Growing food for health
The Gbiota technology is about how to grow food for better health.
The Gbiota movement is about creating supporting clusters of cooperative people for better health.
A bit of a mess
If you have not noticed at the moment the world is in a bit of a mess.
Humans are the most successful creatures on the planet because we are intelligent and naturally cooperative but that seems to have been overtaken by short-term greed by a few.
Cooperative societies are far more pleasant to live in but that has become too woke.
The dictionary definition of woke is politically and socially aware which does not seem a bad thing to me but is definitely out of fashion among the greed-is-good immediate gratification brigade.
Specific target – save 100,000 limbs from diabetic amputation
So it seems prudent to have a more specific target and we have selected 100,000 people avoiding a diabetic amputation.
This is similar to the JFK mission for a man on the moon in ten years, a clear aim everyone could get behind, except that we don’t want to wait ten years.
The easy bit and the difficult bit
There are two parts to achieving this target, the easy bit of developing the technology of how to prevent amputation. However, this requires a change in lifestyle leaving the much more difficult bit of persuading people to change their lifestyle.
The technology is straightforward.
The microbes in our gut exhibit swarm intelligence – they communicate to provide real intelligence specifically monitoring the available nutrients, learning over time which food provides those deficient nutrients then creating a complex array of hormones so we crave that food and when we are satisfied create other hormones so we feel satisfied and stop eating.
This is well-tested being the basis of life for the last billion years.
It does however depend on having the right spectrum of microbes in our gut.
Our modern food system may be hygienic but it is inert, no longer providing the beneficial microbes however microbes breed like crazy but they need the correct balance of nutrients, water and air.
Eco-balance
It is not necessary to be an expert micro-biologist. However, it is necessary to know how to create the right conditions of nutrients, water and air so the beneficial microbes out-compete and out-breed any harmful microbes.
The microbes start their journey in the soil which is where we need to control the conditions, they move into the plants and then into our gut when we eat the plants.
The technical difficulty is that while microbes breed like crazy they have a very short life, they live in a state of dynamic equilibrium breeding and dying very rapidly but with the appearance of a stable population. The microbes we see today are the great-grandchildren of the microbes we saw yesterday.
But the challenge is that once a plant is harvested the microbes will die so the plants must be eaten shortly after harvesting.
Long term – new gut-brain industry today DIY
Breeding the beneficial microbes is straightforward and in the long term I see a new industry of growing gut-brain food but in the short term, if we are to meet the target of avoiding 100,000 diabetic amputations those people in the early stages of diabetes need to grow their own gut-brain food.
This is not difficult and well within normal capabilities but does require a change in lifestyle and this is the difficult bit, persuading the early-stage diabetics that they need to start breeding beneficial microbes for themselves at home.
This is not a technical problem, breeding microbes is easy the difficult bit is persuading these early diabetics that they can and need to do it.
Damon Centola – Change How to Make Big Things Happen
For that, we have to turn to the seminal work of Damon Centola an American sociologist and the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.
His book – Change How to Make Big Things Happen should be compulsory reading for all those interested in changing the health arena so people stop having their legs chopped off.
Before I talk about Professor Centola’s seminal work let me introduce you to a couple of semi-fictional characters who we need to convince.
Fictitious (but real people) – Mary and Sue
Mary is a single mum living in a flat with her three kids, living off fast food and working two jobs in an attempt to pay the bills. She is beginning to put on a bit of weight and is worried she might become diabetic like her elder sister Sue.
Sue is married to a doctor, and lives in a comfortable house with a nice garden but she is a full-blown T2 diabetic.
There is no doubt they are both motivated to change but how do we help them to make that change?
The Gbiota microbe breeding box. The top box is filled with regular soil and plants. The bottom box contains organic waste and microbial inoculants.
Soil blood, containing nutrients and microbes, is circulated in a series of pulses so the soil breathes and nutrients and microbes are distributed around the boxes.
The beauty is not that this is a highly sophisticated system but it is so simple and easy to use that Mary, a single mum with three kids and two jobs can breed her own gut bugs which control her appetite so she does not get fat and sick.
It won’t win any awards for sophistication but it will help us achieve our target of avoiding 100,000 diabetes amputations.
Making the change
This is where Professor Centola comes in as he has studied and run many experiments on the process of change and has some nasty shocks in store for us.
The obvious way to create this change, which is widely adopted across the globe, is to employ the service of an expert in this area to run a major public educational program.
This is happening all over the world with well-run public educational programs yet diabetes is the fastest-growing of all diseases.
If things don’t work we need to stop and ask why? We all know the witticism that you don’t make a new hole by making the existing hole bigger.
We can understand why when we see how Mary and Sue react to these well-run and well-intended educational programs probably run by a highly trained and skilled educator.
Mary tunes out first, she has nothing in common with the educator who Mary thinks is enjoying a very comfortable lifestyle with no understanding of the stress that Mary has to endure every day of her life.
Sue stays the course for longer, but she is already receiving a lot of information from her Doctor husband and is already taking many drugs so she also tunes out thinking she is above this level of education.
Damon’s solution
So what is Damon’s solution? His book contains a very comprehensive analysis but the punch line is simple. It is true that people do need education from the experts, that is an essential part, but it is not enough.
The critical part is to form a cluster of similar people who are successfully applying the technology.
That is what I am trying to do right now so if you feel you would like to be a part of a cluster and combat this epidemic of chronic disease and help avoid 100,000 diabetic amputations then please email me.
