We live in the misinformation age. Later I will take a general view of the damage caused by misinformation but let me start with a specific case – amputations from diabetes.
Diabetes is important, it is the fasted growing disease of modern times and every eight seconds some unfortunate soul has a limb amputated.
Let me work through on a step by step basis.
Diabetes leads to high blood sugars which makes the blood more thick and viscous so it cannot get through the fine capillaries feeding our extremities so they simply go rotten and have to be amputated.
Next step – why do we get diabetes? The first stage, which often goes unnoticed is that we become resistant to insulin which is the hormone which controls blood sugar but then our pancreas, which makes the insulin, becomes clogged with fat and can no longer make insulin.
Next step – and this is where things go wrong – why does our body store excess fat? The misinformation is that this is simply due to us eating too much sugary fatty food so the solution is to go on a calorie restricted diet. It is true that eating too much sugary fatty food is not healthy but it misses the step ‘why do we eat to much sugary fatty food’
Next step – why so we eat too much sugary fatty food? We have an intelligent control system, made up of our gut and head brains which control our bodies including our appetite. If our intelligent control system decides we need to store more fat it will send out hormones to make us hungry and is is almost impossible to defy these hormones over time.
Next step – how do we manage our intelligent control system so it stops us storing excess fat? Answer – training and gut composition.
Our intelligent control starts to learn the minute we are born. If we cut our food intake so there is not enough food we are teaching our gut brain that it needs to store food – excessively restrictive diets are teaching our gut brain to make as fat – exactly the opposite of what we want.
Our gut brain is made up of trillions of microbes which are foreign to us. If we have the wrong sort of microbes they will make us fat but we can simply change our microbes by changing the type of food we eat.
Next step – why are we eating the wrong sort of food?
OK it is time to go general. Diabetes is just one of the many illnesses that is the result of poor food and storing excess fat. The big killers of our era are heart attacks, strokes and dementia and they all have the common theme of food that makes us store the wrong sort of fat in the wrong places.
We live in the era where we have the greatest access to information the world has ever experienced – the internet. But we are also living in the era where power has migrated to global corporations who have more power and money than even a medium sized country and they are ultimately motivated by power and money.
They have more power and money than many Governments and by comparison an isolated consumer has negligible power.
They are extremely good at manipulative promotion so we buy what will make them the most money. In the case of food that is sugary fatty foods. It is virtually impossible for them to provide the fresh food with the beneficial living microbes we need in our gut – they just die before they are even on the shelves.
Next step – what can we do about it?
We are not totally helpless we just need two things. We need information and we need the technology of growing the food that will make us healthy.
That is where the Gbiota movement comes into play. Gbiota is a social benefit organisation, we rely on people volunteering their time and sometimes money to make sure the public has access to the proper information. We cannot supply the world with food that will make people healthy and avoid getting fat and sick but we can give them the information on what to eat and how to grow it.
We simply do not have the money to run massive advertising campaigns but we can be more effective by relying on real people to tell their friends about the Gbiota movement and persuade them to join the movement.
