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.