The Gbiota project is about one simple idea: growing food in biologically active soil to improve our gut biology, restore essential nutrients, and help prevent the chronic diseases now dominating global health.
The aim of the Gbiota Club is to share practical knowledge about how to grow food that actually makes us healthier. Anyone can take part—home gardeners who want better vegetables, or commercial growers who want to supply refurbishment food at scale.
The Gbiota system is built around growing in living, biologically rich soil. Healthy soil produces plants rich in minerals, phytonutrients, and the gut biology we desperately lack in modern diets. This approach has been pioneered by Colin Austin, also known for creating the Wicking Bed system.
In a very short period of human history, our patterns of disease have completely shifted. Infectious diseases once dominated. Now chronic diseases—diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, dementia—account for around 88% of deaths. Worse, although people used to live longer and healthier lives, today both lifespan and health span are declining.
Why Are We Becoming Less Healthy?
Modern food is high in energy but low in nutrients. It is engineered to taste good but often stripped of the biology and trace elements that support a diverse gut biome. Our gut biology evolved to help regulate appetite, mood, weight, and metabolism, yet modern diets disrupt those signals.
Our gut biome has evolved a highly sophisticated system to control appetite—it’s virtually impossible to override the hormones coming from our gut.
This means cravings are not a moral failure or a lack of willpower. The gut simply never evolved a mechanism to tell us which specific nutrients we’re missing. It just sends the message to “eat more,” which drives overconsumption of high-energy, low-nutrient foods.
Citizen Research and Citizen Action
The Gbiota project is not just research—it is practical action. Many people question whether citizen science can contribute anything meaningful, but the goal is not to replace professional research. Instead, it is to complement it by looking at the whole system from soil to gut, something highly specialised fields often overlook.
The internet now gives ordinary citizens access to world-class research. By combining that knowledge with hands-on experimentation, we can build a top-down understanding that drives real-world solutions.
We must start with the real problem: chronic diseases have skyrocketed while average age at death and late-life health have declined. Infectious diseases have dropped from 53% of deaths to around 3%, replaced by chronic illness.
The Three Causes of Declining Health
1. Reduction in Nutrients
Modern agriculture produces large quantities of food that is often low in minerals, phytonutrients, and enzymatic activity. Many studies confirm that nutrient density has fallen across vegetables, fruits, and grains.
2. Disruption of the Gut Biome
Modern diets feed the wrong biology. A diverse gut biome supports immunity, mood, metabolism, and appetite control. The success of faecal transplants in reversing obesity shows how powerful gut biology really is.
3. Appetite Signals No Longer Match Modern Food
Our gut biology evolved during periods of scarcity where food was low in energy but high in nutritional diversity. There was never a need to evolve a mechanism to signal which nutrients we were deficient in—just a general signal to “eat.”
Whether we like it or not, we end up overeating high-energy, low-nutrient modern foods because our gut biology can only send one message: eat more.
Food, Not Pills
Commercial probiotics and prebiotics often deliver underwhelming results and are expensive. But eating the right food can change gut biology dramatically—this has been proven in numerous global studies. Traditional diets rich in diverse plants and living soil biology produce healthier gut biomes than modern Western diets.
The number one aim of the Gbiota system is to improve gut biology through food. By growing in biologically active soil, we reintroduce the microbes, minerals, and phytonutrients missing from industrial food.
Supplementary Biological Food
We do not need our entire diet to come from Gbiota beds. Even adding a proportion of biologically active food can shift the gut toward beneficial species that regulate appetite and metabolism. Traditional diets were naturally balanced—low in energy, high in refurbishment. Today the balance is reversed.
Industrial agriculture excels at producing high-energy foods like wheat, rice, corn, and oats—essential for feeding billions of people. But the lack of refurbishment food has created a global metabolic crisis. Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease follow directly from this imbalance. Restoring gut biology is essential because it controls appetite. Mechanical dieting fails; biology succeeds.
Gbiota for Home Gardeners and Commercial Growers
Gbiota beds allow home gardeners to grow highly nutritious food with relative ease. But the system must also support commercial growers who can supply refurbishment food to the wider population. Many growers want to produce healthier food but find it difficult to compete with industrial farming and supermarket pricing.
For Gbiota to make a real difference, growers must be able to differentiate their produce and be rewarded for growing biologically active food. The Gbiota system offers that pathway.
The Three Stages of the Gbiota Project
Stage 1: Develop and Refine the System
A group of gardeners form the Gbiota Club, build their own beds, compare results, refine the methods, and monitor changes in their health and gut biology.
Stage 2: Spread the Word
Members share the benefits with friends and family, encouraging more people to grow biologically active food or purchase it from growers.
Stage 3: Commercial Adoption
Commercial growers adopt the system once demand is established and there is a clear way to brand and differentiate Gbiota-grown produce.
Bottom-Up vs Top-Down Technology
Despite all our technical sophistication, we have ended up with food that shortens our lives and undermines our health. This is because modern science is highly specialised and tends to miss the big picture.
Bottom-up technology looks at individual components—soil biology, gut bacteria, plant nutrients—but rarely integrates them. Top-down technology starts with the real-world outcome we want: healthier people. The Gbiota project is firmly top-down.
There are countless scientific articles on soil biology and even more on gut biology. But almost none explore the pathway from soil to gut to health. That is the Gbiota niche.
A highly recommended resource is a talk by David R. Montgomery exploring how individuals can improve health by changing soil biology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHy9Cf9IDGA
Why the Gbiota Club Exists
I am not ready to publish the full Gbiota system publicly. The club exists so members can test the system, refine it, and build confidence that it works for real people—not just in theory.
When the group as a whole is confident in the results, the system can be promoted more widely and help the public access genuinely healthy food grown in nutrient-rich living soil.
Anyone can join the club. Members simply agree to keep the technical details confidential during development, and to share their own learning experiences within the group. If you want to join—or if you have not yet received your copy of “Making a Gbiota Bed”—email me at co*********@*****nd.com.
Help us fight diabetes and the chronic diseases caused by modern diets. Spread the word, support growers, and share the benefits of food grown in living soil.
