an invaluable lesson on creating paradigm shifts and this is my story of creating a paradigm shift for food.
The birth of Computer Aided Engineering
Fifty years ago I was a humble lecturer in plastics processing at the RMIT in Melbourne. They had a mainframe computer, typical of the time with punched card input - a most unimpressive machine.
But then the very first mini-computer appeared and I had this instinct that this would change the way engineers went about their business.
I took out a second mortgage on my house to buy the second mini-computer to come to Australia, which is now laughable in its capabilities but still costed about a third of the value of my home.
The simulation with unexpected results
I learned computer programming and wrote, in my spare bedroom, a simulation of hot plastics flowing into a cold mould which was a pioneering technology for that time solving coupled complex non-linear partial differential equations.
The software may have been an achievement but the unexpected results changed the industry.
The industry was having problems in filling some moulds and the obvious solution was to make the flow channels bigger. That looks like common sense.
My software showed that some parts of the mould were filling first and the solution was to make some flow channels smaller to divert the flow into the more difficult areas of the mould.
That simulation showed that the current paradigm of how to design plastic moulds was deficient and my software led to a new paradigm which literally changed the industry across the globe.
Comparing Paradigms
The old paradigm for plastic flow was that the way to fill a mould was to make the flow channels bigger. It seems so obvious.
The new paradigm was to make some flow channels smaller to divert the flow to the more difficult to fill areas.
When I presented this idea at public lectures I was at first ridiculed and heckled. It made no sense. How can making flow channels smaller help a mould to fill?
But a few people heard the message, tried it and it worked and gradually became the accepted new paradigm.
Years later I face a similar situation. The current paradigm is that if you are getting fat then eat less. It seems so obvious.
The new paradigm I am presenting is that we get fat because our bodies (our intelligent control system) can sense deficiencies in our diet so we overeat and then get fat.
My solution is to fix these deficiencies by eating more, well not just more but more of the right sort of food.
I know the conventional wisdom is to eat less so to propose eating more sounds ridiculous. The missing words in that sentence are “more of the right sort of food”.
That automatically leads to eating less of the sugary fatty foods which make us fat.
From Plastics to Food
The company I formed Moldlfow became the leading exporter of technical software and was eventually sold for $500 million. Most of that went to the vulture capitalists but it still put me in the multi-millionaire category.
For my pioneering work on Computer Aided Engineering and creating the paradigm shift which changed the industry I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators.
I took a complete turn in my life to focus on what I thought, and still think, is the major issue facing humanity, how to grow food sustainably which will keep us healthy.
Speculative Research - doing daft things
We like to think of science as a nice logical step by step process and that is certainly part of the scientific process.
But doing things which seem daft at the time can lead to new ways of thinking. Moldflow, a company worth half a billion dollars was the result of doing daft things that led to a new way of thinking.
I was in a position to spend a few million dollars on speculative research knowing that most would be a complete failure but that failures lead to new ways of thinking which can have a profound impact.
With climate change, I am even more convinced of the importance of how we grow our food. I could say that I have spent the last thirty years of my life focused on how to sustainably grow food that will make us healthy but that would not be strictly accurate as I was used as child labour in WW2 to help mum grow food in the German U-boat blockade.
Computers have a delete button - Doctors don’t
My wife is a medical doctor, I am an engineer and there is a vast difference in the mode of operation.
If I make an error in my computer programming I can just hit the delete button whereas a medical doctor has to follow strict protocols which slows the rate of change and the adoption of new paradigms.
I am only too well aware that the current paradigm for chronic diseases is that they are caused by fat in the wrong place and we store fat in the wrong place because we eat more energy food than we burn, the calorie balance theory.
Eat less, Exercise more - it is more complicated than that
There is no disputing that calorie balance is an essential requirement for storing excess fat, this is just obeying the fundamental laws of conservation of mass and energy so it is not in dispute - this is what I call the “how” we store excess fat but it does not explain “why” we store excess fat.
Intelligent control software
It just so happened that I had written intelligent control software which can be quite complex as the software has to learn the behavioural characteristics of the specific machine, it is a form of Artificial Intelligence with self-learning capabilities.
Our bodies have a similar self-learning capability, as we can see from simple experiments on the human body, and the reason why we store excess fat, which leads to the chronic disease epidemic, is that our intelligent control system has decided that we need to store excess fat.
How is not the same as Why
This is the “why” underlying chronic disease.
It then sends out signals so that we eat more food which is the “how” we end up storing fat and is the underlying cause of the epidemic of chronic disease.
To understand why our intelligent control system decides we need to store more fat we have to understand how it takes decisions based on the information it receives.
The key point here is that our intelligent control system is highly sophisticated and the result of millions of years of evolution. Over this extensive period, it has learned to manage our bodies with a food supply relatively low in energy food but with an abundance of both microbes and nutrients.
We changed our food system
It is now faced with a different food supply with an abundance of energy food but deficient in microbes and some nutrients. This is a direct result of changes to our food supply.
To rectify this we need to change the paradigm from calorie balance, which we have tried for decades without success to the intelligent control paradigm.
Changing paradigms is always difficult but in the medical world can be a matter of life and death so a cautionary approach, which may seem prudent, makes this even more difficult.
Effective democracy depends on pro-active Governments
The first problem we have to overcome is the modern phenomenon of busy work.
For the last thirty years, I have been working on how we need to change our food system so it is sustainable and leads to a healthy outcome and I am not a drongo.
I cannot condense thirty years of thinking in an email or two.
It needs intelligent time from someone prepared to consider new concepts with an open mind.
Hopefully, my little cartoon demonstrates the status better than any words.
This is a global issue, every twelve seconds some unfortunate person has a limb amputated from diabetes, eight million people a year.
This is the dominant issue for health globally and I have an instinct that by changing the paradigm to our intelligent control system I could be sitting on the solution - just as I had that instinct fifty years ago that computers would change the way engineers would carry out their daily business.
We are living longer, thanks to major advances in medical science.
In the past people died, often when young, from infectious diseases now we die predominantly from chronic or non-infectious diseases with three out of four people dying from a chronic disease.
We are in the midst of an epidemic of chronic diseases overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and dementia.
Medical science may keep us alive for a long time but far worse is that we may live for a long time with poor health. Our life span may be increasing but our health span is not.
The mind and body are inseparable
We have a mind and a body, they are inseparable with our mind controlling our bodies, I prefer to call the part of our mind that controls our body our intelligent control system.
Chronic diseases determine whether we are fit and healthy or fat and sick. They stem from our intelligent control system not working properly.
A person may be obese because they suffer from food insecurity, this may have started in early childhood or in a war when food was scarce and is now firmly implanted in our mind or intelligent control system.
The person is obese because their intelligent control system has decided that it needs to store more fat so it sends out signals to both eat more and store the excess fat.
Going on a restrictive diet or taking appetite suppressant pills like Ozempic may appear to give some temporary benefit but is not facing the core of the problem which is food insecurity which may be hidden away in our subconscious so we are not even aware of it.
Some people are fat while others are skinny. It all depends on our intelligent control system.
If it decides we should be fat we end up fat and if it decides we should be skinny we end up skinny.
Finding out how our intelligent control system works
We need to understand how our intelligent control system works. Finding a cure once the chronic disease is well established can be very challenging.
For example, it is very difficult to cure blocked arteries which can cause death but it is relatively simple to avoid arteries becoming blocked in the first place.
Prevention is so much better than cure.
We are a communal animal, we cannot breed and thrive without our tribe. If we are suffering from a deep feeling of food insecurity we may find the solution is eating communally with sympathetic members of our tribe, often our family.
The support and understanding of our tribe which focuses on the underlying cause may be a far better solution than some restrictive diet which may make matters worse.
Fat in the wrong places
The underlying cause of these diseases is fat in the wrong place, in our tummies, pancreas, arteries and brain.
So what causes fat in the wrong place? It does not just happen.
Saying that it is because we eat more than we burn and the solution is to eat less and exercise may explain how we get fat, and has not been effective.
That is just restating the fundamental laws of conservation of mass and energy. It does not tell us why we get fat.
We need to understand why we get fat and the answer is because our intelligent control system decides we need to store more fat.
The big question
The big question is why does our intelligent control system decide we need to store more fat?
Every single person has an intelligent control system which regulates their bodies.
This system controls our temperature, heart rate, breathing and most importantly our appetite, what and how much we want to eat and how much fat we store.
If we are going to resolve the epidemic of chronic diseases we need to understand how our intelligent control system works.
Understanding intelligent control systems
I am an engineer. Engineers create machines, and every machine has some form of control system. These can range from simple on-off switches to highly sophisticated intelligent control systems that learn the operating characteristics of a machine to anticipate changes before they happen.
I will describe an intelligent control system I wrote for irrigation and compare it to the intelligent control system in our bodies. This comparison will help us understand how this significantly more advanced biological control system may work.
Both systems are designed to control living organisms - relatively simple plants in one case and our complex bodies in the other.
Processors
In the irrigation system, there is just one processor. In the human body, we have three:
The Conscious Brain This allows us to decide what food we eat - fish and chips or a fresh salad. This is a deliberate choice.
The Subconscious Brain This determines what we want to eat, among many other functions. Some actions, like body temperature regulation and heart rate, are entirely outside our conscious control. Others, like breathing, are partially and temporarily controllable.
The Gut This contains trillions of microbes capable of communication, providing genuine intelligence. However, the results depend on the species of microbes present, which can create different "answers" - a complication akin to having a computer with conflicting outputs. Having a computer which gives different answers does not make life easy.
Awareness
When I suggest that we store fat because our intelligent control system decides that we need to store fat I am not suggesting that we can think ourselves thin.
We are obviously aware of what is happening in our conscious brain but our conscious brain is only a small part of our intelligence system and is very slow and clunky in comparison with our subconscious brain.
Look at catching a ball. Our conscious brain may decide we want to catch but is just too slow and clunky for us to catch the ball.
Our subconscious brain is much faster, looks at the speed and direction of the ball and works out where our hands must be to catch the ball. This takes the speed of our subconscious brain and a lot of learning and storing of information so it is available in the fraction of a second needed to catch the ball.
Our gut brain
We have even less idea what is happening in our gut brain which is not even us.
We know that there are trillions of cells in our gut and they can communicate with each other to provide intelligence similar to a computer.
But we have no idea of the code that drives this super computer.
Science may be the art of managing truth, understanding how our intelligent control system works needs that art of managing ignorance.
The human brain is very good at that - just watch a baby in a pram swiping away at a mobile phone or electronic toy. They have no idea how it works but they can still have fun playing with it.
Fat and skinny
We have known for a long time that we can make fat mice skinny and skinny mice fat simply by feeding them the pooh from the other mice.
Humans are not in the habit of eating each other pooh but we find the same thing happens with faecal transplants.
Sensors for the irrigation software and us
The irrigation software needs a number of sensors.
It needs a soil moisture sensor to measure the moisture level in the soil. This may give multiple values for different positions in the soil but otherwise is simple.
Our bodies are much more complex, we sense much more than full or empty.
We can sense the level of many different chemicals in our bodies, if we spend time digging in the garden on a hot day we can detect a deficiency in our salt levels so we may have a craving for salted nuts rather than for cheesecake.
The irrigation software also needs measurements of how much water is applied at each irrigation, evaporation and predicted evaporation based on data from the weather forecast, rainfall and predicted rainfall and time of the season or rather the stage of development of the plant.
Our bodies are also receiving a plethora of information about events now and predicted.
Learning and Adaption
The initial trial
When seeds are first planted, the irrigation software has no data about the "crop factor" (the ratio of water use to evaporation). It begins by applying a trial amount of water and observing the results - analogous to taking a sip of unfamiliar food.
Learning begins
The software adjusts its calculations based on the trial, learning the relationship between water applied and soil moisture levels. This is akin to us sampling food to decide if it’s bland and can be eaten with gusto or spicy and requires caution.
Similarly, human babies begin with fat reserves and learn to suckle, sensing fullness and satisfaction. If a baby experiences food insecurity (e.g., no breast appears when hungry), it may develop lifelong food cravings and anxiety.
Understanding and learning
We rarely fully understand the world around us but we manage by a sophisticated process of observation and trial and error.
We may start by making a small change and observe what happens, we then may make a bigger change based on what happened with the small change.
You can see this happening from babies to adults, take a sip to see if the curry it mild or hot, observe the results then take a mouthful or just take a very small serving.
That is the way man made intelligent control system works, we call it predictor-corrector schemes and in our machines, we have developed this to very high levels measuring not only the result, but the rate of change of result and any accumulated errors or offset.
This is the way machine controllers work and is the way our body’s control system work.
Self-Learning and Prediction
I designed the irrigation software to self-correct - predict, apply, observe, and refine. Humans perform this prediction-correction process naturally, from learning to walk to gauging how much to eat.
Processors
In the irrigation system, there is just one processor. In the human body, we have three:
The Conscious Brain This allows us to decide what food we eat - fish and chips or a fresh salad. This is a deliberate choice.
The Subconscious Brain This determines what we want to eat, among many other functions. Some actions, like body temperature regulation and heart rate, are entirely outside our conscious control. Others, like breathing, are partially and temporarily controllable.
The Gut This contains trillions of microbes capable of communication, providing genuine intelligence. However, the results depend on the species of microbes present, which can create different "answers" - a complication akin to having a computer with conflicting outputs. Having a computer which gives different answers does not make life easy.
Awareness
When I suggest that we store fat because our intelligent control system decides that we need to store fat I am not suggesting that we can think ourselves thin.
We are obviously aware of what is happening in our conscious brain but our conscious brain is only a small part of our intelligence system and is very slow and clunky in comparison with our subconscious brain.
Look at catching a ball. Our conscious brain may decide we want to catch but is just too slow and clunky for us to catch the ball.
Our subconscious brain is much faster, looks at the speed and direction of the ball and works out where our hands must be to catch the ball. This takes the speed of our subconscious brain and a lot of learning and storing of information so it is available in the fraction of a second needed to catch the ball.
Our gut brain
We have even less idea what is happening in our gut brain which is not even us.
We know that there are trillions of cells in our gut and they can communicate with each other to provide intelligence similar to a computer.
But we have no idea of the code that drives this super computer.
Science may be the art of managing truth, understanding how our intelligent control system works needs that art of managing ignorance.
The human brain is very good at that - just watch a baby in a pram swiping away at a mobile phone or electronic toy. They have no idea how it works but they can still have fun playing with it.
Fat and skinny
We have known for a long time that we can make fat mice skinny and skinny mice fat simply by feeding them the pooh from the other mice.
Humans are not in the habit of eating each other pooh but we find the same thing happens with faecal transplants.
Sensors for the irrigation software and us
The irrigation software needs a number of sensors.
It needs a soil moisture sensor to measure the moisture level in the soil. This may give multiple values for different positions in the soil but otherwise is simple.
Our bodies are much more complex, we sense much more than full or empty.
We can sense the level of many different chemicals in our bodies, if we spend time digging in the garden on a hot day we can detect a deficiency in our salt levels so we may have a craving for salted nuts rather than for cheesecake.
The irrigation software also needs measurements of how much water is applied at each irrigation, evaporation and predicted evaporation based on data from the weather forecast, rainfall and predicted rainfall and time of the season or rather the stage of development of the plant.
Our bodies are also receiving a plethora of information about events now and predicted.
Learning and Adaption
The initial trial
When seeds are first planted, the irrigation software has no data about the "crop factor" (the ratio of water use to evaporation). It begins by applying a trial amount of water and observing the results - analogous to taking a sip of unfamiliar food.
Learning begins
The software adjusts its calculations based on the trial, learning the relationship between water applied and soil moisture levels. This is akin to us sampling food to decide if it’s bland and can be eaten with gusto or spicy and requires caution.
Similarly, human babies begin with fat reserves and learn to suckle, sensing fullness and satisfaction. If a baby experiences food insecurity (e.g., no breast appears when hungry), it may develop lifelong food cravings and anxiety.
Understanding and learning
We rarely fully understand the world around us but we manage by a sophisticated process of observation and trial and error.
We may start by making a small change and observe what happens, we then may make a bigger change based on what happened with the small change.
You can see this happening from babies to adults, take a sip to see if the curry it mild or hot, observe the results then take a mouthful or just take a very small serving.
That is the way man made intelligent control system works, we call it predictor-corrector schemes and in our machines, we have developed this to very high levels measuring not only the result, but the rate of change of result and any accumulated errors or offset.
This is the way machine controllers work and is the way our body’s control system work.
Self-Learning and Prediction
I designed the irrigation software to self-correct - predict, apply, observe, and refine. Humans perform this prediction-correction process naturally, from learning to walk to gauging how much to eat.
Anticipation
Both the babies and the plants now have a common situation - they are both starting to grow and need more food or water.
In addition to the predictor-corrector capability the irrigation software also needs an anticipation capability.
This has to operate at several levels. Based on the weather forecast for rainfall and evaporation the software anticipates how much water needs to be applied but that is not enough.
The plants are continuously growing, so basing the water demand on the last irrigation is always going to mean that less water is applied than is actually needed.
This has to be allowed for by building in a method of looking at the rate of change of the crop factor so the amount of water applied is increased to allow for the increased growth of the plants.
If this sounds complicated let me tell you that the human brain is absolutely superb at this.
Just watch a three year old kid on a bike. They have absolutely no understanding of gyroscopic couples and stability factors. They learn that they have to steer in the direction they feel the bike is falling, which is inherent with gyroscopic couples and they don’t fall off.
By the time they have reached adulthood, they have acquired an incredible range of anticipatory skills. Catching a ball is a classic, you put your hands where you anticipate the balls will be when it get near you.
Observing our intelligent control system
Understanding our intelligent control system should be central to combating chronic diseases. Despite advances in computing, artificial intelligence, and biochemistry, research into this system remains sparse. This neglect may stem from its perceived complexity.
Yet, even without sophisticated tools, we can observe patterns. For example, after gardening on a hot day, I crave salty foods, not sweets - evidence that my control system senses deficiencies and responds accordingly.
Maybe it has been put in the too hard basket, but we don’t have to completely understand it, we can do what artificial intelligence does, which has no understanding - look for patterns.
That is what I do as I try and work out how my intelligent control system works. It does not take any sophisticated scientific equipment, I don’t need any complex scientific equipment to tell if I am hungry, I can tell if I am hungry or satisfied or if I am craving some specific food.
Blood Sugar Regulation
If I spend time digging away in my garden on a hot summer day I come inside craving for some salty food.
That tells me that my intelligent control system does more than tell me if I am full or hungry but can sense deficiencies in my body, has learned over time which foods remedy that deficiency and send out signals so I want to get stuck into a packet of salty nut and not a slice of sugary cheesecake, which I normally gobble up at speed.
Just by digging in my garden, I have already learned a lot about my intelligent control system.
Continuous blood sugar monitoring
I do wear a continuous blood sugar monitor and compare this with what I eat and other events.
We know that when we eat food it is first processed in our gut and then enters the blood, largely as sugars to power our muscles and our bodies.
That will create a blood sugar spike which our intelligent control system treats as an error in a predictor-corrector system.
Our intelligent control system can detect blood sugar levels and as soon as they start to rise beyond an acceptable level will send out messages to convert these sugars into fats which are then hopefully stored where fat should be stored, in our bums.
Again our intelligent control system senses when our blood sugar levels drop and will send out messages to turn some of that fat back into sugars to power our muscles.
Using a continuous blood sugar monitor I can watch this process of my intelligent control system shunting sugars and fat backwards and forwards so I don’t drop dead from lack of energy or make my blood so viscous with excess sugars that it can no longer flow into the fine capillaries throughout my body.
My intelligent control system is continuously learning
But I see much more - every morning just as I am waking up my blood sugar rises. I have not eaten anything so I know that my intelligent control system can learn and I have taught it, without thinking, that I go for a walk before breakfast so will need extra energy.
As I walk, or ride my bike, I might expect that my blood sugar levels may drop as I am burning up energy, but that is not what happens, it maintains or increases the level.
Intelligent Control Software
When I used to write software for intelligent control systems I looked at graphs which would tell me how well (or otherwise) my software was working.
The responses I see from my blood sugar graphs bear an uncanny resemblance to the graphs I used to see from the machines.
But there are even more surprises in store.
I expected to see the graphs fluctuate up and down as it tried to balance the energy coming in from the food I ate, basically in three pulses a day at the main meal times and the energy I was using from my morning walk, my sitting at my terminal reading all those emails and the sporadic energy burst as I worked in my garden or lugged out the rubbish bins.
That is what I saw and it was working pretty well with relatively minor fluctuations as you would expect from a well functioning control system that was under control.
Expect the unexpected
What I did not expect is that there would be much larger variations which I could not relate to any food or energy load.
Mostly there were high peaks soon after I had eaten with the graph often going above the allowable range for a short period indicating that my intelligent irrigation system is working as expected.
Unexpected lows
It is natural to expect that eating food will lead to a blood sugar spike, it makes common sense.
However, I do many experiments trying to understand the link between food and blood sugars.
I was therefore very surprised to see my blood sugar levels dropping below the minimum bar when I drank a green smoothie made from selected vegetables.
My explanation is that it takes a certain amount of energy to digest food. Drinking a smoothie made from vegetables with no fruit takes more energy than is readily available from the vegetables to my blood sugar levels drop.
An even bigger surprise
I was looking for connections between food and blood sugar levels. It was no surprise that stress also caused a significant increase in blood sugar although the extent was surprising.
We live in a high stress society but it may well be that our high stress lifestyle is having a big impact on the chronic disease epidemic as the highly processed food industry.
Watching videos with music and dancing
Sometimes I get tired and just want to relax so watch videos with music and youngsters dancing.
I am not doing anything, just sitting and watching so it would be reasonable to expect my blood sugars to be at equilibrium levels.
But that is not what happens, and what happens is what happens, regardless of what the theory says.
My blood sugar levels rise, presumably because my intelligent control system, with its build in anticipation effect that is essential to all intelligent control systems, is anticipating that I will jump and start leaping around in that crazy gyroscopics I delude myself is dancing.
You just cannot seperate body and mind.
The punch line
Chronic diseases are now the greatest health issue across the globe. We need to move on from thinking that this can be cured by the simplistic calorie balance theory and even our high levels of sophistication in biochemistry - that is just the “how” and start thinking about the “why” which means understanding how our intelligent control system works.
Action plan
Shift the Paradigm Move from focusing on calorie imbalance to understanding and optimising our intelligent control system.
Focus on Gut Biota Support appropriate gut microbes, as emphasized in Gbiota technology. This is the aim of the Gbiota technology which is well described in the following articles.
Train the Control System Develop a sense of food security to reduce lifelong cravings and stress-related eating habits. We must learn how to train our intelligent control system, particularly focusing on creating a feeling of security.
Foster a Supportive Society Address societal stressors contributing to chronic disease and mental health crises, such as suicide among vulnerable populations. The epidemic of chronic disease is bad enough but we also need to recognise that suicide among young girls and middle aged men is the commonest cause of death.
Summary - Rediscovering Gut Health
Not so long ago, our gut health thrived naturally.
Beneficial microbes from the soil entered our food, replenishing our gut biota effortlessly as we consumed fresh plants. These microscopic allies worked together like a supercomputer within us, communicating and releasing hormones to regulate hunger and maintain balance.
It is very simple, our intelligent control system, a subconscious brain formed from our head and gut-brain decides how much sugar we need in our blood and how much fat we need to store in our bodies.
This is subconscious, it decides based on the current situation and learning from the first suck on mum’s breast to that last slice of cheesecake you scoffed.
It sends out signals to regulate our blood sugar and fat levels. We can’t stop these signals - we have no control over our subconscious brain.
But we can restrict our food intake which certainly can work in the short-term but may make matters worse in the long term.
It is only by understanding how this intelligent control system works that we have any hope of preventing the epidemic of chronic disease.
Back then, overeating was rare, and while infectious diseases were a concern, chronic conditions were virtually unheard of.
Medical science has since made remarkable strides in combating infectious diseases.
However, modern food systems - while more hygienic - have inadvertently stripped away the essential microbes our bodies depend on.
The result? A global surge in chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and dementia, far outweighing the threat of communicable illnesses.
Introducing Gbiota Technology: Nurturing Gut-Brain Health
Gbiota technology breeds beneficial microbes in the soil under carefully controlled conditions avoiding the harmful microbes, leading to a healthy and intelligent gut-brain so we feel full and naturally satisfied and no longer want to overeat.
Simple, Affordable, and Life-Changing
This is gaining momentum among health-conscious individuals who are ready to grow their food in microbe-rich, living soil.
But to make a real dent in the chronic disease epidemic, we need visionaries - people and businesses committed to bringing this solution to their communities.
Join the Movement
Whether you're looking to improve your own health as a home grower or interested in building a profitable business that benefits the community Gbiota is your opportunity to make a difference.
Let’s work together to create healthier communities and a brighter future.
Reach out to us today at colin@gbiota.com. Your health - and your community - will thank you!
When Colin's wife, Xiulan - a dedicated medical doctor - faced a dire health crisis as her diabetes spiralled out of control, leading to a threat of amputation, Colin knew something had to change.
As a celebrated engineer recognized for his groundbreaking work in Computer Aided Engineering, Colin's expertise in adaptive systems sparked a revolutionary idea: What if chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity, and dementia stem from a malfunctioning intelligent control system within our bodies?
Drawing inspiration from swarm intelligence in nature—like the collective behaviour of birds, insects, and even slime moulds - Colin realised the key wasn’t about fully understanding this intricate system. Instead, it was about nurturing it, much like feeding and training a loyal puppy.
This breakthrough led to Gbiota technology - a transformative approach to feeding and training your body's internal "puppy" for lifelong health.
Learn how Gbiota can revolutionize your life. Read on to discover more!
The Game Changer: Rewrite Your Future
Chronic diseases aren’t just bad luck—they’re the result of the wrong kind of fat ending up in the wrong places. For years, we’ve been sold the idea that “eat less, exercise more” is the magic fix.
Sure, it might work for a while, but here’s the truth: it trains your body to fight back with relentless cravings, making the problem worse in the long run.
Short-term success. Long-term failure.
The smarter way? Training your body’s intelligent control system—your gut-brain connection—to work with you, not against you. This means fueling yourself with the right kind of food that addresses deficiencies in today’s diet.
When your body gets what it actually needs, cravings disappear, and self-regulation kicks in.
It’s not about eating less. It’s about eating better. Once you realise that eating more of the right foods eliminates the urge for junk, the whole “calorie-cutting” myth falls apart.
But here’s the kicker: this change - the real paradigm shift - depends on you.
Young people like you, who aren’t weighed down by outdated thinking, are the ones who can make it happen. The future is in your hands. Get it right, and you’ll rewrite not just your life, but the health of an entire generation.
Are you ready to lead the way?
The Real World: A Call for Change
What’s happening in the real world? By middle age, many of us face the consequences of poor health choices - weight gain, illness - and only then attempt to undo the damage with calorie-restricted diets.
These efforts often fail because they miss the root cause: our bodies’ "intelligent control system" has already been hardwired by years of unhealthy habits.
The tragedy is greater still for the next generation. Young people witness their parents’ struggles and, driven by societal pressure to look like “broomsticks” to attract a mate, adopt calorie-restricted diets themselves - not for health, but for aesthetics.
This vicious cycle sets them up for long-term harm, training their control systems for a lifetime of scarcity and imbalance.
This isn’t just a health issue; it’s a societal crisis. Walk through any shopping centre and witness the evidence.
Magic diets and pills won’t fix it. True change will come from forward-thinking individuals who challenge the status quo, rally communities, and drive the energy needed for societal transformation.
Eventually, governments, burdened by the escalating costs of chronic diseases, will recognise the urgency and lead preventative measures, starting with public education.
The path forward starts with the young. By teaching them that their bodies’ ultimate regulator is an intelligent control system - not fad diets or quick fixes - we can revolutionise health.
This includes understanding the vital role of gut microbes, nurtured by plants grown in microbe-rich, mineral-rich soil. But let’s make no mistake: this isn’t about promoting “boring” diets.
Through the creative use of herbs, spices, and innovative cooking, we can turn these plant-based foods into exciting, delicious meals.
Yes, change will challenge the food and drug industries, but it also presents an opportunity to redefine their roles in a healthier future.
Together, we can consign the chronic disease epidemic to history - a time when humanity learned from its mistakes and transformed the earth into a better place for all.
Gbiota beds and boxes are systems designed to grow nutrient-rich plants while enhancing soil health through the cultivation of beneficial microbes. These systems utilize compost, organic waste, and rock dust to create a living, sustainable environment that mimics natural ecosystems. Below is a concise guide to building and maintaining Gbiota beds and boxes.
1. Setting Up a Gbiota Bed
Location & Preparation:
Select a suitable area and determine the size (recommended size is around 5 meter long and 0.5 meters wide).
Dig out the topsoil and set it aside. Create a sump box at one end for water drainage and nutrient collection.
Line the base with compacted clay, silt or if needed plastic film to prevent excessive water leakage (add clay if the soil is sandy).
Base Layer & Irrigation:
Install ag (agricultural) pipes for irrigation. The pipe should allow water (or “soil blood”) to seep into the soil but also drain out excess moisture.
Create a “leaky dam” near the sump box to ensure slow drainage and prevent stagnation.
Layers of the Bed:
Organic Waste Layer: Fill the base with organic waste, such as kitchen scraps or grass clippings (about 100mm deep).
Nutrient Layer: Add a mix of manure (e.g., chicken manure), rock dust, dolomite (to balance pH), and blood and bone fertilizer.
Topsoil: Return the reserved topsoil to the bed. If the soil is sandy, mix in clay to improve its structure and water retention.
Planting:
Thoroughly wet the top layer to create a moist surface for seed germination.
Sow a diverse mix of seeds to attract various beneficial microbes and fungi. Include sunflowers for optimal growth of mycorrhizal fungi.
2. Setting Up a Gbiota Box
Box Selection:
Use a UV-stabilized container, such as a 30-liter storage box. Depth should be between 200-300mm for efficient water wicking.
Installation of Swivel Tube:
Drill a hole near the base of the box and install a swivel tube with a grommet for drainage and water level control.
Fit a piece of ag pipe at the bottom for water distribution.
Layering the Box:
Add one-third of the box’s depth in organic waste at the base.
Top with a nutrient mix (manure, rock dust, dolomite, and trace minerals).
Finish with a layer of Wickimix (a microbial-rich soil blend) or good-quality garden soil.
Compost Tube:
Insert a compost tube vertically into the box to allow for easy addition of organic waste. Cover the tube with soil or Wickimix to keep pests away.
Planting & Germination:
Wet the soil thoroughly before seeding to ensure good germination.
Cover the seeds with a light layer of Vermiculite or Wickimix.
3. Key Maintenance Practices
Flood and Flush Irrigation:
Regularly flood the base to provide moisture and nutrients to plant roots while expelling stale air.
Drain excess water (soil blood) to prevent stagnation and aerate the soil.
Soil Blood Reuse:
Collect drained soil blood, dilute it, and use it for irrigation or as a foliar spray to enhance plant and microbial health.
Worm Integration:
Introduce worms to aid in organic matter breakdown and nutrient cycling. Red wrigglers are particularly effective.
Regeneration:
Periodically move the compost tube to distribute nutrients evenly. Add new organic waste and nutrient layers during reseeding cycles (every three months).
4. Benefits of the Gbiota System
Improves soil fertility by fostering microbial diversity and nutrient recycling.
Produces plants rich in beneficial microbes that support human gut health.
Provides a sustainable solution for home gardeners and urban dwellers.
These systems prioritize eco-balance, combining practical design with the principles of natural ecosystems to grow healthier plants while reducing waste.
Colin Austin 23 Nov 24 This document is published under the Creative Commons and can be reproduced without further permission, just acknowledgment of source www.gbiota.com
In today’s fast-paced world, junk food dominates our diets—tasty, convenient, and inexpensive, but hardly healthy. Organic food offers a wholesome alternative, but its high cost puts it out of reach for many. Now, a revolutionary third option promises to be both affordable and nutritious, challenging conventional wisdom about what we eat and how it affects our health.
The Health Crisis at Our Doorstep
Chronic diseases - obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and dementia - are the silent epidemic of our time. They plague millions, drain healthcare systems, and diminish quality of life. For decades, the prevailing solution has been simple: eat less, and exercise more. Yet, this advice fails to address the underlying cause.
What truly lies at the root of these conditions? An imbalance caused by improper nutrition and a neglected gut microbiome.
A Revolutionary Insight into Food and Health
Our bodies operate with a sophisticated control system, akin to a smart thermostat. It manages fat storage, hunger, and immune responses. At the heart of this system is the gut microbiome—a community of trillions of microorganisms vital to our health.
Modern diets, packed with processed foods and depleted of nutrients, starve this essential system. The result? Increased food cravings, inefficient fat storage, and a cascade of chronic conditions. Cutting calories alone cannot fix this; the solution lies in what we eat and how it nourishes our gut.
Enter Gbiota: A New Path to Wellness
The Gbiota movement offers a groundbreaking approach. Transforming organic waste into a nutrient-rich soil called Wickimix, it enables the growth of plants brimming with gut-friendly microbes. When consumed fresh, these foods restore gut health, reduce cravings, and help prevent chronic diseases like diabetes and heart attacks.
This method mimics the diets of earlier generations, who thrived on fresh, locally grown produce teeming with natural goodness. Gbiota’s innovative process combines traditional wisdom with modern science to create a sustainable, scalable solution.
Beyond Nutrition: A Community Movement
Gbiota is more than a health initiative; it’s a call to action for individuals, communities, and governments. It envisions a world where:
Food waste is recycled into Wickimix to enrich the soil.
Local governments support urban agriculture, turning parks and open spaces into hubs for growing fresh produce.
Communities take charge, learning to cultivate and share nutrient-rich food locally.
By empowering people to grow and consume fresh, microbe-rich food, the Gbiota movement creates a ripple effect - one healthy choice inspiring another.
A Sustainable Solution for All
The Gbiota approach isn’t just good for people - it’s good for the planet.
Recycling waste into rich soil reduces landfill, while local farming cuts the carbon footprint of transporting food. It’s a win-win solution that addresses both environmental and health challenges.
Why It Matters
The message is clear: to combat chronic diseases, we must rethink how we feed ourselves. Prevention is better - and cheaper - than cure. Instead of expensive treatments and reactive measures, we can embrace fresh, nutrient-rich food that aligns with our bodies’ natural systems.
Gbiota is leading the charge toward a healthier future. By rediscovering the basics of nutrition, supporting local food systems, and feeding our gut microbiomes, we can break free from the cycle of chronic illness.
Are you ready to be part of the change? Join the Gbiota movement today and take a step toward a healthier, happier tomorrow.
We know that the world’s biggest health issue is the epidemic of chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia and that these are caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place.
We think we know how to fix it, eat less and exercise more but we have been trying that for decades and we know for sure that it has not worked, people are getting fatter and diabetes is the fastest-growing disease on the planet.
We live in an age of hyper-activity. Everyone is heads down with busy work but maybe it is time to take a break and have a bit of a think.
Conventional wisdom
The conventional wisdom, the current paradigm, is that we get fat and sick because we eat more than we burn - the calorie balance theory.
This is based on the fundamental laws of conservation of mass and energy which no one is saying are wrong. Eating more than we burn is essential for us to store more fat than we need, it is what I call the enabling factor. It enables us to store more fat than we need but it is not the reason.
It is the ‘how’ we get fat not the ‘why’ we get fat.
Why we get fat and sick
We get fat and sick because we have an intelligent control system that regulates our bodies, we have known this for the best part of 200 years, the idea of an intelligent control system was first proposed in 1849 by Claude Bernard.
He had no idea how it worked and we still don’t fully understand how it works - but we can make some smart guesses.
We know that our gut has trillions of cells that communicate with each other to provide real but short-term intelligence. We can see that working in swarm intelligence we see in many insects and birds.
We know that our head brain provides long-term intelligence and memory and that it is learning and remembering about food from the first suck on mum’s breast and onwards every time we eat something, for better or worse.
Continuous blood sugar monitoring
I can see this working on my own body by wearing a continuous blood sugar monitoring device.
I understand that my body has two ways of storing energy, large amounts are stored as fat which is not readily available for use while my blood contains very small amounts of energy as sugars in my blood. My body can readily transfer sugar in my blood to fat and vice versa when I need to use or store energy.
I see this on my blood sugar graphs every morning. During the night my blood sugar levels are low but at dawn, even before I wake up my blood sugar levels rise in anticipation of a need for energy, even though I have had nothing to eat.
I go for a brisk walk before breakfast which, if you followed the simple conservation of energy rule you would expect to lead to a drop in my blood sugar levels as I burn energy.
But that is not what happens, my blood sugar levels rise and the only feasible explanation is that my intelligent control system is sending out signals to convert fat in long-term storage into sugars for immediate energy.
When I eat breakfast, particularly if it is serial my blood sugar levels spike, as you would expect but then drop back to normal. Again the only feasible explanation is that my intelligent control system is sending out instructions to convert the sugar in short-term storage into fat in long-term storage for use later.
Two opposing solutions
There are two opposing schools of thought on how to tackle the world’s epidemic of chronic disease.
They start from a common understanding that chronic disease is a major worldwide problem, overloading our health system while costing billions of dollars and causing immense personal suffering with eight million people a year suffering a limb amputation from diabetes.
There is also agreement that the basic cause is the wrong fat in the wrong place, in our Pancreas for diabetes, in our arteries for heart disease and in our brain for dementia.
The divergence in thinking is in the solutions.
The calorie balance school says the solution is to eat less and exercise more which sounds logical.
The intelligent control school says this could be the worst possible approach and is making the situation worse. Instead of eating less, we should be eating more, certainly not more sugary fatty food, that is stupid, but food that will both feed and replenish the beneficial microbes in our gut and provide a consistent supply of the right sort of food so our head brain sees no need to store large amounts of fat.
This is certainly less instinctively obvious but could still be right and if it is right it could save a lot of suffering for the global population and a lot of money for the Governments who fund the health system.
Which one is right - how to find out, a story
How to find out? Let me tell you a story which may seem to have nothing to do with health - but does. Just bear with me for a moment and I will show you how.
Many years ago, when computers were becoming available I realised that they would change the way engineers went about their business.
Moulds often fail to fill so I wrote some software which solved the problems of a hot plastic flowing into a cold mould by solving the simultaneous equations of heat transfer and fluid flow.
Flow balancing - analogous to food balancing
From my simulation, I realised that some areas of a mould were very easy to fill while others were more difficult. By the time the easy parts were filled the plastic entering the more difficult area had frozen so the mould never fully filled.
The conventional approach was to make all flow channels bigger which rarely worked.
With my simulation, I realised that the solution was to make the flow channels to the easy-to-fill area smaller thus diverting flow to the more difficult-to fill areas - a process I called flow balancing. Sounds ridiculous but it works.
What does have to do with food?
We all agree that we are eating too much sugary fatty food, the obvious solution is to persuade people to eat less sugary fatty food. We have been trying that for decades and it has not worked, in the way that making flow channels bigger did not work.
The reason why simply eating less does not work is that we need food that replaces our body parts as they age and wear and food that feeds and replaces our gut microbes. Our modern food system is deficient in these foods. Our intelligent control system senses this and sends out signals for us to eat more food. The result is we eat more sugary fatty foods and get fatter and sicker.
To keep to the analogy with flow balancing we could call this food balancing. If we eat more replacement food and food that feeds and replaces the beneficial microbes in our gut we will feel satisfied and naturally eat less sugary fatty food.
Sound ridiculous? You’re getting fat and sick but instead of eating less eat more food - but not just any food the right sort of food.
Three tanks not one
A common view is that our bodies are like a single tank, as it gets empty we feel hungry and want to eat. That is not the way our bodies work.
We have three tanks, one for fuel or energy food - sugars and fats, one for replacement food - all those complex minerals, vitamins and phyto-nutrients and a third tank to replace and feed the microbes in our gut.
Our intelligent control system can sense all three tanks and if just one is empty it will send out ‘eat more’ signals, even though the other tanks (typically fuel) are overflowing.
That is the core of the epidemic of chronic diseases, we need to balance all the tanks so they equally full.
That is why I call it food balancing and why it is so analogous to my experiences with flow balancing.
It wasn’t me
How did I convince the world’s industry about the importance of flow balancing and how am I going to convince the world about the importance of food balancing?
Here comes the crunch. I went around the world giving lectures about the importance of flow balancing, (just as I now write hundreds of articles about food balancing).
I was jeered and heckled as some nutter from down under telling us that the way to fill a mould is to make the flow channels smaller.
What they missed was that I was not saying make all flow channels smaller, just the select critical flow channels.
Which one is right - how to find out, a story
How to find out? Let me tell you a story which may seem to have nothing to do with health - but does. Just bear with me for a moment and I will show you how.
Many years ago, when computers were becoming available I realised that they would change the way engineers went about their business.
Moulds often fail to fill so I wrote some software which solved the problems of a hot plastic flowing into a cold mould by solving the simultaneous equations of heat transfer and fluid flow.
Flow balancing - analogous to food balancing
From my simulation, I realised that some areas of a mould were very easy to fill while others were more difficult. By the time the easy parts were filled the plastic entering the more difficult area had frozen so the mould never fully filled.
The conventional approach was to make all flow channels bigger which rarely worked.
With my simulation, I realised that the solution was to make the flow channels to the easy-to-fill area smaller thus diverting flow to the more difficult-to fill areas - a process I called flow balancing. Sounds ridiculous but it works.
What does have to do with food?
We all agree that we are eating too much sugary fatty food, the obvious solution is to persuade people to eat less sugary fatty food. We have been trying that for decades and it has not worked, in the way that making flow channels bigger did not work.
The reason why simply eating less does not work is that we need food that replaces our body parts as they age and wear and food that feeds and replaces our gut microbes. Our modern food system is deficient in these foods. Our intelligent control system senses this and sends out signals for us to eat more food. The result is we eat more sugary fatty foods and get fatter and sicker.
To keep to the analogy with flow balancing we could call this food balancing. If we eat more replacement food and food that feeds and replaces the beneficial microbes in our gut we will feel satisfied and naturally eat less sugary fatty food.
Sound ridiculous? You’re getting fat and sick but instead of eating less eat more food - but not just any food the right sort of food.
Three tanks not one
A common view is that our bodies are like a single tank, as it gets empty we feel hungry and want to eat. That is not the way our bodies work.
We have three tanks, one for fuel or energy food - sugars and fats, one for replacement food - all those complex minerals, vitamins and phyto-nutrients and a third tank to replace and feed the microbes in our gut.
Our intelligent control system can sense all three tanks and if just one is empty it will send out ‘eat more’ signals, even though the other tanks (typically fuel) are overflowing.
That is the core of the epidemic of chronic diseases, we need to balance all the tanks so they equally full.
That is why I call it food balancing and why it is so analogous to my experiences with flow balancing.
It wasn’t me
How did I convince the world’s industry about the importance of flow balancing and how am I going to convince the world about the importance of food balancing?
Here comes the crunch. I went around the world giving lectures about the importance of flow balancing, (just as I now write hundreds of articles about food balancing).
I was jeered and heckled as some nutter from down under telling us that the way to fill a mould is to make the flow channels smaller.
What they missed was that I was not saying make all flow channels smaller, just the select critical flow channels.
Flow and food
It is the same with food, I am not promoting that we eat more food but just certain select foods and then we will naturally feel satisfied and eat less sugary fatty food.
So how did I convince the industry about flow balancing and how am I going to convince people concerned about health and food balancing?
The answer is it wasn’t me then and it won’t be me now.
When I gave my lectures, among all the heckling and jeering there were a few people quietly sitting at the back and they heard the magic word ‘some’ flow channels.
Why we need the risk takers
I won’t claim I convinced them at the lectures, but they thought there was a possibility that I might be right and they were risk takers, so they went back to their companies and their labs and tried it and, fortunately for me, it worked.
But these were influential people and they convinced the other members of the industry who were not risk takers and now flow balancing is the norm - the accepted paradigm.
I managed to survive and was later recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators.
Changing the food and health industries
So how am I going to change the Health industry, the simple answer is I am not. However many articles I write, however carefully I present my arguments it will have no impact in the modern world of misinformation and pointless busy work.
But I know, by shear probability, that there will be some freethinkers out there, maybe in my local University in Brisbane or maybe in some research institute in some country where obesity and diabetes are major issues like the US, India or China who will say ‘well I am not convinced as yet but he may just he right about food balancing so I will take the risk and find out for myself by running a trial’.
I am here - waiting
And if you are one of those free thinkers and this article just happens to land on your desk then here is my email colin@gbiota.com and I will be more than happy to hear from you.
My formal qualification may be in engineering rather than medicine but since I was a toddler in WW2 when I was used as child labour I have been dunking flower pots into tanks of foul-smelling fowl manure tea.
This is the basis of the modern Gbiota flood and flush system used to breed the beneficial microbes which eventually form our gut biome and are integral to fighting the modern epidemic of chronic disease.
Chronic diseases are the result of the wrong fat in the wrong place.
The new paradigm is to focus on our intelligent control system, which regulates our bodies. We do this by feeding our gut-brain by breeding beneficial microbes in organic waste to form biologically active soil, growing and eating plants while fresh to feed our gut-brain, and training our head-brain that food is secure.
This leaves us satisfied so we no longer crave food.
This contrast with the conventional paradigm of restricting calories which has not been effective as it leaves us craving food.
The failure of simple calorie restriction
The remedy which has been promoted for decades is eat less and exercise more. This has not been successful. The calorie theory is a valid explanation of howwe get fat but does not explain why we get fat. The right answer to the wrong question.
We have an intelligent control system that regulates our bodies, particularly our appetite. If it decides we need to store more fat it sends out hormones that make us feel hungry and eat more.
With determination we may be able to override that for a short time, but not for long.
If we want success in overcoming chronic diseases we have to learn how to change the signals coming from our intelligent control system.
Adaptive or self-learning controls
We have yet to fully understand how this intelligent control system works but engineers have a good understanding of the complex intelligent control used to control difficult engineering problems which we can use as a model.
They work on the principle of adaptive control. The controller makes a small change to the system and observes the results. Based on the result it will compute an improved change to the system and again observe results.
This can happen hundreds of times a second and as all data is logged rapidly acquires a comprehensive understanding of the operating characteristics of the system.
This is the way humans manage complex tasks like riding a bike or catching a ball. It all happens in our subconscious brain at speeds far higher than our conscious brain can operate so we are not even aware it is happening.
Continuous blood sugar monitoring
Our bodies appear to work in a similar way as I see from wearing a continuous blood sugar monitor. I can see the changes in my blood sugar and the loads on my body which demonstrates the similarity between our bodies and mechanical intelligent control systems.
Our intelligent control system has two parts, the first in our gut which provides short-term intelligence while our head brain provides long-term data storage or memory.
Swarm intelligence
We can understand the intelligence in our gut from swarm intelligence which we can study in many insects, birds and slime moulds. The trillions of cells in our gut communicate with their neighbours providing this swarm intelligence.
For this to work effectively we need the appropriate species of microbes in our gut and we have to feed them.
The long-term memory in our head allows us to train the control system.
Functions of food types
We need relatively simple food for energy, complex chemicals to replace our body parts as they age and wear and food to feed the microbes in our gut.
The control system will only send out signals to make us feel satisfied so we want to stop eating when it senses that all these three types of food are available.
Changing paradigms
If we are to resolve the epidemic of chronic disease we have to recognise that the current paradigm of calorie balance is simplistic and learn how to direct our inbuilt intelligent control system.
Gbiota is a social movement of people dedicated to the prevention of chronic diseases by ensuring that the community has viable access to food, at an affordable price, which will correct for these deficiencies by breeding beneficial microbes in organic waste, then growing and eating plants while still fresh.
We aim to either teach people, or local growers, how to grow these plants themselves.
Dynamic situation
The change from the calorie-restricting paradigm to the new paradigm of managing our intelligent control system is dynamic.
This web is dynamic, we publish a new article most weeks but you can read the older articles by following the links at the bottom of each article.
To follow sign up and click the link ‘Notify me of new posts by email’ at the bottom of every article.
My wife Xiulan, a medical doctor and surgeon became diabetic, the professional medical advice given to us was that diabetes is an irreversible chronic disease, it will steadily get worse, we will put you on progressively stronger medicines but eventually, you are likely to end up with insulin injections and you will probably die young from some complications arising from diabetes.
We accepted that advice as an honest attempt to make us aware of the harsh reality.
But when her foot started to turn black we were advised that she would probably need to have her foot amputated.
We were not happy to accept that advice, searched all the relevant scientific literature we could find as it was quite clear to us that there was a big difference between what the leading researchers were saying and the advice being offered at the retail level.
So what did we see? Now let me be upfront, my wife may be a medical doctor but I am an engineer and engineering is really about the generation, transmission and application of power. So I naturally tend to look at the human body as a thermodynamic machine - like a steam engine.
The body as a thermodynamic machine
Thermodynamic machines have three components, they have a source of energy, in the case of a steam engine a boiler which burns fuel.
As long as the fuel burns in the boiler it does not matter much what the fuel is, coal, oil, gas, that old piano, table or chair that is never used, as long as it gives off heat that is all that matters.
It is the same with the human body. The energy food we eat, whether chicken
wings and chips or organic produce, is simply burned off as fuel.
There is widespread concern about the reliability of food supply yet our modern food system produces enough fuel, energy food to power the entire human population (if it were equatable distributed) now and for years to come.
As long as the sun continues to shine and some dictator with no social conscience and access to rocket technology, and who happens to have a palace on the shores of the Baltic Sea which is in danger of flooding, does not decide to blanket out the sun, there is, and will not be, a shortage of fuel.
Yet nutritionists seem obsessed with calories - lack of calories is not the is not the issue. They should just forget about calories. There are much bigger issues at stake.
That great clanking machine
Our hypothetical steam engine has a structure which must be built and maintained, oils and lubricants applied to keep the machine running smoothly and parts replaced as they wear. In our steam engine, this is done by humans but our bodies are much more sophisticated.
From very conception the fetus, weighing just a few grams, is supplied with food which enables it to grow to a few kilograms and after birth continues to consume food to grow to full size.
Even then our body parts may look pretty much the same but most of our body parts are being replaced, some like our skin very rapidly while others like our teeth much slower.
We could say, in round terms that every three months we need to build a new body and for that we need food, not as much volume as for fuel, but still significant. For some two thousand years this happened from our basic diet, largely from the complex chemicals, phytonutrients in plants grown in living soil and eaten straight after picking.
These phytonutrients are incredibly complex - a single tomato will have some thousand different phytonutrients and no one really knows what they do.
Our modern food system lacks these phytonutrients and this is where nutritionists shine. They use their skills, and sophistication of modern technology, to produce a range of Pills and supplements to overcome these deficiencies.
By and large, it works - at least sort of.
The intelligent controller
But then we come to the last bit of our steam engine. All machines has some sort of controller, it could be a simple on/off switch or it could be a highly sophisticated intelligent control system.
Now it just so happens that my first job as an engineer was working for a company that made controllers for power stations which happen to be highly relevant to the human body.
So let me tell you a funny story about power station controllers - and believe me it is relevant.
Most of the time this is pretty easy, you just monitor the load on the system and adjust the input energy with some fairly basic technology. The controller measures for any error and if the energy input is too low or high it simply cuts back in proportion to the error. This is called proportional control.
But as the error reduces the correction reduces so it never completely corrects so the controller measuring the error over time which it integrates and adjust accordingly. This is called integral control.
But sometimes things change very rapidly so the system also measures the rate of change so the controller applies damping so the system is stable. This is called derivative control. This may not seem to be connected to how our bodies work but we have a much better control system which I want to tell you about.
On many Saturday afternoons, there is a football match and the power consumption is low until the interval when a sizeable proportion of the population will get up and switch their kettles on for a quick cuppa creating a huge surge in power consumption.
This completely overwhelms the control system which by the time it gets the power plant up to the power setting the play has restarted. How do struggling engineers like me manage this crisis - and no cuppa at halftime is a real crisis.
We all have an intelligent control system
This is really important because this is what our bodies do exceptionally well.
We call it adaptive or self-learning software (which was among the software I wrote).
The way it works is that you think you know that there will be a power demand at 3.30 and it will take 30 minutes to get up that extra pressure so you write software so at 3 it schedules the power station up to number 6 on the dial and sit back and see how big a goof you have made.
At 3.30 you (or the system) find out that you had made a big goof and it was no where near big enough so in the software you have written code which say big goof increase by 50% so next Saturday it dials it up to number 9 and wait and see what happens.
And what happens is pressure relief valves blowing off all over the place because number 9 is far too big so the software says 6 is far too small and number 9 is a bit too big so next week it tries number 8 and this goes on and until it works out that 7.352 works really well.
How does this relate to the human body? This is the way the human body works, we have an intelligent control system which is regulating every aspect of our bodies. This is the way our bodies work. But even though I used to be what was called a gun coder (like a gun shearer pretty good at the job) I have absolutely no idea of the code and nor does anyone else.
But that does not mean it is not happening.
At the shopping centre
Next time you go to a shopping centre you will see many obese or overweight people and assume they are just fat little piggies stuffing themselves. And you would be wrong. There is a chance it could be genetic, some people are just naturally fat, but not that many. It could be that the body is sensing that there are deficiencies in the diet, such as a lack of essential phytonutrients and goes into panic sending out signals to eat more so it can stuff fat anywhere and everywhere it can ready for a rainy day.
Or it could be a fault in the supercomputer in your gut-brain or more technically the wrong species of microbes in your gut. Either of these is easily fixed by adding gut-brain food to your diet. I may not know the code in your gut-brain but at least I know how to feed it gut-brain food which automatically includes the phytonutrients.
You can read the technical details in this post - it is straightforward growing plants in Wickimix, the special soil, and maintaining the Goldilocks moisture level. But the plants must be eaten shortly after picking which means it must done at home or at least locally. This is not an operation for mega industries But how do I let people know that this technology exists?
The disinformation age
When the internet and its search engines came out I thought this was one of the greatest innovations of all time giving all people access to that vast pool of knowledge which previously was only available to a limited few. What a great equaliser.
And I was wrong, we are just saturated with dis-information with companies collecting our private details so they can sell that information to anyone who wants to sell us something.
I know this from personal experience. My interest is in gut biology and we get our first gut biology from mum at birth and later while breastfeeding. So naturally I use the internet to search for information about birthing and breastfeeding.
AI or GS?
As a result, I get bombarded with companies trying to sell something that a pregnant lady may want to buy. Now I ask you what is the probability of an 84 year old male being pregnant - answer sweet FA. That’s why they call it Artificial Intelligence AI or as I prefer GS Genuinely Stupid.
What this means is that instead of the Internet being this wonderful innovation where people can get information out it is a blocker of information transfer.
But it is worse than that. Disinformation is such an important issue that it has received a staggering amount of research with some rather unsavoury conclusions.
What this research says is that we naturally form groups and are far more likely to believe what our group says than the facts.
Whether we are aware of it or like it the software on the internet naturally forms us into groups with common views. They call it the echo chamber. Right or wrong is irrelevant, it is what the group thinks that matters.
This even happens in science where the greedy piggy theory dominates the intelligent control system theory for being overweight.
Social conscience and the food industry
The modern food industry does an amazing job of providing us with energy food. It also does an equally amazing job of supplying us with an enormous variety of food choices - a variety of foods from all over the world in and out of season.
This is just so different to when I was a kid when food was just plain boring, toast for breakfast, meat and two veg for lunch and bread and butter and cake for tea.
But almost everyone would grow some fruit and vegetable in naturally living soil which supplied the phytonutrients and gut-brain food essential for health. True there were some fat people but there was no epidemic of chronic diseases, that is man-made as a result of our food system.
We can buy vegetables from the supermarket but they will have been grown in soil with synthetic fertilisers so even at picking will be low in phytonutrients and beneficial microbes.
By the time they have been transported and arrived our table these will have died - hence the food deficiency and chronic disease epidemic. There is no point in trying to change the existing food industry which is dominated by megacorporations whose focus is on profits rather than saving people from having their limbs amputated from diabetes.
And in any case, the issue is the deficiencies of phytonutrients and beneficial microbes in their food.
If their product contained any ingredients that were harmful they would be legally liable but how can a company be legally liable for something that is not in their product? We have to think of a new way in which we overcome group think which has led to a lack of confidence in what people see on the web and is a major obstacle to the adoption of any new technology.
Creating a new local gut-brain industry
At this moment members of the Gbiota movement understand the importance of the technology and are prepared to make the boxes, collect the waste and basically do verything themselves - it is a ‘do it yourself ‘movement run by and for the community.
I have spent a lot of time working our ways that people, living in a flat can collect their waste and turn this into Wickimix, the soil in Gbiota boxes, and a key ingredient in the Gbiota technology.
It works, but does require a bit of dedication and is not for everyone. But think how much easier it would be with Government support. We should try and persuade local councils to collect food waste and process this into Wickimix.
Most councils have land available even in the centre of cities that could be used but they all have some form of recreation land or parks. Every flower bed in every park could be used to prepare Wickimix and they have horticultural expertise.
It just requires burying the rubbish, covering with soil, growing plants that exude the sugars which attract the beneficial microbes then and managing the moisture levels.
After a few months, the WickiMix could be dug up and sold to local growers who could use the Wickimix to prepare Gbiota boxes with plants ready to harvest, which they could sell, on a swap-over basis, to local people who have little to do other than water and harvest their plants and supply clean kitchen waste to the council collection service.
This is a social issue project but just look at the economics.
In Australia, 4,400 people a year have a diabetic amputation which costs about $40,000 in total cost to our health system.
That works out at $176,000,000 per year.
This money could be better spent in other areas of our health system but some of this money should be used to help the local councils who would provide the waste collection and processing.
It just needs coordinating all these activities to make it happen.
We must create an ecosystem, a food ecosystem in which humans can thrive.
Charles Darwin taught us that creatures evolve to thrive in their local environment. Humans now have the technology to change our environment, we must use our technology to create an environment where humans can thrive.
Sure our immediate focus is combating the current epidemic, but we won’t do that with some-short term fix.
We have to create the ecosystem, the food ecosystem in which humans can thrive.
Join us in this community benefit movement putting people ahead of profits.
The real cause of chronic diseases
Chronic diseases are the result of the wrong fat in the wrong place.
The remedy which has been promoted for decades is eat less and exercise more. This has not been successful. The calorie theory is a valid explanation of how we get fat but does not explain why we get fat. The right answer to the wrong question.
We have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly our appetite. If it decides that there is a need to store more fat it sends out hormones so we are hungry. With determination we may be able to override that for a short time, but not for long.
If we want success in overcoming chronic diseases we have to learn how to change the signals coming from our intelligent control system.
We have yet to fully understand how this intelligent control system works but engineers have a good understanding of the complex intelligent control used to control difficult engineering problems which we can use as a model.
Our intelligent control system has two parts, the first in our gut which provide short term intelligence while our head brain provides long term data storage or memory.
We can understand the intelligence in our gut from swarm intelligence which we can study in many insects, birds and slime moulds. The trillions of cells in our gut communicate with their neighbours provide this swarm intelligence.
For this to work effectively we need the appropriate species of microbes in our gut and we have to feed them.
The long term memory in our head allows us to train the control system.
We need relatively simple food for energy, complex chemicals to replace our body parts as they age and wear and food to feed the microbes in our gut.
The controls system will only send out signals to make us feel satisfied so we want to stop eating if it senses that all these three types of food are available.
Gbiota is a social movement of people dedicated to the prevention of chronic diseases by ensuring that the community has viable access to food, at an affordable price, which will correct for these deficiencies by breeding beneficial microbes in organic waste, then growing and eating plants while still fresh.
Our aim is to either teach people, or local growers, how to grow these plants themselves.
Join the movement of other people wanting a better world to live in.
Disruption
The bad news
Humanity is approaching a period of massive disruption, maybe not annihilation, but certainly disruption on an unprecedented scale.
The combination of climate change and degradation of our soil will create difficulties in producing enough healthy food, our intense city lifestyles leaves us exposed to the next pandemic but that will be small compared to the epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases.
This will create tension resulting in waves of displaced people trying to migrate and the continued increase in conflict and killing of civilians on an industrial scale. See Society and Community Health and Jenny and Recycle and Serious Think about Food
The good news
We know how to avoid this massive disruption, our technology and understanding have increased on a scale which would have been unbelievable even a few decades ago. See Food - we love it and Friendly bugs
But technology can be a force of good or bad, it can work for the benefit of the community or it can increase the division across society creating a handful of people with unimaginable wealth and power while the bulk of the community suffers from ever-increasing hardships.
Our technologies give us the potential to solve these problems as long as we take action. We can produce all society’s needs in a couple of days work,
Sadly, a system of busy work has evolved so instead of taking action to resolve these problems we live in a state of overwork and stress leaving us exposed to the approaching disruption.
You can hide under the bedclothes but it does not make the monster go away see My Teddy
The train is at the station
While the worst is yet to come the chronic disease train is already at the station. Chronic or non-infectious diseases, overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia are largely man-made, here now but avoidable, as long as we take action. See The Plan and The Riddle and Disease
If we overcome the busy work and take action we can resolve the curse of chronic diseases.
Start by taking action and read my article Health Paradox then follow the trail.
People get fat and prone to chronic diseases because our modern food system is deficient in gut-brain food so we never feel satisfied, overeat, get fat and so are prone to chronic diseases.
We want to change the system, but we don’t go on street marches, spend money on manipulative marketing or other aggressive actions.
Our plan is simple: Form local clusters of people who grow their own gut-brain food, see for themselves that they now feel satisfied, are no longer craving food, and do not get fat.
They tell their friends and contacts and as the movement grows we change the system so all people have access to food that will keep them healthy.
We are a dedicated bunch of people committed to making the world a better place in a time of chaos.
Join us - we are a bunch of decent people who want to live in a decent society.
I appreciate that there is a fair bit of heavy reading here, but saving humanity from massive disruption is not trivial.
But if, after all this heavy reading, you are prepared to join me in preventing this massive disruption then email me, say Hi and introduce yourself, then sign up to join a group of dedicated volunteers.
Gbiota is a community benefit organisation aiming to prevent the current epidemic of chronic diseases, overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
These are all caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place.
We all have a highly sophisticated intelligent control system, our gut-brain, which regulates our appetite so we don’t overeat and get fat. It works incredibly well but we need to feed it gut-brain food - plants eaten while fresh, grown in soil teaming with beneficial microbes.
Gbiota shows you how to either grow or buy gut brain-food.
Modern food does not feed our gut-brain so getting fat and sick is normal with three out of four people dying prematurely from a chronic disease.
Trying to cure a chronic disease is stressing our health system to the limit, costing our Governments billions of dollars and worst of all does not work.
Prevention by eating gut-brain food costs very little and works.
Join the Gbiota movement and increase your chance of living a long and healthy life.
Why are some people fat and others skinny?
Because we have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies.
It decides on a set point for how much fat we should store. It is like a thermostat in a house, it will try and keep the temperature (or fat store) to this set point.
The conventional wisdom is to override our control system, ignoring the set point and reducing fat using the principle of eat less exercise more.
It is the equivalent of setting the thermostat to 40ºC and opening all the doors and windows rather than turning down the thermostat.
It does work, at least after a fashion, but the costs to the community and the health system are massive, fat in the wrong place is the cause of all chronic diseases.
We need a paradigm shift to adjusting the set point on our inbuilt natural ‘fat’ controller.
That is what Gbiota is all about, changing the set point by eating so we feel satisfied.
You can read about changing the fat set point here on our website www.gbiota.com
Gbiota is a social movement to combat the ever-increasing epidemic of chronic disease. Our focus is on prevention.
Curing a patient suffering from a chronic disease such as amputating a foot which is turning black from diabetes or having a triple bypass to relieve a blocked artery or bariatric surgery to reduce weight is a medical problem.
Preventingchronic disease is a societal issue - having a park where you can walk or play ball with the kids, a local grower who can supply genuinely fresh vegetables, an effective system for recycling waste, above all it is about having the right sort of food readily available at an affordable cost.
Prevention is far more effective and costs a fraction of the medical cost of cure.
If you think you may be interested in joining a social movement to combat the epidemic of chronic diseases by prevention then start by watching this short video (2 mins) and then read the article Health - prevention first (20 mins) then Prevention better than cure.
It is free, you don’t have to sign any forms or register it is shared under the Creative Commonssystem for everyone and provides you with the information for you to decide whether you want to join the Gbiota club, the social movement of combat by prevention, of the epidemic of chronic disease.
If it is not for you that is fine - have a good life - we wish you well.
If it is for you then welcome aboard, sign up and become part of a group committed to making the world a better place to live for us humans.
Learn how living soil supports human health. Discover how beneficial microbes, nutrient-dense food, and simple growing methods can help you improve your gut microbiome and overall wellbeing. Explore the Gbiota resources, videos, and community.
and the daughter boxes, which can be very simple: virtually any convenient, inexpensive box that fully utilises these excess inputs.
I have been trying a new method I call the leaky plug which is based on the well tried method of leaky dams I have been using in garden beds.
I am trialling this against the well-proven method of swivel tubes I have been using for years to control the flow through the boxes, so they are well tried and tested.
You set the saturated level by adjusting the swivel tube angle and the time the water remains in the box before draining.
I discovered that there is an optimum size for the pipe: what I called the Goldilocks size. Not too big and not too small—just right.
But what happens if, instead of relying on expensive and increasingly scarce soluble fertilisers, we apply volcanic rock dust, which is inexpensive and available in enormous quantities?
Think of our bodies like a car.
It needs fuel for energy. No energy – no go. Just like us.
Our bodies are much more complicated than a car, and they have one very clever feature. When bits wear, we don’t have to take it to a garage; our bodies continuously replace body parts as they age and wear, and we don’t even have to think about it or ring up the garage to see if they have the needed parts in stock.
Third, a car needs a mechanical way to control it: a steering wheel and at least two pedals, one to speed up and the other to slow down.
Our bodies need the equivalent of this driver that has to learn. Some people say this learning starts before birth, but certainly at birth learning begins, even if it’s only to find mum’s nipple.
In our bodies, the equivalent of the driver is our brain, which continuously receives electrical signals from sensors throughout our bodies, processes them, learns from them, and sends signals back to the appropriate recipient.
Next we need phytonutrients, specialised chemicals produced by plants. A single tomato has over a thousand separate phytonutrients. There are over thirty thousand edible plants. So I can be a boring sort of person, and I haven’t even got to the complicated bit.
The human body is a remarkable self-learning system. Let me give you an example. When you were born, you had no idea how to ride a bicycle, yet not long after turning three, you could be zooming around with an apparent complete understanding of self-correcting gyroscopic forces.But the truth is that at three you have zero understanding of self-balancing gyroscopic forces. Still, your remarkable self-learning, intelligent control system learned by trial and error (yes, you had to fall off a few times) the operating characteristics of your bicycle, which baffles many engineering undergraduates.
So if a few worms don’t put you off, and you don’t mind the other creepy crawlies that turn dirt into soil and grow metabolic food, then why not join the Gbiota club and enter the fascinating world of self-learning intelligent control systems that nature evolved to give us the edge over the jellyfish.
You don’t have to grow all your own food; that’s impractical, but it is practical to grow the metabolic food your body needs, which is only a fraction of your total food consumption.
I am updating my website to explain how to grow metabolic food that feeds our metabolism and breeds the microbes that regulate our bodies and control our appetite.
Modern technology has dramatically increased fuel production, and we now have a surplus, with an abundant supply available from Supermarkets.
But these are insoluble, so they are not available to plants. But a system has evolved. Plants capture energy from the sun and use it to make sugars, which they exude from their roots.
As a toddler, I was used as child labour in one of the great innovations of the time: Victory gardens, which are sadly one of the great forgotten triumphs of innovation and change.
We are now in another food crisis. We may not see it, as the shops are full of food, but look at the people in the shops, count the number of people who are overweight, the number with a diabetic amputation; there are actually eight million diabetic amputations a year, and each amputation costs about $40,000.
Now I have been in the innovation business for a long time and have been recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators. Still, sadly, innovation is seen as some act of extreme brilliance, but it is not. It is a process and a skill that has to be learned, just like playing a violin.
Let me give you one example of a paradigm that is firmly entrenched, but it’s just plain wrong.
The cause is failure of the intelligent control system that regulates our bodies and decides how much fat we should store. It sends signals that make us feel hungry, and then we eat more than we burn.
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In a natural ecosystem, a complex array of creatures ensures an ongoing supply of beneficial microbes.
You don’t actually need soil to grow plants; you can grow them hydroponically or, more commonly, use soil to hold the plant upright and provide the nutrients it needs with fertilisers, and the plants will grow well. In fact, if you just want to create energy food, it works very well and is highly profitable.
Does that sound highly technical? Well, it’s been happening for billions of years, so a good place to start is studying the natural process of producing soil.
They exude these sugars from their roots, which attracts and feeds microbes. These microbes, particularly fungi, can break down minerals and make them bioavailable.
We need to eat the plants while fresh because Microbes have a short life. They may appear to be the same microbes, but they are descendants of the original microbes living in a state of neutral equilibrium, with the young replacing the old, like my grandkids will soon replace me.
It is a liquid but has tensile strength like steel. People often think water reaches the top of big trees by surface tension, but that force is weak.
Look at my granddaughters and their skill on mobile phones; their little fingers are a high-speed blur, while I still haven’t worked out how to do a bulk delete of messages, despite watching every video I can find on YouTube.
Our energy comes from the sun captured by photosynthesis from the plants, plankton or algae. Our nutrients come from rocks, broken down by fungi, while the system of digestion and natural replacement is powered by the microbes.
Microbes have a short life of around a day. They breed and die rapidly, typically in a day, in a state of dynamic equilibrium.
This is not some wonder new technology; ancient hunter-gatherer tribes had a healthy gut biome, as do the few remaining hunter-gatherers. Their gut biome has been extensively researched, so we can be sure of that.
The easiest way, particularly if you live in a flat with no garden or growing experience, is to grow the beneficial microbes in containers, or more correctly, container sets.
Fill the top box with any good potting mix and seed in the normal way.
Plants use sunlight and carbon from the air to create sugars. They exude some of these sugars to attract and feed the microbes into the root zone.
The bottom box is where most of the breeding action occurs. This is fuelled by organic waste, which you might otherwise throw into the green waste bin, at least if your local council is environmentally sensitive.
You need the aid of the recyclers, that myriad of creatures which recycle waste into something that is valuable.
Beetles (not the musical Beatles, who have a good beat, but no beet) are also a critical member of the team.
If you just watered the top box, you would have two boxes: the top box growing plant in the conventional way. They will grow quite happily, but they will not be the beneficial microbes you need.
But now comes the critical part, which is creating the conditions so the beneficial microbes will out compete and out breed any less beneficial microbes.
That is how we get the Goldilocks moisture, and it is just so simple and is actually less work than dribbling water in every day.
Unless you are wearing exceptionally dark sunglasses, you cannot help but notice that the so-called water is not clear water, but a dark brown.
Right now, I can’t tell you that it will extend your health span or life. It should, but now I don’t know for sure, you will have to wait a few more decades until you are really old, when it will be a bit too late.
But life is a question of risks and balances.
The wrong fat in the wrong place is at the core of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.
There are some who say that modern technology will lead to the extinction of our species. Most people dismiss this as alarmist, green woke talk.
I am in the hot seat. I was a pioneer of Computer Aided Engineering and have been recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators. The company I formed became Australia’s leading exporter of technical software, a multi-million dollar company that changed an industry.
Am I an evil creature leading to the extinction of my species, or can I become a leader to a better society where people not just survive but thrive?
But what is the technology we need to develop so we thrive?
Then microbes appeared, probably from an asteroid.
But not all microbes were beneficial: others were harmful microbes which made us sick or killed us, so only a few people lived to their natural life span.
But humans, ever inventive, developed technologies to combat these harmful microbes.
Our life span increased dramatically, and all looked good until we realised that we had also decimated the beneficial microbes on which life depends, and our health span, how long we remained fit and healthy, was dropping dramatically with an epidemic of chronic diseases - overweight, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, cancer and dementia.
We were slow to appreciate that the beneficial microbes did more than transform rock, recycled organic waste and digested our food. The microbes in our gut communicated with each other to create genuine intelligence, which formed part of the intelligent control system which regulated our bodies, particularly our appetite and where and how much fat we stored.
The wrong fat in the wrong place is at the core of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.
I can’t answer all these questions, all I can do is give you the facts as I understand them.
The calorie balance theory says that if we eat more calories than we burn that we will get fat. It sounds so simple and obvious - how can it possibly be wrong?
If it decides that we need to store fat, for example, if we have been deprived of food for any length of time, as in a war or from an extreme diet, it sends signals to our gut to manufacture hormones to make us crave food.
We have known for a long time that it is simple to change the microbes in mice - they eat each other's pooh. We can make fat mice skinny or skinny mice fat.
We solve both of these problems with the Gbiota bio-boxes which control the conditions to favour the beneficial microbes and make it easy for people to grow the plants themselves, even if they have no garden or growing experience.
One morning I was having my after breakfast read, this time “I’m So effing hungry” by Dr. Amy Shah when I was hit by a bomb shell if you are a pessimist or a light bulb moment if your are an optimist.
Yet here I was reading a book that said pretty much what I had been trying to get out to the public. So I decided to ask my friend, Dr. Google, how successful Amy was in getting the message out.
But there are plenty of open-minded scientist who studied and experimented until they had a clear, and now well accepted view, that we have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies
My daughter, when she was about seven taught me a valuable lesson. She said she believed in Father Christmas because if she stopped believing she may not get any presents.
These microbes monitor the types and amount of food in our bodies and if they sense a deficiency they will send out a complex family of hormones to make us crave the foods we need. Every time we eat it learns about that food and that information is stored in our head-brain ready for use when needed.
This has been happening for millions of years but then we changed our food system so we stopped feeding and nurturing our gut microbes. The result was that it no longer sent out those essential hormones so we overeat and get fat and sick.
It is no good running some monster advertising campaign to try to convince everyone. For a start the bulk of the people don’t want to admit there is a problem and even if they do they don’t want to feel out of place with their daily contacts.
By contrast, the solution of people breeding beneficial microbes, that create hormones naturally, at home is just so simple and low cost.
Bertha Benz ride through the German countryside may not have seemed particularly significant at the time - but look what happened.
Breeding beneficial microbes in the soil is a natural process which which has been going on for millions of years. However breeding the microbes at home in organic waste depends on the flood and flush system so the soil breathes and the soil blood never becomes stagnant. This needs to be done correctly so we restrict access to members registered with a valid email address who will receive regular newsletters.
In the past, and that means going back a million years to the first humanoids there was no epidemic of chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart attack and dementia.
As our population increased, we changed the way we grew our food so instead of eating fresh plants grown in living soil teeming with beneficial microbes, we changed it to growing plants with synthetic fertiliser, which is debatable, but far worse is we changed the food distribution system with extensive delays from harvest to eating.
To understand why these catchy advertising jingles fail, we need to understand the differences between conscious and sub-conscious intelligence.
I have spent my life in the innovation business, with my fair share of ideas that did not work, ideas that worked but no one wanted, two that worked and now the last one which is by far and away the most important. Broadly food that makes us healthy but more specifically breeding gut microbes that will create the hormones to tell us to stop eating when we have had sufficient.
We need the microbes to power the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies.
But we can solve this problem.
We need to create a new industry where people can buy everything they need - the soil, boxes, seeds etc from a local supplier and if needed, get the critical support from a suitably qualified dietitian who understand how the gut microbes act as the control system for our appetite.
Why is it that some people are fit and healthy, enjoy a long health span with hardly a visit to the doctor while despite the sophistication of modern medical research does the epidemic of chronic diseases continues to increase causing a great deal of personal grief and costing health systems trillions of dollars?
We have a wealth of perfectly valid science helping us understand the biochemistry of our bodies which has led to the development of the so-called wonder drugs like Ozempic based on glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1).
We know that the gut contains trillions of cells with each cell being able to communicate with neighbouring cells to create swarm intelligence - which is well understood.
But it is still remarkable, it can control our temperature over a range of conditions to a fraction of a degree, it controls our heart and breathing rate to ensure that there is adequate oxygen for our muscles.
It seems there are three critical issues where we only have partial understanding, at least at the theoretical level but where we have indisputable, even if empirical evidence.
Empirical evidence shows that the human body is far more sophisticated than the simple calorie theory. Our bodies can detect specific deficiencies, and when it does it will create hunger hormones so we eat more, not just more but more of the specific food it has learned will satisfy that specific deficiency.
We know that from birth our intelligent control system is monitoring the specific food we eat and associating this with our feeling of following satisfaction.
The solution, which can operate on an industrial scale is based on the principle of ecological balance, creating the conditions that favour the beneficial microbes so they out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.
If you are female, the doctor will look at the blood test, see that your iron level is low, and probably won’t prescribe that you go down to the local scrap yard and munch away on a few cylinder heads but will give you a short lecture on haem iron and prescribe the appropriate pills.
If you are male, the doctor will suspect that you have been having to much hanky panky which exhaust you supply of zinc, make some comment about lucky you and prescribe some zinc pills as one good hanky panky can exhaust your supply of zinc.
It turns out that the cause of all chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia is the wrong fat in the wrong place.
But is did make me highly motivated, eight million people a year have a limb amputated from diabetes, heart attacks, often related to fat in the arteries, are the most common cause of death while dementia, fat in the brain must be one of the most heart-wrenching diseases.
We have been here before with infectious diseases. It is not that long ago that infectious disease were the big killer, three out of five babies would die before the age of five, another in their teens while most of the adults would never reach their natural life span.
That is because their intelligent control system works in the their subconscious - it is high speed, very powerful and easily overrides our slow and clunky conscious of logical brain.
Is humanity in danger of extinction? Probably not.
What is the biggest problem? Food - there is plenty of food - that is not the problem - modern food is making us fat and sick. We need food that will lead to a long and healthy life.
Modern science has given us a good understanding of what we should eat to lead a long and healthy life. We understand this at the conscious level.
Our gut contains trillions of cells of thousands of species and we often talk about our gut as having swarm intelligence and compare it to flocks of birds, swarms of ants and bees and not to forget the wonder of slime moulds.
Our bodies are complex and difficult to understand so it may be useful to look at an everyday occurrence which we can understand - building a house.
We like to think that we decide what and how much we want to eat in our conscious brain.
Breeding microbes is more than easy, it is almost impossible to stop. Just leave anything organic, meat veggies food scraps, prunings, dead logs, grass cutting, whatever and some microbe will come along and use it as food and once fed it will breed like crazy.
The answer comes from nature and has existed for billions of years - Ecological balance.
A second basic concept is soil blood, a term I made up thinking about how our bodies work.
Gbiota beds are the most direct way of growing plants to enhance our gut biota.
They are filled with a mixture of organic waste, soil with a fine particle size, minerals and initially inoculants and soil creatures.
The same pump can be used to sprinkle irrigate. This has several advantages, the soil blood contains beneficial microbes which will enter the plant via the foliage, the soil blood will absorb oxygen by sprinkling and it also helps germinate seeds.
Gbiota baskets are any suitable container with holes - supermarket baskets work fine and are light enough to carry.
The baskets can be placed in a box with a swivel tube so it works similar to a wicking box and allows the use of the flood and flush system to maintain the Goldilocks moisture level.
The box can be partially filled with water which will wick up to the plants, but it must not lie there stagnant or the wrong microbes will breed.
Gbiota boxes are intermediate between beds and baskets.
We need food for energy, we are thermodynamic machines so we eat food to power our bodies. Typically that energy comes from sugar and fats and if there is one thing that our current food system is good at is providing us with sugary fatty foods, laced with flavourings which are often addictive and promoted by highly skilled manipulative marketing.
I don’t think I am particularly weird in wanting to live a long and healthy life so have experimented on myself with many diets.
I think we can assume that in this disinformation age that hardly anyone is going to believe what they see on the internet - unless it is from a real person they trust.
The epidemic of chronic diseases is global involving billions of people. It will not be resolved by home growers. We need to create a global gut-brain industry. But how?
In option one we can live in a society dominated by marketing hype, where we buy health bars full of sugars and fats because they are promoted as healthy, where we spend a thousand dollars a month to take drugs like Ozemic in an attempt to get slim but find that after a year our bodies have acclimatised so they no longer work.
In option 2 we live in a circular economy where we respect the Earth. We take advantage of creatures like a little fly that lays its eggs in mulch. The larvae that hatch out are so ugly that even their mother cannot love them and flies away.
Many years ago, about fifty to be precise before I decided to devote my attention to what I consider the greatest threat to mankind - how we can sustainably grow food that will keep us healthy. At that time plastics had not become antisocial so I wrote a computer simulation of how plastics flow into a mould.
And almost everyone thought I was a nutter and I was booed and heckled.
Just as with my battle over flow channels when I said make some flow channels smaller but people heard make all flow channels smaller I am now saying forget about the old thinking of eating less I am saying eat more.
This taught me a lot about human nature, what we believe is what is convenient to believe and the facts are only a very secondary issue.
If you learn anything from this website remember never to tangle with a rutting moose, (or rutting adolescent) they are focused on a bit of hanky-panky and any facts are irrelevant.
Unfortunately, it seems to attract more adolescent males than females but the smart males have worked out that a Harley Davidson bike is far more effective, maybe they are more noisy or maybe it is the attraction for the ladies of having a giant throbbing V twin between their legs.
We should make a birthday cake to celebrate but it will have to be big for the 4.3 billion candles, about the size of Tasmania.
But even if we put all those future concerns away as some left of centre city trendy worry about the future there is still the problem of what is happening today. Three out of four people now die from a chronic disease which is caused by our food system.
With chronic diseases, resulting from our food system, we likewise have to stop pretending and accept the world as it is and do something about it.
Modern society is high speed, high pressure with a few people making a lot of money while the bulk of the people are suffering from a health epidemic of overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
It needs fuel for energy. This comes from sugars and fats - which are abundant - our supermarkets are full of them.
It needs a range of complex chemicals to replace parts as they age and wear. We may refer to them by the names of the elements, iron, zinc, magnesium, phosphorous etc. but those elements are useless for us, they have to be combined into complex chemicals which are bio-available.
For most of the time that humanoid creatures have been on earth, some million years we have died young from infectious diseases with very few of us dying a natural death from old age.
Sounds fantastic, and indeed it is, apart from the fact that we have killed off those beneficial microbes which control our appetite so we now tend to overeat and the majority of people now get sick or die from non-infectious diseases like overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
It was obvious what was needed, a way of breeding the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful ones that kill us.
The modern world is full of fake news, fake people and fake food.
You have no doubt heard the conventional wisdom that we get fat and sick because we eat to much and the solutions is to eat less and exercise more - the calorie balance theory.
Humans, being technologically sophisticated, developed the use of chemicals to control any potentially dangerous microbes but the net result was that we killed off the beneficial microbes which has led to the current epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases.
We can solve that problem by licensing the Gbiota technology to local growers who create the Eco-balance in the soil in permanent Gbiota beds.
This they did on a massive scale, they changed the climate and destroyed much of the soil but the costs lay in the future so, at first it was not an immediate worry. There was always time and the possibility of some new technology which would solve any problems.
The first snag was that they needed to breed the beneficial microbes in the soil without breeding the harmful microbes which causes so many problems with infectious diseases.
The second snag is more difficult to overcome. Microbes may breed like crazy but they also die fast with a very short life span.
Most of us now live in towns and cities. We buy our food from the local supermarket wrapped hygienically in plastic which we throw into the bin and it dutifully disappears.
The big question is why does our intelligent control system decide we need to store more fat?
The first problem we have to overcome is the modern phenomenon of busy work.
When I suggest that we store fat because our intelligent control system decides that we need to store fat I am not suggesting that we can think ourselves thin.
We have even less idea what is happening in our gut brain which is not even us.
d compare this with what I eat and other events.
When I used to write software for intelligent control systems I looked at graphs which would tell me how well (or otherwise) my software was working.
Sometimes I get tired and just want to relax so watch videos with music and youngsters dancing.
Not so long ago, our gut health thrived naturally.
When Colin's wife, Xiulan - a dedicated medical doctor - faced a dire health crisis as her diabetes spiralled out of control, leading to a threat of amputation, Colin knew something had to change.
The smarter way? Training your body’s intelligent control system—your gut-brain connection—to work with you, not against you. This means fueling yourself with the right kind of food that addresses deficiencies in today’s diet.
What’s happening in the real world? By middle age, many of us face the consequences of poor health choices - weight gain, illness - and only then attempt to undo the damage with calorie-restricted diets.
Eventually, governments, burdened by the escalating costs of chronic diseases, will recognise the urgency and lead preventative measures, starting with public education.
Through the creative use of herbs, spices, and innovative cooking, we can turn these plant-based foods into exciting, delicious meals.
The controls system will only send out signals to make us feel satisfied so we want to stop eating if it senses that all these three types of food are available.
Humanity is approaching a period of massive disruption, maybe not annihilation, but certainly disruption on an unprecedented scale.
We know how to avoid this massive disruption, our technology and understanding have increased on a scale which would have been unbelievable even a few decades ago. See 
Our technologies give us the potential to solve these problems as long as we take action. We can produce all society’s needs in a couple of days work,
While the worst is yet to come the chronic disease train is already at the station. Chronic or non-infectious diseases, overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia are largely man-made, here now but avoidable, as long as we take action. See 
People get fat and prone to chronic diseases because our modern food system is deficient in gut-brain food so we never feel satisfied, overeat, get fat and so are prone to chronic diseases.