Technology for the community

If you are not confused about modern society then you must be smoking something pretty strong. I certainly am confused.

We have such amazing technologies which can produce goods and food at an unprecedented scale so we should all be enjoying a long, healthy, happy and stress-free life but a click on the evening news shows what a mess we are in.

I am not some arrogant prick, but I have been recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators, probably because I am obsessive and perseverant.

Technology should work for the benefit of the community

But I do hold this belief that technology should work for the benefit of the community and it is not. It may be making a handful of people rich beyond imagination but are the benefits of this technology flowing through to the community – I think not.

Is it good that we develop technology so military people can sit in armchair comfort to kill women and children with remote-controlled drones?

I was a pioneer of CAE Computer Aided Engineering but now work on sustainable and healthy food production.

Again I see the same conflict. Now some 75-80% of people die before their natural life span from our food system which kills the beneficial microbes which are essential for health and life.

Eco-balance

We know how to grow food that is full of beneficial microbes. Come to my garden where I grow my food. It is full of worms and creatures of the soil and I am 84 years old and fit and healthy.

The technology I use is to create the conditions where the beneficial microbes out-breed and out-compete the harmful microbes.

That is the technology of Eco-balance I am promoting on this web. I want to see this widely used across the food system and to do that I have to convince many people of the benefits. This does take more time than the typical three-word acronym.

The aim is to create a social movement of people who believe that technology should work for the benefit of the community – why not join us?

Sorting out the information

I have created hundreds of articles and videos which I admit can be overwhelming so I am converting these into what I call a hip-hop book. I am arranging the articles into a reading sequence but each article is stand alone so if you are not interested in that one you can hop onto the next.

And if you get lost you can always email me.

 

Become a healthy food ambassador

This web is about the global food crisis. It is not a pretty-pretty web but neither is the global food crisis – the biggest threat facing humanity.

Here and now

The global food crisis is not some threat for the future, it is here right now, it is not just about poor people starving in some remote country it is about people in rich countries suffering from chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

It is man-man made, if you face having a leg amputated it is a direct result of the food crisis – the wrong sort of food from our modern food system.

Balance of foods

It is not a simple shortage of food, it is about the wrong balance of foods and that is not what you may expect so it takes quite a bit of explaining.

I understand that everyone is busy these days but I hope that everyone who visits the site will at least read the front page, but more important we need a few people to really understand the issues and become ambassadors for change. If you think you could be a food ambassador and say hi just email me.

Become a food ambassador

We can’t expect big business or even Governments to initiate action, we need a groundswell from the public to create the social pressure for change and that will be led by these ambassadors.

It is a question of what sort of world do we want to live in.  Should food be purely about maximising wealth for a small number of people or should it be for the health and benefits of the community as a whole.

Food for energy

The basic facts are simple but unexpected. We need food for energy and that comes mainly from the sun. The amount of energy coming from the sun is vast in comparison with all man’s use of energy. There is no absolute shortage of energy.

Plants are brilliant converters of the suns energy into food energy, they just need water, carbon dioxide from the air and a few minerals which act as catalyst.

Food for replacement

We may think we are the same person that we were a few months ago but we are not, we are continuously replacing our body parts as they age and wear and that requires a complex array of chemicals which largely comes from the soil via plants.

There is truth in the saying that ‘Health Starts in the Soil’

But even this replacement food is not a crisis. We have a very sophisticated science of biochemistry. We know exactly what chemicals we need and how to produce them, preferably in our food which give a better balance but if all else fails, from pills which are readily available – even if at a high price.

Intelligent control system

Our bodies are very different to a jelly fish, aimlessly swimming around hoping to find food. We have a highly sophisticated intelligent control system which automatically regulates what we want to eat, among all our other bodily requirements.

It is like having a supercomputer in our gut and brain which working away in our subconscious regulates our bodies.

Unlike the mature sciences of biochemistry and microbiology, we really have no idea of the coding that drives this supercomputer but we know that it starts learning from the first suck on Mum’s breast until when we die.

We know that we have to feed it gut-brain food, if it senses deficiencies it will send out signals in the form of hormones so we overeat and get fat and sick.

But we also know that our gut brain is like a city, the city lives on over the centuries but the individuals are continuously breeding and dying, but the microbes have a life span measured in days rather than decades.

If we don’t create the right conditions for these microbes to breed we will end up with the wrong sort of microbes in our gut and our gut brain will not work properly at all.

This is the biggest threat in the global food crisis.

So, if you want a stable world for you and your grand kids, become a health food ambassador.

 

Getting started

I know, from bitter experience, that if I started by saying that Gbiota is about growing bugs that will live in your gut, and have swarm intelligence that controls what and how much you want to eat you would probably find the whole idea repulsive and click away.

So let me start by telling you what I do every day, that I am 84, fit and healthy and there is a whole tribe of us doing the same thing.

It is in three stages

Stage 1 breeding beneficial bugs

I do breed beneficial bugs, I do this in a Gbiota bed or box. I fill just the base with any organic waste I can lay my hands on, mostly kitchen scraps and grass clippings. The upper layer is filled with Wickimix, a really nice soil where I grow my plants.

I flood just the base of the box with soil blood which is what I call the fluid in the base of the box as it does the same job as our blood, distribute nutrients and air throughout the soil.

When I flood I expel all the stale air, I wait and let the soil blood wick up to the root zone of the plants growing in the Wickimix. Then I drain the base of the box which sucks fresh air into the box.

I store the soil blood I catch ready for the next flood and flush cycle.

I eat the plants that I grow, and every morning I make a green smoothie which is full of beneficial bugs which end up in my gut to power my gut-brain.

Stage 2 training my gut-brain

Now I train my gut-brain by eating all sorts of different foods so it learns what foods work for me and what don’t.

Even though I am 84 I will still listen to a 24-year-old nutritionist just out of University and if they tell me I need to get some more Vitamin K or B12, or zinc or whatever I will start to eat food that contains that possibly missing nutrient.

Stage 3 listening to my gut-brain

Now I learn to listen to my gut-brain. I don’t go on any restrictive diet, I think about that famous Wodehouse saying ‘Giving up wine, women and song’ does not make you live longer, it just makes it seem longer.
I

If I go to a party and a pretty girl comes around in a low-cut dress offering me a piece or two of cheesecake she has made for the party then sure as eggs are eggs I am going to stuff myself.

But the next morning my gut-brain is going to tell me ‘Colin, you had a bit of a wild party last night, so it is just your green smoothie and one slice of toast for breakfast for you.

That way I keep myself fit and healthy and also enjoy life, which seems to me to be the point of living.

What I do in life

So what do I do in life? I show people, anyone who is interested in keeping fit and healthy, how to grow this gut-brain food, train and listen to their gut-brain and hopefully have a life in which they enjoy one of the great pleasures of life – eating.

 

One tribe

The Earth has been spinning around the sun for four and a half billion years and we can expect it to be still spinning for a few more billion years.

Modern humans have only been here for a blink of an eye – 200,000 years and an agricultural society for a mere 10,000 years, and industrial society for 200 years and an information society for fifty.

Humans – we are all part of a teratribe

In our modern world we are all part of a teratribe. Part of this tribe can cut down forest in Brazil and that may lead to flooding in New York or Delhi.

We produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet yet millions go hungry, we know that an all-out nuclear war would destroy us all yet we continue to stockpile deadly weaponry, we know that the planet is heating up, sea levels are rising and finite resources are running out yet we continue to emit greenhouse gases at an unsustainable rate.

With our understanding of food and nutrition most of us should be fit and healthy into old age yet we have mega global corporations spending billions of dollars on very clever manipulative advertising so we buy their products and end up fat and sick and maybe having our legs chopped of from diabetes.

The easy bit-last

In the second half of this web I describe the technology of growing food so most people can expect a long and healthy life, that is the easy bit.

I became involved with how to grow food when I was recruited by my Mum as non-optional child labour to grow food in WW2. It is not difficult to grow healthy food sustainably, it is difficult to condense 84 years of learning into a three world acronym, even Eat, Fresh Food Grown in Living Soil takes six words.

There is no doubt that if we want to live long and healthy lives we have to change out food system, we know how to do that – the difficult bit is convincing people that living solely of a diet of chicken wings and chips followed by a double portion of cheese cakes is not the way.

But how to convince people there is a better way is the difficult bit that comes first.

Learning my lesson

But I did learn a very valuable lesson in my era as a pioneer of computer aided engineering, in the early days of computers when they were seriously clunky machines.

I developed software which solved coupled non-linear partial differential equations using an iterative predictor corrector scheme. Sounds boring and it was, but I ploughed on giving lectures on the technology with as much success as trying to stop teenagers thinking about sex.

Does it work?

But then I learned my lesson, people were just not interested in the mechanics of how it worked, there were a few people, the pioneering types, who just wanted to know how to operate the software well enough so they can go away and test it for themselves.

Does it work?

There was no reason why they should believe me but they were happy to run the risk of testing it to see if it worked as I predicted.

Fortunately for me it did and what came next is the interesting bit.

The interesting bit

These early pioneers became really excited about this new technology and with no help from me, I am an engineer not a marketing person, they showed their results to other people and soon this technology, which was at first seen as a bit weird became the norm.

A paradigm shift had occurred right before my eyes.

Feeding 8 billion people

I know that if we are going to feed 8 billion people so they have a long and healthy life that there needs to be a paradigm shift in our food.

I also know that I cannot bring about the paradigm shift myself but I know what I have to do. Find those enterprising early adopters, just a few of them, persuade them to set up Gbiota beds, eat the food and see if this improves their health.

They will then become enthusiastic and they will create the paradigm shift.

So if you find this web dull and boring, not to worry, just hang around and watch what other people are doing.

But if you are one of those early adopters who see the need for a food paradigm shift then I have created this web site for you and I am more than happy to meet up with you, this is my email address and I look forward to chatting with you.

 

Food security – real or hype?

Is food security real or hype? This is what I examine here first and later and more importantly what to do about it.

The Supermarkets are bulging with food so maybe we can just relax. Reliable figures for total food production are difficult to come by but is seems that we can identify production of at least 4 billion tonnes of food a year but the actual figure is probably much higher. Enough to feed the entire world for now and years to come. All seems good.

But let us start breaking this down. We are a thermodynamic machine and we need fuel for energy. That comes largely from the sun. The amount of energy falling on the earth from the sun is huge, far greater than all the energy used by mankind in all ways. No need to worry?

Plants are very effective solar panels, using the energy from the sun to break down water molecules and combining this with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to produce carbohydrates for energy.

If we were to adopt a plant-based diet there would be more than enough energy food, the biggest threat would be fresh water. We are already draining global aquifers for irrigation which are running dry while climate change will increase total rainfall but clump the rains together causing flooding and periods of drought with no usable water.

Then we have fires which are a serious concern.

But food does more than supply energy. We may not seem to change much year to year but our cells are dying and being replaced on a short time scale.

This requires a whole range of complex chemicals which originate from minerals, which we mine, but are processed so they are bio-available by a complex array of microbes, fungi and plants which we eat as phyto-chemicals.

We are rapidly exhausting some of these basic minerals, particularly phosphorous which is serious but even worse our system of modern agriculture is destroying the microbes and fungi which process these basic minerals into nutrients into the food chain.

This is a genuine threat to our food security but we can still manage on a reasonable time scale.

But there is a third function of food, to power the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies. This may be only a very small proportion of our food intake but is critical, in the way the pilot of a plane is only a minute proportion of the energy used by a modern airliner but it is absolutely vital for the smooth and safe operation of the plane.

Lack of the right food to power our intelligent control system is not some distant threat, it is here and now. The modern epidemic of chronic or non-infectious disease, which causes three out of four deaths is the result of deficiencies in our food system.

This is a problem demanding immediate attention, fortunately we know how to resolve this, at least technically, the solution is simple and savesmoney.

The challenge is to gain attention in the world of hype and disinformation in which we live.

Recycle not exploit

Gbiota technology allows virtually all people to breed beneficial microbes at home in organic waste.

For the best part of a million years humanoid creatures have eaten plants grown in living soil teaming with microbes , both good and bad, but many died from infectious diseases from the bad bugs.  In the Gbiota technology we engineer the conditions so the good bugs out breed and out compete the bad bugs.

Our gut biome is part of our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies. If it has the wrong microbes or senses deficiencies it will send out hormones to make us feel hungry so we overeat and get fat.

Fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.

But there are more important but longer-term implications. We are exhausting the natural resources that feed our food system such as phosphorous but most important is fresh water on which all life depends, and which will be grossly affected by climate change.

The Gbiota technology is based on recycling rather than exploitation of the earth’s natural resources and is particularly efficient in its use of water based on the principles of flood, flush and recycle.

It is hoped that this is appreciated by those concerned about climate change and who are prepared to set up demonstration sites to convince the general public of the importance of recycling.

The web has become so saturated with disinformation that there is widespread scepticism. People  will only be convinced by practical demonstration.

Both industry and Governments are under short-term pressure to act, but regular people have a great concern for the lives of their future children and grandchildren.

Gbiota is a social movement and we look forward to cooperating with those organisations who are active in protecting the future of our planet.

 

 

A few tips on using a hip-hop E-book

Reading a hip-hop E-book is a bit different to reading a normal book.

It is dynamic which means that new posts are being added and old ones removed as new information comes to hand and old information becomes obsolete.

Each post is a stand alone post so you can hip-hop around as suits your fancy, however, I do recommend that you read the first half dozen posts in sequence as that will give you a good overview of what Gbiota food is all about.

 Just follow the links as suits you

gbiota.com/2024/08/23/serious-think-about-food/  (home to E-book you are already here)

gbiota.com/2024/09/16/the-plan-2/  (the plan to change our food system, open to all)

gbiota.com/2024/09/13/riddle/  (preface open to all)

gbiota.com/2024/09/13/invite/    (you will need to sign up to access these posts)

gbiota.com/2024/09/11/adoption/

gbiota.com/2024/09/03/disease/

gbiota.com/2024/08/31/recycle/

gbiota.com/technology/

gbiota.com/2024/08/21/think-smarter/

gbiota.com/torch-bearer/

gbiota.com/2024/08/20/food-paradigm-shift/

gbiota.com/2024/08/13/thrive-and-survive-2/

gbiota.com/2024/08/01/smart-young-girl/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/25/soil-blood/  (full members only)

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/23/breeding-wickimix/ (full members only)

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/15/enhancing-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/01/gbiota-overview/

https://gbiota.com/2024/06/29/our-intelligent-control-system/

https://gbiota.com/2024/06/14/the-great-food-war/

https://gbiota.com/2024/06/05/feed-your-gut-brain-2/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/17/food-crisis/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/13/why-we-get-fat/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/12/not-little-piggies/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/25/food-health-and-wealth-for-all/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/14/survival-2/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/13/the-best-pro-biotic-ever/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/try-it-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/true-brain/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/help-me-help-you/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/26/fire-water-and-technology/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/25/fat-and-sick/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/20/health-starts-in-the-soil-4/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/06/what-science-tells-us/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/27/gbiota-movement-4/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/15/survival/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/11/invisible-extinction/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/08/future-of-food/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/21/good-men/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/17/homeostasis/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/17/gbiota-food-for-health/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/13/missinformation/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/08/fat-wrong/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/05/food-waste/

https://gbiota.com/2023/01/05/health-starts-in-the-soil-3/

https://gbiota.com/2022/11/14/health-span/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/24/crazy-world/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/17/no-dumb-donkeys/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/05/how-gbiota-beds-work/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/04/water/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/03/food-and-the-gut-biome/

https://gbiota.com/2022/08/22/health-starts-in-the-soil-2/

https://gbiota.com/2021/11/08/action-plan-for-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2021/10/03/ecobalance/

https://gbiota.com/2021/08/03/anthropocene/

https://gbiota.com/2021/07/02/principles-of-gbiota-beds/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2021/06/02/making-soil/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2021/04/13/making-soil-101/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2020/10/30/the-essence/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2020/09/04/dis-enabling/

https://gbiota.com/2020/08/04/intelligent-control-2/

https://gbiota.com/2020/07/28/sugar-blockers/

https://gbiota.com/2020/07/12/history-of-food/

https://gbiota.com/2020/04/21/making-soil-work/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/paradigm/

 

Look after our intelligent control system

I want to sell you a concept. It is free you don’t have to pay me anything but you do have to think seriously about it for five minutes and getting anyone to devote five minutes to thinking is a challenge in these modern times.

There are a number of steps to this thinking, the first one is the difference between conscious and subconscious thinking.

Round 1 the cat test

Let’s start with the cat test.

Our eyes are like a camera so the images are upside down but our subconscious brain flips them so we see them right way up. It also combines the images from both eyes into one image and, this is the smart bit, tells us how far things are away and it does all this in a twentieth of a second.

Try to do this using your conscious brain.

Look at this upside-down picture and tell me is the cat brown or black?

Using your conscious brain on the upside-down picture it could take you a couple of minutes to pick out the cat and tell me the colour. I know it will take you two minutes until you work out that I am just a silly old man who likes to play games and there is no cat.

Subconscious and conscious brains

Our subconscious brain is incredibly fast and efficient in doing what it can do.

Impressed? No, well give me another go.

You are walking up a flight of steps, carrying a cup of coffee and trying to console your best friend on your mobile phone.

Your friend is a bit upset (to put it mildly) her son has just failed his final exams, got drunk borrowed your car and smashed it up and is in hospital with a broken leg.

She needed that car to drive to the Airport to take a flight to make a presentation on why her company should win a contract to build the new Olympic stadium and she is already worried that her husband may be cheating on her with the nubile daughter next door who has just developed a pair of incredibly impressive breasts.

In other words, modern life as normal.

But all this time while you are consoling your friend, not spilling your coffee your foot lands perfectly on every step without you even thinking about it.

If you are still not impressed with how effective your subconscious is I give up.

Our subconscious brain and food

Let us now look at food and our subconscious brain as something that happens, maybe in different ways, across every culture on the planet.

We all have to eat and that will usually start with a savoury meal of carbs and protein. Nothing special about this, but now, depending on your culture you may have a piece of fruit, cake, a rice pudding, some chocolate or even in some cultures a glass of port or other sweet liqueurs.

Why? Because you need a lot of rapid energy to help digest that savoury meal and so your subconscious decides that you need this rapid energy so it sends out hormones so you want whatever it is you like that is sweet and full of instant energy.

OK hopefully I have won round one and convinced you that your subconscious is pretty smart but now we go into round 2 which is much more difficult, trying to explain how our subconscious manages to be so smart.

Round 2 why is our subconscious so smart?

Your subconscious has to learn to control many things in your body, temperature, heart-beat, oxygen, immune system, the list goes on and on but what I am interested in is how it controls our food intake, what and how much we eat. Notice the what, it controls what we want to eat as well as how much.

How does it do this? Like the way we learn everything – trial and feedback.

It starts with the very first suck on Mum’s breast. One good suck (and babies suck everything, it is part of their survival kit they are born with.) Feedback, positive or negative, is noted and recorded in babies brain for future reference.

Next time it feels hungry it goes to look up the record, cries to make a lot of noise, a breast appears from nowhere, it sucks away and feels good.

Mission accomplished.

This is the intelligent control system working away in our subconscious.

Baby learns that it needs to eat a lot of protein so it grows very fast.

That’s third isle down on the left in the red and blue packet with a picture of a baby on it. Sorry just joking but it certainly is learning what sort of food it wants.

Actually, that is not quite right, our subconscious intelligent control system learns what we need then sends out hormones so we want to eat that.

 

There are many hormones that can send out complex messages, it is much more than a full or empty gauge.

This learning goes on throughout life, babies love food that is both sweet and full of nutrients so they can grow as fast as possible and may end up a bit chubby.

In adolescence, they eat huge quantities of food and are typically skinny, or at least used to be until modern foods came along.

In middle age, we don’t need so much food but it takes us some time to learn that so we get a bit of a bum or tum.

By the time we are old, our bodies have learned we don’t need so much food and end up being skinny again.

The point is that this is a lifelong learning experience.

 

The computer in our tum

I used to write engineering software and we called this a predictor-corrector scheme, make the best guess you can, screw up, hide your screwup so no one sees, and then make a better guess. We also call it adaptive or self-learning but it is the same process screw up, look at the results of the screw up and have another, hopefully, better go.

That is just the way the world works.

People often go on short-term restrictive diets, that are a waste of time and often make things worse, they need to focus on retraining their control system so they want to eat what they need.

It makes life much more pleasant. Remember the old P. G. Wodehouse saying, ‘Giving up wine, women and song does not make you live longer, it just makes it seem longer.’

Recap

So far, this is the easy bit, we are about to go into the difficult bit so lets have a recap of the key points.

All our bodies have a built-in control system which regulates what and how much we want to eat. It is learning from that first suck until we die. While bio-chemistry has gives an in depth understanding of what our bodies need – when it comes to applying this knowledge the most effective way is to focus on training our sub-conscious control system so it tells us what and how much to eat.

Round 3 – The difficult bit with smart bugs

Now comes the difficult bit, hopefully, you have accepted that our subconscious control system is really smart – now I have to convince you that there are really smart bugs which are critical to this subconscious control system.

Have you ever dropped some cake crumbs on the ground and have been too lazy to pick them up? Well, I often feel lazy and am happy to watch the ants come along and remove the crumbs – it is really quite fascinating to watch on a hot sunny afternoon.

Australia in general and my backyard specifically, is ant heaven.

But are they smart? Let me ask you – how many ants have won Nobel prizes? The answer is zero.

An individual ant is not the smartest creature on the globe. They just bobble about in a totally random way with no plan or strategy, none of this dividing an area up into rectangles and sweep searching like the SES do – no just bobble about at random.

But when they find that cake crumb I am too lazy to pick up they leap into intelligent action. One ant will tell another ant, in ant language, which I do not speak. Hey, there are cake crumbs over there and this is the route I used to get there.

Soon there will be thousands of ants busily moving the cake crumbs taking this totally wasteful bobbley route that the first ant took. In no time all the crumbs have been transported back to their home so it works, for them.

Swarm Intelligence

We call this swarm intelligence and before we get feeling superior to the ants I have to say that the biggest uses of swarm intelligence are us humans.

We just love dressing up in Taylor Swift style and going to her concerts by the thousands. We dress that way for a good reason – we can fit in without having to think.

This really works as we don’t have time to solve every problem from scratch.

EUIC

What shall I wear today? The same old T-shirt and shorts I left on the floor last night because I was too lazy to put them away. You may think it is being lazy I call it EUIC as I want to appear trendy with the latest acronym. It is short for Effective Use of Intellectual Capacity.

And it keeps us alive. In and on us are trillions of cells, particularly in our gut. Now you won’t see a particular microbe queuing up to be awarded her PhD but together, with the power of swarm intelligence they do an incredible job in powering our intelligent control system and we would soon be dead without them.

So we need to learn to look after them.

 

The villain

Every good fairy story needs a beautiful heroine, a brave hero and an evil villain. Sorry, fairy stories came from the era before sexual equality but we now have made up for that with Kyoshi the all-conquering female avatar.

Let us hope that Kamala is Kyoshi in disguise, that will make the world a better place.

It is just a fact of life that there are harmful microbes, or what I call bad bugs as it is quicker to type.

Humans are very good at killing things, even our fellow humans – there is no other creature that kills members of its own species on such a grand scale, not a record we should be proud of.

We are very good at killing microbes, we do it intentionally with things like Covid which is good but we also do it unintentionally by killing beneficial microbes in our food system which is at the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.

So how do we kill the bad bugs without killing the good bugs?

A pretty simple but very important question but with a very simple answer.

Ants and worms

Ants and worms are both ace recyclers.

My garden is full of worms and other beneficial creepy crawlies but rarely do I see any ants in my garden while on my patio I never see any worms but it is inundated with ants.

So why the difference?

On my patio I drop crumbs and tell myself (and my wife) I am studying swarm behaviour even though I know that I am just too lazy to pick them up. It is nice and dry so the ants are more than happy but the worms don’t pop in to say Hi!

In my garden, I am using the Gbiota flood and flush system so it is maintained at the Goldilocks moisture level which is the key to the Gbiota system. The worms love it but the ants do not.

The only difference is the conditions. You don’t have to be a wizkid in microbiology – just know how to control the conditions – the food and moisture levels.

Simply by controlling the conditions the beneficial microbes breed happily away out-competing and out-breeding the harmful microbes.

That is what Gbiota is all about

Create the conditions in the soil to breed beneficial microbes without the harmful ones.

The microbes go into the plants and then into our gut to form so our gut biome is filled with beneficial biota which then forms part of our intelligent control system which sends out hormones which make us want to eat the food that we need.

But we are aiming to create a shift in the food paradigm so people think about food in a different as is described in the various articles.

But the food industry is very skilful in using flavourings to make their food taste good. But the flavour industry uses synthetic flavours which are deliberately targeted to be addictive – they are in business to make money.

It is not possible to compete against that with a week-old cabbage so we focus on food which is eaten shortly after picking when the natural flavours are at a peak and

As a final ps, we do cheat a bit. A week old cabbage is really pretty boring so we grow a variety of plants including herbs, like basil, thyme, oregano, thyme etc which brings a wider variety of microbial species into the system and just makes the food so much more attractive to eat.

Food paradigm shift

I have decided to include this in my hip-hop dynamic book even though I probably should not as I wrote this in a state of fury so you may be better to use the skip button above.

The Internet Advising Industry seems to think that the entire world has the attention span of a cabbage moth.

If you decide to read on you will see that it is essential that I establish working relationship with serious thinking people who full understand the importance of our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies.

The failure of this control system is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic disease which is the prime cause of premature death in 70-80% of cases.

I know such people exist but they despite all the wonders of the internet and modern intelligence system they seem unable of unwilling to locate such people – hence by fury.

Here is what I wrote

I have received an offer from internet marketing experts to redesign my web to enhance the marketing. I thought I would temporarily publish my reply on the home page.

Here it is:-

Web design

Many thanks for your offer to redesign my web to improve the customer experience which will bring many thousands of visitors to my site.

I am trying to create a food paradigm shift, I am one of the few people who have hands on experience in creating a paradigm shift so from hard experience let me tell you how paradigm shifts occur in the real world.

Imagine you create this beautiful web which is focused on the forthcoming food crisis and many thousands of people visit the site.

Food crisis

They will see the words food crisis and say what crisis? – the Supermarkets are just overflowing with food.

And they are nearly right. Currently, the total amount of food produced globally is approaching 5 billion tonnes. That is more than enough to feed the entire world population now and into the future. The food industry is one of the world’s largest industries, controlled by large corporations who spend millions of dollars on improving the technology.

The rate of increase of food production exceeds the increase in the world’s population and despite all the threats from climate change, degradation of our soils, and exhaustion of essential minerals there will still be enough food in absolute terms.

Not what you expected

There is a coming food crisis but not what people expect and all people need to understand the nature of this coming food crisis.

So the challenge is how do I get this message out to the public at large.

I have to learn from my previous paradigm shift which was about flow into moulds.

This occurs in flow channels and the conventional wisdom and accepted practise was that the bigger the flow channel the easier the mould would fill – just plain obvious and common sense – right?

I went around the world giving lectures to many hundreds of experienced engineers and what they heard (but not what I said) was that these flow channels should be made smaller not bigger.

Of course, most thought this was ridiculous and I was some sort of lunatic from a country with Kangaroos hopping down the main street and I needed to be put into a straight jacket.

People may not hear what you say

But only a very few people actually heard what I said which was that if you make some flow channels smaller this will deflect the flow away from the easy to fill areas into the more difficult to fill areas.

I had also developed some sophisticated Computer Aided Engineering flow simulations which enabled engineers to calculate how much smaller these flow channels needed to be.

I don’t think any of these pioneering engineers who heard what I said believed me at first but they were sufficiently intrigued to go away and tested it and I was right – it worked. The ultimate test is does it work?

These pioneering engineers then started to tell other engineers that this worked and soon there was an industry wide paradigm shift.

Not me – them

I could never have achieved that myself, how much time and effort I had put into promotion I could never have achieved this paradigm shift. These earlier pioneers were essential and they, not me created the paradigm shift.

This is the way science and technology works, by other scientists and technologist testing the innovative technology independently to test if it really does work.

I was eventually recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators but it was not me that created the paradigm shift it was those early pioneers who saw the potential and demonstrated beyond doubt that this really did work.

Food crisis affects everyone

Now there really is a food crisis coming and this affects everyone on this earth – we all have to eat. We do need a food paradigm shift but however clever and flash my marketing or attractive my web site this will not create this essential paradigm shift.

That will be achieved by other food pioneers who test my technology for themselves, shows it works, then demonstrate to the wide world that this works.

Must talk directly

So my web is for me to talk directly to these food pioneers and help them understand and apply the technology. Then there will be wide spread adoption across the globe, not because of clever marketing but because it works.

My job now is to find and connect to those food pioneers and I need to do this promptly before the food crisis hits.

Food for our intelligent control system

The crisis is not an absolute shortage of food but a shortage of the food that powers our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies so we naturally want to eat the right amount of the right sort of food which is the whole point of this new technology.

I am not a medical doctor, nutritionist of bio-chemist – I am an engineer and engineers design and build machines and every machine has some sort of control system – some a simple on/off switch other a highly sophisticated control system.

Control Systems for Power stations

My first job after qualifying was in a company making control systems for power stations which taught me a useful lesson about control systems.

Power systems have sophisticated control systems but they don’t always work as hoped. A classic story is the case of the football half time break.

People watching the match at home take the break to make a cuppa putting an abrupt strain on the power system which even the sophisticated computer system could not anticipate, it took a human to realise what what going on and manually anticipate the surge in demand. Humans are very good at conceptual thinking while computers are far superior at mechanical thinking.

Intelligent control software for irrigation

Later in life I wrote up some intelligent irrigation control software which gave me an understanding of how the human intelligent control system works.

Irrigation is actually a very difficult problem as the plants, the season and the weather are continuously changing so there are no pre-prepared plans. What is needed is to monitor many factors particularly soil moisture evaporation and rainfall, and water applied over previous irrigations and particularly the predicted evaporation and rainfall.

It is then possible to learn how this system works and predict how much water to apply – an early version of self learning software.

We have an intelligent control system

But this gives us a model for how the human intelligent control system works. From the first suck on Mums breasts we are monitoring what we eat and what the effect is, our control system (our gut-brain) learns which and how much food work for us and ensures we naturally want to eat the right amount of the right sort of food.

In the old food paradigm we nutritionist calculate out to the micro-gram how much of each of the essential nutrients based on an estimate of how much we need. That is not wrong but is only a partial view of how our bodies work.

New paradigm – feed our intelligent control system

In the new paradigm we focus on ensuring our inbuilt intelligent control system, which has worked nicely for a million years or so until we developed hygienic but inert modern ultra processed foods, and works as evolution has determined is best for us.

It has much in common with the intelligent irrigation system which aims to regulate the amount of water applied based on the water used by the plants rather than some formulae based on crop factors derived from generic data.

A war we must win

The failure of our intelligent control system causes more deaths than all the other causes of death, including Covid, Mpox and all those horrible deaths from war.

It is the biggest hazard facing humanity and rises above the need of any internet marketing fashions. It is a war we must win and than requires the right strategy which is forming this alliance with like minded people.

The job at hand is to make contact with those early food pioneers so they can recognise the importance of our intelligent control system and can make this the new paradigm.

 

 

Note – I am trying a new way of dynamic posts so one post covers a total topic.  Instead of writing new posts I will update and print in red the new sections

 

 

Food crisis?

Every day far more energy than we need falls as sunlight. Plants convert this energy into carbohydrates by breaking down the water and extracting carbon dioxide from the air. As long as we have water, there will be an excess of energy food.

But in our inert, triple plastic food system, we are short of food for our intelligent control system – our gut brain. This deficiency is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases.

The prime aim of this web is to create a social movement to create a fundamental change in our food system. Please join or email me. But in the short term, you can learn how to grow your own gut-brain food.

 

Preface

We have, at the most, fifty years to change our food system from one based on exploiting our natural resources to one based on recycling.

We may go to the Supermarket and see the shelves stacked with food from around the world, we are producing and shipping at least two billions tons of food every year. It is difficult to believe that there could be a problem.

But we can’t wait for forty nine years and then make the switch from exploitation to recycling.

We are already experiencing the effects of a failing food system. It lacks critical nutrients and biota to feed our gut-brain. Our intelligent control system senses this deficiency and sends out hormones making us hungry so we overeat.

The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases – obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

It is a here and now problem and we need to act.

Our Governments will play a critical role but in a democratic society, they are controlled by public opinion.

The first aim of this web is to inform the public of the dangers of doing nothing and explain how we need to change so they can influence our Governments.

The second aim is to explain the changes we have to make. We have the technology right now but we have to apply it.

I have been writing about this for years and if I am realistic there are so many articles that it is confusing so I am trying a new tack for the information age – a dynamic web which I will change regularly to give a condensed version.

I have called this Thrive and Survive but I will keep archived versions of all my articles available for those who want to go deeper.

 

We live in the virtual world of fake food

It is making us fat and sick and killing us

Our food system is on the brink of collapse

Soon millions of starving refugees will be

crossing boundaries causing chaos

It does not have to be that way

Join me in the world of real food

Live a long and healthy life

Thrive and survive

Let me show you how

 

 

Thrive and survive (Summary)

At the start, the earth was just a dead inert rock. Then the microbiota appeared, we don’t know from where, but they broke down the rocks making the nutrients in the rocks bio-available creating soil. Plants grew capturing energy from the sun, then animals and life on earth exploded.

Humanoid creatures appeared but they were small and puny. They developed a gut, full of trillions of biota which communicated with each other to provide intelligence, just like a modern computer, which regulated what and how much they wanted to eat and also taught their immune system.

They learned to manage fire and cook which led to massive brains and they started to invent things – spears, bows and arrows, followed by agriculture which led to city states.

Living close together and with poor hygiene many died from infectious diseases but they used their big brains to develop sewage and clean water systems and medicines and the population size exploded.

To feed this increase in population they refined their agriculture using chemicals to fertilise the soil and toxic chemicals to protect their plants from weeds and pests. It was highly in successful producing plenty of food.

But there were fewer microbes to make the nutrients in the soil bio-available and power the intelligent control system which regulated their bodies so people overate and got fat and sick creating a new modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases – obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

The infectious diseases had been swapped for non-infectious diseases.

But worse this system relied on mining and the exploitation of the earth’s natural resources with the threat of global famines, mass starvation and the collapse of their comfortable civilisation.

But ever inventive humans realised they needed a new technology and learned to breed beneficial microbes which out competed and out bred the harmful microbes something they had learned by studying nature and they called Eco-balance. Just manage the condition so the beneficial microbes win.

And they learned to do this using organic waste so the nutrients came from recycling rather than exploitation.

This is what we call the Gbiota technology

But people had to accept this new technology which meant a paradigm shift in how they thought about food.

But they had also invented what is probably the greatest innovation of all times – the Internet – where people can access information from across the world.

But sadly the internet had become saturated with misinformation so people were sceptical about what they read on the internet. So they said it is no good just telling people we have to show people that this works for real so we must ask innovative people who care about the future of their species to set up Gbiota boxes and beds and show people that this works.

And that is why we invite you to join the Gbiota social movement and help change the world for the better, we call it Thrive and Survive.

 

Life on earth

Gbiota is a technology for growing healthy food sustainably.

It is based on the principle of Eco-balance.

The first living creatures on earth were microbes. They broke down rocks to produce soil with bio-available nutrients which allowed plants, then animals, including us humans, to evolve. We are totally dependent on microbes.

But there are also harmful microbes which make us sick or kill us. We have developed an array of chemicals, many toxic, to provide nutrients for our plants and to protect them and us from these harmful microbes, but these have also killed off the beneficial microbes which are essential for life.

Eco-balance is the technology of creating the conditions that suit the beneficial microbes so they out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.

We know how to do this, it is a simple technology which is readily applied.

Technology should work for the benefit of the community but that is not the way it currently works.  Technology benefits a very small minority of people making them obscenely wealthy.

If humanity is to survive the food crisis we need a few entrepreneurial thinking people to take the initiative and demonstrate to the world that this is the way humanity will thrive and prosper.

 

Words aren’t enough

I have written hundreds of articles about sustainable and healthy food production, some are my attempts to treat a serious subject with humour others technical which may only be appreciated by someone with the right background.

But words won’t avoid the food crisis, that takes action.

So all I ask is for you to set up your own Gbiota beds or boxes, start incorporating plants with essential minerals and beneficial microbes into your diet and if you find that if you feel satisfied so no longer want to keep on eating just tell a friend or two.

That way will avoid the looming food disaster which won’t be solved by big business or government but by people dedicated to making the world a better place.

This will also save you money, this is not a solution just for the rich, to work it must be available to everyone.

Gbiota – the essence

Gbiota may appear to be about growing plants, and it is true we do grow plants but that is just a means to an end.

We all have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, its main purpose is to regulate what and how much food we eat, decide how much food we need to eat for energy and to replace our body parts as they age and wear, but it also controls our immune system.

This is a combination of our head and gut brains. Our guts have trillions of cells which communicate with each other just like in a computer. It starts learning about food from the first suck on mum’s breasts and continues throughout our lives.

For our intelligent control system to work we need the right sort of microbes in our gut and we have to feed them.

If we do not feed them we may overeat and get fat and sick. The underlying cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious disease is that we are not feeding our gut-brain as our modern food system is lacking the critical minerals we need and is sterile lacking the fresh microbes.

Gbiota breeds the beneficial microbes in the soil which enter the plants that we eat. But we need to control the conditions carefully, if it is to dry the microbes and the plants will not grow, if it is to wet harmful microbes will breed and we will get sick. We need to have just the right moisture level – Goldilocks moisture.

With this Goldilocks moisture the microbes will breed and break down the minerals we add to the soil to feed them and us the essential minerals and create the right conditions in our gut for the beneficial microbes to breed and our intelligent control system to work properly.

 

Thrive and survive

Growing food – my thing

Everyone has their thing. My thing is in how to grow food sustainably that will enhance health.

It all started in WW2 when I was a toddler and was used as child labour to grow food.

My job was to dunk pots into a brew of chicken manure, flood and drain – that is the basis of modern-day flood and flush.

There are two aspects to this, short-term and long-term.

In the short term modern food is deficient in critical microbiology and minerals. Our bodies have an intelligence, sense this deficiency and sends out hormones to make us hungry so we overeat.

Fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases, overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

This is going to be resolved by changing the food growing system rather than a medical approach which may relieve the systems but does not address the underlying cause.

In the longer term, we are facing food challenges from climate change and degradation of our soils. It is based on the exploitation of natural resources rather than recycling and we only have fifty years left of key minerals such as phosphorous.

We have to change from a system based on exploitation to one based on recycling. If we don’t make that change the comfortable civilisation which we currently enjoy will be under severe stress from hungry and angry people moving within and across national borders.

I have spent the last thirty years developing technological solutions to these twin issues.

The real threat – marketing bullshit

It is my job to try and solve these two problems. It is not easy but it can be done.

The real problem is differentiating between the real world and propaganda (or marketing).

I am a dull boring engineer, I solve problems. You may like to read my article Smart Young Lady.

I know how we can substantially reduce the eight million amputations a year that diabetics suffer.

This is going to be resolved by changing the food growing system rather than a medical approach which may relieve the symptoms but does not address and resolve the underlying cause.

The longer-term problem of a collapse of our food system from climate change and degradation of our soils is more challenging but still soluble.

As a dull boring engineer, I can look at the amount of energy falling on the earth each day. It dwarfs all the energy used by mankind. Fortunately most of that energy is reflects back out to space for the benefit of some little green men in some faraway galaxy or we would all be burned to a cinder.

That energy can be used by plants that extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, break the bonds in water to form energy-rich carbohydrates we use as energy food.

OK, we need other foods to replace our body parts as they age and wear but that is soluble by recycling.

Dull boring articles

As a dull boring engineer, I write long dull boring articles on how we can solve these problems and naturally I want to tell the world about these solutions.

But I like everyone have a range of capabilities and marketing is not one of those, as a marketer I am a pretty good engineer.

So I do the sensible thing and seek the advice of marketing experts thinking naively that in this information age of the internet that this will be simple.

But the marketing experts advising me cringe in horror at my ignorance and do their best to inform this dull boring engineer.

Many people are complaining about the cost of food. They may not realise that the cost of producing food is only a small proportion of the cost we pay in the Supermarket, often as low as 20%. The rest of the cost in other other activities – particularly marketing and packaging.

They need to do that so we buy food which is intrinsically unhealthy.

What a wonderful world we live in.

The virtual world

They explain there is now two worlds, the virtual world which is fun and happy with nubile young people frolicking in waterfalls and just enjoying their virtual existence and the real world which is where all the horrible things happen.

They tell me that if I want to use the Internet to solve the problems of the world I must adopt the rules of the virtual world and not talk about bad things like people having their legs amputated from diabetes or masses of hungry, starving, angry people flooding across borders.

In the virtual world people just want to hear about happy things and no one will want to hear about bad things and if I persist I will probably find my access blocked.

A bit of a worry

For me, this is a bit of a worry. I watch the news and see people killing each other all over the world and ask myself why. I understand full well that humans are the dominant creature on earth for two reasons – we are intelligent and naturally cooperative.

In my younger days, I used to drive out to some remote regions, if you got bogged and you were lucky enough that someone came along there is no way they would leave your there and would pull you out of the bog.

We are naturally a cooperative creature, it is built into us (or at least most of us).

So why is there so much violence in the world? For thousands of years, aggressive leaders have whipped up anger in their tribes to attack and kill humans in other tribes (and steal their women).

I write many articles on this like My Teddy and The Great Food War

But the advent of the Internet and the virtual world has changed the scale, so what do we do about it?

I am not being insensitive when I say stop worrying about those eight million people a year who have a leg amputated or those many millions of starving people who will be flooding across the borders.

There will always be some dull boring engineer who will find technical solutions.

The real threat is not seeing the difference between the virtual and real world.

Finding the solutions

So how do we solve these real-world problems?

We have to change from a system based on exploitation to one based on recycling. If we don’t make that change the comfortable civilisation which we currently enjoy will be under severe stress from hungry and angry people moving within and across national borders.

I have spent the last thirty years developing technological solutions to these twin issues.

That is what dull boring engineers do – find solutions to real-world problems.

 

Experimenting with growing food sustainably

I have been experimenting for over thirty years to find better ways of sustainably growing plants to improve health. The result is the Gbiota technology.

There is a lot of research on what are the best foods for health and also a lot of research on the best way to grow plants for maximum production but how to grow plants for health is a neglected area yet the quality of our food is very dependent on the soil it is grown in and what is known as the horticultural protocol.

Microbes and fungi play an important role, they process minerals in the soil to make them bio-available to the plants and enhance our gut health when we eat the plants.

The latest research shows just how important gut health is for our overall health not just physically but our mental health and feeling of well being.

But it is one thing to develop the technology, it is even more of a challenge to persuade people to change their eating routines. This is even more difficult in this information age which is saturated with manipulative advertising focused on profit rather than community health.

I was a pioneer in Computer Aided Engineering developing technologies which changed the industry for which I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of the country’s leading innovators.

The company I created became the leading exporter of technical software from Australia and was a world leader in its particular area.

But this did teach me about the process of getting new technologies accepted.

It is simply no good running major marketing campaigns, particularly in this modern era of disinformation, people just don’t believe what they read online.

The key to the adoption of any new technology is to find the social entrepreneurial people, who see the critical importance of a secure and sustainable food system, and are prepared to try the technology themselves to show it works.

These will be the sort of people who won’t be taken in by the marketing bullshit but will try it and test if it works for them.

If it works they will tell others and then the technology will gain acceptance.

Fortunately, it is obvious that it is working as people feel satisfied and are no longer craving food.

 

How to get new solutions accepted

But this did teach me about the process of getting new technologies accepted.

It is simply no good running major marketing campaigns, particularly in this modern era of disinformation, people just don’t believe what they read on-line.

The key to the adoption of any new technology is to find the entrepreneurial people who are are prepared to try the technology.

These will be the sort of people who wont be taken in by the marketing bullshit but will try it and test if it works for themselves.

If it works they will tell others and then the technology will gain acceptance.

Fortunately it is obvious that it is working as people feel satisfied and are no longer craving food.

 

My current aim is to attract the interest of these entrepreneurs to form a team to take this technology to the eight billion people on this planet.

Ask yourself these questions.

Which is more important – the profits of a handful of Neo-monopolist mega corporations or community health?

Are you prepared to spend a bit of time learning about flood and flush (the key technology behind the Gbiota system), make your own Gbiota bed or box, eat fresh Gbiota food for a month and if you see real benefits tell your friends?

If so just have a good read then drop me an email.

If this is you please contact me at colin@gbiota.com

 

Making the change

It is easy to get emotional about mega food companies making profits by supplying food that leads to us having our legs chopped off with diabetes and Governments that take no action, is all that true? I am a dull boring engineer and what matters is the end result. So what are the facts?

We live on a little ball spinning around our sun. Every now and again a meteorite comes from outer space but the mass is minute compared with the mass of the earth so we can say it is negligible and the minerals on the earth are fixed.

We cannot say the same thing about energy. Every day the sun delivers a huge amount of energy. It is not well understood how much energy comes from the sun but it is huge in comparison with the amount of energy used in all ways by humans and totally dwarfs the energy that powers our bodies.

Fortunately, most of that energy is reflected back into outer space or else we would all be fried to a cinder.

When the earth was formed some four billion years ago it was just dead rocks but after a billion years or so microbes which appeared from somewhere started to break down the rocks or form soil in which plants started to grow.

These plants collected a huge amount of energy from the sun which was made more soil and plants and then animals – an explosion of life which eventually led to humanoid creatures about a million years ago.

We ate plants but then we discovered how to use fire and cook which made nutrients more digestible and we changed dramatically – our guts shrank and we developed huge brains and started to invent things. At first spears, then bows and arrows, then fibre for clothes and fishing lines.

We were pretty puny creatures in comparison with some of the other creatures that roamed the earth and to survive we had to form tribes for protection.

Tribes had leaders which we were happy to follow, it was a simple question of life or death. This tribal characteristic still forms part of our nature which is why we seem to be so aggressive to members of other tribes killing them was seen to be a virtue.

Then we developed agriculture which led to the formation of city states, people lived in relatively close proximity and became very prone to diseases which kept the population numbers low. Three out of five babies would die before the age of five and another in their teens. But if you reached the age of thirty then you could expect to live a lot longer and die of old age.

Food was an issue but there was plenty of land and despite deaths from famines we managed to struggle through despite the high death rate.

Then we used our big brains, we improved both medicine and hygiene so we stopped dying from infectious diseases at such an alarming rate and the population exploded.

This is not something out of the history book it has happened in little more than my lifetime where the population has tripled.

All those extra mouths had to be filled so we got our big brains out of the cupboard to develop better ways of growing food and we were spectacularly successful in increasing our food production far faster than the increase in population.

We were extraordinarily successful in harvesting the energy that fell from the sun producing energy food to provide us with energy.

Let us not be rude to the nutrition scientists but it really does not matter what food we use as fuel, it is just fuel and the bulk of the food, about 80% we just burn off as fuel.

But like many good things there was nasty side effects. The problem was not what was in the food, it was all good energy food but what was missing from the food, specifically the beneficial microbes which power our gut brain and the minerals and phytonutrients which are needed to feed both us and the microbes.

Our intelligent control system, which regulates our bodies, particularly our appetite, (but also our immune system) detected these deficiencies and so sent our hormones so we felt hungry and overate leading to an epidemic of chronic non-infectious diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

We had swapped infectious diseases for non-infectious disease.

That is what motivated me to develop the Gbiota technology, and the solution turned out to be very simple. Simply create the conditions that favour the beneficial microbes so they out compete and out breed the harmful microbes.

This breeding is done in organic waste which solves another problem, it is replacing the extractions of the minerals which we are exhausting by recycling waste.

This is the way we will thrive and survive.

We do not have to replace our existing food system which generates some five billion tonnes of food each year just supplement it with living Gbiota food.

It is simple, and inexpensive so any one can do it.

But we live in an era where the internet is saturated with fake information. The solution to that is for people who understand this to set up their own Gbiota beds at home, show it works which is easy – just see if the food cravings are reduced – then tell other people.

This is what the Gbiota social movement is all about.

 

The big threat

If you asked me what is the biggest threat facing humanity what would you expect me to say?

If you knew that one of my earliest memories was Mum digging up the lawn to grow food in WW2 and since then, for some 84 years I have been studying how to grow healthy food sustainably you would expect me to say sustainable food production.

And you would be dead wrong. We know how to grow enough food to feed the entire population of the world so we can thrive and survive, now and well into the future.

That is not the problem, the real problem is what is probably the greatest technical innovation of our generation – the Internet. Well not the internet itself, it still amazes me that most people can now access the world’s information.

The problem is the way the Internet has become so saturated with dubious information and manipulative marketing that people now believe you can solve any problem, however complex and challenging, like feeding ten billion people with food that will keep them healthy, with a thirty second scan.

Well, the world does not work that way, we can provide the world with food that will keep them fit and healthy but not with a thirty second scan and a cute slogan. Read my story of the smart young girl.

All I can do is provide the information, people, that’s you and me, decide what we put in our mouths, not big business or Governments.

 

Three action steps

We need to change from exploitation to recycling. Recycling is not a new concept – it has been the way the world has worked for the last few billion years. The patents have well and truly expired.

We tend to think of recycling as microbes composting and that works but it is not the way that most natural system works.

Microbes certainly recycle but there is a bigger army of recyclers, worms in the wet conditions, ants in the dry and a whole range of beetles and also birds.

That pigeon clearing up under your trendy city cafe table is doing a great job of recycling, even if does poop on your shoe.

This wide array of creatures may do some of the crunching but much of the final processing is done in their gut biome, which often resembles ours. This is particularly valuable as their poop enters the soil, then the plants and finally reinforces our gut biota, which is what Gbiota is all about.

But how do we make use of this to save our world from collapsing.

There are three steps we can take.

Grow food at home in Gbiota boxes.

The first is easy, just persuade people to start growing some of their food at home in Gbiota boxes. This is cheaper and much healthier than buying from the supermarket – we just have to get the message out.

This is what I have been researching for many years now.

Manure

Next, we can persuade our farmers to reprocess out waste, particularly both animal and human manure.

But we need to develop a bit of technology hear as we don’t want to just spread this on the surface. We are fighting a continues battle between the good bugs and the bad bugs, so not this way shown.

We need to develop some machinery with an auger and slurry tank so the manure is buried deep in the soil where the beneficial microbes can process it safely. Not difficult for any farm machinery manufacturer.

This should not be such a challenge as it is cheaper than the ever increasing cost of fertiliser.

Urban farms

If we are going to have a nation of people with a healthy gut biota we need to change our city planning to allow for local growing of some plants. This way people have have plants which are harvested and eaten without delay, which is the greatest weakness of our modern food system.

Fresh means living – not gone rotten. An important difference.

This worked spectacularly well in Cuba during the sanctions where they developed an effective system of urban agriculture when under political stress.

We have a different stress now from chronic diseases – we just have to recognise the harm of our modern food system.

 

My plea

So my plea to these entrepreneurial types is simple. Don’t believe all the marketing bullshit or even what I tell you.

Set up some Gbiota boxes, start incorporating some Gbiota grown food into your diet and just monitor how you feel. Nothing complex, no special tests just ask yourself the simple question “Do I feel satisfied and am no longer craving food?”

You can do some scientific test if you like by measuring how much weight you have lost or how often you go to the toilet (sorry but your use of toilet paper will increase – just buy yourself a bidet).

And if the answer is yes then just tell other people. This is the way we will avoid all those amputations from diabetes and those hoards of starving people crossing borders in search of food.

Woke green activist

You may get called a woke green activist. People try and insult me all the time with that phrase, I take it as a compliment and feel good that I am a woke green activist and so should you. You are making the world a much better place for you and your great-grandchildren.

Not a bad feeling.

 

 

There is them that do and them that follow – if you are a doer join me – do it for yourself or do it for your grandkids

 

 

We are a social movement to change our food system so we thrive and survive.  Why not drop me an email and tell me about your interest in food and health first.

 Smart young girl

There is a nice story about a smart young lady who stalled her ageing car on a busy road.

Try as she might she could not get the car started and soon there was a monster traffic jam. The man in the car behind started to blow his horn in a furious rage, she did not know what to do so she went to the car behind and said very politely “Excuse me, sir, would you like to try and start my car while I sit in your car and blow the horn”.

But let me make a sequel, a quiet, dull, boring engineer a couple of cars back, came along, lifted the bonnet and went through a series of checks, taking out the sparking plugs – yes there was a spark, was the fuel getting through – yes there was fuel.

So he diagnosed the carburettor was flooded, spun the engine a few times, put the spark plugs back and brrm brrm the car started and everyone drove off, very relieved.

Now why do I tell this story? Because we are facing a far worse crisis than a traffic jam – the future failure of our food system. We have just fifty years’ supply of some critical minerals, like phosphorous, remaining which will certainly cause a collapse of the food system – that is unless climate change and degradation of our soils have not already caused collapse.

I am not a noisy type, I don’t march in protest movements or climb tall buildings to hoist protest flags, thats me I am a quiet, dull, boring engineer, but I can work through problems systematically to find solutions that work.

I was a toddler in the Second World War when food was critical to survival. I watched as women (the men were away), dug up the lawns, nature strips and common land to grow food, and it worked.

Later in life being a quiet, dull boring engineer, who plodded through difficult problems in a step-by-step way, turned out to be quite useful. I was selected as one of the leading innovators by the Institute of Engineers for my pioneering work on computer-aided engineering.

But then I asked myself what was the biggest problem facing humanity? The answer was simple. How are we going to feed the ten billion that will inhabit the world in a sustainable way.

Working through the problem in a step-by-step way gave some reassurance.

Every day, for the last four billion years, the sun has delivered vast quantities of energy to the earth. Numbers with so many 000 that it is difficult to comprehend and vastly in excess of all the energy used by all humans.

 

Fortunately, most of that energy is reflected back into outer space or both you and me would be dried up cinders, so we are safe, at least until we stop reflecting that heat.

Plants use this energy, by photosynthesis, they take carbon dioxide from the air and water from the soil, breaking the carbon and hydrogen bonds to produce compounds, such as carbohydrates, which contain large amounts of energy that we can use as food.

We can expect that this will continue for many more billions of years, so we can stop worrying about energy food.

But there is a sting in the tail. The bulk of the food we need to eat may be energy food but like a car needs more than just energy fuel, we need a whole array of complex chemicals and microbes to be fit and healthy.

Our bodies need replacement food to rebuild our body parts as they wear or age.

And this is the sting, we are running out of these minerals. To survive we need to change our food system from one based on exploitation of our natural resources to one based on recycling.

So for the last thirty years, yours truly – this quiet, dull boring engineer – has been experimenting with ways of growing food sustainably. This involves experiments with compost, bugs and waste entirely appropriate for a quiet dull, boring engineer.

The result is the Gbiota system, a growing system which will keep us fit and healthy in a sustainable way.

But we can’t just wait for forty-nine years and in fifty years take action.

Right now we are seeing the harmful effects of a diet with a poor balance between energy and replacement foods. Our bodies are intelligent and can sense the lack of replacement foods so it sends out hormones to make us feel hungry so we eat more.

The net result is we overeat and get fat and sick. The underlying cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases (like obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia) is the wrong fat in the wrong place.

We cannot just sit around for forty-nine years saying there is plenty of food in the supermarkets. Of course there is, but it is missing what keeps us fit and healthy.

So this quiet, dull, boring engineer may have the solution but solutions are no use unless they are applied for the benefit of the community.

There was a time when the Internet was an amazing way of getting important information out to the public.

 

Unfortunately, the Internet has now been largely taken over by the internet marketers who run a standardised sausage factory where success is achieved by the latest marketing gimmick rather than the importance of the content. People now only believe what they hear from someone they trust.

To create awareness of the need to change our food system we need people who are not quiet, dull and boring.

We need people who are willing to start using the Gbiota system, see for themselves that they are no longer craving food but feel satisfied and then go out and tell their friends how they can be fit and healthy by eating food grown sustainably.

So if that is you please pick up the torch and go out into the world, tell people that there is more to food than energy – they need replacement food and this is the way we will not just survive but be fit and healthy for generations ahead.