Changing the Health Paradigm

Our intelligent control system

Infectious and chronic or non-infectious diseases

chronic diseasesWe are living longer, thanks to major advances in medical science.

In the past people died, often when young, from infectious diseases now we die predominantly from chronic or non-infectious diseases with three out of four people dying from a chronic disease.

We are in the midst of an epidemic of chronic diseases – overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and dementia.

Medical science may keep us alive for a long time but far worse is that we may live for a long time with poor health. Our life span may be increasing but our health span is not.

This result from our modern food system which we need to change, but changes are never easy.

For the last thirty years, I have been working on how we need to change our food system so it is sustainable and leads to healthy people.

This requires a food paradigm shift – a different way of thinking about food.

As luck would have it I had spent the previous twenty years creating a paradigm shift in how engineers went about their design process.

This was an invaluable lesson on creating paradigm shifts and this is my story of creating a paradigm shift for food.

The birth of Computer Aided Engineering

Fifty years ago I was a humble lecturer in plastics processing at the RMIT in Melbourne. They had a mainframe computer, typical of the time with punched card input – a most unimpressive machine.

But then the very first mini-computer appeared and I had this instinct that this would change the way engineers went about their business.

I took out a second mortgage on my house to buy the second mini-computer to come to Australia, which is now laughable in its capabilities but still costed about a third of the value of my home.

The simulation with unexpected results

I learned computer programming and wrote, in my spare bedroom, a simulation of hot plastics flowing into a cold mould which was a pioneering technology for that time solving coupled complex non-linear partial differential equations.

The software may have been an achievement but the unexpected results changed the industry.

The industry was having problems in filling some moulds and the obvious solution was to make the flow channels bigger. That looks like common sense.

My software showed that some parts of the mould were filling first and the solution was to make some flow channels smaller to divert the flow into the more difficult areas of the mould.

That simulation showed that the current paradigm of how to design plastic moulds was deficient and my software led to a new paradigm which literally changed the industry across the globe.

Comparing Paradigms

The old paradigm for plastic flow was that the way to fill a mould was to make the flow channels bigger. It seems so obvious.

The new paradigm was to make some flow channels smaller to divert the flow to the more difficult to fill areas.

When I presented this idea at public lectures I was at first ridiculed and heckled. It made no sense. How can making flow channels smaller help a mould to fill?

But a few people heard the message, tried it and it worked and gradually became the accepted new paradigm.

Years later I face a similar situation. The current paradigm is that if you are getting fat then eat less. It seems so obvious.

The new paradigm I am presenting is that we get fat because our bodies (our intelligent control system) can sense deficiencies in our diet so we overeat and then get fat.

My solution is to fix these deficiencies by eating more, well not just more but more of the right sort of food.

I know the conventional wisdom is to eat less so to propose eating more sounds ridiculous. The missing words in that sentence are “more of the right sort of food”.

That automatically leads to eating less of the sugary fatty foods which make us fat.

 

From Plastics to Food

The company I formed Moldlfow became the leading exporter of technical software and was eventually sold for $500 million. Most of that went to the vulture capitalists but it still put me in the multi-millionaire category.

For my pioneering work on Computer Aided Engineering and creating the paradigm shift which changed the industry I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators.

I took a complete turn in my life to focus on what I thought, and still think, is the major issue facing humanity, how to grow food sustainably which will keep us healthy.

Speculative Research – doing daft things

We like to think of science as a nice logical step by step process and that is certainly part of the scientific process.

But doing things which seem daft at the time can lead to new ways of thinking. Moldflow, a company worth half a billion dollars was the result of doing daft things that led to a new way of thinking.

I was in a position to spend a few million dollars on speculative research knowing that most would be a complete failure but that failures lead to new ways of thinking which can have a profound impact.

With climate change, I am even more convinced of the importance of how we grow our food. I could say that I have spent the last thirty years of my life focused on how to sustainably grow food that will make us healthy but that would not be strictly accurate as I was used as child labour in WW2 to help mum grow food in the German U-boat blockade.

Computers have a delete button – Doctors don’t

My wife is a medical doctor, I am an engineer and there is a vast difference in the mode of operation.

If I make an error in my computer programming I can just hit the delete button whereas a medical doctor has to follow strict protocols which slows the rate of change and the adoption of new paradigms.

I am only too well aware that the current paradigm for chronic diseases is that they are caused by fat in the wrong place and we store fat in the wrong place because we eat more energy food than we burn, the calorie balance theory.

Eat less, Exercise more – it is more complicated than that

eatless exercise moreThere is no disputing that calorie balance is an essential requirement for storing excess fat, this is just obeying the fundamental laws of conservation of mass and energy so it is not in dispute – this is what I call the “how” we store excess fat but it does not explain “why” we store excess fat.

Intelligent control software

It just so happened that I had written intelligent control software which can be quite complex as the software has to learn the behavioural characteristics of the specific machine, it is a form of Artificial Intelligence with self-learning capabilities.

Our bodies have a similar self-learning capability, as we can see from simple experiments on the human body, and the reason why we store excess fat, which leads to the chronic disease epidemic, is that our intelligent control system has decided that we need to store excess fat.

How is not the same as Why

whyThis is the “why” underlying chronic disease.

It then sends out signals so that we eat more food which is the “how” we end up storing fat and is the underlying cause of the epidemic of chronic disease.

To understand why our intelligent control system decides we need to store more fat we have to understand how it takes decisions based on the information it receives.

The key point here is that our intelligent control system is highly sophisticated and the result of millions of years of evolution. Over this extensive period, it has learned to manage our bodies with a food supply relatively low in energy food but with an abundance of both microbes and nutrients.

 

We changed our food system

It is now faced with a different food supply with an abundance of energy food but deficient in microbes and some nutrients. This is a direct result of changes to our food supply.

To rectify this we need to change the paradigm from calorie balance, which we have tried for decades without success to the intelligent control paradigm.

Changing paradigms is always difficult but in the medical world can be a matter of life and death so a cautionary approach, which may seem prudent, makes this even more difficult.

Effective democracy depends on pro-active Governments

too busyThe first problem we have to overcome is the modern phenomenon of busy work.

For the last thirty years, I have been working on how we need to change our food system so it is sustainable and leads to a healthy outcome and I am not a drongo.

I cannot condense thirty years of thinking in an email or two.

It needs intelligent time from someone prepared to consider new concepts with an open mind.

Hopefully, my little cartoon demonstrates the status better than any words.

This is a global issue, every twelve seconds some unfortunate person has a limb amputated from diabetes, eight million people a year.

This is the dominant issue for health globally and I have an instinct that by changing the paradigm to our intelligent control system I could be sitting on the solution – just as I had that instinct fifty years ago that computers would change the way engineers would carry out their daily business.

Colin

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