This site shows how you can grow food which will keep you fit and healthy for hopefully a long life and possiby save your leg from being chopped of from diabetes. It is a bit different from mosts sites with a buy one for the price of two while stocks lasts commericial crap which pervades the web. So sorry there is no bargain of chopping of both legs for the price of one.
It is largely a subsciption site but we are a bit naive and trust peope so if you want to have a look around you are welcome to access this entire site using the name guest@gbiota.com and password Goodbugs10! but think on this – Gbiota is a community benefit organisation, we are not a funded charity and people give up their time and often money for the benefit of the community so if you using this site for real then please sign up like an honest person at the account page
By the time you have read the home page you will have got to know us and what we are all about then you may like to read Gbiota food for health by which time you will either love us or hate us. If you decide to hate us just remember we are real people so don’t bug us, just nick off and do your own thing somewhere else.
if you decide to love us just or you just get lost in this maze of a site give me a hi at colin@gbiota.com tell me about yourself, I have got to know our serious users pretty well or tell me what you are looking for and I will try and direct you. There is an awful lot of information on this site and we are not a three word slogan sort of operation (grow your own gut food is five words), to tell you how to grow your own gut food take a few more.
I have spent 83 years learning how, I am fit and healthy so may be I got it right, my doc says at the current rate of decline I will definitely be dead before I reach 140.
Thanks for that.
Life choices
You have a choice in life, you can be fit and healthy over a long life or you can have you legged chopped off from diabetes, maybe go blind or die your from liver failure.
It is not an absolute choice, there is an element of luck in life and your genes play a part but given the cards you are dealt it is pretty much up to you.
There are three words you need to know, the first is a scientific word, ‘homeostasis’ which I will explain.
The second you know already ‘why’.
Why is the most important. In this modern world ,with the internet and manipulative marketing, you will be subject to an overwhelming tsunami of information. You need be like a four year old kid and keep on asking why why why until you actually understand why things happen the way they do.
The third word you probably may have heard before – it is ‘bull shit’ or if you want to be polite you can use green washing. Governments and big business are very good at manipulating information to try and make you think exactly the opposite of what is really happening.
Banging out the raw truth
Now be warned, I am neither Government nor big business, I just sit here banging away on my computer saying thing as they really are, bull shit is about as bad as it gets and I have avoided phrases like fuckwit when it it is the right term which should have crept in when I get around to some of the things I see happening in our supposedly most respected organisations.
Now before I get around to explaining the word homeostasis – which is the difference between leading a long, fit and healthy life or having your leg chopped off from diabetes and hooning around in a wheel chair let me talk about that magic word ‘why’.
Why why why
Life is a matter of luck and what we are born with. I was born with a terrible memory, to survive at school and later at University I had to learn the importance of why. If I tried to just remember something I would have been a total failure in life but I found that if I kept on asking why why why until I really understood something I could survive.
But life plays tricks on you and it turned out that this was an enormous advantage. Because I had to keep on asking why all the time, driving everyone mad, it turned out that I was very good at looking at things in a different way and unearthing that third word ‘bull shit’.
Innovation – the art of paradigm busting
So I ended up as a very good innovator or paradigm buster.
I was selected by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators and now believe I have found the solution to one of the Western worlds biggest problems, overweight and diabetes. I just keeping on asking why why why and sifting through the bull shit.
I started a company from my back bedroom that was to become Australia’s leading exporter of technical software, worth $Au500 million and I became recognised world leader in my field by developing a simulation of how how plastic flows into a cold mould – a problem costing the plastics industry millions.
In and out of plastics
I got into plastics when I left University all those years ago when the new engineering plastics were just coming onto the market and I thought they would present a challenge for a young engineer in to learn how to use them, and in my defence that was well before a 5 cents battery has to be wrapped in fifteen layers of blister packs.
But the world kept on changing, the population kept on growing, the food system changed and people started to get fatter and less healthy and I began to really worry about having the right sort of food, not just energy food but food that would actually keep us healthy.
Also I was getting older, I had written a book about plastics production called Faster, Better Cheaper and I started to question if I really wanted to spend the rest of my life helping to make plastics bits faster, better and cheaper.
Into food to keep us healthy
I felt this urge to do something that really benefited the community.
I decided I wanted to see if my innovative skills could be used to be of real value to the community by finding better ways of growing food that will keep people healthy and is genuinely sustainable.
I sold the company which provided me with plenty of money to undertake speculative research, the sort that Governments don’t fund.
Speculative research is really just a posh name for doing daft things and hoping that you stumble on some really significant breakthrough.
I could see that the real threat from climate change is to food production.
Innovation – paradigm busting
The real breakthroughs in research comes from doing off the chart experiments that are almost certain to fail but lead to new ways of thinking.
I now had the financial resources to do totally stupid experiments that just may lead to that big breakthrough. Believe me I did lots of stupid things that wasted a lot of money, but I did not have a grant committee to keep happy, it was my money, and if I wanted to waste my money on stupid things that was my business.
Believe me I wasted money on a grand scale, millions of dollars, just hoping that something good would turn up, and it did. Every year over four thousand Australians have a leg amputated from diabetes and I now know how that can largely be avoided. I recon that is worth blowing a few million.
Steps in innovation
The first step in innovations is to study everything that is known in that area without even thinking about a solution until you really understand the problem and just keep on asking why why why like a four year old.
So, without having to worry about paying the bills I set off on many world world trips to study how we grow our food but particularly focusing on the remote areas in Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Middle East.
In some areas, particularly the mountainous areas of China people were fit and healthy right into old age with no sign of our modern diseases like diabetes.
They had been farming their land for thousands of years and the soil was still healthy and fertile. In other areas, particularly in Africa the soil was depleted and the people not so healthy.
Again why why why.
Diabetes strikes
But then my wife Xiulan, a medical doctor, actually a gynaecologist not a diabetes expert, became diabetic, her foot started to turn black and the doctors were talking about amputating her foot.
The medical experts explained to us that diabetes was a progressive chronic disease, she would need progressively stronger and stronger medicines, at some point she would need insulin injections and that she would probably die young from some disease like kidney failure.
That may have been a reasonable assessment twenty years ago, so it does into fall into the bull shit category, but it is certainly not a valid description based on the latest science.
The fact that we were being given information that was twenty years out of date was an ominous warning of trouble to come.
No chop – we will do it our way thanks
I was not at all happy about this, she has nice legs so I need to do what innovators do – just keep on asking why why why like a four year old.
The experts can give a very good technical explanations of diabetes, at first fat starts to block the entry of sugar into the muscles. They call this insulin resistance and many people do not know they have a problem as the pancreas just makes more insulin.
Then the pancreas gets blocked with fat and cannot make any more insulin, the situation becomes critical requiring drugs to control blood sugar levels, which they do very well, but they fix the immediate issue but do not solve the real problem.
Homeostasis
So time to start asking the why, why, why. Why does the body start storing fat in the wrong places, why does it happen in Western societies but not in people in the mountains in remote China where diabetes is just not known.
The answer may appear to be because we are eating to much sugary fatty food but that brings out the next why – why do we eat too much sugary fatty food.
Again the answer may appear to be because we are hungry but again why are we hungry so we eat too much sugary fatty food.
Now that is a good question and to answer that we have to go back to the second world war. The Dutch people were starved and as expected became very thin and scrawny.
But after the war, when food became available obesity became a big problem.
So again ask the next why. The answer to that question is homeostasis, the body has an intelligent control system which regulates all our bodily functions, our temperature, breathing, heart rate and our appetite and how much and where we store fat.
Our bodies are much smarter than we think
This control system is really smart and has a memory. The period of starvation had trained this control system to store fat. We still see this in modern diets where people simply cut calories, loose weight then some time later they are fatter than ever. They have trained their control system to store fat, the exact opposite of what was wanted.
Innovation step 2 – test, test, test
After the review phase the next step in the innovation process is testing to see if the ideas really work. I set up my wife with continuous blood sugar monitoring so I could compare food intake with blood sugar levels.
My first job as an engineer was working for a company that made control systems for power stations and what I saw from the blood sugar levels was exactly what I had seen in unstable control systems.
She would eat – then the blood sugar levels would rocket up, then drop dramatically to dangerously low levels as the insulin surge cut in, then rise again as it sought out sugar from wherever it could. A classic case of an unstable control system I was familiar with as an engineer.
Diabetes -not a simple medical problem but a control problem
This was enough to convince me that diabetes was not a straight forward medical problem it was an engineering problem of control.
I knew exactly how to fix that from my experiences in the remote mountains of China.
We get fat and diabetic because the control system is broken because we are not feeding our gut brain so it makes us feel hungry so we overeat.
If we want to be healthy we must feed our gut brain the food that gut brains need.
Sorry – no Yaks in this apartment block
Now I needed a solution that was viable in our modern society, it is just not viable to have a yak wondering around pooping all over the place in a modern block of flats.
So substitute the Yak with worms and create a two pot growing system where people can grow their own living soil in one pot and fresh vegetables in the soil in the other pot. As the pots cost only 40cents and the main input is organic waste and volcanic rock dust and inoculant it is incredibly cheap and anyone can use this system, even if they live in a flat.
It is actually cheaper and more reliable that buying from the supermarket.
I call this system the Gbiota system because it is all about feeding our Gut biome.
Saving thousands of people from the chop
I felt this was a major innovation which would save thousand of people having their legs amputated from diabetes.
Now the challenge is to get this innovation to the public. I build up a multi million, multi national company and I know how to create paradigm shifts. I have done it and changed an industry.
I know that spending vast amounts of money on advertising is a waste, the internet is totally saturated with some outfit trying to sell you some pills that wont solve your health issue but may cause inflation in their bank balance.
Create a social movement
What is needed is a social movement where people use the system themselves, find it works then act as ambassadors for the system.
It is not just about diabetes, that is the visible part, it is about creating a community which is fit and healthy. We have a crisis in our health system.
The other day I had an ear infection (probably my fault for playing with my compost) there was a three week wait time to see my GP. I went to emergency department at the local hospital and they were really good and sorted it out (great it was really painful).
True we need more GP and more money on the health system but that should not be number one priority. The number one priority should be on prevention not wait for a cure after people become sick.
Prevention the priority
The most effective way of tackling our health crisis is to run programs so people are naturally fit and healthy so they don’t have to go to the doctors in the first place.
The Governments spends millions of dollars on drugs, particularly with diabetes where the drug companies have a captive market for life – literally.
The Government would save a fortune if they focused on prevention and having a fit and healthy population that does not need to go to the doctor.
Victory gardens
We need to find the ambassadors for prevention rather than cure. I cast my mind back to the Victory Gardens when I was a kid. This Government scheme, was incredibly successful with some 40% of the fresh food grown by amateur home growers and it cost the Government next to nothing just a few posters and speeches – it worked because it had the support of the population.
The Government may have provided the leadership but the energy of the people made it happen.
Community energy
Just look at the energy that went through the country when Sam Kerr scored that magnificent goal last night. But the other side were good and we lost.
But think of the dramatic change in our society if we could convert that energy from the Tildas to a campaign ‘Grow gut brain food’ so we are fit and healthy and did not need to go to the doctor.
So we need a Government department to show leadership and harness the energy of the people.
Which Governments department would you expect to provide leadership in preventing diabetes and initiate a modern version of Victory Gardens. How about Diabetes Australia who have a public responsibility to reduce diabetes.
Thanks, but no thanks – on your bike
What was the reaction of Diabetes Australia when I approached them? Basically thanks but no thanks, on your bike.
This is normal with experts in a specialist field, they may have a good knowledge and can answer the technical questions.
What they are not good at is at being a pesky four year old kid and keep on asking the why questions until they get to the real issue, neither are they good at speculative research doing totally daft things on the off chance that it may lead to a paradigm changing idea.
We need a paradigm shift – how do we make that happen.
Social action
I can do nothing by myself, I am just one person powerless against the might of the Government.
Also people are good at different things, because of a quirk in my brain I happen to be good at innovation and speculative research but I have absolutely no idea how to organise a protest movement.
But I can see the need for one. There is a saying that bad things happen when good men stand by and do nothing.
To my mind having your leg chopped off because of a dozy do nothing Government department is a bad thing and good people need to do something.
While you have been reading this two Australian will have had a limb amputated from diabetes, at least one and maybe both could have been avoided had they heard about homeostasis and followed the slogan ‘grow gut brain food’.
We live in a community
Humans are the most successful creature on the planet for two simple reasons, we are intelligent and we cooperate with each other to form communities.
The cost of living in a vibrant community is that we all have to contribute to the well being of that community according to our skills and capacity.
I don’t have diabetes and now my wife is on a grow gut brain food diet there seems no danger she will loose her foot.
To be honest I have not blown all my money on daft ideas and I am sure if I look at the back of the sofa I will find a few coins, so there is no logical need for me spent all my time and energy on helping people avoid becoming diabetic.
But I want to feel I am contributing to my society according to my abilities.
Right now the community needs to be aware that, if they want, they can be fit and healthy and avoid risk having their leg chopped off by growing gut brain food and if they don’t want to then that is their choice. But they need to be told that this is an option.
So I ask you whatever you skills and capability to help make people aware of the option. This may just be telling a friend, posting on social media or becoming part of a protest movement to pressurise the Government, who has the major capacity, to make the community aware of the option.
It is a good feeling when you are contributing to your community and believe me it is much more fun and satisfying than playing Bingo.
Who has the skills to run a protest movement
It is up to the people with the skills in organising a protest movement to breath a bit of life into do nothing bureaucrats.
We need a social movement with people posting on social media, getting the media motivated like they were with the Robo Debt and PWC scandals but focused on prevention and the grow brain food slogan.
We need a stream of people in wheel chairs with signs saying you chopped off my leg when there was no need, you knew and you never told me.
If you would like to live a long and healthy life, want to live in a society that values being fit and healthy and avoid having your leg chopped off from diabetes then do something useful for the community and form or join a protest movement, contact your MP or Mark Butler the Minister for Health email minister.butler@health.gov.au and tell him, in your own words that if he is interested in saving 4,000 legs a year from amputation he better sort out Diabetes Australia, that will also save millions in subsidised pills and also prevent another Robo Debt, PWC scandal.
We need a strong proactive public service
We need a strong and active public service that is focused on providing a service to the public and protecting us from the power of the mega corporations that are just driven by profit.
We need a public service that puts the people first – this is the essence of a working democracy which is sadly under threat.
I am 83 year old, still fit and healthy but it is up to younger people to create this protest movement – I think I have done my bit.
If you agree with the theme, have relevant skills even if just posting on social media please contact me at colin@gbiota.com