Gutivars Strike Back: A Spielberg-Style Story About Gut Health and Diabetes

This article is written as a playful “screenplay for a film by Steven Spielberg,” but it carries a serious message. Diabetes and obesity are not just about willpower or one perfect diet. Our guts act like an intelligent control system, and modern science still does not fully understand how that system decides what to do with food. The story argues we are chasing symptoms instead of causes, and proposes an integrative, real-world approach: change the system, test outcomes, and learn what works.

Colin Austin — 1 March 2018.

What This “Film” Is Really About

“Gutivars strike back” is written as a screenplay, with Spielberg-style scene changes, humour, and a few sharp jabs at modern systems. Under the fun, the goal is serious: explain why diabetes and chronic disease have become so widespread, why experts often disagree, and why the missing piece is the gut as an intelligent control system. The film framing is not just entertainment. It is a way to make a complex topic easier to follow, while keeping the central argument intact.

Scene 1: Austria, 1920s — The “Little Man” With Levers

The opening scene is set in a beautiful Austrian town in the 1920s. Two scientists are developing what the script calls one of the greatest breakthroughs of all time: how hormones control our bodies, a discovery that could save millions from heart attacks and diabetes. The film uses a humorous cartoon model: inside our guts is a “little man” who inspects food and decides what to do with it.

He has levers. If the food is energy-dense (like cheesecake), he might pull a lever that sends energy into the bloodstream, turning the person into an overexcited kid at a party. Or he might store the food as tummy fat. Or he might decide the food is “crap” and send it out of the body. The key point follows: there is no little man. Hormones do it. But what we still do not fully understand is how the “system” decides which lever to pull.

The scientists publish their work in an obscure publication, not a major journal. Then history turns dark: Hitler’s people decide the scientists should not “waste time” saving lives and the breakthrough is almost lost. The script claims it is later recovered when someone finds the paper in New York around 1950. It is written as a dramatic rescue of an idea that should have changed everything.

Scene 2: Mao’s China — Trauma, Hunger, and a Real Person

The film jumps to Mao-era China during the Cultural Revolution. Spielberg-style visuals show starvation and terror. The script references estimates of famine deaths ranging widely, and shows extreme human behaviour during famine to underline how powerful food scarcity is. Then it narrows to one person: a teenage girl separated from her family and sent by train to Xinxiang near Mongolia, leaving her scarred for life.

The script names her: Xiulan Tang. It then shows resilience. Despite early trauma, she becomes a doctor and later a respected surgeon in Shanghai. This matters to the story because it contrasts real hunger (where people will do anything for food) with modern abundance (where people can be surrounded by food and still be nutritionally damaged).

Scenes 3–8: Modern Life — A Diabetes Story With No Clear Guide

Next we meet Colin Austin as an older man in a Shanghai hospital, looking for a remedy for a collapsing knee. He ends up with a high-tech artificial knee, and a wife, Xiulan. The couple later move to Australia, and the story shifts to a supermarket scene: abundance everywhere, strong contrast to famine memories. Xiulan comes to love tasty processed food and, within two years, develops Type 2 diabetes. The script notes that changing diet is not easy, especially across cultures and habits.

Then come the medical scenes. A doctor confirms diabetes. Later, the story escalates: Xiulan begins to lose sight, falls down stairs, breaks bones in her foot, and the foot begins to turn black. They face the classic diabetic fear: becoming a blind, limbless torso. They move from specialist to specialist, and each tells a different story. One suggests cortisone injections; another warns it will raise blood sugar. Colin asks about diet, but specialists refuse to enter the “low carb vs low fat” debate and tell them to keep eating normally and keep taking pills.

The tension peaks with the dietician: diabetes is described as irreversible, steadily worsening until insulin injections and early death. Colin reacts with anger, thumps the table, and insists that if diabetes is caused by diet, it should be cured by diet, and he will find out how. Spielberg then adds a human twist: the dietician cries afterwards and admits, quietly, that he may be right but they do not know how to help people.

Scene 9: Driving Home — “Silo Effect” and the Setup for the Real Message

Driving home, Colin explains the “silo effect”: clever people working in narrow areas without understanding how the pieces link together. In engineering he calls it “cardboard box engineering” or “over the wall engineering,” where one group throws the problem to the next and it becomes a “dead cat.” The dialogue is written for humour, but the meaning is serious: chronic disease care needs integration, not isolated expertise.

Scene 10: A Flashback to Detroit — Integrative Technology

The film flashes back about forty years to a General Motors training room. Colin is teaching computer-aided engineering software. The audience is sceptical at first, then angry when he suggests they are doing things wrong, then gradually receptive as they see the method. A senior engineer asks how someone “from Australia” can tell them what to do. Colin’s answer is the backbone of the article: experts are expert in their own field, and each will know more than him in their speciality, but the real job is integration.

Colin explains that complex problems involve many technologies: heat transfer, fluid flow, materials, geometry, and unknowns where you cannot calculate an answer. He describes solving equations, getting wrong results, then changing assumptions and using empirical methods until results match real-world tests. The point is not “make things up.” The point is: fill the gaps between disciplines, then test the whole system. He calls this “integrative technology,” where “2 plus 2 makes 5.” It is powerful, but only works when you test the system as a whole under real conditions.

Scene 11: Proof It Works — Business, Wicking Beds, and Empirical Testing

The screenplay then uses a quick “company history” segment to prove the method is real, not theory. Colin describes early computing, building software, forming Moldflow, and the idea that integration can create extraordinary value. He then links it to environmental work, including developing wicking beds and responding to experts who said water would go putrid. The claim is that by integration and empirical testing, wicking beds became practical. The message is: integrative thinking is investable, and it solves problems that silo-thinking cannot.

Scenes 12–16: Carb vs Fat, Big Food, and the “Red Car” Warning

Now Spielberg turns to the nutrition war: Ancel Keys and the low-fat paradigm, contrasted with writers like Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz who challenged the process that led to the “fats are bad” conclusion. The screenplay argues Keys used correlation without mechanism, got the wrong answer, and his authority helped lock the view into medicine. It also satirises Big Food, which benefited from low-fat messaging because cheap carbs and sugar became profitable. It compares this confusion-making to techniques used by tobacco companies: create doubt, fund research, and keep the public uncertain.

The “red car” scene is a simple lesson in bad science. Speed cameras catch more red cars than grey ones. Officials test red vs grey cars, find no performance difference, then tax red cars anyway. The true reason is social: young men drive red cars fast to impress girls. The parallel is blunt: we often chase symptoms (like fatness) without understanding causes (the control system that drives fat storage). Statistically significant does not automatically mean meaningful.

The Central Claim: We Are Still Missing the Lever-Puller

The film returns to the Austrian “little man” metaphor. We know excess insulin can make people fat and drive insulin resistance, which we call diabetes. We also know faecal transplants can make fat people thin, showing gut biology matters. But the screenplay insists we still lack the deeper answer: why do some people’s guts push levers toward fat storage and diabetes, while others seem almost immune even with similar diets? Until we understand that decision-making system, we will keep arguing diet slogans and treating symptoms.

It also warns against turning “keto vs low fat” into the new dogma. Even if one side is partly right, it will not solve a global problem at seven billion people. Any workable solution must involve changing the food system, not just giving wealthy people a special diet. The screenplay frames Nina’s message as criticism of scientific method, not just a food argument.

My Comments: Why This Matters to Ordinary People

Colin then steps out of the film voice and speaks directly. He describes moving from specialist to specialist and seeing competence in silos, but no one of “average competence” integrating the whole story. He argues diabetes is caused by diet, so it is a fair bet it can be cured by diet, yet after years of following arguments about “the right diet,” he calls it a shambles that defies scientific process.

His explanation is consistent: our bodies are not dumb machines. Our guts are an intelligent system formed by billions of communicating cells. This changes how we interpret diet disputes. Even fructose becomes a different question. One gut might send it to the liver and convert it to fat, triggering obesity and diabetes. Another gut might discard it. So the goal is not to fight endlessly over which food is “bad,” but to use diet and environment to change gut decision-making so it works for health.

The Gbiota Hypothesis: Soil, Plants, and a Path Into the Gut

Colin describes a “hunch” that changing gut biology may involve the route biology takes from soil through plants into our guts. He admits it may sound silly because soil biology is not the same as human gut biology. But he argues it is worth testing, especially after reading research suggesting plants have their own biome and that soil creatures with guts can attack roots and pass biology into plants. None of this proves the outcome, but it supports the idea that growing plants in biologically active soil could influence gut biology through diet.

Citizen Research: Why the Gbiota Club Can Help

The screenplay finishes with a call to action: citizen research. Gardeners can grow plants in biologically active soil and observe whether it changes gut biology and health. If a proof of concept is demonstrated, professional researchers are more likely to invest serious effort. Citizen research can be faster and freer because it does not require grants and rigid academic constraints. It can pursue ideas that are high risk but high reward.

The text also includes a practical “facilitating factor”: diabetes is measurable. It is risky for citizens to experiment with heart disease directly, but diabetes progress can be tracked simply through blood sugar monitoring, and general chronic disease improvement can also be observed through waist measurement, scales, and personal energy levels. That is why the author wants to form the Gbiota club and invites readers to email if they want to join.

Contact: co*********@*****nd.com