The health paradox
Colin Austin © November 2024 Published under the Creative Commons System, it can be republished without further approval, just recognition of source.
Preface
Chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia cause a great deal of personal distress and cost Governments billions of dollars.
They are very difficult to cure but can be prevented relatively easily and at low cost. But that requires a change in the way our Governments, our health systems, and society operate to one with a focus on prevention rather than cure.
The underlying cause of all chronic diseases is the wrong fat in the wrong place.
So how does the fat get in the wrong place? We could give a simple answer – because more food (actually carbon) goes in than comes out.
The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of all chronic diseases.
So why do so many people get fat now, at epidemic proportions, when fifty years ago there were only a very few fat people?
We need to store some fat, no one likes to talk about it but that is what our bums are for and is essential for both health and survival. But why do we now store fat in the wrong places, our tummies, pancreas, arteries and brain?
Why do we store fat in the wrong places?
The simplistic answer is a bit like asking how Donald Trump got elected and answering because more people voted for him. True but not the answer.
The real question is why more people voted for Trump and that is complex and will no doubt be the subject of much deep analysis.
We know how we get fat, input is greater than consumption, but what we want to know is why we eat more than we need.
A simple answer may appear to be that modern food is cheap, convenient and tasty so we just pig out.
But that is not the real answer, we have to dig deeper and put more emphasis on prevention which takes the pressure of cure.
Why do we overeat?
We should start by recognising that the epidemic of chronic disease is a new phenomenon that started only a little over fifty years ago. True there have always been fat people, genetics play a part, but predominantly the epidemic is a modern phenomenon.
How we get fat is easy to answer – if more carbon goes into our bodies than comes out we get fat. But that is not an answer, we need to know why more goes in than comes out.
We have not all turned into little piggies so saying eat less and exercise more is not the solution, we need to understand why we eat more than we need.
There are sound scientific reasons why we overeat and if we are going to fix the chronic disease epidemic we need to understand why.
Our bodies – a thermodynamic machine
I find it useful to think of our bodies as a thermodynamic machine like a car.
Every machine has some form of control system, even if it just an on/off switch but today we have some extremely sophisticated intelligent control systems as I discuss in Health – prevention first
A car needs fuel, typically a simple hydrocarbon. We need fuel for our bodies and that is typically some combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in the form of a sugar or fat which we burn to form carbon dioxide, which we breathe out and water which we use internally or pee out.
As burning carbon to form carbon dioxide always releases the same amount of energy it has become fashionable to talk about the conservation of energy, the calorie balance but it is the excess carbon we don’t breathe out as carbon dioxide which makes us fat and that is governed by the indisputable law of the conservation of mass.
So why do we store excess carbon (as fat)? That is when it get really interesting.
Cars and our bodies both need fuel
A car needs more than fuel, it needs a whole range of quite complex chemicals, oils for lubrication, water for cooling plus a whole range of components that wear out and need replacing from windscreen wiper blades to engine bearings, brake pads and batteries.
Typically the owner driver will take the car to a mechanic who will check the car over and replace bits that need replacing.
Our bodies are similar. We need a range of complex chemicals to survive and replace our body parts as they age and wear. We get these complex chemicals largely from the phytonutrients that plants produce, either directly by eating the plants or indirectly by eating animals that eat the plants and pass on the phytonutrients.
The car driver and our gut-brain
As the driver of the car, you are like a brain for the car telling it where to go, what route, how fast etc. and you like to be fed.
Our bodies similarly have a gut-brain which controls our bodies, deciding every aspect of our body’s operation, maybe subconsciously but it is still a decision and one of the most important decisions is what and how much we want to eat.
Our gut-brain likes to be fed too.
Three sorts of food
So we need three sorts of food – food for energy, food to replace our body parts as they age or wear and food to feed our gut-brain which controls our body.
In round figures about 80% of the food we eat is burned as fuel, 15% is used to replace our body parts and only 5% is needed to feed our gut-brain.
Historically energy fuel was in short supply while replacement and gut-brain food were abundant, so by the time we had gathered enough energy food for fuel we had an ample supply of replacement and gut-brain food.
Humanoids have been on this earth for some million years and in all that time we have been short of food for energy. Even today we are obsessed with energy food.
Then we changed the food system so there was an abundant supply of cheap energy food – fuel.
Who can blame the food industry for providing us with cheap energy food?
Our intelligent control system needs three ticks
Our intelligent control system can send out a complex variety of hormones to make us feel hungry or full, eg satisfied.
We don’t need any complex piece of scientific equipment to tell us we are satisfied – our bodies tell us we feel full and satisfied.
But despite eating large amounts of modern food we still don’t feel satisfied.
Why?
The key to solving the epidemic of chronic disease
The answer to that question is the key to solving the epidemic of chronic disease.
Before our intelligent control system sends out signals to say we are full or satisfied it must have three ticks, one tick for enough energy, another tick for replacement food and the last tick to feed the gut-brain.
When, and only when, it senses that all these needs are satisfied will it send out hormones saying enough – stop eating. The food cravings stop and we feel satisfied and stop eating.
We may have all the energy food we need but if either we don’t have enough replacement food or enough gut-brain food we will not feel satisfied.
The hormones will create food cravings, we will not feel satisfied and whatever our dietitian tells us we will eventually be overcome and eat more energy food than we need.
That is how 8 million people a year end up in the operating room having a limb amputated. Bad for them, bad for our health system – we need to fix it.
How our food system has changed
In times gone past energy food was on the critical path so by the time we had eaten enough energy food it had received ticks for both replacement and gut-brain food so it sends out the hormones to say we are full or satisfied so there was no epidemic stemming from the wrong fat in the wrong place.
In our modern food system, there is an abundance of energy food so we very easily eat enough food to get a tick for energy food but we will still not have created a tick for replacement or gut-brain food.
So our intelligent control system does not send out signals saying you are satisfied, instead, it sends out signals saying eat more.
While we are eating more food to generate a tick for replacement and gut-brain food we keep on eating which results in us eating more energy food than we need and as a result, we end up storing more fat and creating the epidemic of chronic disease.
Our bum, the natural storage for fat becomes overfull so our intelligent control system, faced with a surplus of energy food starts storing the fat anywhere it can in our tummies, thighs, arteries and brain so now we have an epidemic of chronic disease.
It is critical to understand this process to create the societal change we need to reverse the epidemic of chronic disease.
Fortunately, it is very easy and inexpensive to increase the supply of replacement and energy food and save billions of dollars in medical costs.
Getting the message out
But we have to get the message out to not just the Governments who fund the health system and the medical practitioners who run the health system but also the population at large to create the needed societal change.
The Health Paradox
This is so important to reversing the chronic disease epidemic allow me to emphasise this critical point even if I repeat myself, if we are going to fix the epidemic of chronic disease we all need to understand this simple paradox.
The paradox is, with our modern food system, loaded with energy food, that even though we have eaten enough energy food we still have not satisfied our need for replacement and gut-brain foods.
Our intelligent control system is smart and detects that we are still short of replacement and gut-brain food so it sends out signals saying you are not satisfied so eat more food. However determined we are to stick to some diet it is very hard to resist our intelligent control system sending out hormones that say you are still not full so keep on eating.
We don’t feel satisfied and keep on eating.
That is why we get fat, not just fat but fatter and fatter – we are losing the battle.
Why we need a prevention strategy
There is no suggestion that we should stop caring for people that are fat and sick but by the time they have reached that stage, it is a bit late.
If someone has reached the stage where they are on the operating table to have a limb removed from diabetes it is a bit late and anyway removing the limb will not cure diabetes.
That is why we need a health system that focuses on prevention, it won’t cost much money to run a prevention program and will save a far greater amount of money in expensive medical care later.
Our sophisticated intelligent control system
We won’t get far in making these changes unless we recognise just how sophisticated our intelligent control system is.
Engineers know a lot about intelligent control systems, just look at the sophistication that is used in power stations and rockets which can now navigate back to Earth and re-dock.
But we don’t have to look at these exotic applications, your car sitting in your driveway is an excellent example of intelligent control at work, which has remarkable similarities to our human bodies.
Short and long-term energy
It has a fuel tank for storing fuel – the equivalent of our bums for storing fuel in the form of fat. It just sits there, doing nothing until there is a call for action eg you start the car so it needs fuel to keep the engine running.
It does this by transferring a tiny amount of fuel from the tank to the fuel injection system where highly sophisticated sensors work out precisely how much fuel needs to be injected into the engine.
If you, as the driver of the car and part of the intelligent control system, want to accelerate or go up a hill the system works out how much extra fuel needs to be injected.
Our bodies work in a similar way.
We fill up our fuel tank, our bum, by eating food.
Initially the food, as sugars, goes into our bloodstream but the amount of energy we can store in our blood is minute so our intelligent control system sends out hormones to transfer this energy into our fuel tank, our bum.
When we start some activity which requires a lot of energy our intelligent control system will at first use the energy which is in our blood, but that is tiny so it sends our signals to transfer energy from our fuel tank, our bum, back into the bloodstream where it can power our muscles.
Our intelligent control system is continuously managing our energy supply, converting fast-acting sugars into fat for long-term storage and back from fats to sugars in our blood for immediate energy.
Watch it in action
You don’t have to believe me, you can watch this in action on your own body by doing what I do and just buy a continuous blood sugar monitor and watch.
This is what I see every day.
At night my blood sugar will be relatively low and stable (apart from a bit of a bump when I get up for a pee).
But as soon as the sun gets up my blood sugar will rise. I have not eaten anything but my intelligent control system has learned from experience (what engineers call self-learning) that when it starts to get daylight I will soon be getting up and need energy so it takes energy out of my long-term storage (my bum) making it readily available for short term use as sugar in my blood.
It is smart and has learned this over time using the same process of self-learning that I used in the intelligent control software I used to write.
Then I will eat my breakfast, the microbes in my gut, which is part of my intelligent control system, will digest my breakfast releasing the energy as sugars into my bloodstream.
This is sensed by my intelligent control system (and I see from my blood sugar monitor) as a blood sugar spike so my intelligent control system takes a decision that it needs to send out instructions to take this short-term energy supply – sugars in my blood and store this in my long term storage tank, my bum.
If the preferred storage vessel (my bum) is full it will find somewhere else to store the fat and wherever that is is not good news.
A highly sophisticated process
This is a highly sophisticated deliberate process which is occurring 375/24. It does not happen by chance and if we want to get on top of the epidemic of chronic disease we have to gain an understanding of how our intelligent control system works.
Sadly we only have a limited understanding of how our intelligent control system works a the code level.
However, we can get some inspiration from the intelligent control system that we have developed for our machines.
Take a trip to the local BMX track and see for yourself our intelligent self-learning control system at work.
Learning to ride a bike (or catch a ball)
I am an engineer. When I was at Uni I learned about gyroscopic couples and self-balancing systems, the basis of how a bike stays upright, and to be honest I found it difficult to get my head around.
But I had been riding bikes for years with no understanding of self-balancing gyroscopic couples – how come I could still ride a bike without falling off?
When I had kids and they wanted a bike for Christmas did I sit down with them and give them a long lecture about self-balancing gyroscopic couples?
No way! Take them out to the lawn so they won’t hurt themselves too much and let them learn by trial and error, falling off a few times but within a couple of hours they have the knack, never to be forgotten.
I have this somewhat crazy-sounding idea that as part of a nutrition course, the students should spend an afternoon watching the kids at a BMX park.
There will be the beginners who get halfway up the ramps and run out of speed and fall off and the experts who fly to the top of the ramp, flip their bike in mid-air and zoom back down the ramp – truly amazing.
That is our intelligent control system at work, you can see the kids learning about anticipatory control, learning the art of measuring the rate of change without a mention of self-balancing gyroscopic forces or differential calculus.
For the best part of a million years, we applied this expertise in self-learning to control our appetite so we did not get fat and sick.
Not being fat is singularly important if you don’t want to be that snarling beast’s dinner and need to nip up that protective tree. Evolution is a cruel, but effective system.
Maybe we have to change from being our modern high-tech-twenty-first century science specialist to an eighteen-century natural philosopher understanding how systems work as a whole.
We need to become modern-day Darwins.
Changed the rules
Now we have changed the rules by having cheap, convenient high-energy food readily available.
If we want to resolve the chronic disease epidemic we have to learn how to retrain our intelligent control system to adapt to these new conditions.
This requires a societal change.
Societal change
This is the aim of the Gbiota social benefit movement.
There are two parts to the Gbiota movement.
There is the technology of how to grow replacement and gut-brain food and that is just straightforward technology. This can be cheaper than buying food from the supermarket but does mean that people have to do it themselves or we change the design of our cities so local growers can supply genuinely fresh plants.
With the threat of climate change having cities with green spots to reprocess organic waste seems highly desirable.
The difficult bit – creating societal change
The second part is the difficult part, how do we change both our health system and our society so the focus is on prevention rather than cure?
How do we do this in the misinformation age where the internet is saturated with marketing crap?
People learn from other people that they trust. My experience as an innovator is there are three types of people,
– the pioneers, the change makers, or early adopters who see the need for change and make it happen,
– the puddings who agree logically that there is a need for change but there is always some reason to procrastinate, the busy work brigade,
– and the crusties who will never change but who eventually die.
Start with the pioneers
Pioneers can be found anywhere, they can be just highly motivated private individuals who see the need for change, they can be from within the scientific system, the Universities and research establishments and there are even pioneers within Governments.
I can’t change the world myself, but I can try and get the message out to the pioneers of the importance of understanding our intelligent control system and training it to change our eating habits so we stop stuffing ourselves with energy food.
I am continuously amazed by the modern world we live in, how mega companies put profits ahead of community benefit, the disinformation which saturates the internet and even the election of Donald Trump.
But even that shows one thing – there is dissatisfaction with the current system and the world is ready for change.
Let us make it happen. Email me colin@gbiota.com