I recently watched Invisible extinction on SBS television. This is the best explanation of why our gut microbes are so important to health.
You can easily watch it yourself on SBS on demand and I thouroughly recommend you do.
I wrote a letter to Martin Blaser, a principle scientist involved in the research and thought you may be interested.
Colin
Dear Martin,
I have just watched the film Invisible Extinction about the Disappearing Microbes which has just be shown on SBS television here in Australia.
I have been obsessed by the gut biome since my wife Xiulan, a medical doctor became diabetic and her foot started to turn black and the doctors were saying that amputation was the only solution.
I am not a micro-biologist, I am an engineer and my first job was working for a company that made control system for power stations so I really understood how control system worked.
Later in life I was a pioneer in the early days of computing when you had to write in machine code and understand how computers actually work at the base level. For my work in developing computer aided engineering I was selected as one of Australia’s top innovators by the Institute of Engineers.
I was therefore looking at the gut biome as an intelligent control system.
Diabetes as we know is largely caused by the wrong sort of fat accumulating in the wrong places but I wanted to try and understand what actually made people store fat.
I know that the conventional wisdom is to look at this from the point of view of diet but that didn’t seem to fit the facts.
We know for example that people in Holland were basically starved at the end of world war two and later, when food became available, many people became overweight regardless of what diet they tried.
The only explanation I could see that really fitted the fact was that during the war they had trained their gut brain that it needed to send out signals to store fat.
As we well know faecal transplants from a fat person can cause the recipient to also become fat. Obviously there is an association between the species of microbes and the tendency to store fat but that is just an association and does no provide the mechanism.
But if we look at nature there are many examples of swarm intelligence in insects and birds but one of the most interesting is slime mould.
When researchers put slime mould into a maze with a hidden food supply the slime mould as expected would hunt around in a random way until it found the food source.
But repeat the experiment with the same slime mould it would go straight to the food source so some how the slime mould had been trained and retained that training to find food.
This is very similar to the Dutch people at the end of the war whose gut had been trained to store any available fat and retained this training over many years.
I know it may seem ridiculous at first sight but when we undertake a faecal transplant we may be transplanting more than the microbes, we are also transplanting the training of those microbes.
This is of course in conflict with the way we think, if you disagree with what I am saying you may describe this as a load of shit meaning it makes no sense but maybe that is not quite right and that shit can actually transfering intelligence and training.
There is little doubt that the gut biome is at the core of the most critical health issue we face and we really need a practical solution.
So being an engineer I wanted to find a practical solution and developed the Gbiota BioBiobox system. This is a very simple system where people can breed the beneficial microbes in the soil at home under carefully controlled conditions so they breed beneficial microbes.
They can then eat plants grown in this soil, which is teaming with beneficial microbes and the nutrients to feed both the microbes, and so enhance their gut and hence general health.
At this moment I am just using an inoculant to give a broad spectrum of beneficial microbes but I see no reason why an inoculant with specific species could not be used.
Whatever the theoretical issue this is an extremely simple and effective system which any one can use by recycling waste food and at a lower cost than buying food from the supermarket.
I very much hope we can set up some dialogue to discuss this.
You can read more about my work from my web www.gbiota.com and I have made many YouTube videos under @colinaustin1000 but the best overview is a very short 4 minute video Grow gut microbes
Hoping to hear from you.
Colin Austin