Health – prevention first cure second
Colin Austin 4 Nov 2024 © This document is published under Creative Commons. It may be copied and republished without further permission, just acknowledgement of source.
Summary
Across the globe, we are suffering from an epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases. Three out of four people die prematurely from a chronic disease. The social and economic costs are massive stretching our medical resources to the limit and at high cost.
We know that these chronic diseases are caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place and it is widely assumed that this is because we are eating too much sugary fatty foods – the calorie balance theory.
While it is true that we do have to consume an excess of sugary fatty foods this is not the cause. How much and where we store fat is decided by our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies. The microbes in our gut are an integral part of our intelligent control system regulating our appetite and immune system.
We need to both feed and train these microbes. Our modern food system is deficient in gut-brain food.
This can only be rectified at an individual level, ‘we the people’ but it needs the Government to run educational programs and support the change in the way we grow our food.
This is not a cost to the Governments as it would save them billions of dollars in the health care system.
What life for my great grandchildren?
What will life be like for my great grandchildren? Long, healthy and happy I hope.
But at this moment we are facing an epidemic of chronic diseases. We know how to fix it but we are all too busy with pointless busy work.
Here I show how to fix that.
Three out of four people die prematurely from chronic disease.
That is bad but it gets worse, across the globe our health systems are creaking at the joints, doctors are overworked and in short supply waiting lists for other medical needs stretch out, ambulance ramping is the norm and the cost to our medical services run into the multi-billions.
Eight million people a year suffer an amputation from diabetes.
Health is a major cost to our Governments.
This is the major issue facing our health services.
The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of all chronic or non-infectious diseases overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, and dementia.
What makes our bodies store the wrong fat in the wrong place? This is a control problem.
Not little piggies
The conventional wisdom or paradigm is that we get fat and sick because we have turned into little piggies.
We see this everywhere, in the thousands of books written, in articles and on the many influential websites on diet and health.
It is called the calorie balance theory and it says that we can model our bodies like a water tank, with water flowing in and out.
If we have more water flowing in than out the level in the tank will go up, which is equivalent to us getting fat so we get fat because we are consuming more calories than we are burning so we end up fat.
Is this really true?
It is well worthwhile breaking the over-activity cycle which seems to dominate everyday modern life by asking if this model is a valid representation of how our bodies work.
We can’t procrastinate and say we are too busy. Busy work is not an alternative to death.
Control systems
Let me confess, I am not a medical doctor, micro-biologist or bio-chemist. I am an engineer which may seem totally irrelevant to the human body.
Engineers make machines, and every machine has some form of control system – maybe a dead simple on-off switch of something a bit more complex if you are controlling a rocket to the moon.
How control system work
I understand how control systems, my first real job was working for a company that made control systems for power stations. Later in life I was a pioneer of Computer Aided Engineering and wrote software which led me to be recognised by the Australian Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators.
Among the software I wrote was sophisticated control software so I know a bit about control systems which means I can look at how intelligent control systems work and see if there is anything relevant to understanding how the intelligent control system in our bodies may work.
Balancing capacity with demand on time
Control systems have some target, in a power station it may be providing the power to balanced load.
This is similar to the problem in our bodies, balancing energy in and energy out.
The challenge in a power station is that the load varies while it takes some time for the power plant to increase output. It is essential to know the timing characteristics of the power plant.
In our bodies the target is to control both our blood sugar and fat levels. In a way these are interchangeable as our bodies can turn sugar into fat and fat into sugar but they have very different timing characteristics.
Sugar is like having food on the table, it is immediately available, fat is like having food in a cupboard, to make it available we have to take it out of the cupboard and process it ready to eat and that takes time.
Errors and timing characteristics
Typically we have a simple target and we can operate in a narrow band, in a more complex situation like driving a car the target is continuously changing.
In our bodies we have a fairly stable requirement for our blood sugar and fat levels to be controlled within a narrow band but a dramatically varying demand whether we are running to catch that train or waiting in a queue.
PID controllers
In a relatively simple case we can get away with measuring the error between the target and actual and this is important, the rate of change of error.
If we are driving a car and see it is wandering from the lane we may decide to just gently correct, but if we see the car is about to leave the road we may make a dramatic correction but then we have to be careful we don’t over correct.
All this is handled by the traditional proportional, integral and derivative controllers which have been around for years.
But more recently we have developed self learning software which learns over time how the system is working based on observing history or even applying real intelligence.
Intelligent controllers
More recently we have developed intelligent controllers which can learn to deal with the unexpected.
A classic example is the football half time problem.
On Saturdays, when there is a football match there is a low demand as people are busy watching the game.
But at half time many people will put their kettles onto make a cup of tea creating a huge and initially unexpected peak in demand that no regular controller could handle.
But engineers may have been caught out initially but they soon worked out the problem and developed an intelligent solution.
It was impossible for them to cover this abrupt surge in power demand with a conventional power system. But having identified the problem they located a pumped hydro facility and well before half time the put the power station on full bore but used that power to fill the upper reservoir.
Then by half time the main power plant was operating at full capacity and could be supplemented by the power from the pumped hydro so avoiding the disaster of not having a cuppa at half time.
This is the basic principle of self learning or adaptive control, it involves learning how the system works, anticipating a change and applying a correction ahead to time.
Toddler on a bike
The human body is incredibly good as this self learning and anticipatory control process.
Have you ever watched a toddler learning to ride a bike?
They don’t sit down and read a book on gyroscopic couples and self balancing systems, no way, they just hop on the bike and after a couple of spills the kid has learned the dynamics and is up and away.
Anticipatory control is natural for the human brain.
Continuous blood sugar monitoring
I am in the habit of wearing a continuous blood sugar monitor, it tell so much more than a single measurement. This shows that our intelligent control system fully understands anticipatory control.
At night my blood sugar will drop to a low (and oddly erratic level) but when it gets time for me to get up my blood sugar level will rise in anticipation of my needing extra energy.
I have not eaten anything it is just my intelligent control system looking after me.
What is happening is my intelligent control system recognises that I will soon be getting up and will need energy. It goes to the bodies pantry, the fat cells, takes some out, converts it to blood sugar ready for that spurt of energy I will need as I start the days activities.
Anticipatory control
That is what we engineers call anticipatory control, it is the technique we use so that the football fans can have their cuppa at half time.
Engineers have only been able to exploit anticipatory control since the development of the computers, our bodies have been doing this for hundreds of thousand of years.
Time for a bit of humility.
Self learning software and the self learning body
It also understand that I have different loads at different times of the day.
There is a difference in response with food eaten at a normal meal time and a meal that is not on schedule.
While it is normal to expect that a meal would increase blood sugar levels this is not the way it works.
It takes a lot of energy to digest food so we need extra energy for digestion, which is why we eat a sweet desert to provide the energy to digest the heavy main meal.
It appears our bodies have learned this so if I eat an experimental meal in the middle of the afternoon when my body is not expecting these loads I will get different traces.
Our bodies are just much more sophisticated than the over simplistic calories in calories out theory.
The puppy inside our tummies
As an engineer I know full well the laws of conservation of mass and energy but these are not the driving force that is the cause of the modern epidemic of chronic disease which makes us fat and sick, it is our intelligent control system which is the driving force.
It is like having a puppy inside us, it is there to look after us and if we feed it and look after it, all is great, if we don’t feed and train our puppy then we end up with the epidemic of chronic disease.
Feed and train
If we expect our intelligent control system to work effectively we have to both feed and train it.
At birth we get our initial burst of gut microbes from out mum, later she feeds us pre-biotics in her milk but later our gut micro-biota depends on the food we eat.
We have known it for a long time
We have known this for a long time.
We learned in the second world war that people deprived of food would be trained to overeat and get fat when food was available.
We learned that changing the gut biota in mice could make fat mice skinny and skinny mice fat.
We learned from faecal transplants that skinny people could become fat just by changing their gut biota.
And then we conducted the largest experiment on food and health ever conducted, it was called processed foods which were inert, dead, lacking the essential pre and pro biotics .
People across the globe got fat and sick in the worlds largest epidemic.
And still the simplistic calorie balance theory prevails.
A peculiar creature
We are a singularly peculiar creature, we are naturally intelligent and naturally cooperative which has led to us becoming the dominant creature on earth.
Yet we kill ourselves on an industrial scale in modern warfare, we destroy soil, the basis of a healthy food system and despite a clear intelligence we cling to outdated ideas because they are simple and convenient (and make the big food and big pharma a lot of money).
The real reason why we get fat and sick
We get fat and sick because our modern food system does not feed our gut-brain which regulates our appetite and immune system.
The solution is to feed your gut-brain.
I cannot do this for you – there is no magic pill, but I can show you how.
It is not trivial, takes a bit of effort and must be done right but other people are doing it.
It is your body, your life and your choice.
Diabetes and insulin resistance
Insulin resistance is an evolved characteristic that ensures the brain has a continuous supply of sugars.
When sugars are in short supply insulin resistance restricts the flow of sugars to the muscles so sugars are available for the brain.
Insulin resistance is an evolved characteristic for our survival. If the brain dies we die. It is the way our intelligent control system keeps us alive.
When our intelligent control system is fully functional the system works fine. When our intelligent control system is not functional we get diabetes.
Our intelligent control system operates in our subconscious brain, we have no control or even know what it is doing but it regulates our bodies.
Temperature is a classic example of our intelligent control system at work, it makes us shiver when cold or sweat when hot, we have no control over it but it regulates our temperature to a fraction of a degree.
Our gut biome is a critical part of this intelligent control system, playing a major part in our appetite, how much and what sort of food we want to eat and also our immune system protecting us 24/7.
From the moment we are born, it is learning and adapting to the current conditions, as described in more detail later.
It works to keep us alive protecting us from both infectious and non-infectious diseases and can only be described as a marvel of the human body.
But, at times it fails and then we have serious problems.
Unfortunately, the importance of our intelligent control system is not widely recognised so we fail to feed and train it with disastrous consequences.
The modern diabetes epidemic is caused by failure to feed our gut brain so our intelligent control system no longer functions properly.
Eating a diet rich in vegetables may improve our gut-brain and intelligent control system but only if the vegetables are grown in soil containing the beneficial microbes.
This is well understood in enlightened scientific circles but unfortunately, the popular press is fixated with the calorie balance theory which is overly simplistic so we rely on magic pills or diets, which are highly profitable when the real problem is we are not caring for our intelligent control system.
Sadly we have switched from being Homo-sapiens to Homo-profitus.
Profit or Health
Our intelligent control system
I experiment. I breed microbes in the soil, grow plants in that soil and then eat them. I eat different foods and measure my blood sugar levels to see what happens.
We do not appreciate how sophisticated our bodies are.
We have an intelligent control system in our gut which regulates our appetite – what and how much we want to eat.
It works like the intelligent control software I used to write. It senses our blood sugar has an error, it looks at how rapidly it is changing and applies a correction, it looks at how well that correction worked, learns from that and creates a new correction.
I feed my gut-brain so I have an effective intelligent control system.
Piggy me
I look at my blood sugar reading and it is fine.
But then I am naughty and go to a restaurant and pig out.
I see that I get a blood sugar spike from eating naughty food but the microbes in my gut are here to look after me and protect me from my naughty habits.
They communicate with each other, just like in a computer to provide real intelligence.
They work out that something is wrong and make hormones to bring my blood sugar level down and within a couple of hours my blood sugar is back to normal.
Feed our gut-brains
All I have to do is feed my gut-brain and make sure it has the right microbes. There is nothing new about this, we evolved this way and we have been feeding our gut-brain for hundreds of thousands of years.
And then we stopped. Why?
Because our modern food system puts their profits ahead of our health.
But you and I can fix that.
Microbes breed like crazy, they make teenagers at a drunken party look like a pack of nuns.
There is no problem in breeding microbes all we have to do is to manage the conditions so the good bugs out-breed the bad bugs a process we call Eco-balance which again has been going on for millions of years.
That is what Gbiota is all about, it is a social movement that puts health before profits and shows people who want to live a long and healthy life how to feed their gut brain.
Read on – then sign up and join the movement.
The good gut bugs are here to protect us
Beneficial microbes, the good bugs, in our gut control our appetite and immune system leading to a long and healthy life.
Our modern food system is deficient in these, good bugs, so we have an epidemic of chronic non-infectious diseases – overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
Three out of four people now die, prematurely from chronic diseases.
Our health system is creaking at the joints, not enough doctors and health care professionals, ambulances ramping outside overfull wards, billions of dollars spent on avoidable care and amputations.
All because we don’t have the protection of the good gut bugs.
We know how to fix it – we just have to do it.
Our intelligent control system
People often think our bodies are dumb and we get fat and sick because we eat too much.
Our bodies are very smart and we can see this by looking at the blood sugar level throughout the day.
Imagine that you are controlling your blood sugar level and have to keep the level within limits, you have two buttons one to increase blood sugar levels and the other to reduce it.
How, as an intelligent creature, would you manage those two buttons?
At night there is not much to do so just a little push on the down button is all you need.
But then in the morning, you know there will be a need for energy so you press the up button at wake-up time and the blood sugar levels rise.
We can see that our intelligent control system does exactly this our blood sugar rises between wake-up and breakfast.
Both you and our intelligent control system know that at breakfast time there is going to be a big surge in blood sugar levels as your body gets stuck into all that toast and marmalade so you are both on standby.
As soon as you see the blood sugar levels rising both you and your body’s intelligent control system start pushing the down button to bring the blood sugar level back under control.
Message – your body is smart not some dumb machine that works on a crude calories in calories out basis.
Of course, the basic laws of conservation of mass and energy apply so we have to eat to get fat and sick but the reason why we overeat is because we have are not looking after our intelligent control system not because we are little piggies.
Blood sugar and fat are pretty much interchangeable.
Before I even wake up in the morning my intelligent control system anticipates that I will need extra energy so it draws down on my fat stores so I have energy available.
When I get around to eating breakfast there is a surplus of energy so my intelligent control system stores some of this sugar as fat.
I used to write intelligent control software which had self-learning and anticipatory functions. Our intelligent control system seems to have these capabilities built in.
This is a natural human capacity. If we wake up and see a blue sky we may go and water the garden. We have learned that blue sky means a probability of being hot and dry so we anticipate a high water use by our plants.
If there are dark clouds we may put of watering for now.
This is a natural human capability so we need to assume that this is how our intelligent control system is managing our blood sugar and fat storage.
What we can say for sure is that the calorie balance theory, which looks as our body like a water tank, with flows in and out and the water level is determined by these flows is a simplistic model which is leading us to major errors.
This is serious as three out of four people die prematurely from a chronic disease which is caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place.
How have we got ourselves into such a mess?
We know how to breed the beneficial microbes, the good bugs. Just collect organic waste, mix with soil and volcanic rock dust, add inoculants, grow plants and eat them while fresh.
How do I know this, for a start I study the work of experts in the field like Professor Tim Spencer and Bill Bulsiewicz, but then I collect organic waste and grow gut-brain food.
Then I test it on myself.
I wear a continuous blood sugar monitor.
If I eat modern food my readings go through the roof, I am not diabetic but would soon be if I just ate modern foods that are deficient in beneficial microbes.
So I eat gut-brain food adding it to my regular diet and see my reading drop down to healthy levels.
This is not rocket science – anyone can do it.
I can’t do it for you but I can show you how.
So why haven’t we fixed the chronic disease problem?
Most Governments have Health and Welfare departments whose job is to prevent these chronic diseases. Why aren’t they promoting that we all eat gut-brain food full of the good bugs?
It is a simple question of profits versus health and at this moment profits for big food and big pharma are winning while Governments stand back and procrastinate with busy work.
Market power
Profits! Big food and big pharma make a lot of money from the current system, they have immense marketing power to protect their profits while there is no money to be made showing people how to collect their kitchen waste to breed the good bugs and grow the plants that will feed the good bugs in our gut.
Join us
What can you do about this? Join the Gbiota movement for social change.
The first step is to register, stand up and show you care, the more people that show they care the better able we are to get people to eat gut-brain food.
You can join for free and read the many articles on food and health, later when you are convinced that all people should be eating gut-brain food you can learn how, we do ask people to contribute but it is a pittance and you will end up saving money (and maybe your foot).
We are a social benefit organisation, but it costs money to develop technology to learn how to grow gut-brain food and we have to cover our costs. If you can’t afford to contribute we have a needy membership for $1 for those that cannot afford to pay.
Join us and change the world so people can have a long and healthy life with a sustainable food system based on recycling waste.
Want to live a long and healthy life?
DIY breed your own gut bugs? Your immediate reaction may be no thanks I am not a microbiologist.
Well, let me tell you, right now you are breeding your own gut bugs, whether you like it or not.
Microbes, I prefer to call them bugs, are everywhere, in the air, our drinks, our food and they breed like crazy doubling every twenty minutes 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128 …. trillions.
You can kill them all off with powerful disinfectants but they will be back.
You can’t stop them breeding, the only choice you have is what sort of bugs live inside you.
There are good bugs which make you fit and healthy, not-so-good bugs which make you fat and sick, and bugs that kill you.
You don’t need to be a microbiologist to tell what species of bugs are inside people.
Just go to any shopping centre and you will see people that are fit and healthy, they have the good bugs.
People with wobbly bums and tums, they have the not-so-good bugs.
If you want to see the people with the bad bugs you will have to go to the mortuary to find them.
You can’t stop bugs breeding but you can choose what sorts of bugs are breeding inside you.
If you have the conditions that benefit the good bugs they will out-breed and out-compete the not-so-good and bad bugs.
It has been going on for millions of years and we call it Eco-balance. We can use Eco-balance to select what sort of bugs live inside us.
That is what Gbiota is all about, we can’t breed the bugs for you but we can show you how to create the conditions that will favour the bugs you want, which we assume is the good bugs so you can look forward to a long and healthy life but you have to do it yourself – we show you how.
Our intelligent control system
Our bodies have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly our appetite and immune system.
Our gut is an integral part of this control system. If we have the right blend of species in our gut we can expect a long and healthy life, if we have a poor blend of species we get fat and sick.
The blend of species in our gut is the result of a long chain, starting in the soil with the nutrients and moisture, the microbes in the soil, the creatures of the soil, the plants that are grown, how quickly the plants are eaten after harvesting and how they are processed.
We have to look at all these factors as an integrated system, which may be complex but we can easily tell if we have it right, we feel satisfied and stop craving more food.
This may seem complex but the final answer is simple, grow your own gut-brain food. Anyone can do it and look forward to a long and healthy life.
We need the microbes
We don’t eat rocks to get our nutrients, we need microbes and fungi to break down the rocks into nutrients we can digest.
Similarly with energy, we need photosynthesis from plants on land or algae in water to capture the sun’s energy.
Our lives are dependent on these micro-organisms.
But they do much more than provide a path to nutrients and energy, they can communicate with each other to provide intelligence which regulates our bodies. We see this with insects like bees and ants, birds that live in flocks, slime moulds and even human society.
We call this swarm intelligence and it is what regulates our bodies which controls our bodily functions particularly our appetite and immune system.
Microbes are essential for life. However, there are beneficial microbes that keep us fit and healthy and harmful microbes that make us fat and sick.
Over millions of years, nature has evolved a system with trillions of microbes and many thousands of species but with the right conditions so the beneficial microbes preferentially out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes, we call this ecological balance and it is how we exist today.
Generally, microbes breed and die incredibly fast with cells dividing within twenty minutes of formation, we may see the same species over time, they are not the same microbes they are their great, great grand kids, we call this dynamic equilibrium.
There are trillions of microbes in our gut comprising many thousands of species. Initially, these microbes come from our mum but later they come from microbes that breed in the soil, move into the plants we eat and then into our gut biome.
Our health depends on the dynamic equilibrium of the microbes in the soil and in our gut biome. Our modern food system, centred on chemical industrial agriculture and highly processed foods is lacking these beneficial microbes which has led to a global epidemic of chronic diseases, overweight, diabetes, heart attack and dementia.
To overcome this we need to preferentially breed the beneficial microbes in the soil by carefully controlling the conditions, growing plants and eating them while still fresh before the microbes die.
This is not difficult, virtually anyone can do it. We cannot do it for you but we can show you how to do it by having a Gbiota box of plants growing at your home which you pick and eat.
Modern food
Modern food, backed up by a multi-billion dollar highly sophisticated advertising campaign, may claim to be healthy but is making us fat and sick and killing us from man-made chronic diseases, overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
It is deficient in the beneficial microbes which forms part of the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies and also critical trace minerals.
Health starts in real soil, teaming with beneficial microbes and nutrients. Eat plants, grown in living nutritious soil and eaten fresh – not plants grown in chemical soil and eaten days after harvesting.
It is not rocket science, anyone with a little effort can grow plants that will make them healthy. It costs less and is always there in an emergency.
Gbiota shows you how.
But there is so much hype on the web that people have become sceptical. They want to see hard evidence from real people. This takes a social movement.
That is why there are two parts to the Gbiota movement.
The first – the easy bit, is developing the technology – the second is to apply the technology and for that, we need a social movement and why we need you.
Start by reading my last two articles Community Health and Jenny explain why and what we can do about it.
Chronic diseases require a life style change, they cannot be cured by pills or injections. You have to make the effort.
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