For Jenny and anyone else wanting a healthy and sustainable food system

I received this email from Jenny, one of the Gbiota members. I am very happy for such emails as they tell me that the documentation is not clear which gives me a chance to make it clearer.

I hope this helps Jenny and a few (million) other people.

Jenny’s question about soil-blood gets to the core of the Gbiota system.

Jenny’s question

Hello Colin

I’ve enjoyed your new articles, particularly the one relating to tower growing.

Also the in-depth details about soil-blood and how often to water/flood the boxes.

One question though: what do you do with the ‘soil-blood’ for the week between watering? Does it retain its high microbial quality and expected health benefits, sitting in a bucket waiting for next Thursday until you use it again? I get the feeling it would deteriorate rapidly, being kept in an anaerobic environment.

I am planning to get started making a Gbiota bed because my current compost heap is seriously dry and can’t retain/hold water for 24hrs. Hence everything is very slow to compost and useless for growing food.

Thanks again for the new articles.

Jenny

My not-so-short answer

Hi Jenny,

Many thanks for your message which is telling me that I have not done a good enough job of explaining the Gbiota technology and aims.

I write a lot but sometimes the core of the message is lost in a mass of words, let me have another go.

The needle in the haystack

There is an immense amount of solid scientific research on how food affects health, again the core message is easily lost in the volume. But the core is simple.

Our gut matters

The biota in our gut is critical to health, it does much more than digest food.

The microbes in the gut communicate with each other, like in a computer so our gut forms part of the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly appetite.

It manufactures a range of chemicals which are essential for the body to operate and lack of these chemicals leads to chronic infectious diseases.

Also, much of our immune system is located in our gut, as we learned with Covid. People eating a healthy diet still caught Covid but were much less likely to die than people eating a poor diet or under stress.

We know from studies of the gut biome that the biota comes from the food we eat (or the food that mum ate) and that these microbes originate in the soil.

Modern highly processed foods – no bugs

Modern highly processed food may be hygienic but is devoid of beneficial microbes. Traditional food is full of microbes, some beneficial some dangerous leading to sickness and death.

Traditionally these microbes breed in organic waste in the soil.

Under some conditions, beneficial microbes breed preferentially and all is fine.

In other conditions, the toxic microbes breed preferentially leading to infectious diseases of varying severity.

Preferential breeding

Learning how to preferentially breed beneficial microbes in organic waste is one of the critical challenges facing our species.

But there is another side to the story.

 

Sustainable food

Recycling organic waste is sustainable, while modern chemical agriculture, based on the exploitation of natural resources is not.

There are eight billion people on the earth, they consume thousands of tonnes of food each year. The current system is unsustainable, we have no option but to learn how to grow food sustainably.

We need to create a new industry of growing plants that act as pre and pro-biotics by breeding beneficial microbes in organic waste, both healthy and sustainable.

This will be community driven – join us in the Gbiota movement.

Not all food

Let me be clear here, we do not need to replace the entire food industry – that is just ridiculous.

Most of the food we eat is burned off as energy and our modern food does that very well.

Rather we need to create a new industry supplying gut-brain food which is only a fraction of the total food we eat.

But it needs to be local as microbes have a short life. This will start with a few entrepreneurial home growers setting up their own Gbiota boxes but later local commercial growers supplying their local community.

Gbiota – not just a technology – a social movement

I need to make this message clear to my fellow humans. This is why I put so much emphasis that Gbiota is a social movement, we have to change the way society works. That is more important than profits.

Any space traveller passing by and watching the 7 O’clock news is hardly likely to be handing out gold stars for our harmonious society.

Unks and unkunks

No this is not gibberish in some weird language but an issue at the core of health.

I know I go on a bit about the ‘profits before people’ actions in the food industry but there is another, even bigger issue.

An Unk is something you don’t know but at least you know you don’t know it and can develop strategies to mitigate, bad but not that bad.

An Unkunk is something you are unaware of – so are unprotected from the danger ahead.

The history of food is riddled with unkunks and it is a big issue.

Let us look at lessons we can learn from the history of food.

Hunter-gatherers

For hundreds of thousands of years, we were hunter-gatherers and totally at the mercy of the climate. While our food was generally health a few bad years would leave us starving.

Research shows that modern day hunter gatherers, who diet contains some plants plant grown in living soil full of nutrients have a far healthy gut biome.

They do not suffer the modern epidemic of chronic diseases. We need to feed our gut -brain, we know how – it is just a question of doing it.

Farmers

When we saw the possibility of growing plants ourselves, particularly seed plants like wheat, corn and rice which could be stored we jumped at the opportunity – and why not?

Who could have foreseen that the reliable food supply would lead to a massive increase in population leading to cities which allowed infectious diseases to spread, our actions had led to the creation of terrible plagues.

We also had no idea that repetitive harvesting would exhaust the soil leading to the complete collapse of some civilisations.

Good intentions gone wrong – caught out by an Unkunk.

Had we been aware of the dangers of plagues and soil degradation we would probably have still gone ahead and adopted farming, with all its benefits but taken steps to avoid the plagues and soil degradation.

Hygiene

Then we learned how important hygiene was so we built water and sewage systems, invented the modern bed and adopted regular washing.

Fantastic success – but it led to yet another population explosion which put great pressure on available food supplies.

How can you argue that improved hygiene is wrong – that would be plain stupid – but had we been aware of the population explosion which would result we may have taken steps to manage it better.

The green revolution

Then came Norman Borlaug, and the green revolution and we increased food production, all with the best of intentions but which led to yet another population explosion.

However, with our modern technology, we were able to produce enough food to feed the entire world. That is true we just failed to learn how to distribute food equitably – a social, not a technical problem.

Had we been aware that this could lead to swarms of starving refugees we may have taken steps to manage the gross inequalities – who knows – would short-term greed still have triumphed?

The gut-brain

But again there was an unexpected trap, our highly efficient food system largely based on chemicals for fertiliser and crop protection meant that our food was inert so our gut biome, which is an important part of the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies was no longer fully functional.

No one is blaming Norman Borlaug and his contemporaries, they worked diligently to feed the world’s ever-increasing population but were caught by an Unkunk and so now we are left with the problem of creating a supplementary food system to feed the gut-brain.

Unkunks and the modern gut biome

At least we have learned about the importance of the gut biome and its impact on health. It is very much the science of the decade. But we are still looking at it from the viewpoint of biochemistry.

We know full well we can make fat people skinny and skinny people fat by changing the gut biome, we know what species of gut biota make us fat and which species make us skinny.

But we have no idea of the mechanism, the how, we just have observational experiments.

Our understanding of the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies is still in its infancy (meaning we haven’t the faintest idea of the code that makes it work) and even more dangerous we have yet to recognise its importance.

We don’t do nothing, with 8 million people a year suffering a diabetic amputation that is not an option. We recognise and learn to manage our ignorance.

Calorie balance

Pick up virtually any book on diet or weight loss and you will be presented with the idea that we get fat because we consume more calories than we burn.

Now read carefully, I am not saying that the fundamental laws of the conservation of energy and the conservation of mass are wrong. I was indoctrinated with these ideas at University and they have stuck.

But calorie imbalance, eating more than we burn, is not the cause of the modern epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart attack and dementia.

I accept the expert’s opinion that these are caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place. No augment from me here.

So why do we get fat and sick?

Calorie imbalance is not the cause. It is how, or what I like to call the enabling factor.

The why, the real reason why we get fat and sick is because our intelligent control system, of which the gut-brain is an integral part, has decided that we need to store more fat.

Yet the standard response to storing excess fat is to talk about the calorie imbalance. We are the victim of an Unkunk.

We should have known better, over seventy years ago, after the end of WW2 we learned that people who had been deprived of food in the war became overweight when food was available.

Our intelligent control system had been trained that is needed to store fat, it was a question of survival. When food became available it deliberately created a calorie imbalance by our gut-brain sending our hormones so we were obsessed with eating as much food as we could lay our hands (or maybe teeth) on.

Read the warning label

So, dear Jenny, read the warning label. I and no one else really knows how our intelligent control system works, but we can observe it in action.

What I am trying to do here is to take it out of the Unkunk section and bring it into the Unk section.

There is an old saying, science is the art of managing knowledge – engineering is the art of managing ignorance.

I am an engineer, I was brought up on how to manage ignorance. We build bridges and weird machines and so they don’t fall to bits we use what we like to call safety factors. These are not safety factors at all, they are ignorance factors.

So when you read on please understand that there are no absolute truths here.

The overall aim is to learn how to grow plants which are both pre- and pro-biotics. We need to be able to do this at scale by creating what is in effect a new industry, we are not going to solve the epidemic of chronic diseases by lab-scale breeding of a limited selection of microbial species.

Growing plants as natural pre and pro biotics is a process which has been tested (unknowingly) for millions of years so reducing the risk of Unkunks.

Soil-blood is a key part of this new technology. Learning how to manage soil-blood is at the core of resolving the epidemic of chronic disease. But it is not without risk.

As a pioneer of the soil-blood revolution I have used my body as a piece of lab equipment to see how far I can go before I sense a problem and I can honestly say the worst effect I have experienced is an occasional increase in the consumption of toilet paper.

If you want to increase your level of safety factor then do so. I have tried to indicate how and now it is your decision.

Principles no rule of thumb

It is not possible to give a set of instructions, like a cooking recipe, as climate, season and plants (and people) vary so much so what I try and do is give a set of principles which the grower can apply whether in Finland or Bundaberg.

The basic principles behind the Gbiota system are simple. We want to breed beneficial microbes in the soil. These will enter the plants that we eat and from there into our gut, a process that has been going on for a few million years but we decided to abort with our modern, ultra hygienic, food system.

Part of the reason we stopped is that if the conditions are not right harmful microbes, which make us sick or will kill us will breed.

But the real reason is it is much more profitable to grow plants using chemicals than go to the trouble of recycling organic matter.

We use a simple process of Eco-balance where we create the conditions that favour the beneficial microbes so they out-breed and out-compete the harmful microbes – a process that has been going on for many millions of years so the Patents have well and truly expired.  It is well tested.

Both good and bad Microbes need food so that is not a differentiator, the key differentiator is air and moisture.

How water moves through the soil may appear to be simple but is actually complex and for those interested I wrote an article water which may help understand the Gbiota process but there are two key things to understand about water.

 

Goldilocks water

If the soil is too dry nothing happens, the plants don’t grow and the bugs won’t breed.

If it is too wet most plants won’t grow well, yes watercress and seaweed may be healthy, but life is about variety.

So what we want is Goldilocks water, not too wet, not too dry, just right.

Sounds simple but it is not.

Weird water

Water is weird but very friendly stuff, it loves itself so water molecules are attracted to other water molecules which gives it tensile strength, which is a bit weird for a liquid, but it is also a bit like a teenager, it loves some things and hates others – what we call hydrophobic and hydrophilic.

The other weird thing about water is it does not like being invaded by other stuff so if there is a strong solution then any nearby water will rush in to dilute the strong solution, what we call osmosis.

These two together are how plants work, osmosis means that water will enter the root system as long as the solution in the plant’s roots is stronger than the solution in the soil.

If it is not, the water will be sucked out of the plants and they will die. Something I have demonstrated many times in my experiments.

Once the water has entered the root system, evaporation from the leaves will pull water up to great heights by the tensile strength of water that has entered the root system by osmosis.

Water does not spread uniformly

You may agree with the Goldilocks water approach, not too dry, not too wet just right and think it is so simple – just water a little bit.

But that is not the way soil and water works.

If you are lucky and have hydrophilic (water-loving soil) the water will cling to the first bit of soil it finds. But generally (almost always) soil has different particle and pore sizes.

The surface tension forces are much larger in a small pore than in a big pore (it has more surface area) so the water will move from large pores to small pores and then stop.

When you apply water from above, however you do it – drip tape, sprinkler, hose, flood or a good old fashioned bucket you are applying liquid water that will initially fill all the pores, big and small where you applied the water, so they are all filled with liquid water.

The soil is saturated with no air spaces.

The importance of pore size

But all soils have a range of pore sizes and if the soil is hydrophilic, (water-loving), the forces attracting the water in the small pores are higher than in the large pores so water will move from the large pores to the small pores until there is a balance and flow will stop.

This is wicking.

The moisture level at the end of wicking is normally called field capacity but is really an equilibrium state which is a better term.

This moisture level is independent of how much water is applied. If you apply more water it will just go deeper into the soil.

I will say this again, and put up with the abusive emails it will generate. Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, you cannot vary the moisture level in the soil by how much water you apply from above.

The moisture levels at the end of irrigation will always be the same, it will start saturated and then drop down to field or equilibrium value.

Applying more water will mean it will penetrate deeper into the soil.

What we can do

If we change either the nature of the soil, so it is more or less hydrophilic, or change the pore size we will change the equilibrium level.

This is what we are trying to do with Wickmix, create a soil that is hydrophilic, water-loving but with a large pore size – a giant sponge.

Not make sense? Think of it this way.

Clay is generally nutrient-rich but has a very small pore size so will hold a lot of water and very little air and so will be anaerobic which is great for breeding bad bugs.

Sand has a large pore size so contains a lot of air – which is good but will hold very little water and nutrients. Great for growing Cacti but not so good for broccoli.

Wickimix

With Wickimix, which we make from organic waste, rock dust and a bit of soil (preferably with a small particle size like in clay to give a large surface area) there are plenty of nutrients.

But to get (and maintain) a large pore size we need a little help from the creatures of the soil, particularly the worms.

But let us not forget the beetles, larvae, nematodes and all those creepy-crawlies found in good soil.

They are happy to eat all the nutrients we provide but to pay the rent they make lots of holes and passages in the soil so we have soil full of air.

Flood and flush

The other part of Gbiota technology is flood and flush. Instead of applying the water from above, which reduces the air content and seals the surface, we apply the water, at least most of the water, from below and let wicking action take it up to near the surface so the plant roots can grow in Goldilocks moisture.

Let me talk you through the process.

We have a pipe going down into the soil. We could just use a small tube, and that is what I started with many years ago.

But as I was brought up to squeeze the most out of everything so I now use a large tube which I can fill with organic waste, so I call it a compost tube.

For those keen gardeners who understand that labile or fresh compost can be full of growth inhibitors, I should point out that this is separate from the soil in which I am growing plants.

For those of you who have read my article on how water moves through the soil, you will understand that to get bulk water movement you need to use the principle of hydraulic or pressure flow which inevitably means the soil will be saturated.

This pressure flow (I say pressure but it is only a few mm of head but still pressure) will force the water to flow over the base of the bed and being saturated some water will wick up towards the root zone and towards the surface.

Just what we want.

But after we have saturated the base of the bed we are left with all this saturated soil which is ideal for breeding all those nasty bad bugs.

In the Gbiota boxes, we have a swivel pipe while in the Gbiota beds a leaky dam so we can drain the water (or soil-blood).

This is the neat bit, as the water drains out it will suck air back into the soil, we are making the soil breathe. This is a core Gbiota technology.

You can hear the air being sucked back into the soil and for the benefit of any adolescent boys reading this, they may like to call this a reverse fart.

 

What to do with the left-overs

People who know me understand that I was a toddler in WW2 and was brought up not to waste anything.

I could not leave half a slice of toast without being told that I must eat it as there were starving children in Africa. When I asked very politely about the logistics of getting my half a slice of toast to the kids in Africa I was rewarded with less than polite thump to the ear.

How times have changed. But there is still a need for more change.

The idea that ‘greed is good’ has to go. It is absurd to have a society where billionaires are taking joy trips to space so they can see for themselves if the world is round or flat, executives of food companies fly around in private jets when people are having their legs chopped off from diabetes or living under railway bridges.

Things need to change – join the wonderful world of the Gbiota movement.

But back to leftovers.

Soil blood

What drains out from the swivel tube or leaky dam is not just water, it is full of nutrients and weird creatures. I look at them under my microscope and they make the monsters from Aliens look tame.

I call this soil-blood because it fulfils the same function as blood in us, transporting nutrients, air, weird creatures and microbes throughout the soil and into the plants and finally us.

This is just too valuable to waste.

But how best to use it?

The obvious way is to pour it back down the compost tube, but when?

As Jenny asks, will this go putrid if it is left for a week in the collection bottle?

In Bundaberg in summer almost certainly yes, but here is how to find out.

Safe or not?

I admit that I pour some soil-blood onto the plant leaves as this is another way the plants can absorb the beneficial microbes that we need.

I have some concerns about recommending this publicly so I leave it to people to decide for themselves. All I can say is I have been doing it for years without harm.

I have no desire to get sick from some weird disease so just before harvest I will stop using soil blood on the foliage and rinse the foliage with clean water instead.

Surface wetting

Another issue is that wicking works great in transferring water from wet areas to drier areas but there can be a problem in re-wetting the soil if it dries out completely.

To avoid this I will periodically wet the soil surface and often use soil blood for that.

Germination

However, the big problem with this subsurface irrigation is germination, the top surface is dry so seeds do not germinate without love and care.

I have tried many ways, including totally saturating the soil before seeding and applying the covering layer. That only needs to be done once but I find that saturating the soil and the following patting down tend to compact the soil when what we want is a very open soil with a large pore size.

I have now gone back to the old-fashioned way and just seed and cover with the top layer then gently apply water to just keep that top layer moist enough for germination.

A bit more work than ‘saturate and leave’ method but more reliable.

Radishes

Radishes must be the easiest plant to grow so it is with shame that I admit that they do not grow that well in normal Gbiota boxes.

They, and other root crops like beets, grow profusely with an immense display of foliage but the roots fail to swell as hoped for.

I think the problem is that the nutrient-rich soil and frequent use of soil-blood means there is just too much nutrient available for what is a tough plant that has evolved to flourish in tough conditions.

I now grow radishes and other root crops in their own box. I don’t use the soil-blood at all in these boxes instead using it in other boxes and use fresh water both in the compost tube and for surface wetting.

Designing the human body

I haven’t answered Jenny’s question about how long the soil blood can be left.

If you have ever looked in a mirror you may have noticed a lumpy thing sticking out from just above your mouth and wondered why it is there and not somewhere else more convenient.

It is called a nose but why put it there?

It has not evolved as a convenient thing to hold our glasses.

Let’s talk about the design of the human body. I am an engineer and the best design is always the simplest that will do the job.

We need to take in air and food so the simplest design would be to have a hole in the chest for taking in air and another hole to our belly just below – for shoveling in food.

Why go to all this bother of pipes and valves so air goes to the lungs and food to our stomach and why put the nose immediately above the mouth? It seems overly complex.

Evolution keeps on trying out different designs and keeps on increasing sophistication until it finds the simplest that works.

It did try a simpler version, and it did work, we call it a jellyfish, but I ask you, how many jellyfishes have won a Nobel prize? I can count them on the number of fingers growing out of my ears.

Neat design

This current design may seem overly complicated but it works.

Anything you put near your mouth is immediately inspected by your nose.

Any suspicious sign (smell) it hits that red button which is the alarm bell for your subconscious brain and in a fraction of a second (your subconscious brain works much faster than your conscious brain) it has sent out a OMG STOP signal so your arm screeches to a halt before that pongy thing enters your mouth, so possibly saving your life.

What I do

Now as I know nothing about growing food in Finland I can’t tell you what the safe time to leave soil-blood is but you can try what I do.

Gbiota is my job in life, I have over fifty experimental boxes trialing different techniques and plants so I am not too bothered about time.

I have come to an arrangement with my body that I use it as part of the experimental process and as part of the deal, I guarantee it a reserve stockpile of toilet paper, which fortunately is only needed occasionally.

I have trialed different schedules and plants.

I have found there is no problem with using the flood and flush system every day. It guarantees there is no stagnant soil-blood but it makes for a lot of extra work.

This may be unnecessary as I do not recommend flood and flushing every day but useful to know if problems occur (such as when you have been on holiday and on your return are greeted with a bit of a pong.

So Jenny the rule is simple, a big sniff – if pongy irrigate more frequently.

Gbiota beds – developed from Wicking Beds

Gbiota beds were developed from Wicking beds which have the big advantage that they can store a lot of water so you can go for a long time without irrigation.

But the whole point of Gbiota beds is to breed beneficial microbes – not save work and that means a bit more effort.

How often

I typically irrigate twice a week but if I have any suspicion that the soil mix is getting a bit overripe, (using my nose), I will run a flood and flush cycle.

I like everyone, go away for several days or even a couple of weeks and then I will revert to a Wicking Beds and leave the swivel tube in the up position.

It is not ideal but keeps the plants alive. But when I return I may give a few daily flushes to clean the system.

If I have any suspicions (eg a bit of pong) I am too mean to discard this suspect soil-blood so I just empty the container onto my lawn and later capture the nutrients in the grass cutting which are part of my Gbiota bed process.

I understand that it is easy to kill plants with too high a level of nutrients by reverse osmosis. This is easily detected ahead of time by excess green growth.

(How many times have I got all excited over an experiment with fantastic growth but come back one morning to find everything dead.)

This rarely happens but if it does I just use the soil blood on other boxes and just use water in the suspect box.

Different plants exude different sugars to attract different species of microbes so normally I use a wide spectrum of plants in one box. This is very practical using some slow and fast-growing plants which increases the time span that the box is producing.

(Link to ‘What to grow’)

So I still like to spread the soil blood among the boxes to introduce as wide a range of microbes as possible.

As I have mentioned some species, like the root crops, seem sensitive to over-nutrition so I may stop using the soil blood and use water.

I am sorry to my readers in Finland that I can not offer them any specific advice, but I am sure that in winter they will be growing indoors with plant lamps and they will soon find a schedule which works fine without getting a pongy mess.

Final word

So Jenny there is a very long answer to a very simple question. Keep the question coming they help make the total system better and don’t forget that this is a social benefit movement as well as growing a few veggies so help spread the word.

It is not a bad feeling that you have saved someone from having a foot chopped off from diabetes.

 

 

This is the preface to the dynamic E-book which is about solving the food crisis. It is about how to get the adoption of the new technology we need.

A dynamic E-book is made up of multiple stand alone articles. If you are not interested in the process of innovation you can jump to the next article which explains why we have a food crisis. Just click below.

 

Solving the food crisis – the plan

Solving any problem goes through three stages.

The first is too often overlooked and is not easy, developing a clear understanding of what the problem is.

The second stage can be surprisingly easy, developing the technical solution.

The third stage is the most difficult – adoption, effectively applying the known technology.

Understanding the problem

There are two problems.

The short-term problem is that our current food system is deficient in the microbes which form our gut biome and essential minerals which have led to an epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

The longer-term problem is our current food system relies on the exploitation of finite resources, particularly water, which is aggravated by climate change and shortages of key minerals which are being exhausted. Phosphorous is the most urgent.

The technology

We already have the technology, it is changing the way we grow our food using organic waste as a key input and controlling the conditions to breed the beneficial microbes so they out-compete the harmful microbes which make us fat and sick and kill us – a process of Eco-balance which has been going on for millions of years if we care to look.

Adoption

The real problem is how to get these known solutions adopted.

I have been innovating for much of my life with a spectacular array of failures and a few successes for which I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators.

But failures are not a waste, they are the way we learn so I want to devote this article to extracting the lessons from my failures (and the successes).

Learning from failures

The high-speed dolls pram

My first innovation dates back to the late 1940’s (yes I am very old).

I made a powered doll pram for my sister and it was a fantastic success, at least technically. It went so fast she could not keep up with it so it would result in spectacular crashes.

But the lesson is that this innovation, however good technically did not fill a real need. My sister was perfectly happy pushing her old dolls pram along and Mum was certainly not happy about this high-speed doll pram crashing into the furniture.

The road junction ramps

My next, not-so-brilliant idea, was in the 1950s when I proposed the idea that we could make road crossing safer by raising the intersection so cars would slow down before the intersection and speed up automatically as they left.

I remember explaining this to the local council who were very diplomatic to an over-enthusiastic teenager who had just learned about potential and kinetic energy at school.

They explained that this was not practical. The disappointment would have been less had they pointed out that if a hung around for a few decades there would be electric cars with regenerative braking which would do exactly what I was trying to do – capture the kinetic energy for reuse later.

Lesson – theory may be fine but it has to be practical.

The automotive crash absorber

Next was after I graduated in the 1960s when I was working for a Research Institute on the mechanical properties of plastics. I realised that while plastics had reasonable strengths they were very flexible, which is why they are called plastic and this meant they could absorb large amounts of energy.

So I designed a plastic shock absorber that could be fitted between a car’s chassis and the bumper bar (or fender in the US) which would absorb a large amount of energy.

Now, give my bosses their due, they thought this idea had merit and no doubt wishing to encourage a young graduate approached the car industry, on my behalf.

Their response was unenthusiastic saying there was no public demand.

This is a bitter learning experience because we made and tested some energy absorbers and they really worked.

The technology was sound and economic but the social conditions were not ready for acceptance.

It was years later when Ralph Nader became the champion for more safe cars and changed the public attitude.

But more than changing the public attitude, it changed the Government’s attitude, they introduced legislation on safety but even more importantly they introduced a star safety rating.

This meant that car buyers had a way of judging the safty of competing models and it turned out that the public cared and bought the safer cars so there was money for the car companies.

The lessons are that the social conditions must be right for innovations to be accepted and Governments can play a role in creating the right social conditions for the adoption of new technology.

The centrifuge

My most spectacular failure was in the late 1960s when I had this theoretically great but impractical idea of using a giant centrifuge to produce reinforced plastics.

It worked on simple shapes but there was no way of producing the preforms to make complicated shapes.

As the major benefit of plastics is the way they can be formed into complex shapes this was a total failure.

The lesson is that a simple but essential defect in an otherwise sound idea can lead to total failure.

Moldflow

That is enough of failures, lets have a story that started as a failure but ended up a major success.

I mortgaged my house to buy what I believe was the second mini-computer to come to Australia. It is now unbelievable that it cost one-third the value of my house but this was in the day of mainframes and punched cards.

I wrote a computer simulation of hot plastics flowing into a cold mould which was quite a technical challenge involving solving coupled non-linear partial differential equations. Fortunately, Newton had done all the hard work for me.

This simulation gave me a much better understanding of the mechanism of flow and I developed design principles such as flow balancing, which meant using the flow channels to control flow.

This meant that often the flow channels were much smaller than conventional flow channels.

Having spent all my money on buying this primitive computer I bought an around-the-world ticket, on credit on my American Express card, to tell the world about what I thought was a major innovation.

This meant leaving my long-suffering wife to work out how to feed our two kids which had magically appeared from nowhere, as kids do.

Innovators are generally too busy and preoccupied to have time to have kids but apparently not in my house.

Lesson – being an innovator is rugged, being an innovator’s wife is worse.

Changing the paradigm

So I went around the world giving lectures on flow balancing expecting to receive a warm welcome.

But what people heard was not what I said.

I was trying to explain a rather complex concept that you could use the computer simulation to redesign the flow path so it filled uniformly.

What they heard was if the mould does not fill make the flow channels smaller.

I actually said some flow channels but they missed the ‘some’.

The conventional wisdom and common sense say if the mould does not fill make the flow channels larger – obvious right?

Let me tell you that is not a pleasant experience standing up in front of a crowd who think you are some sort of nutter from down under where Kangaroos hop down the main street.

The important bit

There were some free-thinking entrepreneurial thinkers (actually I should use the correct term intrapreneurial as these were free thinkers inside large organisations).

I won’t say they believed me but they were adequately free thinking that I may have a point so they went away and tried it and it worked, and this is the important bit for them.

And they told other people that it worked for them and Moldflow just took off and was eventually a company worth over $500million. (I didn’t get $500million that went to the vulture capitalist.)

The lesson here is that you can’t change a paradigm by spending a fortune on promotion and advertising. (Particularly if you don’t have a fortune which is the norm for innovators.)

You need to find those free thinkers who have standing and let them try it for themselves.

 

 

Faster, better cheaper

I wrote a book, ‘Faster better cheaper’ which was about how to make plastics parts, you guessed it faster better and cheaper.

As soon as I had written it I asked myself if that was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, make plastics parts Faster, Better and Cheaper.

The answer was a resounding no, so I asked myself what is the biggest challenge facing humanity.

I don’t think that humans are so stupid that we are going to annihilate our species in an atomic war so I decided the answer is how are we going to feed billions of people healthy food in a sustainable way.

So that is when I sold the company and took a new direction in life.

Broad-acre subsurface irrigation

Time for some more lessons from failure.

I became very concerned about the supply of fresh water. We are draining aquifers that have taken millions of years to fill at an alarming rate. We needed a more efficient way of irrigating large areas like cow pastures.

So I developed a very low-cost subsurface irrigation tape which could be ploughed into the ground. Sounded good.

But when I saw the cows digging up the irrigation tape and eating it I knew I had got it wrong again. Why cows should dig up irrigation tape and eat it was unanticipated but that is the life of an innovator.

Project scrapped.

Lesson – prepare for the unexpected.

Adaptive irrigation control

For my next project, I thought I would develop what I called adaptive irrigation control but we now may put into the Artificial Intelligence bracket.

The idea was simple, collect all the information on how much rain falls and water is supplied from irrigation, measure the evaporation and soil moisture to learn how much water the plants are using, look at the predicted evaporation and then estimate how much water to apply at the next irrigation.

This is all in a continuous loop so the system is continuously refining its predictions.

Great idea (or so I thought) but this was way back in the late 1990’s and there was not the computer power available at that time so it failed. Good idea but no supporting technology.

Lesson – innovation does not occur in isolation and depends on the available technologies at the time.

Wicking beds

My next project arose from a trip to Ethiopia to see if I could find a way of providing sustenance food in times of drought.

The idea was very simple. Collect up a bunch of weeds because they are very efficient at extracting nutrients from the soil, much better than food plants.

Dig a trench, line it with a plastic film (there is an abundant supply of waste plastic bags available for free throughout Africa), fill it with weeds. Use more plastic bags to create catchments to feed any rain that falls into the beds.

It worked great but here comes the crunch.

The idea caught on, not in Africa but in wealthy Western countries. It was featured in TV gardening shows so received maximum publicity.

But they didn’t understand the basic principles so instead of using weeds they replaced these with dead inert rocks with no nutrients.

This has the advantage of increasing the time between watering which is popular and seems important in our modern high-pressure life, but does not feed us the nutrients we need.

Lessons I have learned

There is a very important lesson to be learned from these projects.

Innovators are rarely in a position to promote their own innovations, and anyway, they are biased so why should anyone believe them?

Adoption occurs because an independent source, preferably someone widely respected, hears about the idea, may be not convinced it will work but thinks it may have a chance of working, has some benefit, so tests it for themselves, finds it works then tells other people and the idea catches on and bingo – you have a paradigm shift.

Whatever the business textbook tells you about the way that innovations occur this is the way they occur in the real world.

The new hobby – leg chopping

My life took a major turn when my wife, a medical doctor, became diabetic her foot turned black and they wanted to amputate her leg.

I was not keen on the idea as she had nice legs and it seemed that she was not too keen on the idea either.

Eight million people a year have a limb amputated from diabetes.

As I am getting on in years I am continuously amazed by what I see on Social Media like TikTok, I just cannot believe the weird things that people get up to.

But after serious thought, I have concluded that there is not some craze going around initiated by some video that has gone viral promoting the idea that it is a great hobby to eat the wrong food, get diabetes and have a leg chopped off.

Given the right information, at the right time (that is before sitting in the waiting room to have your leg chopped off) most people would think that two legs are better than one.

The question is how to get that message out when the world is saturated with billions of dollars of very clever, but manipulative advertising that our modern food system is healthy????

Maybe not TikTok

If it is not some craze on TikTok what is it that is causing eight million people a year to eat food that will lead to them having their leg chopped off, then what is it?

The answer lies in why we are the most successful creature on the planet. We are a magic combination of intelligent and cooperative.

To understand that we have to go back in time, I don’t mean to when I was born which may be a long time ago but much further.

Even further back in time when there were no Wheaties for breakfast but when we caught and ate Mastodons.

Let me tell you a bit about Mastodons, they are big, bigger than an elephant and they have two massive tusks.

If one human tried to kill a Mastodon the score would very quickly be Mastodon 1 human 0 with the human ending up skewered on the Mastodon tusks like a sausage on a stick.

Yet we ended up with Mastodon steaks in our figurative serial bowl for breakfast.

How did we do it? Because we are intelligent and cooperative.

If you have never been on a Mastodon hunt let me assure you that you don’t hang around thinking through every step using a process of logic, unless you want to end up skewered on a Mastodon trunk.

You are part of a team, you know what is expected of you and you do it (and quickly).

That is the way we work (or at least most of us). That is how we live together in cities of millions of people without too much trouble.

So what is the action plan?

We already have the technology of how to grow healthy food sustainably.

We just have to get people to adopt the technology.

We can’t do that by some scattergun internet marketing campaign.

We have to locate free-thinking intrapreneurs in the health profession, preferably some in Government responsible for community health in the prevention area.

We have to provide them with all the information they need so they can independently test it for themselves and decide whether this is marketing bullshit or the real world.

If they are convinced that this is for real they will then promote this to other health professionals who in turn will promote it to the wider public.

That is how ideas spread exponentially.

Keep reading, the rest of this dynamic E-book gets down to the nitty gritties.

 

The great riddle

Look around the world and back over time and you will see the great riddle of three communities.

Low tech communities

We see low-tech communities with a poor food system, lack of hygiene and a sophisticated medical infrastructure where people die before their natural life from infectious diseases.

Life is struggle, this is clearly bad.

High tech communities

We see rich high-tech communities with a sophisticated food system, good hygiene and medical support and where people die before their natural life from non-infectious or chronic diseases obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia..

Their high-tech medical infrastructure keeps many people alive, but maybe not healthy.

But what about the quality of life let alone the great expense to the Government and the community?

The blue zones

We see the blue zones where people live to a ripe old age, well into their nineties or hundreds and are fit and healthy.

What is it about these blues zones that people live not just long lives but long and healthy lives?

You have got to admit it is a puzzle.

We all need to eat

I can tell you the answer but before I do there is something I must warn you about.

I was a toddler in WW2 I was used as child labour to help grow food in this terrible war where starvation was used as a weapon of war. I am a bit obsessed with having a healthy food system.

No drongo

I am no drongo, I wrote a simulation of hot plastics flowing into a cold mould which involves solving coupled non-linear partial differential equations. I set up a company Moldlfow from my back bedroom which became the leading exporter of technical software from Australia – a multi-million dollar international company and I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators.

But I was still obsessed with having a viable and sustainable food system, I could see that the ability to sustainably produce healthy food was going to be the critical issue for the future of humanity – everybody has to eat and all people should have access to healthy food.

Thirty years of slog and experimentation

So thirty years ago I sold my company and used the money for speculative research, the sort of high-risk research that no self-respecting research funder would support. I took the view that it was my money and if I wanted to blow it on something I thought important then I should and could do it. Who else would?

Challenging the current paradigms

What did I find? Many of the ideas that we accept as gospel are flawed. For example, the current epidemic of non-infectious or chronic diseases is caused because we are little piggies and stuff ourselves. Not true!

No instant gratification

We live in a world of instant gratification but you can’t cram thirty years of experimentation and thinking into a three-word slogan like ‘eat less exercise more’.

The E-book that may save us

This web is an E-book if you want to know why people in the blue zones live such a long and healthy life, or want to avoid having your leg chopped off from diabetes, you will need to spend a bit of time and having your existing views on food challenged and that may not be a pleasant experience.

I won’t say it will save the world, that has survived for over four billion years and will be spinning around the sun for another few billion years – but it may just save us from the looming food crisis.

 

 

The Calorie trap

But let me get to the biggest problem of all. FAT

We are all told that the underlying cause of the epidemic of chronic diseases is the wrong fat in the wrong place.

No argument from me on that one.

But if you have been to University and studied to become a dietitian you will have had it drummed into you that you get fat because of a calorie balance.

If you consume more calories than you burn you will get fat. We see that slogan eat less exercise more all the time.

If I was to say that this is wrong I would be met with an uproar. I would be told that it is just basic physics and can’t be wrong.

Sixty years ago I was at University studying engineering and I had the basic laws of conservation of mass and conservation drummed into me in the way the calorie balance is drummed into student nutritionists so don’t get me wrong when I say that the fundamental laws of conservation of mass and energy are valid (unless you are letting of atomic bombs) this is not the underlying cause of why we store excess fat.

The calorie theory is an enabling factor, to go on in must go in. But it is not the cause.

The underlying reason is that we have an intelligent control system that regulates our bodies.

My first job after University was with a company making control systems for power stations, in later life I found myself writing intelligent control software where the computer would learn the characteristics of the system and by a process we called predictor-corrector, which is upmarket trial and error the computer was able to control the system within very fine tolerances.

That is how our body works, we have a highly sophisticated intelligent control system which is learning from the first suck on Mum’s breast to when we die and it works incredibly well – until it doesn’t.

There are three times when it does not work.

If we have the wrong microbes in our gut biome (which is an integral part of this intelligent control system) it won’t work, if it senses a deficiency in some trace mineral it will send out signals for us to eat more and if we are exposed to a period just lacking food (as happens in some diets) it again decides we should store more fat.

The basis of the Gbiota technology is fixing these problems and is a very different way of thinking to the calorie in calorie out approach.

And I do know it is a challenge to change an established paradigm and it is very difficult to persuade people to make that shift.

But I have learned over my life as an innovator that the solution is simple – don’t tell them show them. That is what this web is all about, getting people to try it and see it for themselves.

 

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Gbiota – breeding the Good biota

Eco-balance

The Gbiota process of breeding beneficial gut microbes starts in the soil where the conditions are controlled so the beneficial microbes out-breed and out-compete the harmful microbes.

This is called Eco-balance which is how the world has worked for billions of years.

This is why you don’t find polar bears in the Sahara desert or antelopes in the Arctic. They each require their specific conditions to breed, if those conditions are met they successfully breed and become the dominant creature and if those conditions are not met they are out-bred.

The Gbiota process controls the conditions to breed beneficial microbes, plants are grown, the microbes enter the plants from the roots, we eat the plants and they enter our gut.

It is a simple and inexpensive process, anyone can do it, everyone should and we show you how.

Wonder of the world

Our gut-brain is one of the wonders of the world. It knows what we eat and the effects on our bodies, learns and remembers whether it is good or bad and then manages our appetite so we want to eat the foods that are good for us.

It has been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years, without doctors or dietitians to tell us whether we need more vitamins B12, K zinc or magnesium and it is how we have survived.

Even more remarkable is that this gut-brain is not part of us but is made up of trillions of microbes which communicate with each other, like in a computer.

These microbes start in the soil, or more specifically in the guts of creatures that live in the soil, enter the plants that we eat and then form our gut-brain.

The tragedy is that our modern food system is so hygienic and it takes so long from when the plants are harvested to when we eat them that these life-giving microbes have died.

This is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

The solution is to start eating food with these living beneficial microbes. We know how to do this, it is simple, inexpensive and the food tastes better. The difficulty is persuading people to try gut-brain food.

That is why we are searching for those pioneering people willing to cast off the old ways and try something new. If you are a food pioneer email me.

 

Why we get fat and sick

The physical reason for this epidemic is the wrong fat in the wrong place. This is not simply that we overeat. Our gut brain decides that we need to store more fat, this may be because of the wrong microbes in our gut-brain or there is a genuine deficiency in our diet. It sends our signal to make us hungry and we overeat.

We have to overeat to get fat but that is the enabling factor, it is not the cause. We can go on a restrictive diet which will stop us storing fat in the short term, which will disable the mechanism that enables us to store fat but we have not solved the underlying cause.

The aim of the Gbiota technology is to fix the underlying cause – the wrong microbes or deficiencies by eating nutrient rich food with these living beneficial microbes.

It is simple, inexpensive, and sustainable based on recycling organic waste and the food tastes better.

This web is in two parts, the easy bit and the really hard bit.

The easy bit

The easy bit is the technology. Healthy plants need a balanced combination of nutrients, water and air.

Nutrients are easy, all you need to understand is that organic waste, our basic input, already contains a lot of nutrients but will need topping up with essential trace minerals which are found in abundance in volcanic rock dust and you may need a bit of dolomite or calcium to balance the pH.

Water and air are equally simple, the bad bugs like it wet while the good bugs like it just damp but with air (actually oxygen but we are not nitpickers). The Gbiota technology is just a simple way of applying water so the soil breathes and the water (actually soil blood) never becomes stagnant.

Not trivial but virtually anyone who is prepared to read the instructions can do it, even if they have limited gardening experience and live in an apartment.

This is all described in the growing section which is a subscription area, we have bills to pay just like you.

Fortunately, there are people with pioneering spirit prepared to set up their own Gbiota beds or boxes, but they are a rare breed.

The difficult bit

The difficult bit is changing the public attitude towards the food system, that is really difficult but we just have to try for two reasons.

Our modern food system has created an epidemic of non-infectious diseases in which three out of four people die before their natural life span.

Even worse, but longer term we are slowly but steadily destroying the means of food production, the supply of critical inputs, (particularly water and phosphorous) is being exhausted, and we are destroying the fertile topsoil while climate change is just amplifying the problem.

The Gbiota technology addresses both of these issues but the potential benefits will not be realised if we cannot find a way of gaining widespread acceptance.

That is not easy – let me illustrate.

Take a hydroponically grown lettuce, it is grown without soil, just relying on synthetic chemicals for nutrients and protection from pests, it looks perfect, not a blemish and there are no bugs so the risk of getting E-coli is perceived as minimal.

Even in conventional agriculture, soil is there to hold the plant with the nutrients being supplied synthetic fertilisers.

Now take a Gbiota lettuce grown in living soil, teaming with beneficial microbes and nutrients. The benefits we are promoting are that it contains beneficial bugs and a balance of nutrients.

Typically people’s reaction is ‘I do not want bugs in my food as they will make me sick’.

To change that view I have to convince people that the bugs in our gut are beneficial by communicating with each other creating intelligence and forming part of our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies.

It learns over time what foods are good or bad for us and then regulates our appetite so we want to eat the right sort of food that will keep us healthy.

Not an easy view to accept even if backed up by in-depth science but up against the billions of dollars that the food industry spends convincing us that the food they sell, which is the food that makes them the most money, is healthy.

They are very good at this.

Gbiota is a community benefit organisation, we don’t have billions of dollars to spend on manipulative advertising.

The only way we get our arguments out to the community as a whole is to rely on the good intentions of dedicated people who are prepared to study the literature on this web, set up their own Gbiota beds or boxes then show their friends that they don’t drop dead from some weird disease but are healthy with their appetite controlled by the gut-brain so they don’t get fat and sick.

All we can do is hope there are enough people out there so we can rely on their dedication to avoid a major food crisis.

This web contains a lot of information on how the way we grow our food affects our health. It is all free to access but we only want genuine people so we ask that they register with a valid email address so we know they are real and not some dubious organisation using our web to promote some magic pill.

 We don’t sell any physical product, no magic pill from the Amazon jungle or the Himalayan Mountains. Sorry about that but the web is full of products making this claim.

We try and help people understand why some foods lead to a long and healthy life while other foods lead to us becoming fat and sick.  We do our best to answer all genuine questions from people with a longer attention span than a butterfly.

 Community benefit

Gbiota is a community benefit organisation focused on healthy food. We operate like any other business aiming to earn enough money to pay our bills.

We are not a charity, we aim to earn our keep.

We think that the focus, taught in business schools, that the purpose of a company is to make as much money for its shareholders is fundamentally harmful to the community.

It is not a good community where the wealthiest top 2% of the population own the bulk of the wealth while people have no home to live in and can’t afford decent food. This is not a good society.

All companies should accept that they have a social responsibility, I am asking you to join the Gbiota social movement to demonstrate that accepting this social responsibility is viable and leads to a better society.

Every year eight million people have a limb amputated from diabetes, every leg we save by a better food system is a demonstration that all companies should accept they have a social responsibility.

Humans are social creatures, we are both intelligent and cooperative, this is why we are the dominant creature on earth, not because of some economic theory from Chicago that a company’s role is solely to increase shareholder profits. Join us in the Gbiota social movement and show them.

We are such a wasteful society, it is unsustainable. The Earth’s resources are finite, at the current rate of consumption we will run out of essential ingredients, like water and phosphorous within fifty years which will be a catastrophe for the world.

This is why I want Gbiota to be a success, to show the world that all companies should work for the community’s benefit and not just solely focus on profits, it is unsustainable.

Let me give you just one example to illustrate my point.

The current food industry spends a vast amount of money on manipulating us to buy products, loaded with calories and artificial flavourings because it is highly profitable for them.

The result is a society where the bulk of the people will die from a non-infectious disease such as obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

Yet our bodies have a built-in intelligent control system which naturally regulates what and how much we want to eat. It is a combination of our gut and head brain which learns over time what foods work for us.

Yet our current food system is not feeding our gut-brain so instead of regulating how much we eat we fall prey to very clever manipulative advertising so we become sick and eventually die from these non-infectious diseases.

The solution is to eat food that nourishes our gut-brain so it works as it should. It is so simple and inexpensive we just need to educte the public.

This is  why we put so much effort into trying to educate the community about the critical importance of having a functioning gut-brain and why we chose the name Gbiota short for Gut Biota for this social movement. Read more in the article on the sitch from infectious to non-infectious disease here.

But there is no money in educating the public about the importance of gut-brain health.

So I invite you (and our Governments) to join me in creating public awareness of gut-brain health.

You can start by reading some of the critical articles on this web, all for free but recognise that it will take a bit of time and effort, we are not going to make the world a healthy and sustainable place to live by following the lead of the three-word slogans of the advertising industry.

Taking on the largest and most powerful companies in the world is not the easiest job in the world, an email of support is welcome.

Do it for yourself and your grandkids.

 

Creating a paradigm shift

We are talking about a paradigm shift – changing the way we think. That is one of the most difficult things to do.

Let us look at the old and new paradigms and then how we go about creating a paradigm shift.

Current paradigm

The current paradigm is we go to the Supermarket and toss a load of food that the Supermarket wants to sell us because it makes them money, into our shopping trolley.

So easy.

But then most people will start to put on a bit of weight, which they just live with but then it gets serious so they go to a doctor for help who may recommend they go to a nutritionist who will suggest a change of diet and maybe a basket load of pills to make up for deficiencies in this or that mineral or vitamin.

It sort of works, at least for a while but it often ends up with a serious health problem like having a leg amputated from diabetes or death from a heart attack, or perhaps the worst dementia – a living zombie.

The new paradigm

Now let’s look at the new paradigm.

This says we have a natural intelligent control system which regulates our bodies and by a combination of hormones and electrical signals makes us select what food we fancy eating and how much.

The snag is that while we know this is what happens we have no idea how our bodies do this – the code that drives this intelligent control system which makes writing scientific papers a bit of a problem.

But we can observe how it operates, it starts from the first suck on Mum’s breasts, learning throughout our life what food works for us and how much we need. We don’t know how it does this but we know from observation that it does.

We also know that the microbes in our gut are an integral part of this intelligent control system, if we have the right bugs we are likely to be fit and healthy and if we have the wrong bugs we are likely to become fat and sick and die before our natural age of death.

The paradigm shift is for us to start eating food which contains these beneficial microbes so they out-compete and out-breed any harmful microbes.

Pretty easy and inexpensive to do and most importantly easy to see if it is working – monitor what and how much you want to eat.

Just eat gut-brain food and watch your appetite change.

All sounds so easy so why aren’t we all eating gut-brain food? Because we don’t like changing our minds. We don’t like paradigm shifts.

Creating a paradigm shift

It just so happens I was part of a major paradigm shift so know how they happen.

Some fifty years ago (yes I am very old) I saw that computers were going to completely change the way engineers went about their daily job. I wrote up some software which simulated the flow of hot plastics into a cold mould.

This did involve solving coupled non-linear partial differential equations which might sound a bit complicated but the hard work had all been done years ago by smart people like Newton and Leibniz.

All I had to do was buy a book from the second-hand bookshop for a few dollars and cut a bit of code.

The industry was facing serious problems with filling moulds and my simulation and the paradigm of the day was to make the feed system bigger.

So obvious, the mould does not fill so make the flow channels bigger – just common sense.

However, my simulation showed this was not necessarily true. If you made some flow channels smaller you would deflect the flow into more difficult areas to fill – logical but not common sense.

The hard lesson to learn

This is where I learned about paradigm shifts. I travelled around the world telling people about my simulation and how at times it was better to make the flow channels smaller.

If you have ever had the experience of standing up in front of a crowd hurling abuse at you because they think you are a raving lunatic, let me tell you it is not a pleasant experience.

Logic and argument do not work, in the same way that nowadays trying to get people to change their diet by advertising and promotion, however skilful does not work.

Praise for the entrepreneurs

But luck was with me as there were a few people (actually very few) who thought that maybe I had a point.

They did not believe me but they were sufficiently entrepreneurial (which means prepared to take risks) and went back to their companies, tried my simulation and my luck held out because it worked.

They then told other people and before long the whole industry changed, we had achieved a paradigm shift.

I did not achieve this paradigm shift, I may have been the catalyst but it was those entrepreneurial early adopters who created the paradigm shift.

The food paradigm shift

If we want to stop people from having their legs chopped off from diabetes or dropping dead from heart attacks we need a similar paradigm shift so people start eating gut-brain food full of beneficial microbes.

I know how to breed the microbes, they breed like crazy making teenagers at a drunken party look like Nuns. But just telling people won’t create a food paradigm shift.

We just need to make sure we breed the good but and not the bad bugs so we use the principle of Ecological balance – been around for a few billion years so should soon be out of pilot plant phase.

Show not tell

What is needed is just a small number of entrepreneurial eaters to start growing and eating gut-brain food, see for themselves the change in their appetite and to go out and tell their friends and contacts and in a figurative blink of an eyelid we will have the needed paradigm shift.

Then many people will avoid having their leg chopped off from diabetes (there are eight million people a year who have a limb amputated from diabetes).

So if you are an entrepreneurial eater and with me on the need to change from an economic system based on greed to one based on community benefit drop me an email so we can chat.

 

Getting started

Start by reading applying-technology  which examines infectious and non-infectious diseases and how our gut is part of our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies and keeps us fit and healthy naturally.

Then you can start reading my online Hip-hop Ebook picking which articles gets your interest.  This is all free but you should register.

When you are ready and want to add gut-brain food to your diet then go to growing.  This is a subscription area but if you want to increase the chances of living a long and healthy life then there is a cost, but the good news is that you will save money overall as the Gbiota system is based on recycling organic waste.

 

 

Applying technology

With all our modern technology and automated production capacity, we should only need to work a couple of days a week to have everything we need and live a healthy life right to the end of our natural life.

But we are not so what went wrong? There is nothing wrong with the technology – we just don’t know how to apply it for the benefit of the community.

That is where I come in. I am 84 years old, fit and healthy, and spend my time reading a range of scientific papers and conducting speculative research to find better ways of growing food – the sort of experiments that no self-respecting funding agencies would support so I pay for myself.

Most of my experiments fail, that is what is meant by speculative, I just hide them so no one sees but occasionally one works or at least leads to a new way of thinking. That is the prize.

It is a formula that has worked well for me and has led to me being recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators.

The aim is simple, to find a way to feed the eight million(and growing) people on Earth sustainably so they live a long and healthy life.

I do this for my great-grandkids and I am happy for the rest of the world to come along for the ride.

I try to integrate all this expertise into a simple system, which I call the Gbiota system because the focus is on breeding a healthy gut biota. This could help all people live a long and healthy life, maybe your great-grandkids.

I invite you to join me in this journey, just sign up to join the Gbiota movement, it is free, or better still join as a paying member, set up your own Gbiota beds and demonstrate that this is a technology that really works. We live in a world of disinformation so no one believes anything so show them for real that this works.

Follow me, there are no guarantees, I have no idea what is waiting around the corner but following me will increase your chances.

There are hundreds of articles on this web that I have written over the years and it is confusing (it confuses me and I wrote them) so I have invented what I call a Hip-hop Ebook which is really just a collection of posts on a particular theme.

My first Ebook is called ‘Serious thinking about food’ which lists a suggested reading sequence, but you have no need to follow that, just Hip-hop about as you please, but at least you have a list of the relevant articles.  (It is on the menu as E-book).

 

 

I made this diagram to illustrate a concept, it is based on real data, as far as it is available.

As you can see there are two lines, the red one for infectious diseases, which we know a lot about and are right, and the green one for non-infectious diseases which we think we know a lot about but sadly are wrong.

What I have done is looked at global data and which vary throughout the world so I have picked out the region where the epidemic is most severe and looked for information on the percentage of people who were affected, eg seriously ill or died.

I go back a million years when humanoid creatures first appeared on Earth. I have no actual data, and the batteries on my time machine are flat, but I can look at modern members of the ape family to take a guess – not very scientific but until the batteries are charged the best I can do.

Some two hundred thousand years ago the first humans appeared as hunter-gatherers. There are still modern day hunter-gatherers we can study and we know they are intelligent and take care of their health by eating a broad spectrum of healthy food and not contaminating the soil with sewage so were a pretty healthy bunch.

Ten thousand years ago we started to grow much of our food from agriculture, largely growing grains which provided us with a lot of energy food but was low in the essential trace minerals and vitamins needed to replace our body parts as they wear and age.

But we still collected wild herbs so at first it was not too bad but there was a gradual decline in health with the combination of increased population density and poor sanitation led to a steady decline in health and ever-increasing cases of infectious diseases.

This reached a peak with the black death in 1347 which wiped out 50% of the population in seriously affected areas and even higher is some cases.

After that, we gradually improved sanitation and medical science but there were still serious outbreaks of cholera and flu. The worst case (not shown as it was highly localised) was the construction of the Panama Canal where up to 80% of the imported labourers died.

We all know about the modern epidemics but with modern medical science and hygiene, they are not as damaging as previous epidemics.

But all those years suffering from these horrendous infections have given us an instilled fear which has led to even worse consequences – non-infectious diseases.

 

Non-infectious diseases

The main non-infectious diseases are obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

Let me put this in perspective, these non-infectious diseases are a far bigger cause of ill health and death than any infectious disease. The biggest killer is heart attacks but diabetes is the fastest growing. The half a billion people with diabetes dwarfs the 7 million people who have died from Covid. Every year 8 million people have a limb amputated from diabetes.

They are largely man-made (yes meaning that man’s failure to properly understand the issues has resulted in the best part of 8 million people having a limb amputated).

What we need is a system where we can breed the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful ones. To feed the 8 billion people on earth it must be able to operate at scale and at a low cost.

That is why the Gbiota technology was developed and is described in detail on the web. It works very well, no one is claiming it is trivial but it can certainly be used by anyone, even if they live in a flat as long as they are prepared to put the effort into reading the directions.

You can read all the articles about food and health for free but you do need to sign up and click the notify me of new posts button.

When you have reached the point that you want to start using the technology you need to sign up as a full member which will give you access to the growing section and also receive on line support online and by video conference.

 

Note this is an abridged version of a longer article which you can read here

 

 

 

Applying technology

With all our modern technology and automated production capacity, we should only need to work a couple of days a week to have everything we need and live a healthy life right to the end of our natural life.

But we are not so what went wrong? There is nothing wrong with the technology – we just don’t know how to apply it for the benefit of the community.

That is where I come in. I am 84 years old, fit and healthy, and spend my time reading a range of scientific papers and conducting speculative research to find better ways of growing food – the sort of experiments that no self-respecting funding agencies would support so I pay for myself.

Most of my experiments fail, that is what is meant by speculative, I just hide them so no one sees but occasionally one works or at least leads to a new way of thinking. That is the prize.

It is a formula that has worked well for me and has led to me being recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators.

The aim is simple, to find a way to feed the eight million(and growing) people on Earth sustainably so they live a long and healthy life.

I do this for my great-grandkids and I am happy for the rest of the world to come along for the ride.

I try to integrate all this expertise into a simple system, which I call the Gbiota system because the focus is on breeding a healthy gut biota. This could help all people live a long and healthy life, maybe your great-grandkids.

I invite you to join me in this journey, just sign up to join the Gbiota movement, it is free, or better still join as a paying member, set up your own Gbiota beds and demonstrate that this is a technology that really works. We live in a world of disinformation so no one believes anything so show them for real that this works.

Follow me, there are no guarantees, I have no idea what is waiting around the corner but following me will increase your chances.

There are a lot of very clever and dedicated people working in this area writing many sophisticated articles, I try to explain these in the hundreds of articles on my web. You are welcome to study these but let me try and break it down into the basics which you can apply if you don’t have the time.

I am going to keep this as simple as I can but there are two concepts I really have to explain, and you need to understand if you are going t live a long and healthy life.

Firstly why infectious and non-infectious diseases are so very different and

secondly the important difference between static and dynamic equilibrium in living communities.

Give me a go – I will do my best to make it clear.

 

I am working on this page live, you are welcome to read while I tidy up the details.  Colin

I made this diagram to illustrate a concept, it is based on real data, as far as it is available.

As you can see there are two lines, the red one for infectious diseases, which we know a lot about and are right, and the green one for non-infectious diseases which we think we know a lot about but sadly are wrong.

What I have done is looked at global data and which vary throughout the world so I have picked out the region where the epidemic is most severe and looked for information on the percentage of people who were affected, eg seriously ill or died.

I go back a million years when humanoid creatures first appeared on Earth. I have no actual data, and the batteries on my time machine are flat, but I can look at modern members of the ape family to take a guess – not very scientific but until the batteries are charged the best I can do.

Some two hundred thousand years ago the first humans appeared as hunter-gatherers. There are still modern day hunter-gatherers we can study and we know they are intelligent and take care of their health by eating a broad spectrum of healthy food and not contaminating the soil with sewage so were a pretty healthy bunch.

Ten thousand years ago we started to grow much of our food from agriculture, largely growing grains which provided us with a lot of energy food but was low in the essential trace minerals and vitamins needed to replace our body parts as they wear and age.

But we still collected wild herbs so at first it was not too bad but there was a gradual decline in health with the combination of increased population density and poor sanitation led to a steady decline in health and ever-increasing cases of infectious diseases.

This reached a peak with the black death in 1347 which wiped out 50% of the population in seriously affected areas and even higher is some cases.

After that, we gradually improved sanitation and medical science but there were still serious outbreaks of cholera and flu. The worst case (not shown as it was highly localised) was the construction of the Panama Canal where up to 80% of the imported labourers died.

We all know about the modern epidemics but with modern medical science and hygiene, they are not as damaging as previous epidemics.

But all those years suffering from these horrendous infections have given us an instilled fear which has led to even worse consequences – non-infectious diseases.

 

Non-infectious diseases

The main non-infectious diseases are obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

Let me put this in perspective, these non-infectious diseases are a far bigger cause of ill health and death than any infectious disease. The biggest killer is heart attacks but diabetes is the fastest growing. The half a billion people with diabetes dwarfs the 7 million people who have died from Covid. Every year 8 million people have a limb amputated from diabetes.

They are largely man-made (yes meaning that man’s failure to properly understand the issues has resulted in the best part of 8 million people having a limb amputated). This must be the biggest failure in the global health system and the biggest failure of Governments to educate their populations on the simple steps that can be taken to avoid this catastrophe.

I cannot find words to describe this failure (actually I can but I can put them into print)

How we screwed up so badly

Ask any medical doctor what is the cause of these non-infectious diseases and they may say the wrong fat in the wrong place, they may talk about adipose tissue but that is what they mean – and there is no issue – they are right.

Now go along to a dietitian to learn what causes us to store fat and they may well explain that it is an imbalance between calories in and calories consumed.

You could argue that this is technically correct, there is truth in the old saying to go on it must go in but it is completely missing the difference between cause and enabling.

Absolutely true you have to eat enough to enable your body to store excess fat but it is not the cause.

The frustration is that this was described over seventy years ago in the scientific literature (this is not me telling you this) and has been dutifully ignored as an inconvenient truth. This is all covered in the body of the web which you can read at your leisure, for now I want to stick to the main theme.

Good bugs and bad bugs

For very good reason we do not like bad bugs that make us sick and kill us.

It is totally understandable that we should want to kill them but we don’t want to kill the good bugs.

So let me talk about the good bugs that live in our gut.

We understand what they do from the viewpoint of biochemistry.

We understand how they digest our food making the nutrients available to our bodies, we understand how our gut bugs form a powerful chemical factory manufacturing a range of essential chemicals essential for life.

We understand how they train much of our immune system to inspect and sort out any unwelcome visitors. This is not a rarity, every time we breath in we inhale on average some four fungal spores and a host of microbes which our immune system quietly taps on their shoulder and says sorry no admittance.

We know from direct observation these bugs provide all the beneficial services but we really have no idea how it does this.

We do know about swarm intelligence which we see widely in nature and can only assume that it works in a similar way.

One individual cell has very little intelligence in isolation, but if can communicate, even at a basic level with a neighbouring cell it can create a bit more intelligence than the two cells combined.

But we have trillions of cells in our gut biome which all communicate together and with our head brain creates a powerful control system.

We can observe to see how this works but to explain this I need to diverge and talk about our conscious and subconscious intelligence.

 

Our conscious brain, the one you are using right now, is very slow and clunky compared to our subconscious brain.

Just think about any simple action, walking, riding a bike, catching a ball, we go through a training period as we grow and learn to do these actions automatically and at high speed.

Think about eating, every time we eat something our subconscious brain learns that food and the effects it has on our bodies.

If a particular food provides us with a mineral that our bodies need it will associate that food with that mineral so if we are short of that mineral our control system will send out signals, in the form of hormones and electrical signals so we have a desire to eat that particular food.

It is a remarkable system the result of millions of years of evolution.

If our intelligent control system detects that we are short of certain types of food it will decide that we need to store more food. This is why we get fat.

We can prevent getting fat by restricting our food intake, the very opposite of enabling – disenabling. This is training our intelligent control system to store yet more fat.

Our modern food system

There is a widespread view that our modern food system of ultra-processed food is at the core of the epidemic of noninfectious diseases, with good reason.

But it is not simply because it is full of sugars and fats which overload us with calories. It is because there are deficiencies in our diet, deficiencies in the beneficial microbes in the soil make essential minerals bio-available which our intelligent control system senses and in the beneficial microbes which form part of our intelligent control system.

 

Gut-brain food and the community benefit movement

I realised that this was more than growing food, what mattered was the type of food. We all have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly our appetite so we want to eat the right sort of food in the right amount.

But to work this control system needs to be fed gut-brain food which means eating fresh plants grown in living soil full of beneficial microbes.

Our modern food system does not feed our gut-brain which is the underlying reason for our modern health epidemic of non-infectious diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia. The result is that 75% of people are dying before their natural life from non-infectious diseases.

This led me to spend the last thirty years developing the Gbiota system so virtually anyone can grow gut-brain food in Gbiota beds of boxes, at home, even if they live in an apartment.

The technology is developed, so the issue is how to get this widely accepted when the internet is saturated with disinformation and marketing hype.

People are now so sceptical that they need to see someone they trust using this technology.

The technology is described in this web but right now the issue is to create a social benefit movement of people who believe that it is in their and the community’s interest for all people to have access to healthy food that will feed their gut-brain.

If this could be you please drop me an email.

If you are not sure whether this is for you just join up for free below and click on the notify me of new posts button. You can cancel at any time.