For Jenny and anyone else wanting a healthy and sustainable food system

I received this email from Jenny, one of the Gbiota members. I am very happy for such emails as they tell me that the documentation is not clear which gives me a chance to make it clearer.

I hope this helps Jenny and a few (million) other people.

Jenny’s question about soil-blood gets to the core of the Gbiota system.

Jenny’s question

Hello Colin

I’ve enjoyed your new articles, particularly the one relating to tower growing.

Also the in-depth details about soil-blood and how often to water/flood the boxes.

One question though: what do you do with the ‘soil-blood’ for the week between watering? Does it retain its high microbial quality and expected health benefits, sitting in a bucket waiting for next Thursday until you use it again? I get the feeling it would deteriorate rapidly, being kept in an anaerobic environment.

I am planning to get started making a Gbiota bed because my current compost heap is seriously dry and can’t retain/hold water for 24hrs. Hence everything is very slow to compost and useless for growing food.

Thanks again for the new articles.

Jenny

My not-so-short answer

Hi Jenny,

Many thanks for your message which is telling me that I have not done a good enough job of explaining the Gbiota technology and aims.

I write a lot but sometimes the core of the message is lost in a mass of words, let me have another go.

The needle in the haystack

There is an immense amount of solid scientific research on how food affects health, again the core message is easily lost in the volume. But the core is simple.

Our gut matters

The biota in our gut is critical to health, it does much more than digest food.

The microbes in the gut communicate with each other, like in a computer so our gut forms part of the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly appetite.

It manufactures a range of chemicals which are essential for the body to operate and lack of these chemicals leads to chronic infectious diseases.

Also, much of our immune system is located in our gut, as we learned with Covid. People eating a healthy diet still caught Covid but were much less likely to die than people eating a poor diet or under stress.

We know from studies of the gut biome that the biota comes from the food we eat (or the food that mum ate) and that these microbes originate in the soil.

Modern highly processed foods – no bugs

Modern highly processed food may be hygienic but is devoid of beneficial microbes. Traditional food is full of microbes, some beneficial some dangerous leading to sickness and death.

Traditionally these microbes breed in organic waste in the soil.

Under some conditions, beneficial microbes breed preferentially and all is fine.

In other conditions, the toxic microbes breed preferentially leading to infectious diseases of varying severity.

Preferential breeding

Learning how to preferentially breed beneficial microbes in organic waste is one of the critical challenges facing our species.

But there is another side to the story.

Sustainable food

Recycling organic waste is sustainable, while modern chemical agriculture, based on the exploitation of natural resources is not.

There are eight billion people on the earth, they consume thousands of tonnes of food each year. The current system is unsustainable, we have no option but to learn how to grow food sustainably.

We need to create a new industry of growing plants that act as pre and pro-biotics by breeding beneficial microbes in organic waste, both healthy and sustainable.

This will be community driven – join us in the Gbiota movement.

Not all food

Let me be clear here, we do not need to replace the entire food industry – that is just ridiculous.

Most of the food we eat is burned off as energy and our modern food does that very well.

Rather we need to create a new industry supplying gut-brain food which is only a fraction of the total food we eat.

But it needs to be local as microbes have a short life. This will start with a few entrepreneurial home growers setting up their own Gbiota boxes but later local commercial growers supplying their local community.

Gbiota – not just a technology – a social movement

I need to make this message clear to my fellow humans. This is why I put so much emphasis that Gbiota is a social movement, we have to change the way society works. That is more important than profits.

Any space traveller passing by and watching the 7 O’clock news is hardly likely to be handing out gold stars for our harmonious society.

Unks and unkunks

No this is not gibberish in some weird language but an issue at the core of health.

I know I go on a bit about the ‘profits before people’ actions in the food industry but there is another, even bigger issue.

An Unk is something you don’t know but at least you know you don’t know it and can develop strategies to mitigate, bad but not that bad.

An Unkunk is something you are unaware of – so are unprotected from the danger ahead.

The history of food is riddled with unkunks and it is a big issue.

Let us look at lessons we can learn from the history of food.

Hunter-gatherers

For hundreds of thousands of years, we were hunter-gatherers and totally at the mercy of the climate. While our food was generally health a few bad years would leave us starving.

Research shows that modern day hunter gatherers, who diet contains some plants plant grown in living soil full of nutrients have a far healthy gut biome.

They do not suffer the modern epidemic of chronic diseases. We need to feed our gut -brain, we know how – it is just a question of doing it.

Farmers

When we saw the possibility of growing plants ourselves, particularly seed plants like wheat, corn and rice which could be stored we jumped at the opportunity – and why not?

Who could have foreseen that the reliable food supply would lead to a massive increase in population leading to cities which allowed infectious diseases to spread, our actions had led to the creation of terrible plagues.

We also had no idea that repetitive harvesting would exhaust the soil leading to the complete collapse of some civilisations.

Good intentions gone wrong – caught out by an Unkunk.

Had we been aware of the dangers of plagues and soil degradation we would probably have still gone ahead and adopted farming, with all its benefits but taken steps to avoid the plagues and soil degradation.

Hygiene

Then we learned how important hygiene was so we built water and sewage systems, invented the modern bed and adopted regular washing.

Fantastic success – but it led to yet another population explosion which put great pressure on available food supplies.

How can you argue that improved hygiene is wrong – that would be plain stupid – but had we been aware of the population explosion which would result we may have taken steps to manage it better.

The green revolution

Then came Norman Borlaug, and the green revolution and we increased food production, all with the best of intentions but which led to yet another population explosion.

However, with our modern technology, we were able to produce enough food to feed the entire world. That is true we just failed to learn how to distribute food equitably – a social, not a technical problem.

Had we been aware that this could lead to swarms of starving refugees we may have taken steps to manage the gross inequalities – who knows – would short-term greed still have triumphed?

The gut-brain

But again there was an unexpected trap, our highly efficient food system largely based on chemicals for fertiliser and crop protection meant that our food was inert so our gut biome, which is an important part of the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies was no longer fully functional.

No one is blaming Norman Borlaug and his contemporaries, they worked diligently to feed the world’s ever-increasing population but were caught by an Unkunk and so now we are left with the problem of creating a supplementary food system to feed the gut-brain.

Unkunks and the modern gut biome

At least we have learned about the importance of the gut biome and its impact on health. It is very much the science of the decade. But we are still looking at it from the viewpoint of biochemistry.

We know full well we can make fat people skinny and skinny people fat by changing the gut biome, we know what species of gut biota make us fat and which species make us skinny.

But we have no idea of the mechanism, the how, we just have observational experiments.

Our understanding of the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies is still in its infancy (meaning we haven’t the faintest idea of the code that makes it work) and even more dangerous we have yet to recognise its importance.

We don’t do nothing, with 8 million people a year suffering a diabetic amputation that is not an option. We recognise and learn to manage our ignorance.

Calorie balance

Pick up virtually any book on diet or weight loss and you will be presented with the idea that we get fat because we consume more calories than we burn.

Now read carefully, I am not saying that the fundamental laws of the conservation of energy and the conservation of mass are wrong. I was indoctrinated with these ideas at University and they have stuck.

But calorie imbalance, eating more than we burn, is not the cause of the modern epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart attack and dementia.

I accept the expert’s opinion that these are caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place. No augment from me here.

So why do we get fat and sick?

Calorie imbalance is not the cause. It is how, or what I like to call the enabling factor.

The why, the real reason why we get fat and sick is because our intelligent control system, of which the gut-brain is an integral part, has decided that we need to store more fat.

Yet the standard response to storing excess fat is to talk about the calorie imbalance. We are the victim of an Unkunk.

We should have known better, over seventy years ago, after the end of WW2 we learned that people who had been deprived of food in the war became overweight when food was available.

Our intelligent control system had been trained that is needed to store fat, it was a question of survival. When food became available it deliberately created a calorie imbalance by our gut-brain sending our hormones so we were obsessed with eating as much food as we could lay our hands (or maybe teeth) on.

Read the warning label

So, dear Jenny, read the warning label. I and no one else really knows how our intelligent control system works, but we can observe it in action.

What I am trying to do here is to take it out of the Unkunk section and bring it into the Unk section.

There is an old saying, science is the art of managing knowledge – engineering is the art of managing ignorance.

I am an engineer, I was brought up on how to manage ignorance. We build bridges and weird machines and so they don’t fall to bits we use what we like to call safety factors. These are not safety factors at all, they are ignorance factors.

So when you read on please understand that there are no absolute truths here.

The overall aim is to learn how to grow plants which are both pre- and pro-biotics. We need to be able to do this at scale by creating what is in effect a new industry, we are not going to solve the epidemic of chronic diseases by lab-scale breeding of a limited selection of microbial species.

Growing plants as natural pre and pro biotics is a process which has been tested (unknowingly) for millions of years so reducing the risk of Unkunks.

Soil-blood is a key part of this new technology. Learning how to manage soil-blood is at the core of resolving the epidemic of chronic disease. But it is not without risk.

As a pioneer of the soil-blood revolution I have used my body as a piece of lab equipment to see how far I can go before I sense a problem and I can honestly say the worst effect I have experienced is an occasional increase in the consumption of toilet paper.

If you want to increase your level of safety factor then do so. I have tried to indicate how and now it is your decision.

Principles no rule of thumb

It is not possible to give a set of instructions, like a cooking recipe, as climate, season and plants (and people) vary so much so what I try and do is give a set of principles which the grower can apply whether in Finland or Bundaberg.

The basic principles behind the Gbiota system are simple. We want to breed beneficial microbes in the soil. These will enter the plants that we eat and from there into our gut, a process that has been going on for a few million years but we decided to abort with our modern, ultra hygienic, food system.

Part of the reason we stopped is that if the conditions are not right harmful microbes, which make us sick or will kill us will breed.

But the real reason is it is much more profitable to grow plants using chemicals than go to the trouble of recycling organic matter.

We use a simple process of Eco-balance where we create the conditions that favour the beneficial microbes so they out-breed and out-compete the harmful microbes – a process that has been going on for many millions of years so the Patents have well and truly expired.  It is well tested.

Both good and bad Microbes need food so that is not a differentiator, the key differentiator is air and moisture.

How water moves through the soil may appear to be simple but is actually complex and for those interested I wrote an article water which may help understand the Gbiota process but there are two key things to understand about water.

Goldilocks water

If the soil is too dry nothing happens, the plants don’t grow and the bugs won’t breed.

If it is too wet most plants won’t grow well, yes watercress and seaweed may be healthy, but life is about variety.

So what we want is Goldilocks water, not too wet, not too dry, just right.

Sounds simple but it is not.

Weird water

Water is weird but very friendly stuff, it loves itself so water molecules are attracted to other water molecules which gives it tensile strength, which is a bit weird for a liquid, but it is also a bit like a teenager, it loves some things and hates others – what we call hydrophobic and hydrophilic.

The other weird thing about water is it does not like being invaded by other stuff so if there is a strong solution then any nearby water will rush in to dilute the strong solution, what we call osmosis.

These two together are how plants work, osmosis means that water will enter the root system as long as the solution in the plant’s roots is stronger than the solution in the soil.

If it is not, the water will be sucked out of the plants and they will die. Something I have demonstrated many times in my experiments.

Once the water has entered the root system, evaporation from the leaves will pull water up to great heights by the tensile strength of water that has entered the root system by osmosis.

Water does not spread uniformly

You may agree with the Goldilocks water approach, not too dry, not too wet just right and think it is so simple – just water a little bit.

But that is not the way soil and water works.

If you are lucky and have hydrophilic (water-loving soil) the water will cling to the first bit of soil it finds. But generally (almost always) soil has different particle and pore sizes.

The surface tension forces are much larger in a small pore than in a big pore (it has more surface area) so the water will move from large pores to small pores and then stop.

When you apply water from above, however you do it – drip tape, sprinkler, hose, flood or a good old fashioned bucket you are applying liquid water that will initially fill all the pores, big and small where you applied the water, so they are all filled with liquid water.

The soil is saturated with no air spaces.

The importance of pore size

But all soils have a range of pore sizes and if the soil is hydrophilic, (water-loving), the forces attracting the water in the small pores are higher than in the large pores so water will move from the large pores to the small pores until there is a balance and flow will stop.

This is wicking.

The moisture level at the end of wicking is normally called field capacity but is really an equilibrium state which is a better term.

This moisture level is independent of how much water is applied. If you apply more water it will just go deeper into the soil.

I will say this again, and put up with the abusive emails it will generate. Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, you cannot vary the moisture level in the soil by how much water you apply from above.

The moisture levels at the end of irrigation will always be the same, it will start saturated and then drop down to field or equilibrium value.

Applying more water will mean it will penetrate deeper into the soil.

What we can do

If we change either the nature of the soil, so it is more or less hydrophilic, or change the pore size we will change the equilibrium level.

This is what we are trying to do with Wickmix, create a soil that is hydrophilic, water-loving but with a large pore size – a giant sponge.

Not make sense? Think of it this way.

Clay is generally nutrient-rich but has a very small pore size so will hold a lot of water and very little air and so will be anaerobic which is great for breeding bad bugs.

Sand has a large pore size so contains a lot of air – which is good but will hold very little water and nutrients. Great for growing Cacti but not so good for broccoli.

Wickimix

With Wickimix, which we make from organic waste, rock dust and a bit of soil (preferably with a small particle size like in clay to give a large surface area) there are plenty of nutrients.

But to get (and maintain) a large pore size we need a little help from the creatures of the soil, particularly the worms.

But let us not forget the beetles, larvae, nematodes and all those creepy-crawlies found in good soil.

They are happy to eat all the nutrients we provide but to pay the rent they make lots of holes and passages in the soil so we have soil full of air.

Flood and flush

The other part of Gbiota technology is flood and flush. Instead of applying the water from above, which reduces the air content and seals the surface, we apply the water, at least most of the water, from below and let wicking action take it up to near the surface so the plant roots can grow in Goldilocks moisture.

Let me talk you through the process.

We have a pipe going down into the soil. We could just use a small tube, and that is what I started with many years ago.

But as I was brought up to squeeze the most out of everything so I now use a large tube which I can fill with organic waste, so I call it a compost tube.

For those keen gardeners who understand that labile or fresh compost can be full of growth inhibitors, I should point out that this is separate from the soil in which I am growing plants.

For those of you who have read my article on how water moves through the soil, you will understand that to get bulk water movement you need to use the principle of hydraulic or pressure flow which inevitably means the soil will be saturated.

This pressure flow (I say pressure but it is only a few mm of head but still pressure) will force the water to flow over the base of the bed and being saturated some water will wick up towards the root zone and towards the surface.

Just what we want.

But after we have saturated the base of the bed we are left with all this saturated soil which is ideal for breeding all those nasty bad bugs.

In the Gbiota boxes, we have a swivel pipe while in the Gbiota beds a leaky dam so we can drain the water (or soil-blood).

This is the neat bit, as the water drains out it will suck air back into the soil, we are making the soil breathe. This is a core Gbiota technology.

You can hear the air being sucked back into the soil and for the benefit of any adolescent boys reading this, they may like to call this a reverse fart.

What to do with the left-overs

People who know me understand that I was a toddler in WW2 and was brought up not to waste anything.

I could not leave half a slice of toast without being told that I must eat it as there were starving children in Africa. When I asked very politely about the logistics of getting my half a slice of toast to the kids in Africa I was rewarded with less than polite thump to the ear.

How times have changed. But there is still a need for more change.

The idea that ‘greed is good’ has to go. It is absurd to have a society where billionaires are taking joy trips to space so they can see for themselves if the world is round or flat, executives of food companies fly around in private jets when people are having their legs chopped off from diabetes or living under railway bridges.

Things need to change – join the wonderful world of the Gbiota movement.

But back to leftovers.

Soil blood

What drains out from the swivel tube or leaky dam is not just water, it is full of nutrients and weird creatures. I look at them under my microscope and they make the monsters from Aliens look tame.

I call this soil-blood because it fulfils the same function as blood in us, transporting nutrients, air, weird creatures and microbes throughout the soil and into the plants and finally us.

This is just too valuable to waste.

But how best to use it?

The obvious way is to pour it back down the compost tube, but when?

As Jenny asks, will this go putrid if it is left for a week in the collection bottle?

In Bundaberg in summer almost certainly yes, but here is how to find out.

Safe or not?

I admit that I pour some soil-blood onto the plant leaves as this is another way the plants can absorb the beneficial microbes that we need.

I have some concerns about recommending this publicly so I leave it to people to decide for themselves. All I can say is I have been doing it for years without harm.

I have no desire to get sick from some weird disease so just before harvest I will stop using soil blood on the foliage and rinse the foliage with clean water instead.

Surface wetting

Another issue is that wicking works great in transferring water from wet areas to drier areas but there can be a problem in re-wetting the soil if it dries out completely.

To avoid this I will periodically wet the soil surface and often use soil blood for that.

Germination

However, the big problem with this subsurface irrigation is germination, the top surface is dry so seeds do not germinate without love and care.

I have tried many ways, including totally saturating the soil before seeding and applying the covering layer. That only needs to be done once but I find that saturating the soil and the following patting down tend to compact the soil when what we want is a very open soil with a large pore size.

I have now gone back to the old-fashioned way and just seed and cover with the top layer then gently apply water to just keep that top layer moist enough for germination.

A bit more work than ‘saturate and leave’ method but more reliable.

Radishes

Radishes must be the easiest plant to grow so it is with shame that I admit that they do not grow that well in normal Gbiota boxes.

They, and other root crops like beets, grow profusely with an immense display of foliage but the roots fail to swell as hoped for.

I think the problem is that the nutrient-rich soil and frequent use of soil-blood means there is just too much nutrient available for what is a tough plant that has evolved to flourish in tough conditions.

I now grow radishes and other root crops in their own box. I don’t use the soil-blood at all in these boxes instead using it in other boxes and use fresh water both in the compost tube and for surface wetting.

Designing the human body

I haven’t answered Jenny’s question about how long the soil blood can be left.

If you have ever looked in a mirror you may have noticed a lumpy thing sticking out from just above your mouth and wondered why it is there and not somewhere else more convenient.

It is called a nose but why put it there?

It has not evolved as a convenient thing to hold our glasses.

Let’s talk about the design of the human body. I am an engineer and the best design is always the simplest that will do the job.

We need to take in air and food so the simplest design would be to have a hole in the chest for taking in air and another hole to our belly just below – for shoveling in food.

Why go to all this bother of pipes and valves so air goes to the lungs and food to our stomach and why put the nose immediately above the mouth? It seems overly complex.

Evolution keeps on trying out different designs and keeps on increasing sophistication until it finds the simplest that works.

It did try a simpler version, and it did work, we call it a jellyfish, but I ask you, how many jellyfishes have won a Nobel prize? I can count them on the number of fingers growing out of my ears.

Neat design

This current design may seem overly complicated but it works.

Anything you put near your mouth is immediately inspected by your nose.

Any suspicious sign (smell) it hits that red button which is the alarm bell for your subconscious brain and in a fraction of a second (your subconscious brain works much faster than your conscious brain) it has sent out a OMG STOP signal so your arm screeches to a halt before that pongy thing enters your mouth, so possibly saving your life.

What I do

Now as I know nothing about growing food in Finland I can’t tell you what the safe time to leave soil-blood is but you can try what I do.

Gbiota is my job in life, I have over fifty experimental boxes trialing different techniques and plants so I am not too bothered about time.

I have come to an arrangement with my body that I use it as part of the experimental process and as part of the deal, I guarantee it a reserve stockpile of toilet paper, which fortunately is only needed occasionally.

I have trialed different schedules and plants.

I have found there is no problem with using the flood and flush system every day. It guarantees there is no stagnant soil-blood but it makes for a lot of extra work.

This may be unnecessary as I do not recommend flood and flushing every day but useful to know if problems occur (such as when you have been on holiday and on your return are greeted with a bit of a pong.

So Jenny the rule is simple, a big sniff – if pongy irrigate more frequently.

Gbiota beds – developed from Wicking Beds

Gbiota beds were developed from Wicking beds which have the big advantage that they can store a lot of water so you can go for a long time without irrigation.

But the whole point of Gbiota beds is to breed beneficial microbes – not save work and that means a bit more effort.

How often

I typically irrigate twice a week but if I have any suspicion that the soil mix is getting a bit overripe, (using my nose), I will run a flood and flush cycle.

I like everyone, go away for several days or even a couple of weeks and then I will revert to a Wicking Beds and leave the swivel tube in the up position.

It is not ideal but keeps the plants alive. But when I return I may give a few daily flushes to clean the system.

If I have any suspicions (eg a bit of pong) I am too mean to discard this suspect soil-blood so I just empty the container onto my lawn and later capture the nutrients in the grass cutting which are part of my Gbiota bed process.

I understand that it is easy to kill plants with too high a level of nutrients by reverse osmosis. This is easily detected ahead of time by excess green growth.

(How many times have I got all excited over an experiment with fantastic growth but come back one morning to find everything dead.)

This rarely happens but if it does I just use the soil blood on other boxes and just use water in the suspect box.

Different plants exude different sugars to attract different species of microbes so normally I use a wide spectrum of plants in one box. This is very practical using some slow and fast-growing plants which increases the time span that the box is producing.

(Link to ‘What to grow’)

So I still like to spread the soil blood among the boxes to introduce as wide a range of microbes as possible.

As I have mentioned some species, like the root crops, seem sensitive to over-nutrition so I may stop using the soil blood and use water.

I am sorry to my readers in Finland that I can not offer them any specific advice, but I am sure that in winter they will be growing indoors with plant lamps and they will soon find a schedule which works fine without getting a pongy mess.

Final word

So Jenny there is a very long answer to a very simple question. Keep the question coming they help make the total system better and don’t forget that this is a social benefit movement as well as growing a few veggies so help spread the word.

It is not a bad feeling that you have saved someone from having a foot chopped off from diabetes.

This is the preface to the dynamic E-book which is about solving the food crisis. It is about how to get the adoption of the new technology we need.

A dynamic E-book is made up of multiple stand alone articles. If you are not interested in the process of innovation you can jump to the next article which explains why we have a food crisis. Just click below.

Solving the food crisis – the plan

Solving any problem goes through three stages.

The first is too often overlooked and is not easy, developing a clear understanding of what the problem is.

The second stage can be surprisingly easy, developing the technical solution.

The third stage is the most difficult – adoption, effectively applying the known technology.

Understanding the problem

There are two problems.

The short-term problem is that our current food system is deficient in the microbes which form our gut biome and essential minerals which have led to an epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

The longer-term problem is our current food system relies on the exploitation of finite resources, particularly water, which is aggravated by climate change and shortages of key minerals which are being exhausted. Phosphorous is the most urgent.

The technology

We already have the technology, it is changing the way we grow our food using organic waste as a key input and controlling the conditions to breed the beneficial microbes so they out-compete the harmful microbes which make us fat and sick and kill us – a process of Eco-balance which has been going on for millions of years if we care to look.

Adoption

The real problem is how to get these known solutions adopted.

I have been innovating for much of my life with a spectacular array of failures and a few successes for which I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators.

But failures are not a waste, they are the way we learn so I want to devote this article to extracting the lessons from my failures (and the successes).

Learning from failures

The high-speed dolls pram

My first innovation dates back to the late 1940’s (yes I am very old).

I made a powered doll pram for my sister and it was a fantastic success, at least technically. It went so fast she could not keep up with it so it would result in spectacular crashes.

But the lesson is that this innovation, however good technically did not fill a real need. My sister was perfectly happy pushing her old dolls pram along and Mum was certainly not happy about this high-speed doll pram crashing into the furniture.

The road junction ramps

My next, not-so-brilliant idea, was in the 1950s when I proposed the idea that we could make road crossing safer by raising the intersection so cars would slow down before the intersection and speed up automatically as they left.

I remember explaining this to the local council who were very diplomatic to an over-enthusiastic teenager who had just learned about potential and kinetic energy at school.

They explained that this was not practical. The disappointment would have been less had they pointed out that if a hung around for a few decades there would be electric cars with regenerative braking which would do exactly what I was trying to do – capture the kinetic energy for reuse later.

Lesson – theory may be fine but it has to be practical.

The automotive crash absorber

Next was after I graduated in the 1960s when I was working for a Research Institute on the mechanical properties of plastics. I realised that while plastics had reasonable strengths they were very flexible, which is why they are called plastic and this meant they could absorb large amounts of energy.

So I designed a plastic shock absorber that could be fitted between a car’s chassis and the bumper bar (or fender in the US) which would absorb a large amount of energy.

Now, give my bosses their due, they thought this idea had merit and no doubt wishing to encourage a young graduate approached the car industry, on my behalf.

Their response was unenthusiastic saying there was no public demand.

This is a bitter learning experience because we made and tested some energy absorbers and they really worked.

The technology was sound and economic but the social conditions were not ready for acceptance.

It was years later when Ralph Nader became the champion for more safe cars and changed the public attitude.

But more than changing the public attitude, it changed the Government’s attitude, they introduced legislation on safety but even more importantly they introduced a star safety rating.

This meant that car buyers had a way of judging the safty of competing models and it turned out that the public cared and bought the safer cars so there was money for the car companies.

The lessons are that the social conditions must be right for innovations to be accepted and Governments can play a role in creating the right social conditions for the adoption of new technology.

The centrifuge

My most spectacular failure was in the late 1960s when I had this theoretically great but impractical idea of using a giant centrifuge to produce reinforced plastics.

It worked on simple shapes but there was no way of producing the preforms to make complicated shapes.

As the major benefit of plastics is the way they can be formed into complex shapes this was a total failure.

The lesson is that a simple but essential defect in an otherwise sound idea can lead to total failure.

Moldflow

That is enough of failures, lets have a story that started as a failure but ended up a major success.

I mortgaged my house to buy what I believe was the second mini-computer to come to Australia. It is now unbelievable that it cost one-third the value of my house but this was in the day of mainframes and punched cards.

I wrote a computer simulation of hot plastics flowing into a cold mould which was quite a technical challenge involving solving coupled non-linear partial differential equations. Fortunately, Newton had done all the hard work for me.

This simulation gave me a much better understanding of the mechanism of flow and I developed design principles such as flow balancing, which meant using the flow channels to control flow.

This meant that often the flow channels were much smaller than conventional flow channels.

Having spent all my money on buying this primitive computer I bought an around-the-world ticket, on credit on my American Express card, to tell the world about what I thought was a major innovation.

This meant leaving my long-suffering wife to work out how to feed our two kids which had magically appeared from nowhere, as kids do.

Innovators are generally too busy and preoccupied to have time to have kids but apparently not in my house.

Lesson – being an innovator is rugged, being an innovator’s wife is worse.

Changing the paradigm

So I went around the world giving lectures on flow balancing expecting to receive a warm welcome.

But what people heard was not what I said.

I was trying to explain a rather complex concept that you could use the computer simulation to redesign the flow path so it filled uniformly.

What they heard was if the mould does not fill make the flow channels smaller.

I actually said some flow channels but they missed the ‘some’.

The conventional wisdom and common sense say if the mould does not fill make the flow channels larger – obvious right?

Let me tell you that is not a pleasant experience standing up in front of a crowd who think you are some sort of nutter from down under where Kangaroos hop down the main street.

The important bit

There were some free-thinking entrepreneurial thinkers (actually I should use the correct term intrapreneurial as these were free thinkers inside large organisations).

I won’t say they believed me but they were adequately free thinking that I may have a point so they went away and tried it and it worked, and this is the important bit for them.

And they told other people that it worked for them and Moldflow just took off and was eventually a company worth over $500million. (I didn’t get $500million that went to the vulture capitalist.)

The lesson here is that you can’t change a paradigm by spending a fortune on promotion and advertising. (Particularly if you don’t have a fortune which is the norm for innovators.)

You need to find those free thinkers who have standing and let them try it for themselves.

Faster, better cheaper

I wrote a book, ‘Faster better cheaper’ which was about how to make plastics parts, you guessed it faster better and cheaper.

As soon as I had written it I asked myself if that was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, make plastics parts Faster, Better and Cheaper.

The answer was a resounding no, so I asked myself what is the biggest challenge facing humanity.

I don’t think that humans are so stupid that we are going to annihilate our species in an atomic war so I decided the answer is how are we going to feed billions of people healthy food in a sustainable way.

So that is when I sold the company and took a new direction in life.

Broad-acre subsurface irrigation

Time for some more lessons from failure.

I became very concerned about the supply of fresh water. We are draining aquifers that have taken millions of years to fill at an alarming rate. We needed a more efficient way of irrigating large areas like cow pastures.

So I developed a very low-cost subsurface irrigation tape which could be ploughed into the ground. Sounded good.

But when I saw the cows digging up the irrigation tape and eating it I knew I had got it wrong again. Why cows should dig up irrigation tape and eat it was unanticipated but that is the life of an innovator.

Project scrapped.

Lesson – prepare for the unexpected.

Adaptive irrigation control

For my next project, I thought I would develop what I called adaptive irrigation control but we now may put into the Artificial Intelligence bracket.

The idea was simple, collect all the information on how much rain falls and water is supplied from irrigation, measure the evaporation and soil moisture to learn how much water the plants are using, look at the predicted evaporation and then estimate how much water to apply at the next irrigation.

This is all in a continuous loop so the system is continuously refining its predictions.

Great idea (or so I thought) but this was way back in the late 1990’s and there was not the computer power available at that time so it failed. Good idea but no supporting technology.

Lesson – innovation does not occur in isolation and depends on the available technologies at the time.

Wicking beds

My next project arose from a trip to Ethiopia to see if I could find a way of providing sustenance food in times of drought.

The idea was very simple. Collect up a bunch of weeds because they are very efficient at extracting nutrients from the soil, much better than food plants.

Dig a trench, line it with a plastic film (there is an abundant supply of waste plastic bags available for free throughout Africa), fill it with weeds. Use more plastic bags to create catchments to feed any rain that falls into the beds.

It worked great but here comes the crunch.

The idea caught on, not in Africa but in wealthy Western countries. It was featured in TV gardening shows so received maximum publicity.

But they didn’t understand the basic principles so instead of using weeds they replaced these with dead inert rocks with no nutrients.

This has the advantage of increasing the time between watering which is popular and seems important in our modern high-pressure life, but does not feed us the nutrients we need.

Lessons I have learned

There is a very important lesson to be learned from these projects.

Innovators are rarely in a position to promote their own innovations, and anyway, they are biased so why should anyone believe them?

Adoption occurs because an independent source, preferably someone widely respected, hears about the idea, may be not convinced it will work but thinks it may have a chance of working, has some benefit, so tests it for themselves, finds it works then tells other people and the idea catches on and bingo – you have a paradigm shift.

Whatever the business textbook tells you about the way that innovations occur this is the way they occur in the real world.

The new hobby – leg chopping

My life took a major turn when my wife, a medical doctor, became diabetic her foot turned black and they wanted to amputate her leg.

I was not keen on the idea as she had nice legs and it seemed that she was not too keen on the idea either.

Eight million people a year have a limb amputated from diabetes.

As I am getting on in years I am continuously amazed by what I see on Social Media like TikTok, I just cannot believe the weird things that people get up to.

But after serious thought, I have concluded that there is not some craze going around initiated by some video that has gone viral promoting the idea that it is a great hobby to eat the wrong food, get diabetes and have a leg chopped off.

Given the right information, at the right time (that is before sitting in the waiting room to have your leg chopped off) most people would think that two legs are better than one.

The question is how to get that message out when the world is saturated with billions of dollars of very clever, but manipulative advertising that our modern food system is healthy????

Maybe not TikTok

If it is not some craze on TikTok what is it that is causing eight million people a year to eat food that will lead to them having their leg chopped off, then what is it?

The answer lies in why we are the most successful creature on the planet. We are a magic combination of intelligent and cooperative.

To understand that we have to go back in time, I don’t mean to when I was born which may be a long time ago but much further.

Even further back in time when there were no Wheaties for breakfast but when we caught and ate Mastodons.

Let me tell you a bit about Mastodons, they are big, bigger than an elephant and they have two massive tusks.

If one human tried to kill a Mastodon the score would very quickly be Mastodon 1 human 0 with the human ending up skewered on the Mastodon tusks like a sausage on a stick.

Yet we ended up with Mastodon steaks in our figurative serial bowl for breakfast.

How did we do it? Because we are intelligent and cooperative.

If you have never been on a Mastodon hunt let me assure you that you don’t hang around thinking through every step using a process of logic, unless you want to end up skewered on a Mastodon trunk.

You are part of a team, you know what is expected of you and you do it (and quickly).

That is the way we work (or at least most of us). That is how we live together in cities of millions of people without too much trouble.

So what is the action plan?

We already have the technology of how to grow healthy food sustainably.

We just have to get people to adopt the technology.

We can’t do that by some scattergun internet marketing campaign.

We have to locate free-thinking intrapreneurs in the health profession, preferably some in Government responsible for community health in the prevention area.

We have to provide them with all the information they need so they can independently test it for themselves and decide whether this is marketing bullshit or the real world.

If they are convinced that this is for real they will then promote this to other health professionals who in turn will promote it to the wider public.

That is how ideas spread exponentially.

Keep reading, the rest of this dynamic E-book gets down to the nitty gritties.

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.

Become a healthy food ambassador

This web is about the global food crisis. It is not a pretty-pretty web but neither is the global food crisis – the biggest threat facing humanity.

Here and now

The global food crisis is not some threat for the future, it is here right now, it is not just about poor people starving in some remote country it is about people in rich countries suffering from chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

It is man-man made, if you face having a leg amputated it is a direct result of the food crisis – the wrong sort of food from our modern food system.

Balance of foods

It is not a simple shortage of food, it is about the wrong balance of foods and that is not what you may expect so it takes quite a bit of explaining.

I understand that everyone is busy these days but I hope that everyone who visits the site will at least read the front page, but more important we need a few people to really understand the issues and become ambassadors for change. If you think you could be a food ambassador and say hi just email me.

Become a food ambassador

We can’t expect big business or even Governments to initiate action, we need a groundswell from the public to create the social pressure for change and that will be led by these ambassadors.

It is a question of what sort of world do we want to live in.  Should food be purely about maximising wealth for a small number of people or should it be for the health and benefits of the community as a whole.

Food for energy

The basic facts are simple but unexpected. We need food for energy and that comes mainly from the sun. The amount of energy coming from the sun is vast in comparison with all man’s use of energy. There is no absolute shortage of energy.

Plants are brilliant converters of the suns energy into food energy, they just need water, carbon dioxide from the air and a few minerals which act as catalyst.

Food for replacement

We may think we are the same person that we were a few months ago but we are not, we are continuously replacing our body parts as they age and wear and that requires a complex array of chemicals which largely comes from the soil via plants.

There is truth in the saying that ‘Health Starts in the Soil’

But even this replacement food is not a crisis. We have a very sophisticated science of biochemistry. We know exactly what chemicals we need and how to produce them, preferably in our food which give a better balance but if all else fails, from pills which are readily available – even if at a high price.

Intelligent control system

Our bodies are very different to a jelly fish, aimlessly swimming around hoping to find food. We have a highly sophisticated intelligent control system which automatically regulates what we want to eat, among all our other bodily requirements.

It is like having a supercomputer in our gut and brain which working away in our subconscious regulates our bodies.

Unlike the mature sciences of biochemistry and microbiology, we really have no idea of the coding that drives this supercomputer but we know that it starts learning from the first suck on Mum’s breast until when we die.

We know that we have to feed it gut-brain food, if it senses deficiencies it will send out signals in the form of hormones so we overeat and get fat and sick.

But we also know that our gut brain is like a city, the city lives on over the centuries but the individuals are continuously breeding and dying, but the microbes have a life span measured in days rather than decades.

If we don’t create the right conditions for these microbes to breed we will end up with the wrong sort of microbes in our gut and our gut brain will not work properly at all.

This is the biggest threat in the global food crisis.

So, if you want a stable world for you and your grand kids, become a health food ambassador.

Getting started

I know, from bitter experience, that if I started by saying that Gbiota is about growing bugs that will live in your gut, and have swarm intelligence that controls what and how much you want to eat you would probably find the whole idea repulsive and click away.

So let me start by telling you what I do every day, that I am 84, fit and healthy and there is a whole tribe of us doing the same thing.

It is in three stages

Stage 1 breeding beneficial bugs

I do breed beneficial bugs, I do this in a Gbiota bed or box. I fill just the base with any organic waste I can lay my hands on, mostly kitchen scraps and grass clippings. The upper layer is filled with Wickimix, a really nice soil where I grow my plants.

I flood just the base of the box with soil blood which is what I call the fluid in the base of the box as it does the same job as our blood, distribute nutrients and air throughout the soil.

When I flood I expel all the stale air, I wait and let the soil blood wick up to the root zone of the plants growing in the Wickimix. Then I drain the base of the box which sucks fresh air into the box.

I store the soil blood I catch ready for the next flood and flush cycle.

I eat the plants that I grow, and every morning I make a green smoothie which is full of beneficial bugs which end up in my gut to power my gut-brain.

Stage 2 training my gut-brain

Now I train my gut-brain by eating all sorts of different foods so it learns what foods work for me and what don’t.

Even though I am 84 I will still listen to a 24-year-old nutritionist just out of University and if they tell me I need to get some more Vitamin K or B12, or zinc or whatever I will start to eat food that contains that possibly missing nutrient.

Stage 3 listening to my gut-brain

Now I learn to listen to my gut-brain. I don’t go on any restrictive diet, I think about that famous Wodehouse saying ‘Giving up wine, women and song’ does not make you live longer, it just makes it seem longer.
I

If I go to a party and a pretty girl comes around in a low-cut dress offering me a piece or two of cheesecake she has made for the party then sure as eggs are eggs I am going to stuff myself.

But the next morning my gut-brain is going to tell me ‘Colin, you had a bit of a wild party last night, so it is just your green smoothie and one slice of toast for breakfast for you.

That way I keep myself fit and healthy and also enjoy life, which seems to me to be the point of living.

What I do in life

So what do I do in life? I show people, anyone who is interested in keeping fit and healthy, how to grow this gut-brain food, train and listen to their gut-brain and hopefully have a life in which they enjoy one of the great pleasures of life – eating.

One tribe

The Earth has been spinning around the sun for four and a half billion years and we can expect it to be still spinning for a few more billion years.

Modern humans have only been here for a blink of an eye – 200,000 years and an agricultural society for a mere 10,000 years, and industrial society for 200 years and an information society for fifty.

Humans – we are all part of a teratribe

In our modern world we are all part of a teratribe. Part of this tribe can cut down forest in Brazil and that may lead to flooding in New York or Delhi.

We produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet yet millions go hungry, we know that an all-out nuclear war would destroy us all yet we continue to stockpile deadly weaponry, we know that the planet is heating up, sea levels are rising and finite resources are running out yet we continue to emit greenhouse gases at an unsustainable rate.

With our understanding of food and nutrition most of us should be fit and healthy into old age yet we have mega global corporations spending billions of dollars on very clever manipulative advertising so we buy their products and end up fat and sick and maybe having our legs chopped of from diabetes.

The easy bit-last

In the second half of this web I describe the technology of growing food so most people can expect a long and healthy life, that is the easy bit.

I became involved with how to grow food when I was recruited by my Mum as non-optional child labour to grow food in WW2. It is not difficult to grow healthy food sustainably, it is difficult to condense 84 years of learning into a three world acronym, even Eat, Fresh Food Grown in Living Soil takes six words.

There is no doubt that if we want to live long and healthy lives we have to change out food system, we know how to do that – the difficult bit is convincing people that living solely of a diet of chicken wings and chips followed by a double portion of cheese cakes is not the way.

But how to convince people there is a better way is the difficult bit that comes first.

Learning my lesson

But I did learn a very valuable lesson in my era as a pioneer of computer aided engineering, in the early days of computers when they were seriously clunky machines.

I developed software which solved coupled non-linear partial differential equations using an iterative predictor corrector scheme. Sounds boring and it was, but I ploughed on giving lectures on the technology with as much success as trying to stop teenagers thinking about sex.

Does it work?

But then I learned my lesson, people were just not interested in the mechanics of how it worked, there were a few people, the pioneering types, who just wanted to know how to operate the software well enough so they can go away and test it for themselves.

Does it work?

There was no reason why they should believe me but they were happy to run the risk of testing it to see if it worked as I predicted.

Fortunately for me it did and what came next is the interesting bit.

The interesting bit

These early pioneers became really excited about this new technology and with no help from me, I am an engineer not a marketing person, they showed their results to other people and soon this technology, which was at first seen as a bit weird became the norm.

A paradigm shift had occurred right before my eyes.

Feeding 8 billion people

I know that if we are going to feed 8 billion people so they have a long and healthy life that there needs to be a paradigm shift in our food.

I also know that I cannot bring about the paradigm shift myself but I know what I have to do. Find those enterprising early adopters, just a few of them, persuade them to set up Gbiota beds, eat the food and see if this improves their health.

They will then become enthusiastic and they will create the paradigm shift.

So if you find this web dull and boring, not to worry, just hang around and watch what other people are doing.

But if you are one of those early adopters who see the need for a food paradigm shift then I have created this web site for you and I am more than happy to meet up with you, this is my email address and I look forward to chatting with you.

Food security – real or hype?

Is food security real or hype? This is what I examine here first and later and more importantly what to do about it.

The Supermarkets are bulging with food so maybe we can just relax. Reliable figures for total food production are difficult to come by but is seems that we can identify production of at least 4 billion tonnes of food a year but the actual figure is probably much higher. Enough to feed the entire world for now and years to come. All seems good.

But let us start breaking this down. We are a thermodynamic machine and we need fuel for energy. That comes largely from the sun. The amount of energy falling on the earth from the sun is huge, far greater than all the energy used by mankind in all ways. No need to worry?

Plants are very effective solar panels, using the energy from the sun to break down water molecules and combining this with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to produce carbohydrates for energy.

If we were to adopt a plant-based diet there would be more than enough energy food, the biggest threat would be fresh water. We are already draining global aquifers for irrigation which are running dry while climate change will increase total rainfall but clump the rains together causing flooding and periods of drought with no usable water.

Then we have fires which are a serious concern.

But food does more than supply energy. We may not seem to change much year to year but our cells are dying and being replaced on a short time scale.

This requires a whole range of complex chemicals which originate from minerals, which we mine, but are processed so they are bio-available by a complex array of microbes, fungi and plants which we eat as phyto-chemicals.

We are rapidly exhausting some of these basic minerals, particularly phosphorous which is serious but even worse our system of modern agriculture is destroying the microbes and fungi which process these basic minerals into nutrients into the food chain.

This is a genuine threat to our food security but we can still manage on a reasonable time scale.

But there is a third function of food, to power the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies. This may be only a very small proportion of our food intake but is critical, in the way the pilot of a plane is only a minute proportion of the energy used by a modern airliner but it is absolutely vital for the smooth and safe operation of the plane.

Lack of the right food to power our intelligent control system is not some distant threat, it is here and now. The modern epidemic of chronic or non-infectious disease, which causes three out of four deaths is the result of deficiencies in our food system.

This is a problem demanding immediate attention, fortunately we know how to resolve this, at least technically, the solution is simple and savesmoney.

The challenge is to gain attention in the world of hype and disinformation in which we live.

Recycle not exploit

Gbiota technology allows virtually all people to breed beneficial microbes at home in organic waste.

For the best part of a million years humanoid creatures have eaten plants grown in living soil teaming with microbes , both good and bad, but many died from infectious diseases from the bad bugs.  In the Gbiota technology we engineer the conditions so the good bugs out breed and out compete the bad bugs.

Our gut biome is part of our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies. If it has the wrong microbes or senses deficiencies it will send out hormones to make us feel hungry so we overeat and get fat.

Fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.

But there are more important but longer-term implications. We are exhausting the natural resources that feed our food system such as phosphorous but most important is fresh water on which all life depends, and which will be grossly affected by climate change.

The Gbiota technology is based on recycling rather than exploitation of the earth’s natural resources and is particularly efficient in its use of water based on the principles of flood, flush and recycle.

It is hoped that this is appreciated by those concerned about climate change and who are prepared to set up demonstration sites to convince the general public of the importance of recycling.

The web has become so saturated with disinformation that there is widespread scepticism. People  will only be convinced by practical demonstration.

Both industry and Governments are under short-term pressure to act, but regular people have a great concern for the lives of their future children and grandchildren.

Gbiota is a social movement and we look forward to cooperating with those organisations who are active in protecting the future of our planet.

A few tips on using a hip-hop E-book

Reading a hip-hop E-book is a bit different to reading a normal book.

It is dynamic which means that new posts are being added and old ones removed as new information comes to hand and old information becomes obsolete.

Each post is a stand alone post so you can hip-hop around as suits your fancy, however, I do recommend that you read the first half dozen posts in sequence as that will give you a good overview of what Gbiota food is all about.

 Just follow the links as suits you

gbiota.com/2024/08/23/serious-think-about-food/  (home to E-book you are already here)

gbiota.com/2024/09/16/the-plan-2/  (the plan to change our food system, open to all)

gbiota.com/2024/09/13/riddle/  (preface open to all)

gbiota.com/2024/09/13/invite/    (you will need to sign up to access these posts)

gbiota.com/2024/09/11/adoption/

gbiota.com/2024/09/03/disease/

gbiota.com/2024/08/31/recycle/

gbiota.com/technology/

gbiota.com/2024/08/21/think-smarter/

gbiota.com/torch-bearer/

gbiota.com/2024/08/20/food-paradigm-shift/

gbiota.com/2024/08/13/thrive-and-survive-2/

gbiota.com/2024/08/01/smart-young-girl/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/25/soil-blood/  (full members only)

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/23/breeding-wickimix/ (full members only)

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/15/enhancing-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/01/gbiota-overview/

https://gbiota.com/2024/06/29/our-intelligent-control-system/

https://gbiota.com/2024/06/14/the-great-food-war/

https://gbiota.com/2024/06/05/feed-your-gut-brain-2/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/17/food-crisis/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/13/why-we-get-fat/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/12/not-little-piggies/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/25/food-health-and-wealth-for-all/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/14/survival-2/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/13/the-best-pro-biotic-ever/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/try-it-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/true-brain/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/help-me-help-you/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/26/fire-water-and-technology/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/25/fat-and-sick/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/20/health-starts-in-the-soil-4/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/06/what-science-tells-us/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/27/gbiota-movement-4/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/15/survival/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/11/invisible-extinction/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/08/future-of-food/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/21/good-men/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/17/homeostasis/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/17/gbiota-food-for-health/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/13/missinformation/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/08/fat-wrong/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/05/food-waste/

https://gbiota.com/2023/01/05/health-starts-in-the-soil-3/

https://gbiota.com/2022/11/14/health-span/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/24/crazy-world/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/17/no-dumb-donkeys/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/05/how-gbiota-beds-work/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/04/water/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/03/food-and-the-gut-biome/

https://gbiota.com/2022/08/22/health-starts-in-the-soil-2/

https://gbiota.com/2021/11/08/action-plan-for-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2021/10/03/ecobalance/

https://gbiota.com/2021/08/03/anthropocene/

https://gbiota.com/2021/07/02/principles-of-gbiota-beds/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2021/06/02/making-soil/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2021/04/13/making-soil-101/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2020/10/30/the-essence/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2020/09/04/dis-enabling/

https://gbiota.com/2020/08/04/intelligent-control-2/

https://gbiota.com/2020/07/28/sugar-blockers/

https://gbiota.com/2020/07/12/history-of-food/

https://gbiota.com/2020/04/21/making-soil-work/ (members only)

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/paradigm/

Look after our intelligent control system

I want to sell you a concept. It is free you don’t have to pay me anything but you do have to think seriously about it for five minutes and getting anyone to devote five minutes to thinking is a challenge in these modern times.

There are a number of steps to this thinking, the first one is the difference between conscious and subconscious thinking.

Round 1 the cat test

Let’s start with the cat test.

Our eyes are like a camera so the images are upside down but our subconscious brain flips them so we see them right way up. It also combines the images from both eyes into one image and, this is the smart bit, tells us how far things are away and it does all this in a twentieth of a second.

Try to do this using your conscious brain.

Look at this upside-down picture and tell me is the cat brown or black?

Using your conscious brain on the upside-down picture it could take you a couple of minutes to pick out the cat and tell me the colour. I know it will take you two minutes until you work out that I am just a silly old man who likes to play games and there is no cat.

Subconscious and conscious brains

Our subconscious brain is incredibly fast and efficient in doing what it can do.

Impressed? No, well give me another go.

You are walking up a flight of steps, carrying a cup of coffee and trying to console your best friend on your mobile phone.

Your friend is a bit upset (to put it mildly) her son has just failed his final exams, got drunk borrowed your car and smashed it up and is in hospital with a broken leg.

She needed that car to drive to the Airport to take a flight to make a presentation on why her company should win a contract to build the new Olympic stadium and she is already worried that her husband may be cheating on her with the nubile daughter next door who has just developed a pair of incredibly impressive breasts.

In other words, modern life as normal.

But all this time while you are consoling your friend, not spilling your coffee your foot lands perfectly on every step without you even thinking about it.

If you are still not impressed with how effective your subconscious is I give up.

Our subconscious brain and food

Let us now look at food and our subconscious brain as something that happens, maybe in different ways, across every culture on the planet.

We all have to eat and that will usually start with a savoury meal of carbs and protein. Nothing special about this, but now, depending on your culture you may have a piece of fruit, cake, a rice pudding, some chocolate or even in some cultures a glass of port or other sweet liqueurs.

Why? Because you need a lot of rapid energy to help digest that savoury meal and so your subconscious decides that you need this rapid energy so it sends out hormones so you want whatever it is you like that is sweet and full of instant energy.

OK hopefully I have won round one and convinced you that your subconscious is pretty smart but now we go into round 2 which is much more difficult, trying to explain how our subconscious manages to be so smart.

Round 2 why is our subconscious so smart?

Your subconscious has to learn to control many things in your body, temperature, heart-beat, oxygen, immune system, the list goes on and on but what I am interested in is how it controls our food intake, what and how much we eat. Notice the what, it controls what we want to eat as well as how much.

How does it do this? Like the way we learn everything – trial and feedback.

It starts with the very first suck on Mum’s breast. One good suck (and babies suck everything, it is part of their survival kit they are born with.) Feedback, positive or negative, is noted and recorded in babies brain for future reference.

Next time it feels hungry it goes to look up the record, cries to make a lot of noise, a breast appears from nowhere, it sucks away and feels good.

Mission accomplished.

This is the intelligent control system working away in our subconscious.

Baby learns that it needs to eat a lot of protein so it grows very fast.

That’s third isle down on the left in the red and blue packet with a picture of a baby on it. Sorry just joking but it certainly is learning what sort of food it wants.

Actually, that is not quite right, our subconscious intelligent control system learns what we need then sends out hormones so we want to eat that.

There are many hormones that can send out complex messages, it is much more than a full or empty gauge.

This learning goes on throughout life, babies love food that is both sweet and full of nutrients so they can grow as fast as possible and may end up a bit chubby.

In adolescence, they eat huge quantities of food and are typically skinny, or at least used to be until modern foods came along.

In middle age, we don’t need so much food but it takes us some time to learn that so we get a bit of a bum or tum.

By the time we are old, our bodies have learned we don’t need so much food and end up being skinny again.

The point is that this is a lifelong learning experience.

The computer in our tum

I used to write engineering software and we called this a predictor-corrector scheme, make the best guess you can, screw up, hide your screwup so no one sees, and then make a better guess. We also call it adaptive or self-learning but it is the same process screw up, look at the results of the screw up and have another, hopefully, better go.

That is just the way the world works.

People often go on short-term restrictive diets, that are a waste of time and often make things worse, they need to focus on retraining their control system so they want to eat what they need.

It makes life much more pleasant. Remember the old P. G. Wodehouse saying, ‘Giving up wine, women and song does not make you live longer, it just makes it seem longer.’

Recap

So far, this is the easy bit, we are about to go into the difficult bit so lets have a recap of the key points.

All our bodies have a built-in control system which regulates what and how much we want to eat. It is learning from that first suck until we die. While bio-chemistry has gives an in depth understanding of what our bodies need – when it comes to applying this knowledge the most effective way is to focus on training our sub-conscious control system so it tells us what and how much to eat.

Round 3 – The difficult bit with smart bugs

Now comes the difficult bit, hopefully, you have accepted that our subconscious control system is really smart – now I have to convince you that there are really smart bugs which are critical to this subconscious control system.

Have you ever dropped some cake crumbs on the ground and have been too lazy to pick them up? Well, I often feel lazy and am happy to watch the ants come along and remove the crumbs – it is really quite fascinating to watch on a hot sunny afternoon.

Australia in general and my backyard specifically, is ant heaven.

But are they smart? Let me ask you – how many ants have won Nobel prizes? The answer is zero.

An individual ant is not the smartest creature on the globe. They just bobble about in a totally random way with no plan or strategy, none of this dividing an area up into rectangles and sweep searching like the SES do – no just bobble about at random.

But when they find that cake crumb I am too lazy to pick up they leap into intelligent action. One ant will tell another ant, in ant language, which I do not speak. Hey, there are cake crumbs over there and this is the route I used to get there.

Soon there will be thousands of ants busily moving the cake crumbs taking this totally wasteful bobbley route that the first ant took. In no time all the crumbs have been transported back to their home so it works, for them.

Swarm Intelligence

We call this swarm intelligence and before we get feeling superior to the ants I have to say that the biggest uses of swarm intelligence are us humans.

We just love dressing up in Taylor Swift style and going to her concerts by the thousands. We dress that way for a good reason – we can fit in without having to think.

This really works as we don’t have time to solve every problem from scratch.

EUIC

What shall I wear today? The same old T-shirt and shorts I left on the floor last night because I was too lazy to put them away. You may think it is being lazy I call it EUIC as I want to appear trendy with the latest acronym. It is short for Effective Use of Intellectual Capacity.

And it keeps us alive. In and on us are trillions of cells, particularly in our gut. Now you won’t see a particular microbe queuing up to be awarded her PhD but together, with the power of swarm intelligence they do an incredible job in powering our intelligent control system and we would soon be dead without them.

So we need to learn to look after them.

The villain

Every good fairy story needs a beautiful heroine, a brave hero and an evil villain. Sorry, fairy stories came from the era before sexual equality but we now have made up for that with Kyoshi the all-conquering female avatar.

Let us hope that Kamala is Kyoshi in disguise, that will make the world a better place.

It is just a fact of life that there are harmful microbes, or what I call bad bugs as it is quicker to type.

Humans are very good at killing things, even our fellow humans – there is no other creature that kills members of its own species on such a grand scale, not a record we should be proud of.

We are very good at killing microbes, we do it intentionally with things like Covid which is good but we also do it unintentionally by killing beneficial microbes in our food system which is at the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.

So how do we kill the bad bugs without killing the good bugs?

A pretty simple but very important question but with a very simple answer.

Ants and worms

Ants and worms are both ace recyclers.

My garden is full of worms and other beneficial creepy crawlies but rarely do I see any ants in my garden while on my patio I never see any worms but it is inundated with ants.

So why the difference?

On my patio I drop crumbs and tell myself (and my wife) I am studying swarm behaviour even though I know that I am just too lazy to pick them up. It is nice and dry so the ants are more than happy but the worms don’t pop in to say Hi!

In my garden, I am using the Gbiota flood and flush system so it is maintained at the Goldilocks moisture level which is the key to the Gbiota system. The worms love it but the ants do not.

The only difference is the conditions. You don’t have to be a wizkid in microbiology – just know how to control the conditions – the food and moisture levels.

Simply by controlling the conditions the beneficial microbes breed happily away out-competing and out-breeding the harmful microbes.

That is what Gbiota is all about

Create the conditions in the soil to breed beneficial microbes without the harmful ones.

The microbes go into the plants and then into our gut to form so our gut biome is filled with beneficial biota which then forms part of our intelligent control system which sends out hormones which make us want to eat the food that we need.

But we are aiming to create a shift in the food paradigm so people think about food in a different as is described in the various articles.

But the food industry is very skilful in using flavourings to make their food taste good. But the flavour industry uses synthetic flavours which are deliberately targeted to be addictive – they are in business to make money.

It is not possible to compete against that with a week-old cabbage so we focus on food which is eaten shortly after picking when the natural flavours are at a peak and

As a final ps, we do cheat a bit. A week old cabbage is really pretty boring so we grow a variety of plants including herbs, like basil, thyme, oregano, thyme etc which brings a wider variety of microbial species into the system and just makes the food so much more attractive to eat.

Food paradigm shift

I have decided to include this in my hip-hop dynamic book even though I probably should not as I wrote this in a state of fury so you may be better to use the skip button above.

The Internet Advising Industry seems to think that the entire world has the attention span of a cabbage moth.

If you decide to read on you will see that it is essential that I establish working relationship with serious thinking people who full understand the importance of our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies.

The failure of this control system is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic disease which is the prime cause of premature death in 70-80% of cases.

I know such people exist but they despite all the wonders of the internet and modern intelligence system they seem unable of unwilling to locate such people – hence by fury.

Here is what I wrote

I have received an offer from internet marketing experts to redesign my web to enhance the marketing. I thought I would temporarily publish my reply on the home page.

Here it is:-

Web design

Many thanks for your offer to redesign my web to improve the customer experience which will bring many thousands of visitors to my site.

I am trying to create a food paradigm shift, I am one of the few people who have hands on experience in creating a paradigm shift so from hard experience let me tell you how paradigm shifts occur in the real world.

Imagine you create this beautiful web which is focused on the forthcoming food crisis and many thousands of people visit the site.

Food crisis

They will see the words food crisis and say what crisis? – the Supermarkets are just overflowing with food.

And they are nearly right. Currently, the total amount of food produced globally is approaching 5 billion tonnes. That is more than enough to feed the entire world population now and into the future. The food industry is one of the world’s largest industries, controlled by large corporations who spend millions of dollars on improving the technology.

The rate of increase of food production exceeds the increase in the world’s population and despite all the threats from climate change, degradation of our soils, and exhaustion of essential minerals there will still be enough food in absolute terms.

Not what you expected

There is a coming food crisis but not what people expect and all people need to understand the nature of this coming food crisis.

So the challenge is how do I get this message out to the public at large.

I have to learn from my previous paradigm shift which was about flow into moulds.

This occurs in flow channels and the conventional wisdom and accepted practise was that the bigger the flow channel the easier the mould would fill – just plain obvious and common sense – right?

I went around the world giving lectures to many hundreds of experienced engineers and what they heard (but not what I said) was that these flow channels should be made smaller not bigger.

Of course, most thought this was ridiculous and I was some sort of lunatic from a country with Kangaroos hopping down the main street and I needed to be put into a straight jacket.

People may not hear what you say

But only a very few people actually heard what I said which was that if you make some flow channels smaller this will deflect the flow away from the easy to fill areas into the more difficult to fill areas.

I had also developed some sophisticated Computer Aided Engineering flow simulations which enabled engineers to calculate how much smaller these flow channels needed to be.

I don’t think any of these pioneering engineers who heard what I said believed me at first but they were sufficiently intrigued to go away and tested it and I was right – it worked. The ultimate test is does it work?

These pioneering engineers then started to tell other engineers that this worked and soon there was an industry wide paradigm shift.

Not me – them

I could never have achieved that myself, how much time and effort I had put into promotion I could never have achieved this paradigm shift. These earlier pioneers were essential and they, not me created the paradigm shift.

This is the way science and technology works, by other scientists and technologist testing the innovative technology independently to test if it really does work.

I was eventually recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators but it was not me that created the paradigm shift it was those early pioneers who saw the potential and demonstrated beyond doubt that this really did work.

Food crisis affects everyone

Now there really is a food crisis coming and this affects everyone on this earth – we all have to eat. We do need a food paradigm shift but however clever and flash my marketing or attractive my web site this will not create this essential paradigm shift.

That will be achieved by other food pioneers who test my technology for themselves, shows it works, then demonstrate to the wide world that this works.

Must talk directly

So my web is for me to talk directly to these food pioneers and help them understand and apply the technology. Then there will be wide spread adoption across the globe, not because of clever marketing but because it works.

My job now is to find and connect to those food pioneers and I need to do this promptly before the food crisis hits.

Food for our intelligent control system

The crisis is not an absolute shortage of food but a shortage of the food that powers our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies so we naturally want to eat the right amount of the right sort of food which is the whole point of this new technology.

I am not a medical doctor, nutritionist of bio-chemist – I am an engineer and engineers design and build machines and every machine has some sort of control system – some a simple on/off switch other a highly sophisticated control system.

Control Systems for Power stations

My first job after qualifying was in a company making control systems for power stations which taught me a useful lesson about control systems.

Power systems have sophisticated control systems but they don’t always work as hoped. A classic story is the case of the football half time break.

People watching the match at home take the break to make a cuppa putting an abrupt strain on the power system which even the sophisticated computer system could not anticipate, it took a human to realise what what going on and manually anticipate the surge in demand. Humans are very good at conceptual thinking while computers are far superior at mechanical thinking.

Intelligent control software for irrigation

Later in life I wrote up some intelligent irrigation control software which gave me an understanding of how the human intelligent control system works.

Irrigation is actually a very difficult problem as the plants, the season and the weather are continuously changing so there are no pre-prepared plans. What is needed is to monitor many factors particularly soil moisture evaporation and rainfall, and water applied over previous irrigations and particularly the predicted evaporation and rainfall.

It is then possible to learn how this system works and predict how much water to apply – an early version of self learning software.

We have an intelligent control system

But this gives us a model for how the human intelligent control system works. From the first suck on Mums breasts we are monitoring what we eat and what the effect is, our control system (our gut-brain) learns which and how much food work for us and ensures we naturally want to eat the right amount of the right sort of food.

In the old food paradigm we nutritionist calculate out to the micro-gram how much of each of the essential nutrients based on an estimate of how much we need. That is not wrong but is only a partial view of how our bodies work.

New paradigm – feed our intelligent control system

In the new paradigm we focus on ensuring our inbuilt intelligent control system, which has worked nicely for a million years or so until we developed hygienic but inert modern ultra processed foods, and works as evolution has determined is best for us.

It has much in common with the intelligent irrigation system which aims to regulate the amount of water applied based on the water used by the plants rather than some formulae based on crop factors derived from generic data.

A war we must win

The failure of our intelligent control system causes more deaths than all the other causes of death, including Covid, Mpox and all those horrible deaths from war.

It is the biggest hazard facing humanity and rises above the need of any internet marketing fashions. It is a war we must win and than requires the right strategy which is forming this alliance with like minded people.

The job at hand is to make contact with those early food pioneers so they can recognise the importance of our intelligent control system and can make this the new paradigm.

Note – I am trying a new way of dynamic posts so one post covers a total topic.  Instead of writing new posts I will update and print in red the new sections

Food crisis?

Every day far more energy than we need falls as sunlight. Plants convert this energy into carbohydrates by breaking down the water and extracting carbon dioxide from the air. As long as we have water, there will be an excess of energy food.

But in our inert, triple plastic food system, we are short of food for our intelligent control system – our gut brain. This deficiency is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases.

The prime aim of this web is to create a social movement to create a fundamental change in our food system. Please join or email me. But in the short term, you can learn how to grow your own gut-brain food.

Preface

We have, at the most, fifty years to change our food system from one based on exploiting our natural resources to one based on recycling.

We may go to the Supermarket and see the shelves stacked with food from around the world, we are producing and shipping at least two billions tons of food every year. It is difficult to believe that there could be a problem.

But we can’t wait for forty nine years and then make the switch from exploitation to recycling.

We are already experiencing the effects of a failing food system. It lacks critical nutrients and biota to feed our gut-brain. Our intelligent control system senses this deficiency and sends out hormones making us hungry so we overeat.

The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases – obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

It is a here and now problem and we need to act.

Our Governments will play a critical role but in a democratic society, they are controlled by public opinion.

The first aim of this web is to inform the public of the dangers of doing nothing and explain how we need to change so they can influence our Governments.

The second aim is to explain the changes we have to make. We have the technology right now but we have to apply it.

I have been writing about this for years and if I am realistic there are so many articles that it is confusing so I am trying a new tack for the information age – a dynamic web which I will change regularly to give a condensed version.

I have called this Thrive and Survive but I will keep archived versions of all my articles available for those who want to go deeper.

We live in the virtual world of fake food

It is making us fat and sick and killing us

Our food system is on the brink of collapse

Soon millions of starving refugees will be

crossing boundaries causing chaos

It does not have to be that way

Join me in the world of real food

Live a long and healthy life

Thrive and survive

Let me show you how

Thrive and survive (Summary)

At the start, the earth was just a dead inert rock. Then the microbiota appeared, we don’t know from where, but they broke down the rocks making the nutrients in the rocks bio-available creating soil. Plants grew capturing energy from the sun, then animals and life on earth exploded.

Humanoid creatures appeared but they were small and puny. They developed a gut, full of trillions of biota which communicated with each other to provide intelligence, just like a modern computer, which regulated what and how much they wanted to eat and also taught their immune system.

They learned to manage fire and cook which led to massive brains and they started to invent things – spears, bows and arrows, followed by agriculture which led to city states.

Living close together and with poor hygiene many died from infectious diseases but they used their big brains to develop sewage and clean water systems and medicines and the population size exploded.

To feed this increase in population they refined their agriculture using chemicals to fertilise the soil and toxic chemicals to protect their plants from weeds and pests. It was highly in successful producing plenty of food.

But there were fewer microbes to make the nutrients in the soil bio-available and power the intelligent control system which regulated their bodies so people overate and got fat and sick creating a new modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases – obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

The infectious diseases had been swapped for non-infectious diseases.

But worse this system relied on mining and the exploitation of the earth’s natural resources with the threat of global famines, mass starvation and the collapse of their comfortable civilisation.

But ever inventive humans realised they needed a new technology and learned to breed beneficial microbes which out competed and out bred the harmful microbes something they had learned by studying nature and they called Eco-balance. Just manage the condition so the beneficial microbes win.

And they learned to do this using organic waste so the nutrients came from recycling rather than exploitation.

This is what we call the Gbiota technology

But people had to accept this new technology which meant a paradigm shift in how they thought about food.

But they had also invented what is probably the greatest innovation of all times – the Internet – where people can access information from across the world.

But sadly the internet had become saturated with misinformation so people were sceptical about what they read on the internet. So they said it is no good just telling people we have to show people that this works for real so we must ask innovative people who care about the future of their species to set up Gbiota boxes and beds and show people that this works.

And that is why we invite you to join the Gbiota social movement and help change the world for the better, we call it Thrive and Survive.

Life on earth

Gbiota is a technology for growing healthy food sustainably.

It is based on the principle of Eco-balance.

The first living creatures on earth were microbes. They broke down rocks to produce soil with bio-available nutrients which allowed plants, then animals, including us humans, to evolve. We are totally dependent on microbes.

But there are also harmful microbes which make us sick or kill us. We have developed an array of chemicals, many toxic, to provide nutrients for our plants and to protect them and us from these harmful microbes, but these have also killed off the beneficial microbes which are essential for life.

Eco-balance is the technology of creating the conditions that suit the beneficial microbes so they out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.

We know how to do this, it is a simple technology which is readily applied.

Technology should work for the benefit of the community but that is not the way it currently works.  Technology benefits a very small minority of people making them obscenely wealthy.

If humanity is to survive the food crisis we need a few entrepreneurial thinking people to take the initiative and demonstrate to the world that this is the way humanity will thrive and prosper.

Words aren’t enough

I have written hundreds of articles about sustainable and healthy food production, some are my attempts to treat a serious subject with humour others technical which may only be appreciated by someone with the right background.

But words won’t avoid the food crisis, that takes action.

So all I ask is for you to set up your own Gbiota beds or boxes, start incorporating plants with essential minerals and beneficial microbes into your diet and if you find that if you feel satisfied so no longer want to keep on eating just tell a friend or two.

That way will avoid the looming food disaster which won’t be solved by big business or government but by people dedicated to making the world a better place.

This will also save you money, this is not a solution just for the rich, to work it must be available to everyone.

Gbiota – the essence

Gbiota may appear to be about growing plants, and it is true we do grow plants but that is just a means to an end.

We all have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, its main purpose is to regulate what and how much food we eat, decide how much food we need to eat for energy and to replace our body parts as they age and wear, but it also controls our immune system.

This is a combination of our head and gut brains. Our guts have trillions of cells which communicate with each other just like in a computer. It starts learning about food from the first suck on mum’s breasts and continues throughout our lives.

For our intelligent control system to work we need the right sort of microbes in our gut and we have to feed them.

If we do not feed them we may overeat and get fat and sick. The underlying cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious disease is that we are not feeding our gut-brain as our modern food system is lacking the critical minerals we need and is sterile lacking the fresh microbes.

Gbiota breeds the beneficial microbes in the soil which enter the plants that we eat. But we need to control the conditions carefully, if it is to dry the microbes and the plants will not grow, if it is to wet harmful microbes will breed and we will get sick. We need to have just the right moisture level – Goldilocks moisture.

With this Goldilocks moisture the microbes will breed and break down the minerals we add to the soil to feed them and us the essential minerals and create the right conditions in our gut for the beneficial microbes to breed and our intelligent control system to work properly.

Thrive and survive

Growing food – my thing

Everyone has their thing. My thing is in how to grow food sustainably that will enhance health.

It all started in WW2 when I was a toddler and was used as child labour to grow food.

My job was to dunk pots into a brew of chicken manure, flood and drain – that is the basis of modern-day flood and flush.

There are two aspects to this, short-term and long-term.

In the short term modern food is deficient in critical microbiology and minerals. Our bodies have an intelligence, sense this deficiency and sends out hormones to make us hungry so we overeat.

Fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases, overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

This is going to be resolved by changing the food growing system rather than a medical approach which may relieve the systems but does not address the underlying cause.

In the longer term, we are facing food challenges from climate change and degradation of our soils. It is based on the exploitation of natural resources rather than recycling and we only have fifty years left of key minerals such as phosphorous.

We have to change from a system based on exploitation to one based on recycling. If we don’t make that change the comfortable civilisation which we currently enjoy will be under severe stress from hungry and angry people moving within and across national borders.

I have spent the last thirty years developing technological solutions to these twin issues.

The real threat – marketing bullshit

It is my job to try and solve these two problems. It is not easy but it can be done.

The real problem is differentiating between the real world and propaganda (or marketing).

I am a dull boring engineer, I solve problems. You may like to read my article Smart Young Lady.

I know how we can substantially reduce the eight million amputations a year that diabetics suffer.

This is going to be resolved by changing the food growing system rather than a medical approach which may relieve the symptoms but does not address and resolve the underlying cause.

The longer-term problem of a collapse of our food system from climate change and degradation of our soils is more challenging but still soluble.

As a dull boring engineer, I can look at the amount of energy falling on the earth each day. It dwarfs all the energy used by mankind. Fortunately most of that energy is reflects back out to space for the benefit of some little green men in some faraway galaxy or we would all be burned to a cinder.

That energy can be used by plants that extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, break the bonds in water to form energy-rich carbohydrates we use as energy food.

OK, we need other foods to replace our body parts as they age and wear but that is soluble by recycling.

Dull boring articles

As a dull boring engineer, I write long dull boring articles on how we can solve these problems and naturally I want to tell the world about these solutions.

But I like everyone have a range of capabilities and marketing is not one of those, as a marketer I am a pretty good engineer.

So I do the sensible thing and seek the advice of marketing experts thinking naively that in this information age of the internet that this will be simple.

But the marketing experts advising me cringe in horror at my ignorance and do their best to inform this dull boring engineer.

Many people are complaining about the cost of food. They may not realise that the cost of producing food is only a small proportion of the cost we pay in the Supermarket, often as low as 20%. The rest of the cost in other other activities – particularly marketing and packaging.

They need to do that so we buy food which is intrinsically unhealthy.

What a wonderful world we live in.

The virtual world

They explain there is now two worlds, the virtual world which is fun and happy with nubile young people frolicking in waterfalls and just enjoying their virtual existence and the real world which is where all the horrible things happen.

They tell me that if I want to use the Internet to solve the problems of the world I must adopt the rules of the virtual world and not talk about bad things like people having their legs amputated from diabetes or masses of hungry, starving, angry people flooding across borders.

In the virtual world people just want to hear about happy things and no one will want to hear about bad things and if I persist I will probably find my access blocked.

A bit of a worry

For me, this is a bit of a worry. I watch the news and see people killing each other all over the world and ask myself why. I understand full well that humans are the dominant creature on earth for two reasons – we are intelligent and naturally cooperative.

In my younger days, I used to drive out to some remote regions, if you got bogged and you were lucky enough that someone came along there is no way they would leave your there and would pull you out of the bog.

We are naturally a cooperative creature, it is built into us (or at least most of us).

So why is there so much violence in the world? For thousands of years, aggressive leaders have whipped up anger in their tribes to attack and kill humans in other tribes (and steal their women).

I write many articles on this like My Teddy and The Great Food War

But the advent of the Internet and the virtual world has changed the scale, so what do we do about it?

I am not being insensitive when I say stop worrying about those eight million people a year who have a leg amputated or those many millions of starving people who will be flooding across the borders.

There will always be some dull boring engineer who will find technical solutions.

The real threat is not seeing the difference between the virtual and real world.

Finding the solutions

So how do we solve these real-world problems?

We have to change from a system based on exploitation to one based on recycling. If we don’t make that change the comfortable civilisation which we currently enjoy will be under severe stress from hungry and angry people moving within and across national borders.

I have spent the last thirty years developing technological solutions to these twin issues.

That is what dull boring engineers do – find solutions to real-world problems.

Experimenting with growing food sustainably

I have been experimenting for over thirty years to find better ways of sustainably growing plants to improve health. The result is the Gbiota technology.

There is a lot of research on what are the best foods for health and also a lot of research on the best way to grow plants for maximum production but how to grow plants for health is a neglected area yet the quality of our food is very dependent on the soil it is grown in and what is known as the horticultural protocol.

Microbes and fungi play an important role, they process minerals in the soil to make them bio-available to the plants and enhance our gut health when we eat the plants.

The latest research shows just how important gut health is for our overall health not just physically but our mental health and feeling of well being.

But it is one thing to develop the technology, it is even more of a challenge to persuade people to change their eating routines. This is even more difficult in this information age which is saturated with manipulative advertising focused on profit rather than community health.

I was a pioneer in Computer Aided Engineering developing technologies which changed the industry for which I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of the country’s leading innovators.

The company I created became the leading exporter of technical software from Australia and was a world leader in its particular area.

But this did teach me about the process of getting new technologies accepted.

It is simply no good running major marketing campaigns, particularly in this modern era of disinformation, people just don’t believe what they read online.

The key to the adoption of any new technology is to find the social entrepreneurial people, who see the critical importance of a secure and sustainable food system, and are prepared to try the technology themselves to show it works.

These will be the sort of people who won’t be taken in by the marketing bullshit but will try it and test if it works for them.

If it works they will tell others and then the technology will gain acceptance.

Fortunately, it is obvious that it is working as people feel satisfied and are no longer craving food.

How to get new solutions accepted

But this did teach me about the process of getting new technologies accepted.

It is simply no good running major marketing campaigns, particularly in this modern era of disinformation, people just don’t believe what they read on-line.

The key to the adoption of any new technology is to find the entrepreneurial people who are are prepared to try the technology.

These will be the sort of people who wont be taken in by the marketing bullshit but will try it and test if it works for themselves.

If it works they will tell others and then the technology will gain acceptance.

Fortunately it is obvious that it is working as people feel satisfied and are no longer craving food.

My current aim is to attract the interest of these entrepreneurs to form a team to take this technology to the eight billion people on this planet.

Ask yourself these questions.

Which is more important – the profits of a handful of Neo-monopolist mega corporations or community health?

Are you prepared to spend a bit of time learning about flood and flush (the key technology behind the Gbiota system), make your own Gbiota bed or box, eat fresh Gbiota food for a month and if you see real benefits tell your friends?

If so just have a good read then drop me an email.

If this is you please contact me at colin@gbiota.com

Making the change

It is easy to get emotional about mega food companies making profits by supplying food that leads to us having our legs chopped off with diabetes and Governments that take no action, is all that true? I am a dull boring engineer and what matters is the end result. So what are the facts?

We live on a little ball spinning around our sun. Every now and again a meteorite comes from outer space but the mass is minute compared with the mass of the earth so we can say it is negligible and the minerals on the earth are fixed.

We cannot say the same thing about energy. Every day the sun delivers a huge amount of energy. It is not well understood how much energy comes from the sun but it is huge in comparison with the amount of energy used in all ways by humans and totally dwarfs the energy that powers our bodies.

Fortunately, most of that energy is reflected back into outer space or else we would all be fried to a cinder.

When the earth was formed some four billion years ago it was just dead rocks but after a billion years or so microbes which appeared from somewhere started to break down the rocks or form soil in which plants started to grow.

These plants collected a huge amount of energy from the sun which was made more soil and plants and then animals – an explosion of life which eventually led to humanoid creatures about a million years ago.

We ate plants but then we discovered how to use fire and cook which made nutrients more digestible and we changed dramatically – our guts shrank and we developed huge brains and started to invent things. At first spears, then bows and arrows, then fibre for clothes and fishing lines.

We were pretty puny creatures in comparison with some of the other creatures that roamed the earth and to survive we had to form tribes for protection.

Tribes had leaders which we were happy to follow, it was a simple question of life or death. This tribal characteristic still forms part of our nature which is why we seem to be so aggressive to members of other tribes killing them was seen to be a virtue.

Then we developed agriculture which led to the formation of city states, people lived in relatively close proximity and became very prone to diseases which kept the population numbers low. Three out of five babies would die before the age of five and another in their teens. But if you reached the age of thirty then you could expect to live a lot longer and die of old age.

Food was an issue but there was plenty of land and despite deaths from famines we managed to struggle through despite the high death rate.

Then we used our big brains, we improved both medicine and hygiene so we stopped dying from infectious diseases at such an alarming rate and the population exploded.

This is not something out of the history book it has happened in little more than my lifetime where the population has tripled.

All those extra mouths had to be filled so we got our big brains out of the cupboard to develop better ways of growing food and we were spectacularly successful in increasing our food production far faster than the increase in population.

We were extraordinarily successful in harvesting the energy that fell from the sun producing energy food to provide us with energy.

Let us not be rude to the nutrition scientists but it really does not matter what food we use as fuel, it is just fuel and the bulk of the food, about 80% we just burn off as fuel.

But like many good things there was nasty side effects. The problem was not what was in the food, it was all good energy food but what was missing from the food, specifically the beneficial microbes which power our gut brain and the minerals and phytonutrients which are needed to feed both us and the microbes.

Our intelligent control system, which regulates our bodies, particularly our appetite, (but also our immune system) detected these deficiencies and so sent our hormones so we felt hungry and overate leading to an epidemic of chronic non-infectious diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

We had swapped infectious diseases for non-infectious disease.

That is what motivated me to develop the Gbiota technology, and the solution turned out to be very simple. Simply create the conditions that favour the beneficial microbes so they out compete and out breed the harmful microbes.

This breeding is done in organic waste which solves another problem, it is replacing the extractions of the minerals which we are exhausting by recycling waste.

This is the way we will thrive and survive.

We do not have to replace our existing food system which generates some five billion tonnes of food each year just supplement it with living Gbiota food.

It is simple, and inexpensive so any one can do it.

But we live in an era where the internet is saturated with fake information. The solution to that is for people who understand this to set up their own Gbiota beds at home, show it works which is easy – just see if the food cravings are reduced – then tell other people.

This is what the Gbiota social movement is all about.

The big threat

If you asked me what is the biggest threat facing humanity what would you expect me to say?

If you knew that one of my earliest memories was Mum digging up the lawn to grow food in WW2 and since then, for some 84 years I have been studying how to grow healthy food sustainably you would expect me to say sustainable food production.

And you would be dead wrong. We know how to grow enough food to feed the entire population of the world so we can thrive and survive, now and well into the future.

That is not the problem, the real problem is what is probably the greatest technical innovation of our generation – the Internet. Well not the internet itself, it still amazes me that most people can now access the world’s information.

The problem is the way the Internet has become so saturated with dubious information and manipulative marketing that people now believe you can solve any problem, however complex and challenging, like feeding ten billion people with food that will keep them healthy, with a thirty second scan.

Well, the world does not work that way, we can provide the world with food that will keep them fit and healthy but not with a thirty second scan and a cute slogan. Read my story of the smart young girl.

All I can do is provide the information, people, that’s you and me, decide what we put in our mouths, not big business or Governments.

Three action steps

We need to change from exploitation to recycling. Recycling is not a new concept – it has been the way the world has worked for the last few billion years. The patents have well and truly expired.

We tend to think of recycling as microbes composting and that works but it is not the way that most natural system works.

Microbes certainly recycle but there is a bigger army of recyclers, worms in the wet conditions, ants in the dry and a whole range of beetles and also birds.

That pigeon clearing up under your trendy city cafe table is doing a great job of recycling, even if does poop on your shoe.

This wide array of creatures may do some of the crunching but much of the final processing is done in their gut biome, which often resembles ours. This is particularly valuable as their poop enters the soil, then the plants and finally reinforces our gut biota, which is what Gbiota is all about.

But how do we make use of this to save our world from collapsing.

There are three steps we can take.

Grow food at home in Gbiota boxes.

The first is easy, just persuade people to start growing some of their food at home in Gbiota boxes. This is cheaper and much healthier than buying from the supermarket – we just have to get the message out.

This is what I have been researching for many years now.

Manure

Next, we can persuade our farmers to reprocess out waste, particularly both animal and human manure.

But we need to develop a bit of technology hear as we don’t want to just spread this on the surface. We are fighting a continues battle between the good bugs and the bad bugs, so not this way shown.

We need to develop some machinery with an auger and slurry tank so the manure is buried deep in the soil where the beneficial microbes can process it safely. Not difficult for any farm machinery manufacturer.

This should not be such a challenge as it is cheaper than the ever increasing cost of fertiliser.

Urban farms

If we are going to have a nation of people with a healthy gut biota we need to change our city planning to allow for local growing of some plants. This way people have have plants which are harvested and eaten without delay, which is the greatest weakness of our modern food system.

Fresh means living – not gone rotten. An important difference.

This worked spectacularly well in Cuba during the sanctions where they developed an effective system of urban agriculture when under political stress.

We have a different stress now from chronic diseases – we just have to recognise the harm of our modern food system.

My plea

So my plea to these entrepreneurial types is simple. Don’t believe all the marketing bullshit or even what I tell you.

Set up some Gbiota boxes, start incorporating some Gbiota grown food into your diet and just monitor how you feel. Nothing complex, no special tests just ask yourself the simple question “Do I feel satisfied and am no longer craving food?”

You can do some scientific test if you like by measuring how much weight you have lost or how often you go to the toilet (sorry but your use of toilet paper will increase – just buy yourself a bidet).

And if the answer is yes then just tell other people. This is the way we will avoid all those amputations from diabetes and those hoards of starving people crossing borders in search of food.

Woke green activist

You may get called a woke green activist. People try and insult me all the time with that phrase, I take it as a compliment and feel good that I am a woke green activist and so should you. You are making the world a much better place for you and your great-grandchildren.

Not a bad feeling.

There is them that do and them that follow – if you are a doer join me – do it for yourself or do it for your grandkids

We are a social movement to change our food system so we thrive and survive.  Why not drop me an email and tell me about your interest in food and health first.

 Smart young girl

There is a nice story about a smart young lady who stalled her ageing car on a busy road.

Try as she might she could not get the car started and soon there was a monster traffic jam. The man in the car behind started to blow his horn in a furious rage, she did not know what to do so she went to the car behind and said very politely “Excuse me, sir, would you like to try and start my car while I sit in your car and blow the horn”.

But let me make a sequel, a quiet, dull, boring engineer a couple of cars back, came along, lifted the bonnet and went through a series of checks, taking out the sparking plugs – yes there was a spark, was the fuel getting through – yes there was fuel.

So he diagnosed the carburettor was flooded, spun the engine a few times, put the spark plugs back and brrm brrm the car started and everyone drove off, very relieved.

Now why do I tell this story? Because we are facing a far worse crisis than a traffic jam – the future failure of our food system. We have just fifty years’ supply of some critical minerals, like phosphorous, remaining which will certainly cause a collapse of the food system – that is unless climate change and degradation of our soils have not already caused collapse.

I am not a noisy type, I don’t march in protest movements or climb tall buildings to hoist protest flags, thats me I am a quiet, dull, boring engineer, but I can work through problems systematically to find solutions that work.

I was a toddler in the Second World War when food was critical to survival. I watched as women (the men were away), dug up the lawns, nature strips and common land to grow food, and it worked.

Later in life being a quiet, dull boring engineer, who plodded through difficult problems in a step-by-step way, turned out to be quite useful. I was selected as one of the leading innovators by the Institute of Engineers for my pioneering work on computer-aided engineering.

But then I asked myself what was the biggest problem facing humanity? The answer was simple. How are we going to feed the ten billion that will inhabit the world in a sustainable way.

Working through the problem in a step-by-step way gave some reassurance.

Every day, for the last four billion years, the sun has delivered vast quantities of energy to the earth. Numbers with so many 000 that it is difficult to comprehend and vastly in excess of all the energy used by all humans.

Fortunately, most of that energy is reflected back into outer space or both you and me would be dried up cinders, so we are safe, at least until we stop reflecting that heat.

Plants use this energy, by photosynthesis, they take carbon dioxide from the air and water from the soil, breaking the carbon and hydrogen bonds to produce compounds, such as carbohydrates, which contain large amounts of energy that we can use as food.

We can expect that this will continue for many more billions of years, so we can stop worrying about energy food.

But there is a sting in the tail. The bulk of the food we need to eat may be energy food but like a car needs more than just energy fuel, we need a whole array of complex chemicals and microbes to be fit and healthy.

Our bodies need replacement food to rebuild our body parts as they wear or age.

And this is the sting, we are running out of these minerals. To survive we need to change our food system from one based on exploitation of our natural resources to one based on recycling.

So for the last thirty years, yours truly – this quiet, dull boring engineer – has been experimenting with ways of growing food sustainably. This involves experiments with compost, bugs and waste entirely appropriate for a quiet dull, boring engineer.

The result is the Gbiota system, a growing system which will keep us fit and healthy in a sustainable way.

But we can’t just wait for forty-nine years and in fifty years take action.

Right now we are seeing the harmful effects of a diet with a poor balance between energy and replacement foods. Our bodies are intelligent and can sense the lack of replacement foods so it sends out hormones to make us feel hungry so we eat more.

The net result is we overeat and get fat and sick. The underlying cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases (like obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia) is the wrong fat in the wrong place.

We cannot just sit around for forty-nine years saying there is plenty of food in the supermarkets. Of course there is, but it is missing what keeps us fit and healthy.

So this quiet, dull, boring engineer may have the solution but solutions are no use unless they are applied for the benefit of the community.

There was a time when the Internet was an amazing way of getting important information out to the public.

Unfortunately, the Internet has now been largely taken over by the internet marketers who run a standardised sausage factory where success is achieved by the latest marketing gimmick rather than the importance of the content. People now only believe what they hear from someone they trust.

To create awareness of the need to change our food system we need people who are not quiet, dull and boring.

We need people who are willing to start using the Gbiota system, see for themselves that they are no longer craving food but feel satisfied and then go out and tell their friends how they can be fit and healthy by eating food grown sustainably.

So if that is you please pick up the torch and go out into the world, tell people that there is more to food than energy – they need replacement food and this is the way we will not just survive but be fit and healthy for generations ahead.

List of all files – latest first

gbiota.com/2024/08/21/think-smarter/

gbiota.com/2024/08/20/food-paradigm-shift/

gbiota.com/2024/08/13/thrive-and-survive-2/

gbiota.com/2024/08/01/smart-young-girl/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/25/soil-blood/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/23/breeding-wickimix/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/15/tim-spector/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/15/enhancing-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/14/library/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/13/real-food/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/12/making-a-gbiota-box-july-24/

https://gbiota.com/2024/07/01/gbiota-overview/

https://gbiota.com/2024/06/29/our-intelligent-control-system/

https://gbiota.com/2024/06/14/the-great-food-war/

https://gbiota.com/2024/06/07/growers-wanted/

https://gbiota.com/2024/06/05/feed-your-gut-brain-2/

https://gbiota.com/2024/05/07/community-benefit/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/30/does-it-work/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/25/getting-started-2/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/24/making-a-gbiota-box/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/22/save-100000-legs-from-diabetic-amputation/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/17/food-crisis/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/15/newsletter-15-april-24/ (your turn)

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/14/user-posts/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/13/why-we-get-fat/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/12/not-little-piggies/

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/10/eco-balance/ growing

https://gbiota.com/2024/04/02/compost-bin-or-bury/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/25/food-health-and-wealth-for-all/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/21/why-we-need-to-act/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/18/gbiota-boxes-made-easy/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/14/survival-2/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/18/support-plastic-sheeting/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/13/the-best-pro-biotic-ever/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/09/11396/ (Food matters)

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/06/hello/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/05/gbiota-101/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/03/gbiota-overview-2024/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/try-it-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/true-brain/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/fire-and-food/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/conflict-and-aggression/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/modern-epidemic/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/help-me-help-you/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/26/fire-water-and-technology/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/25/fat-and-sick/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/20/health-starts-in-the-soil-4/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/11/try-it/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/08/inoculants/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/06/what-science-tells-us/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/27/gbiota-movement-4/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/20/gbiota-soil/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/17/about-gbiota-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/16/tribox-story/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/15/survival/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/12/gbiota-meaning/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/11/invisible-extinction/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/08/gbiota-intro/

https://gbiota.com/2023/10/29/gbiota-biobox-practise/

https://gbiota.com/2023/10/29/gbiota-biobox-theory/

https://gbiota.com/2023/10/03/what-plants-to-grow/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/26/why-we-need-to-change/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/22/our-choice/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/20/tribox-how-to/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/18/gbiota-tri-box-intro/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/08/future-of-food/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/24/gbiota-easy-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/21/good-men/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/17/homeostasis/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/17/gbiota-food-for-health/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/10/how-to-gpots/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/25/diabetes-project/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/25/about-us/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/13/missinformation/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/13/diabetes-gut-food-project/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/12/growing-gut-food-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/30/gut-and-diabetes/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/30/qldgov/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/19/newsletter-19th-june-23/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/16/bill-bryson/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/14/gbiota-movement-3/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/08/fat-wrong/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/05/food-waste/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/02/people-over-profits/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/02/real-and-fantasy/

https://gbiota.com/2023/05/18/invite-to-medical-research/

https://gbiota.com/2023/05/15/lamborghini-and-our-gut/

https://gbiota.com/2023/05/04/the-wickimix-story/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/24/feed-your-brains/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/17/unks-and-ununks/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/09/sues-story/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/09/upgraded-beds-introduction/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/04/upgraded-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/02/new-posts/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/02/welcome/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/02/food-for-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/28/the-food-crisis/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/21/chat-with-george/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/19/george/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/13/marys-mini/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/08/the-side-hustle/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/08/it-worked/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/08/frustration/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/02/our-gut/

https://gbiota.com/2023/02/27/our-gut-brain-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/02/13/what-is-the-gbiota-project/

https://gbiota.com/2023/02/13/what-is-it-all-about/

https://gbiota.com/2023/02/01/the-story-of-our-guts/

https://gbiota.com/2023/01/10/better-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2023/01/05/health-starts-in-the-soil-3/

https://gbiota.com/2022/12/15/gbiota-bed-update-4-dec-2022/

https://gbiota.com/2022/12/11/overview-2/

https://gbiota.com/2022/12/07/diabetes-trial/

https://gbiota.com/2022/11/14/health-span/

https://gbiota.com/2022/11/10/trench-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2022/11/02/gbiota-boxes-update/

https://gbiota.com/2022/11/01/wwwww/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/31/the-plan/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/24/food-and-floods/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/24/crazy-world/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/21/key-points/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/17/no-dumb-donkeys/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/14/soaker-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/12/in-grounds-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/10/food-for-health-3/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/10/community-food-2/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/05/welcome-to-worm-pooh/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/05/how-gbiota-beds-work/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/04/water/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/03/food-and-the-gut-biome/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/03/prologue/

https://gbiota.com/2022/08/22/health-starts-in-the-soil-2/

https://gbiota.com/2022/08/16/action-plan/

https://gbiota.com/2022/07/19/bit-of-a-mess/

https://gbiota.com/2022/07/16/community-growers/

https://gbiota.com/2022/07/13/meet-you/

https://gbiota.com/2022/07/06/bioboxes/

https://gbiota.com/2022/06/30/lettuce/

https://gbiota.com/2022/06/29/about-gbiota/

https://gbiota.com/2022/05/30/elowyn/

https://gbiota.com/2022/05/05/energy/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/31/time-travel/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/28/why-gbiota-boxes/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/22/i-am-a-person-2/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/21/bioboxes-basics/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/16/the-paradigm-shift/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/11/gut-health-4/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/04/home4mar22/

https://gbiota.com/2022/01/17/local-gut-food/

https://gbiota.com/2021/12/06/get-real/

https://gbiota.com/2021/11/25/join-the-gbiota-club-2/

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https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/aunti-maud/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/micro-farms/
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https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/gut-health-2/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/health-starts-in-the-soil/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/our-intelligent-control/

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https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/food-basics/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/intelligent-control/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/food-for-health/

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https://gbiota.com/2020/01/31/gut-health/

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https://gbiota.com/2020/01/27/hello-world/

Colin Austin © 5th July 2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.  

Gbiota overview

Food not pills

Pick and eat plants grown in living soil – that is the way to feed your gut-brain which controls your appetite and how much fat your body stores.

The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

This article is an overview of how the Gbiota system works. This is not an instruction manual, just to give you a general overview.

Gbiota is a community benefit organisation, (not some mega-corporation). It is run by activists who want to see future generations have access to healthy food. This does require active participation from members either in producing Gbiota boxes or being a customer and buying Gbiota boxes – the power of your wallet is supporting the movement.

Eco-balance

The underlying principle of the Gbiota system is to create an Eco-balance by breeding beneficial microbes in the soil and creating the conditions where the beneficial microbes out-breed and out-compete potential harmful microbes.

Beneficial microbes need a combination of nutrients, water and air.

In the Gbiota system, this is achieved by a combination of flood and drain and recycling.

The base of the bed is flooded which expels all the stale air, the bed is then allowed to drain and as the water drains it sucks in fresh air so the soil is breathing.

The fluid that is drained is full of nutrients and living creatures so this is recycled back into the bed – we call this fluid soil blood as it does the same job as our blood.

Wickimix and Gbiota beds.

The first step is to produce Wickimix, a growing media (or soil) full of beneficial microbes, living creatures and nutrients.

This is done in a Gbiota bed.

If you don’t have a garden or want to mess about producing your own Wickimix then find a local grower who can supply you with either Wickimix or Gbiota boxes.

These are raised beds about 300mm high and are free-standing eg with no side wall.

Start by laying ag pipes, these must be level so either the bed must be flat or the pipe(s) laid along a contour line.

The bed is then covered to a depth of 100mm with organic waste. Grass cuttings make a good base, then covered with food or other organic waste.

This is then covered with a nutrient layer, typically a mix of manure, volcanic rock dust, dolomite (to balance pH) and trace minerals (found in blood and bone).

If just starting this is then covered with a third layer of soil plus inoculants (microbes and soil creatures) but one started this layer will be old Wickimix from boxes that are being regenerated.

The inlet to the ag pipe is raised for filling.

The exit is raised, sitting on a leaky dam. When the pipe is filled the incoming flow is much higher than the outlet flow from the leaky dam so the base is flooded, but when the inlet flow is stopped the base of the dam drains.

The drainage from the leaky dam is normally caught in a sump, with a pump, so the soil blood is automatically recirculated but a simple alternative is to replace the sump with a lower bed which catches the soil blood and is used to grow water-loving plants. Not ideal but practical.

Feeding the life stock

Gbiota beds are full of living creatures from the larger creatures like the worms right to the microscopic bacteria, fungi and viruses.

These feed on the organic waste and nutrients in the bed, but also plants which are growing in the soil exude nutrients from the roots.

Each species of plant exudes different nutrients to attract different species so a broad spectrum of plants are grown.

These can simply be used as green manure or consumed or sold.

Experienced home gardeners can quite happily make their own Gbiota beds but commercial growers can run a viable business selling Gbiota boxes to customers with no growing experience and who live in apartments.

Gbiota Boxes

Growers are most likely to sell Gbiota boxes with plants ready to start harvesting, but they may also supply clean skins, boxes ready to plant or even just supply the Wickimix which is a vital part of the Gbiota process.

These boxes work on the same principle as Gbiota beds using the flood and drain and recycling system but in a different way.

The box is fitted with a swivel tube which allows the bed to be flooded and drained and the soil blood to be circulated.

As with a bed, there is a length of ag pipe running along the base, and the box is initially loaded with three layers, grass clippings and organic waste, a nutrient layer and the top layer of mature Wickimix.

A compost tube is also used for customers who want to recycle their organic waste.

Seeding and germination

Seeds are sprinkled on the surface and covered with either Vermiculite (which is very light and holds water) or another layer of Wickimix.

Some seed varieties germinate best if they are totally flooded while others germinate best with light watering.

The compost tube goes down to the base of the box and is used to water the plants from underneath with the water wicking up to the root zone.

Regular watering

The compost tube can be filled with household waste so when water is poured into the tube the compost leachate is flushed into the base of the box.

The swivel tube is put into the up position and water (or the soil blood) is simply poured into the compost tube until the soil blood reaches the top of the swivel tube.

A container will be placed under the swivel tube to catch an overflow. The swivel tube will be turned to the down position to drain the box and the soil blood captured for the next irrigation.

Tipping

Plants are often grown on the cut-and-come-again principle in which just the tips of the leaves are harvested and the plant regrows. This gives a much longer harvesting period but at some point, the box will need reseeding.

Some customers may like to reseed themselves while others will just order a replacement box with plants ready to harvest.

Colin Austin © 29^th June 2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.  

Our intelligent control system

That great mystery of life

We all have an intelligent control system that regulates our bodies. How it works is one of the great mysteries of life. It is not one single organism but is a collection of sensors, intelligence, hormones and electric signals which work together as an integrated system.

If we see a pretty girl offering pieces of cheesecake it will make us feel hungry, if we smell the morning fresh air in a forest it will make us want to get up and walk, if we hear the sound or rhythmic drumming we will want to move our body in synchrony.

Continuous learning

It is continuously learning, if we get invaded by pathogens it will do its best to fight them off and during the battle, we may feel very ill but next time it may deal with them without us even noticing.

Every time we eat, it will learn about the taste and how it affects our bodies later and remember this for life.

Our gut-brain

Our gut is an integral part of this intelligent control system which is particularly focused on regulating our appetite, deciding what and how much we need to eat and converting that to what we want to eat by a complex system of hormones.

It is also a major host to our immune system, every time we eat and breathe we ingest both beneficial and harmful microbes which it identifies and deals with.

Thanks mum

Our gut-brain is made up of trillions of cells of thousands of different species that communicate with each other, just like in a computer, to provide real intelligence.

We get our first burst of these cells from mum during birth and later her breast milk feeds these cells so they grow.

But these cells have a very short life span, they start breeding within twenty minutes but they quickly die, an hour in their life is equivalent to a human year.

But if we feed them the right sort of food, which we refer to as pre-biotics, they will breed inside us but we also need to regenerate the strains which we do from our food. The microbes in our food we call pro-biotics and they largely come from the soil.

Health starts in the soil

Virgin soils are full of life. Some microscopic bacteria, fungi and viruses live by directly consuming organic debris. Others, the recyclers like the worms, beetles, slaters and pill bugs eat the organic debris which is digested in their gut and the microbes in their gut digest and pooped out. Into the soil.

Plants also exude sugars from their roots to feed the soil life in return for providing minerals.

Micro-organisms enter the plants which, if we eat while genuinely fresh, create our gut biome.

Infectious and non-infectious (chronic) diseases

Hunter-gatherers, whose diet incorporates plants, grown in soil teaming with microbes and eaten fresh have a healthy gut biome.

Modern man may have overcome many infectious diseases but has an unhealthy gut biome. This is sensed by our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies which sends out hormones to make us feel hungry so we overeat and get fat.

The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases.

How the world has changed

Our ancestors may have had a healthy gut but they died from infectious diseases, the majority of babies born would die before they reached adulthood from an infectious disease but if they reached adulthood they would have a reasonable life span.

But humans are intelligent creatures and we made major improvements in fighting infectious diseases both by medical science but also improvements in hygiene, particularly modern sewage and water systems. Even the modern bed has saved millions of lives by avoiding the harmful bugs that live in the ground.

But this improvement in health led to an explosion in the human population and we all needed to eat.

Again human intelligence came to our help and we made major improvements in food production by a combination of synthetic fertilisers, chemicals to control pests and diseases and plant genetics.

The increase in energy food production has been faster than the increase in population and we now produce enough energy food to feed the current world population, if it was distributed fairly.

But there has been a downside to this system of chemical industrial agriculture, the soil is no longer breeding the beneficial microbes needed to replenish our gut biome.

The modern epidemic of chronic disease

As the health of the gut biome has deteriorated our intelligent control system has responded by sending out hormonal signals to make us want to eat more.

Many people have tried to resist this by adopting restrictive diets, which work in the short term but in the long term, they are just training our intelligent control system to send out yet more hunger-inducing hormones which we just can’t fight long term.

The net result is an epidemic of chronic diseases, overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, and dementia – all caused by the wrong fat in the wrong place.

That’s bad but it gets worse

These diseases may be terrible and contribute to the majority of deaths and reduced health span but there is an even greater threat to our species.

We may be over-eating but we are undernourished, which is noted by our intelligent control system which keeps on sending our hormones so we feel hungry.

The really bad thing about feeling hungry is that it also makes us angry. We have a name for it ‘hangry’.

It is impossible not to notice the increase in stress levels and tension in modern society, we are changing the very nature of humanity into an aggressive species, this is the greatest threat we face as a species, and we will destroy ourselves in a progressive increase in aggression.

The reasons why we are the most successful species on the planet are that we are an intelligent and naturally cooperative species. But if we change ourselves into an aggressive species there is a real threat to our species, far worse than the threat of climate change and the destruction of the natural resources of our planet on which we all depend.

What is the solution?

The solution is in two parts, the first part is the easy bit. We just have to modify our food system by supplementing with food that feeds our gut biome so we stop feeling hangry.

That is relatively simple, it is just a question of developing the technology of breeding the beneficial microbes, which form a healthy gut biome, without breeding the harmful microbes lead to infectious disease.

This is a technical problem and humans are very good at solving technical problems and we already have the technical solution.

But there is a much more difficult problem to resolve, that of gaining widespread adoption.

It may appear that with the internet and the modern communication system that this would be easy to resolve but it actually makes it worse.

The internet has become the home for dis-information. It is now saturated with information which has little basis in reality and is used to promote ideas for short-term benefits of money or power.

How to get the attention of the population to create the longer-term social change when humans are becoming hangry, demanding short-term gratification and have developed the attention span of a butterfly is indeed a major challenge.

But let me first deal with the simple problem of technology.

Eco-balance

The Gbiota technology is based on the principle of Eco balance. We control the conditions, specifically nutrients and most importantly moisture and air so the beneficial microbes in the soil out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.

This is a problem of fluid flow – my day job.

Gbiota beds and boxes

The majority of people now live in cities, often in apartments with no garden so the Gbiota system is a two-stage process.

Stage 1 is to produce Wickimix, a growing medium or soil full of beneficial microbes and nutrients in raised garden beds.

Stage 2 is to load the Wickimix into Gbiota boxes where plants can be grown in a modern dwelling, even a flat with no garden, so people can pick and eat plants while still fresh.

Dynamic population

All the individuals living in a city a hundred years ago have now died, but they bred to create a new population. It is similar to microscopic life but the time scale if very different. An hour in the life of a microbes is equivalent to a human year so plants must be picked and eaten while genuinely fresh.

There is a big difference between being genuinely fresh, with the microbes still alive, and not gone rotten.

Growers and consumers

The Gbiota movement has growers, maybe just urban micro-farms which produce the Wickimix which they may load into Gbiota boxes and plant ready for the consumers so they have growing plants ready to harvest at home.

Gbiota boxes may be clean skins, eg loaded ready to start growing so the consumer looks after all the seeding and growing or with plants grown to the stage where they are ready to start picking.

Typically the plants are tipped, eg the tips of the plants are cut off where they regrow, often called cut and come again.

The boxes may also have a spectrum of plants, this is partly to achieve a wider spectrum of beneficial microbes but also they have a staggered growing period with slow and fast-growing plants giving a longer harvest period.

At the end of the cycle, the boxes would be returned to the grower for reloading with fresh Wickimix and its beneficial microbes.

Sustainability

An important benefit of this system is that the inputs are organic waste and rock dust (to provide the essential minerals). Fortunately, these are in abundant supply and sustainable.

Swapping from a system of exploitation to recycling is essential for the survival of our species.

We may be rich now but it will stop when we have used up the readily available resources. Look at Nauru, once one of the wealthiest countries in the world mining guano, then one day the thing happened that everyone had been predicting but done nothing about, they ran out of guano.

It will happen to us first with phosphorous, an essential mineral for growing plants.

Gordon Brown, once Prime Minister in the UK warned us we face massive migration, extremism and environmental destruction. We have been warned. Are we dumb donkeys that will just sit around waiting for that to happen?

How to make it happen

Creating social change

We know what we need to do technically, it is simple and not expensive so what is the problem?

How do we create a social change so people can have ready access to gut-brain food when the internet is saturated with a sea of dis-information?

We can be sure it will not happen overnight by just having pretty websites with clever images darting across the screen. Techy gimmicks may be great for selling T-shirts (or pills) but not that great for protecting us from our inability to act when needed.

We have to look at what makes people change their minds, what we call a paradigm shift.

Paradigm shifts

Change does not happen by logic alone. We need to be right but that is not enough.

We are a social animal, we have our tribes and we are influenced by what members of our tribe think and do.

We have to go through a series of waves, small at first then building up into a Tsunami.

First, we need to establish an inner circle of people who start eating gut-brain food and experience for themselves the benefits. Fortunately it is very easy to feel the benefits, there is no need for super complex data and statistical analysis that is rarely convincing.

All that needs to be done is to experience that feeling of satisfaction, of not feeling hungry or hangry.

Then we move on to the next stage. People need certain basics, we need somewhere to live which is secure, we need food but then we need to be part of a community – our tribe.

Our tribes

Belonging to our tribe is a powerful instinct for humans, despite what the advertising moguls say, we are not dominated by immediate self-interest, we are quite prepared to put effort into our tribe and creating a viable community.

We belong to many tribes, so this inner circle of gut-brain food eaters will be able to influence people who are in these different tribes and so the tribe of gut-brain food eaters will expand to an outer circle.

Revolutionary stuff this, we should put down our mobile phones and start talking to each other again, if we have not forgotten how.

This can continue until we have the Tsunami of gut-brain food eaters.

We create our society

People simply do not want to live in a society full of stress, aggression and hangry people. We are naturally a cooperative species and will go to great lengths to live in a peaceful and harmonious society and that is how we will survive as a species and not destroy ourselves and the planet we live on.

Join the gut-brain social movement

Out gut is part of the intelligent control system which regulates what and how much we want to eat.

In the past we had a very healthy gut-brain but died young from infectious diseases.

Modern food may be hygienic and full of energy food but does not feed our gut-brain so we get fat and sick from non-infectious diseases.

Now we know how to get a healthy gut without getting infectious diseases.

We just have to make it happen.  Only we the people can make it happen, we decide what we eat, not big business or the Government, it is up to us.

Microbes breed in the soil, enter the plants we eat and form part of our gut-brain which determines whether we are fit and healthy or get fat and sick – our choice.  It is not rocket sciencce.

We need to create a new industry of growing gut-brain food with local growers and consumers working together. Gbiota aim is to bring consumers and local growers  together by community action.

We train local growers (and skilled individuals) to breed the beneficial microbes that form our gut brain and supply their local community.

Whether you are a consumer who wants a healthy gut-brain or a potential grower sign up to our free membership and become part of the action. You will receive our Newsletter and learn about gut-brain health.

Join the movement for community health and take control of your health.

Feed your gut bugs

Feed your gut bugs, they are your friends, your mates. They look after you, digest your food, house much of your immune system, and make all sorts of complex chemicals your body needs.

You provide a nice warm home for them but you do have to feed them. You would not have a dog, cat or bird and not feed them and they are pets, your gut bugs are your mates and look after you, you just have to feed them in return.

They just need plants, eaten fresh and grown in living soil full of beneficial microbes and nutrients.

They like to party (and breed) with other bugs, it’s called biome diversity.

But if you don’t feed them they get grumpy, just like a human mate would and they send out hormones that make food cravings so you overeat and get fat and sick, you may get diabetes and have a leg chopped off, die from a heart attack, or worst of all get dementia.

So feed your gut bugs, they are your mates, living creatures just like your human mates.

This website shows you how to grow gut food at home but if you are too busy or just can’t be bothered then go to your local farmer’s markets, preferably with a bunch of human mates, and find a local grower – just copy them on this web site and we will take it from there.

They will deliver Gbiota boxes to your door with plants already growing, all you have to do is water in the Gbiota way and pick and eat.

So simple, so inexpensive, less than buying ageing plants from a supermarket, just plants grown in living soil and eaten fresh before the good bugs die.

Why our gut-brain matters

Most people know that our gut is important for health – but do they know why?

Our gut-brain is the command centre for our bodies

Our gut contains trillions of cells which communicate with each other – just like in a computer.

It is the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, in particular how much and what we want to eat.

We don’t get fat and sick simply because we eat too much. We get fat and sick because our gut-brain senses deficiencies in our diet so decides it need to store more fat, send out hormones so we overeat, then we get fat and sick.

We can choose – do we want to live a long and healthy life, fit and active to the very end or do we want to get fat and sick and die young.

We must feed our gut-brain

If we want to be fit and healthy then we need to feed out gut brain so it works properly. This is not a total guarantee, our genetics play a part but if we don’t feed our gut-brain then the odds of living a long and healthy life are remote.

Gbiota™ is not a product you can buy at a chemist shop – it is a way of growing food – plants that contain the beneficial microbes and phytonutrients that your gut-brain needs to work properly and you intelligent control system. Gut-Brain Food.

If you have the space and gardening skill you can do it yourself but for most people, particularly those living in a flat you will need to buy Gbiota boxes with plants already growing from a local grower.

Put your name on the waiting list

First step is to register here with with your general location so you are on the waiting list. When there is a group we will look for a local grower in your area who can supply Gbiota boxes.

The wrong fat in the wrong place

Overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, and dementia all have a common underlying cause – the wrong fat in the wrong place.

This is not because we have turned into little piggies and overeat, it is because our modern chemical industrial food system is deficient in phyto-nutrients and beneficial microbes.

Our gut-brain, our intelligent control system that regulates our bodies, senses this deficiency and send out signals creating food cravings so we overeat and then we get fat and sick.

You can easily solve this by growing your own gut brain food, even if you live in a flat with no garden.

That is what this website is all about – we show you how.

Save 100,000 legs from diabetic amputation

This looks at the changes we must make to our food system to reduce the impact of chronic diseases like diabetes and ensure a sustainable supply of food that will keep us healthy.

Read more here

Colin Austin © 29th June 2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.

My Teddy

If you think everything in the world is fine then you are either a hermit or smoking some pretty strong stuff.

The heartless massacre of ordinary people by powerful militia and the possibility of World War 3 cannot go unnoticed.

Neither can the waves of hungry refugees moving across the globe looking for a safe place to live.

We could say that is just ‘The News’ but look at one of the wealthiest countries in the world, good old Australia. Homeless people sleeping under bridges because there are not enough houses while we have plenty of land while the builders who could build more houses are going bankrupt.

If that is not crazy I don’t know what is. Actually, I do – a food system which is making us fat and sick while we are a major food exporter.

One solution would be to take our teddies and hide under the blanket until mummy says it is safe to come out – but there is not a factory capable of making 8 billion teddies in time.

So who is going to save us? Could it be big business? Unlikely, big business has learned the trick of Neo-monopolies so we now have autocratic capitalism which seems not that much better than the worst of autocratic Governments.

Nice to think that our Governments are coming to save us, but it is not looking good. They are struggling as much as us to come to terms with the new world order as the over-exploitation of our natural resources begins to bite.

So what do we do? We do what made humans the dominant creature on earth, we use our intelligence and cooperate.

But how. Well, look at climate change. For decades scientists were telling us that things were going to get bad, but the delaying tactics of the fossil fuel industry and the lack of public pressure meant that Governments learned the ancient art of procrastination.

Then along came a school girl with Asperger syndrome, a grotty cardboard sign and determination and it totally tipped the balance. Now let us be clear, she did not change the world by herself, what she did was convince a few people that uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels was not the greatest idea, and they convinced the next tier who in turn convinced the next tier.

And before you could say Greta Thunberg the social pressure was so great that no Government could resist the social pressure. She formed a tribe that was unstoppable.

Now we need a food tribe. A tribe that understands that we need more than energy food, we need a food system that both makes us healthy and is sustainable.

To be healthy we need a healthy gut. Our gut does more than digest our food, the trillions of cells in our gut communicate with each other, just like in a supercomputer, to form a brain with real intelligence. This gut-brain decides what and how much food we want to eat and also hosts much of our immune system.

We simply cannot be healthy without a healthy gut-brain and that means feeding it gut-brain food.

And that is why we call it Gbiota and we use the slogan ‘Feed your gut brain’.

Our next job is to form a tribe with people who understand the importance of the gut-brain and want to live a long and healthy life and growers who can grow gut-brain food and see that this is providing both a community service but also an ethical and profitable business opportunity for those with a pioneering spirit.

So be smart, join the Gbiota social movement and be part of a social movement to create a food system that makes us healthy and is sustainable.

The Great Food War

Colin Austin © 13^th June 2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.

Who will win the Great Food War?

Will the power of mega-corporations that control our food system reign supreme leaving the community fat and sick and destroying civilisation as we know it as the supply of essential minerals is exhausted or will the community rise up and unite so common sense prevails?

Let me start with the story of the mouse and the elephant.

The mouse

I sat down to eat my breakfast, a bowl of muesli and there was a cute little mouse on the table watching me. Actually, a virtual mouse rather than a real mouse, but still cute.

I am very fond of this little mouse, it is what I do, working out how to grow food that will make us healthy. That is a bit different to knowing what food will make us healthy. Take that wonder vegetable that some people swoon over, Kale.

Kale can actually be what the trendies call a super-food but if you don’t grow it the right way in the right soil it is pretty useless.

The selfish gene

I know from Richard Dawkins and The Selfish Gene that I, like everyone else want to keep our human Genes going long after we die and that needs males and females doing what they do – a bit of the good old hanky-panky.

Females have a problem with lack of iron but they can’t just go down to the local scrap yard and start munching on a wrecked car, apart from breaking their teeth that iron is not what we like to call bio-available which means it can get into her bloodstream.

Now that is my day job, finding some microscopic bugs which can convert the iron in a wrecked car to make it bio-available so it can go into a plant which she can eat, or maybe an animal that she can eat, so she gets a good dose of iron into her blood.

Males have a different problem, zinc. One good night of hanky-panky and there goes his supply of zinc. Again no use munching into a pile of zinc-coated roofing sheets, instead find some rock that contains zinc and the appropriate bugs, create some soil with bio-available zinc, grow some plants and bingo he is ready for another night of hanky-panky.

All good fun and I am really quite happy messing around with what some people may think is just yukky soil full of rotting stuff to feed a few bugs and grow healthy food and telling people stories about what I learn.

The elephant

But then I went to go outside and there was this huge elephant, a really big one that was just too big to come inside so could not be the elephant in the room but is seemed quite happy to be the elephant just outside the room.

It has a big label on its trunk saying ‘Modern food system’.

Anyone with experience with elephants knows they are vegetarian which means they shit a lot, big steamy piles, so I was concerned that this elephant, although virtual, might still dump piles of shit in my patio.

And my fears were justified which is the point of this story.

Just in case you think I am making this all up just to spin a yarn can I recommend a couple of really good books.

Eating the Earth by Justyn Walsh

Food for Life The New Science of Eating Well by Tim Spector

What a magnificent creature!

Of course, the elephant is just an avatar for our food system but what a magnificent creature.

Let us look at it in reality.

We can go to the supermarket which is stacked high with foods from all over the world.

It may be a national pass time moaning about the cost of living, but that is because the increase in wealth from our ever-developing technologies goes into the pockets of a few ultra-rich people.

Compared with times past food is incredibly cheap and is a much smaller fraction of our weekly budget than not so long ago.

Households now spend only around a tenth of their disposable income on food compared to a third before 1950.

Food needs to be cheap or else we would not be able to afford tickets to the world’s favourite billionaire songstress, Taylor Swift. Let’s get our priorities right (or wrong).

But are we on the edge of a Titanic moment, nothing can go wrong until it does.

People who predict disaster with our food system do not have a good record.

Malthus the one-time predictor of food disaster became the butt of jokes. Paul Ehrlich did not do much better. So it seems that the best way of predicting the future is just to wait until it happens.

But predictions would make a really good disaster film with millions of starving people, hungry and angry (they even invented a word for it hangry) crossing the globe causing mayhem and disaster.

We can say that that won’t happen with the same assurance that people said the Titanic was unsinkable.

So forget about predicting the future, it is too unpredictable, and instead, look at what is happening right now and look for the trends. A lot safer.

Overfed and undernourished

There is a very nice phrase, overfed and undernourished and if you want to see that in action just go to your local shopping centre and count the number of overweight people with wobbly bums and tums and the people in wheelchairs or hobbling about on crutches with a leg chopped off.

It is what the experts like to call an epidemic of chronic diseases but to me that does not seem a good term, these are not infectious diseases they are a condition.

You can’t cure being overweight but as sure anything is in this world you can change your diet and not be overweight. But not by eating less and exercising more, we have been trying that for decades and it has not worked so we try eating even less and exercising more and it still doesn’t work.

Reminds me of the story of the farmer who was training his donkey to eat less. He got it down to one bean a day when the darned animal died.

This is where the current paradigm on weight is just so wrong. The common paradigm is that we get fat and sick because we are little piggies and overeat and that is just not the way it works.

The man on the bridge

Our bodies are smart and detect there is a deficiency in our diet, either of beneficial microbes or critical nutrients. The captain, the man on the ships bridge bangs his bell shouting emergency, emergency store any food you can lay your paws on.

Then the man on the bridge bangs his bell again and tells the gut down below to make up some of those hormones that make us hungry and squirt them out into our bloodstream so we end up just craving food, then the other crewmen pick up all this food that is streaming in and poke it neatly away in our bums and tums so we end up looking like a circus doll.

The not-so-free market

The number of people who claim to be religious has dropped but there is one religion that is doing extremely well.

This religion says that the free market will solve all the world’s problems and we don’t have to do anything, the invisible hand of the free market will fix everything, just go out and spend money on whatever we fancy (and if we can’t afford it then just borrow).

That may have been a workable religion many years ago when people lived in villages with a Saturday market and the power of the buyers and sellers was balanced and there was a good range of both suppliers and customers and there was no internet to spread disinformation.

What actually happens

But that is not the way the modern food system works. The food industry is riddled with Neo-monopolies.

Let us just talk about what a Neo-monopoly actually is. Governments don’t like monopolies, they are so clearly bad that they get spurred into action and do something about it.

In nature species become extinct (it could happen to us). But nature is smart so a new creature may evolve which is pretty much the same as before but does not get killed off.

That is exactly how Neo-monopolies evolved. Instead of one single company becoming a genuine monopoly which would attract the attention of the Government a new system has evolved.

Several companies maybe with one or possibly two lead companies with a handful of followers so they escape the actions of the marauding Government out to kill off monopolies but this little group know the rules.

There is no need for clandestine meetings in dark parks after night or popping secret messages into holes in the wall like in spy films, just follow the well-understood but unpublished rules, and watch the money pour in.

Eating the Earth (a must read)

Let me give you a few quotes from Eating the Earth.

Volume, efficiency and profits, rather than the health or needs of the local population tend to be the drivers of the industrial food economy.

Industrialised agriculture favours quantity over quality.

The food Fordism of gigantic farms and processing plants has been complemented by increasing monopolisation at both ends of the agricultural supply chain.

At the pre-farmgate stage, 40% of the world’s commercial seed market, four companies account for more than 60% of global pesticide sales and just four corporations comprise a third of global nitrogen fertiliser production.

At the other end of the supply chain, the purchase of international bulk commodities is dominated by just four privately owned companies who together control around 90% of the global grain trade.

Big agriculture has defeated the competitive dynamics with a contrivance to raise prices while leveraging overwhelming bargaining power to drive down payments to the far more fragmented production sector, the actual farmers, squeezed in between.

Industrial agriculture’s high input, high output business model requires more fossil fuel-based fertilisers, pesticides and pumped water.

Thanks, Justyn Walsh for your revealing book

Sounds bad? Well, it is nothing compared to the damage done to the soils which are degenerating to little more than dirt to hold up the plants which are fed chemical input.

Whoops, I almost left out climate change. Sorry Greta. What a combination, climate change and destruction of our soils. Is there something wrong with our species that we have a death wish?

How is it that there are such amazing people like Zomi Frankcom, who worked for World Central Kitchen, risked her life, and was killed, trying to get food to starving people in Gaza, yet we have such atrocities as the deception in the Tobacco industry, copied by the oil and food industries.

Woke green nutter

The executives at these mega food companies, on their multi-million dollars-a-year salaries, and whose decision lead to 8 million people a year having a limb amputated from diabetes are regarded as pillars of the community.

Why are we so fixated with money? It is obvious that on a finite planet, we cannot continue to grow at an exponential rate and that at some point in time we must move from exploitation to recycling, a clever creature like us humans should be able to understand that simple message.

All these terrible things and people don’t even seem to care.

I care, I care about the life my two great-granddaughters will have, and all the terrible things I talk about that will happen in their lifetime, yet I get classified as a woke green nutter.

There have been times in my life when I have been poor and others rich. I have no delusions that being rich is more pleasant but money should not so dominate our thinking that we do things that make people fat, sick and have their legs chopped off from diabetes.

I can’t quite find the word, at least a polite word to describe that but there is no word for destroying the planet on which human life depends just for the sake of money.

What is wrong with us as a species, how are some people so dedicated to helping society while other seems intent on destroying us as a species? If you know the answer please email me colin@gbiota.com

It keeps on getting worse

But it gets worse, this reliance on chemicals results in food which is deficient in the beneficial microbes needed to replenish our gut biome and critical trace elements that are essential for our bodies but not essential for plants to grow into what looks like but isn’t healthy food.

The net result is the epidemic of non-infectious diseases which are here right now.

But what happens when we have used up all those minerals that power modern industrial agriculture? We only have some fifty years of phosphorous left.

Prediction is a dangerous business

If we don’t change from a society based on the exploitation of natural resources to one based on recycling then life is going to get real shitty, and I mean really shitty.

Malthus and Paul Ehrlich may have got their timing wrong but were spot on in predicting oncoming chaos.

Shit Happens

Human beings are weird creatures. We are the most successful creature on the planet yet, in war, we kill each other with gay abandon, but also in peace with food that is equally effective as an AK-47 in killing people.

Why do we do that?

The answer to that lies in another great book. Facts and Other lies, Welcome to the disinformation Age by Ed Coper.

Let me give you my version.

Human beings are not physically well equipped for life in the wild, being a bit challenged in the claw, teeth and beak departments.

True an adult human can survive in the wild for several episodes of Alone, cheered on by a television crew with a backup helicopter and support vehicles.

Species survive by breeding

But that is not really survival, for the species to survive we have to be able to breed.

The hanky-panky part of breeding we do incredibly well, any aircraft toilet, dark alley, back of the bike shed or if we are boring a bed will allow the job to be done.

But then 9 months later appears this totally useless baby whose only survival apparatus seems to be a good pair of lungs to attract attention and a powerful suck when mum wakes up.

But it takes a couple of decades before this baby can enter the Alone competition.

It takes a village to raise a child

So we have that nice African phrase ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ which neatly says that if we are to survive we need the support of a village, our tribe or group – we just have to belong to survive.

To belong we have to conform which means adopting the views or our group. This is really the essence of ‘Facts and other lies’ we think what our group thinks regardless of what the science of the real facts tell us.

If our group thinks that we should all go out and massacre the next tribe along because they have adopted a silly hairstyle or wear their headgear back to front we will happily go out and massacre them, and maybe even get a medal from our tribe.

Think for yourself

Thinking for yourself seems an incredibly difficult operation which is of course discouraged by our education system.

The kid who repeats the conventional wisdom is rewarded with an A while the kid who thinks for herself and gets it wrong gets punished with an F.

And the ‘Fact’ yes real fact, is that if you think for yourself the odds are that you will be wrong.

Failure

Failure should be a curriculum item in our education system, first session every Wednesday. I don’t mean we should be teaching our kids to fail, but that failure is an integral part of life and we should learn to learn from failures.

I know this well from my day job of experimental growing of plants. My experiments rarely work – they fall into that category of ‘it seemed a good idea at the time’.

Now let me tell you the secret, as long as you don’t tell anyone. When an experiment fails, as is statistically probable, then just put it in the back of the shed and don’t tell anyone.

If you tell them about the failures they will think you are some dumb clot.

When something actually works, like my development of Wicking beds, then you tell the world and everyone thinks you are really smart.

Rubbish theory

I experiment to find out how well food works, using my body. I was getting a bit of a tum so I thought I would try a calorie-reduced diet. It did not have much effect on my tum but I was thoroughly miserable and grumpy.

But when I caught sight of my face in a mirror and saw an intern from a World War Two concentration camp I decided the calorie theory was total rubbish and what really mattered was the quality not the quantity of food.

Am I right? Well for me yes, I am 84 and fit and healthy. But I am not your fairy god mother so try for yourself and find out. Life is on big experiment.

Eating a diet deficient in key elements, such as living microbes, and trace minerals just does not work so it is time to admit failure and try a new approach.

But when the experts are all saying reduce calories this is not so easy which is why we have this epidemic of chronic diseases.

We must learn from failures, failures are a necessary part of life.

Failures of societies

Within any particular society, there is generally a feeling that this society cannot fail.

Yet the facts show otherwise. Just look at the history of civilisations. European societies think they were the pioneers of civilisation but for some reason I don’t understand, civilisations sprung up across the globe in Asia, India and the Americas at roughly the same time.

Some of these had a long history. Another really good book is Farmers of Forty Centuries which examined why civilisations in China, Korea and Japan had been stable for over four thousand years while so many other civilisations collapsed.

The picture is clear, the civilisations that had long-term survival were based on recycling their waste to provide nutrients in their soils.

The civilisations that failed did it in two stages. They degraded their soils (and sometimes water systems) which weakened their civilisations but did not lead to their final collapse. That happened when they were overrun by other military-aggressive nations.

Change what you are smoking

If you think that our modern-day civilisations, with the combination of climate change and degradation of our soils and water supply, are immune to collapse there are two possible explanations.

That general view among the majority of the people is that our civilisation is immune to collapse (despite history saying that no civilisation is immune) so we just follow along

or

What you are smoking is leading you to a state of delusion.

Failure of our modern civilisation is a real threat, we just don’t know when. But it is likely to be in the lifetime of my two great-granddaughters who have just joined us.

So what to do?

So what can you and I do? And we must be realistic about what we can do.

Let’s face reality, you and I are powerless against the might of billion-dollar international companies.

We should be able to look to our Governments, after all, it is their job to protect the interests of the people. But again we have to face reality and their track record in taking on these mega corporations who can afford the very best public relations companies is not a story of success.

I, and probably you, have no access to our Minister for Health. At best I may get a ChatGPT generated letter saying how concerned the Government is about the end of civilised society. The wonders of AI, it should have been called GS genuine stupidity.

But these mega-corporations with a bag of gold in donations have an open door.

But we should at least expect our Government to run educational programs so people have ready information on how food works.

Information is power.

But that is not enough. We must recognise there is a war on.

Back to The Great Food War

On one side of the war is the mega-corporations. Large well resourced and ruthless for short-term profit and on the other side the community is placid, looking for a quiet life and a bit naive.

The mega-corporations are willing to use the power of the disinformation age to convince us their food is healthy for us when in reality it lacks critical components which make us fat and sick and run the risk of having a leg chopped off from diabetes.

But worse, it is destroying the planet on which we all depend, exploiting the finite natural resources which will eventually lead to the collapse of the food system and civilised society as we know it.

This is a war the community must win, but right now we are in the battle of the gut-brain which is the intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly what and how much we eat.

This is a battle we must win or we will lose the war – but how?

There are eight billion warriors on our side and we have the ultimate weapon, the power of the wallet, (well lots of wallets) but we are disorganised and therefore ineffective.

A few gallant individuals will fight on, growing some of their own food and we need them, they are the commandos in this war paving the war for the bigger battle to follow.

But we need the full power of the community to win this battle.

That is what the Gbiota club is all about, it brings together the local growers, who have the capacity to grow gut-brain food with the community as a whole who have the numbers.

And how can it work? The growers can produce Wickimix, that magical growing medium teaming with beneficial life and critical nutrients which feed the plants which we eat to feed our gut.

They can supply this in boxes, as clean skins, ready for the more adventurous members of the community who want to take charge of growing some of their own food or they can supply boxes, with plants ready to be picked and eaten genuinely fresh before the beneficial microbes die.

You can learn more about the Gbiota technology at www.gbiota.com or you can join the Gbiota club at www.gbiota.club and meet up with like-minded people on a private secure self-managed social media site.

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Growers wanted

At this moment Gbiota is used by a pretty determined bunch who are prepared to the bother of making their own Gbiota beds and boxes. However, it is now clear that while there are many people who want to have the health benefits of eating Gbiota food the majority of people just want to have a box delivered to their home.

So now I am on a campaign of setting up a network of local growers, independent businesses using the Gbiota technology to produce Wickimix the specialist growing media) and Gbiota boxes.

This is described below, this is not a legal document just a lay description of what will be the basis for a formal agreement.

Background

The human body has an intelligent control system, of which the gut is an integral part. This regulated bodily functions, particularly how much and what food we want to eat.

This is referred to as the gut-brain which needs to be fed gut-brain food made up of beneficial microbes and phytonutrients.

Modern food, particularly, highly processed foods lacks these microbes and phytonutrients which traditionally occurr naturally in the soil.

Modern food relying heavily on chemicals does not contain these essential beneficial microbes and phytonutrients. This deficiency is sensed by the gut-brain which produces hormones which create food cravings resulting in overeating that leads to excess fat storage.

The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

While the food and pharmaceutical industries have tried to develop various pills to resolve this epidemic these have not provided an effective solution, certainly at an affordable price.

There is no real viable alternative but to eat natural food which contains beneficial microbes and phytonutrients.

However food grown in the traditional process, largely relying on natural fertilisers, like manure and compost can contain both the beneficial microbes but also pathogens which lead to infectious diseases.

Cohort International Pty Ltd is a company focused on intellectual property, rather than the manufacture of products.

They have developed a system of breeding beneficial microbes in the soil with careful control of the moisture and air levels in the soil, to breed the beneficial microbes while the breeding of harmful microbes of pathogens are controlled.

This is a two-stage process with the beneficial microbes being bred in Gbiota™ beds to produce a growing medium called Wickimix.

This Wickimix is then loaded in a container, called Gbiota™ boxes which can be used to grow plants, which contain the beneficial microbes, in homes and apartments.

This home growing is important as the beneficial microbes have a short life so it is important the plants are eaten shortly after picking, hence the name of the website www.pickandeat.shop.

These boxes can be supplied as clean skins, eg just the boxes and Wickimix ready-to-grow plants or as part of a swap over system where boxes with plants grown to the stage of being ready to eat and the boxes swapped over on an exchange basis.

Typically these boxes would be ordered online and delivered by the growing company.

Cohort International wishes to enter into a licensing arrangement with companies who can undertake all or part of the process. In many cases, these companies would already be in the business of supplying conventional vegetable fruit and vegetable boxes and the supply of Gbiota boxes would be in addition to their normal business.

For its part, Cohort International Pty Ltd would provide expertise and training in setting up and managing Gbiota bed and boxes. It would also undertake the promotion of the Gbiota system and the grower as an approved and licensed grower.

The grower would recognise the intellectual property of Cohort International, have the right to use the trade name Gbiota™ and would sell products under the Gbiota name.

For its part, the grower would agree to conform to set quality standards and to sell through the multi-vendor web site www.pickandeat.shop

A sales margin which is currently set at 15% would be charged on all sales.

In addition, the grower would register on the subscription site as a grower, which currently has an annual fee of $40 per annum which allows them to access the technology site www.gbiota.com.

They would also be invited to join the social media site www.gbiota.club a social media site which is free and can be used to communicate directly with customers.

Feed your gut-brain

Our Gut-brain – decides what and how much we eat.

We need the right sort of microbes in our gut to be healthy. The microbes in our gut communicate with each other to form our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly how much and what sort of food we want to eat.

If we don’t have the right sort of microbes in our gut, which control our appetite, we get fat and sick.

Modern food may be safe but it is inert so we don’t have the beneficial microbes in our gut.

Swarm intelligence

People may say that we get fat and sick because we eat too much but that is not the real reason. We get fat and sick because our gut brain decides that it needs to store more fat and sends out hormones that make us crave food so we overeat.

Our gut contains trillions of microbes of many thousands of species. Each cell can communicate with its neighbours to create what is known as swarm intelligence which we see in many insects, birds and slime moulds. Each cell may be insignificant but together they create a powerful intelligence.

Our gut has evolved to have real intelligence and forms part of the intelligent control system which controls our bodies, particularly our appetite, how much and what sort of food we want to eat.

In the short term, we can overcome this with a calorie-restrictive diet but all that does is train our gut-brain that it needs to store yet more fat.
The solution is to feed our gut brain so it recognises that there is adequate food and sends out hormones so we feel satisfied.

Beneficial microbes essential

Feeding our gut-brain starts in the soil where we breed beneficial microbes in organic waste. These break down the added minerals and make them bio-available to the plants and later us.

Microbes are easy to breed, anyone can do it, we have been doing it for over a million years but so are the harmful microbes, the pathogens which make us sick and kill us.

That is what Gbiota is all about, breeding the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful pathogens. You can do it yourself. We breed microbes and then package them in plants.

We also grow a broad spectrum of plants which exude sugars which attract an even broader spectrum of microbes.

We create the conditions of air and moisture, using the Gbiota circulatory flood and drain system, so the beneficial microbes out-breed and out-compete the harmful microbes.

That is why a plant grown using the Gbiota system is so different to a similar-looking plant grown in dead soil with chemical fertilisers.

Soil life matters.

Eating fresh matters

This creates a soil, called Wickimix, teaming with beneficial microbes and nutrients.

We load this soil into Gbiota boxes to grow plants so people can pick and eat the plants at home. This is important as the beneficial microbes have a short life – they breed fast and die fast so it needs to be done at home.

We breed the beneficial microbes in the soil, grow plants in the soil and eat the plants – simple.

But we must eat the plant before the beneficial microbes die.

They look just like other plants so what is the difference?

Our modern industrial chemical food system grows attractive-looking plants but the soil and hence the plants are deficient in beneficial microbes and nutrients.

Gbiota plants may not have the look of factory grown plants because we cannot use toxic chemicals to ward off insects and have to use other means but they do contain a full spectrum of beneficial microbes and nutrients.

Do we have to grow all own own food?

No.

The bulk of the food, we eat is purely for energy, various combinations of carbon and hydrogen that we burn giving off carbon dioxide and water plus energy.
The modern food industry does that very well.

Energy food is not a problem

A small amount of the food we eat, around 15%, is used to grow and replace our body parts. This requires a whole range of complex chemicals, some are made in our gut while others, like the minerals and critical nutrients like B12 we have to eat.

The modern food industry barely gets a pass mark on this so is a factor in the Gbiota system.

How much Gbiota food should I eat?

We only need to eat about 5% of our daily food as Gbiota food, just enough to feed our gut.

Although small it is critical, without a functioning gut-brain to provide our intelligent control system we get fat and sick.

Providing that intelligent control system is what Gbiota is all about.

No pills – eat fresh plants

How to buy Gbiota plants?

While we can show you how to grow plants using the Gbiota method it does take some time and skill so most people would prefer to order Gbiota boxes online and have them delivered to their door.

You choose – DIY or buy from an approved grower

You can do everything yourself but you do have to do it right so it does take time and needs some skill or you can simply buy a box with plants ready to be eaten from an approved grower, all you have to do is water and pick and eat.

At this moment we are recruiting local growers to produce Gbiota boxes and we need to link you with a local grower. You do this by filling in the registration form here.

Who should eat Gbiota plants?

Our Gut biome is set early in life so it is important that young people, particularly ladies of childbearing age eat Gbiota food so they pass the beneficial microbes onto their children.

Because of time pressure, they would probably prefer to have Gbiota boxes delivered to their home.

As we age our gut biome and general health tend to deteriorate, largely as a result of our modern food system, but eating Gbiota food can extend health span. Older people, if they have the time and skills, may prefer to grow their own Gbiota food, but it is their choice.

How do I know it is working?

You will feel if your gut-brain is working as you will feel full and satisfied and food cravings will disappear. You don’t need to worry about special diets, your body knows what it needs, you just have to learn to read the messages it is sending.

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Colin Austin  © Creative commons this document may be reproduced but the source should be acknowledged. Information may be used for private use but commercial use requires a license.

The community benefits of gut-brain food

Colin Austin © 8thMay 2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.

The black foot and avoiding amputation

My wife Xiulan, a medical doctor and surgeon became diabetic, the professional medical given to us was that diabetes is an irreversible chronic disease, that will steadily get worse, we will put you on progressively stronger medicines but eventually, you are likely to end up with insulin injections and you will probably die young from some complications from diabetes.

We accepted that advice as an honest attempt to make us aware of the harsh reality.

But when her foot started to turn black we were advised that she would probably need to have her foot amputated.

We were not happy to accept that advice, searched all the relevant scientific literature we could find as it was quite clear to us that there was a big difference between what the leading researchers were saying and the advice being offered at the retail level.

So what did we see? Now let me be upfront, my wife may be a medical doctor but I am an engineer and engineering is really about the generation, transmission and application of power. So I naturally tend to look at the human body as a thermodynamic machine – like a steam engine.

The body as a thermodynamic machine

Thermodynamic machines have three components, they have a source of energy, in the case of a steam engine a boiler which burns fuel.

As long as the fuel burns in the boiler it does not matter much what the fuel is, coal, oil, gas, that old piano, table or chair that is never used, as long as it gives off heat that is all that matters.

It is the same with the human body. The energy food we eat, whether chicken wings and chips or the most select organic produce, is simply burned off as fuel.

There is widespread concern about the reliability of food supply yet our modern food system produces enough fuel, energy food to power the entire human population (if it were equatable distributed) now and for years to come.

As long as the sun continues to shine and some dictator with no social conscience and access to rocket technology, and who happens to have a palace on the shores of the Baltic Sea which is in danger of flooding, does not decide to blanket out the sun, there is, and will not be, a shortage of fuel.

Yet nutritionists seem obsessed with calories – lack of calories is not the issue. They should just forget about calories.

There are much bigger issues at stake.

That great clanking machine

Our hypothetical steam engine has a structure which must be built and maintained, oils and lubricants applied to keep the machine running smoothly and parts replaced as they wear. In our steam engine, this is done by humans but our bodies are much more sophisticated.

From very conception the fetus, weighing just a few grams, is supplied with food which enables it to grow to a few kilograms and after birth continues to consume food to grow to full size.

But even then our body parts may look pretty much the same but most of our body parts are being replaced, some like our skin very rapidly others like our teeth much slower.

We could say, in rather round terms that every three months we need to build a new body and for that we need food, not as much volume as for fuel, but still significant.

For some two thousand years this happened from our basic diet, largely from the complex chemicals, and phytonutrients in plants grown in living soil and eaten straight after picking.

These phytonutrients are incredibly complex – a single tomato will have some thousand different phytonutrients and no one really knows what they do.

Our modern food system lacks these phytonutrients and this is where nutritionists shine. They use their skills, and sophistication of modern technology, to produce a range of pills and supplements to overcome these deficiencies.

By and large, it works – at least sort of.

The intelligent controller

But then we come to the last bit of our steam engine. All machines has some sort of controller, it could be a simple on/off switch or it could be a highly sophisticated intelligent control system.

Now it just so happens that my first job as an engineer was working for a company that made controllers for power stations which happen to be highly relevant to the human body.

So let me tell you a funny story about power station controllers – and believe me it is relevant.

Most of the time this is pretty easy, you just monitor the load on the system and adjust the input energy with some fairly basic technology.

The controller measures for any error and if the energy input is too low or high it simply cuts back in proportion to the error. This is called proportional control

But as the error reduces the correction reduces so it never completely corrects the error. So the controller integrates the error and adjusts accordingly. This is called integral control.

But sometimes things change very rapidly so the system also measures the rate of change so the controller applies damping so the system is stable. This is called derivative control.

This may not seem to be connected to how our bodies work but we have a much better control system which I want to tell you about.

On many Saturday afternoons, there is a football match and the power consumption is low until the interval when a sizeable proportion of the population will get up and switch their kettles on for a quick cuppa creating a huge surge in power consumption.

This completely overwhelms the control system which by the time it gets the power plant up to the power setting the play has restarted.

How do struggling engineers like me manage this crisis – and no cuppa at halftime is a real crisis.

We all have an intelligent control system

This is really important because this is what our bodies do exceptionally well.

We call it adaptive or self-learning software (which was among the software I wrote).

The way it works is that you think you know that there will be a power demand at 3.30 and it will take 30 minutes to get up that extra pressure so you write software so at 3 it schedules the power station up to number 6 on the dial and sit back and see how big a goof you have made.

At 3.30 you (or the system) find out that you had made a big goof and it was nowhere near big enough so in the software you have written code which says big goof increase by 50% so next Saturday it dials it up to number 9 and wait and see what happens.

And what happens is pressure relief valves blowing off all over the place because number 9 is far too big so the software says 6 is far too small and number 9 is a bit too big so next week it tries number 8 and this goes on and until it works out that 7.352 works really well.

How does this relate to the human body? This is the way the human body works, we have an intelligent control system which is regulating every aspect of our bodies. This is the way our bodies work. But even though I used to be what was called a gun coder (like a gun shearer pretty good at the job) I have absolutely no idea of the code and nor does anyone else.

But that does not mean it is not happening.

At the shopping centre

Next time you go to a shopping centre you will see many obese or overweight people and assume they are just fat little piggies stuffing themselves. And you would be wrong.

There is a chance it could be genetic, some people are just naturally fat, but not that many.

It could be that the body is sensing that there are deficiencies in the diet, such as a lack of essential phytonutrients and goes into panic sending out signals to eat more so it can stuff fat anywhere and everywhere it can ready for a rainy day.

Or it could be a fault in the supercomputer in your gut-brain or more technically the wrong species of microbes in your gut.

Either of these is easily fixed by adding gut-brain food to your diet. I may not know the code in your gut-brain but at least I know how to feed it gut-brain food which automatically includes the phytonutrients.

You can read the technical details in this post – it is straightforward growing plants in Wickimix, the special soil, and maintaining the Goldilocks moisture level. But the plants must be eaten shortly after picking which means it must done at home or at least locally. This is not an operation for mega industries

But how do I let people know that this technology exists?

The disinformation age

When the internet and its search engines came out I thought this was one of the greatest innovations of all time giving all people access to that vast pool of knowledge which previously was only available to a limited few.

What a great equaliser.

And I was wrong, we are just saturated with dis-information with companies collecting our private details so they can sell that information to anyone who wants to sell us something.

I know this from personal experience. My interest is in gut biology and we get our first gut biology from mum at birth and later while breastfeeding. So naturally I use the internet to search for information about birthing and breastfeeding.

AI of GS?

As a result, I get bombarded with companies trying to sell something that a pregnant lady may want to buy. Now I ask you what is the probability of an 84 year-old male being pregnant – answer sweet FA. That’s why they call it Artificial Intelligence AI or as I prefer GS Genuinely Stupid.

What this means is that instead of the Internet being this wonderful innovation where people can get information out it is a blocker of information transfer.

But it is worse than that. Disinformation is such an important issue that it has received a staggering amount of research with some rather unsavoury conclusions.

What this research says is that we naturally form groups and are far more likely to believe what our group says than the facts.

Whether we are aware of it or like it the software on the internet naturally forms us into groups with common views. They call it the echo chamber.

Right or wrong is irrelevant it is what the group thinks that matters.

This even happens in science where the greedy piggy theory dominates the intelligent control system theory for being overweight.

Social conscience and the food industry

The modern food industry does an amazing job of providing us with energy food. It also does an equally amazing job of supplying us with an enormous variety of food choices – a variety of foods from all over the world in and out of season.

This is just so different to when I was a kid when food was just plain boring, toast for breakfast, meat and two veg for lunch and bread and butter and cake for tea.

But almost everyone would grow some fruit and vegetable in naturally living soil which supplied the phytonutrients and gut-brain food essential for health.

True there were some fat people but there was no epidemic of chronic diseases, that is manmade as a result of our food system.

We can buy vegetables from the supermarket but they will have been grown in soil with synthetic fertilisers so even at picking will be low in phytonutrients and beneficial microbes.

By the time they have been transported and at arrived our table these will have died – hence the food deficiency and chronic disease epidemic.

There is no point in trying to change the existing food industry which is dominated by megacorporations whose focus is on profits rather than saving people from having their limbs amputated from diabetes.

And in any case, the issue is the deficiencies of phytonutrients and beneficial microbes in their food.

If their product contained any ingredients that were harmful they would be legally liable but how can a company be legally liable for something that is not in their product?

We have to think of a new way in which we overcome group-think which has led to a lack of confidence in what people see on the web and is a major obstacle to the adoption of any new technology.

Creating a new local gut-brain industry

At this moment members of the Gbiota movement understand the importance of the technology and are prepared to make the boxes, collect the waste and basically do everything themselves – it is a ‘do it yourself ‘movement run by and for the community.

I have spent a lot of time working our ways that people, living in a flat can collect their waste and turn this into Wickimix, the soil in Gbiota boxes, and a key ingredient in the Gbiota technology.

It works but does require a bit of dedication and is not for everyone.

But think how much easier it would be with Government support.

We should try and persuade local councils to collect food waste and process this into Wickimix. Most councils have land available even in the centre of cities that could be used but they all have some form of recreation land or parks. Every flower bed in every park could be used to prepare Wickimix and they have horticultural expertise.

It is just requires burying the rubbish, covering with soil, growing plants that exude the sugars which attract the beneficial microbes then and managing the moisture levels.

After a few months, the WickiMix could be dug up and sold to local growers who could use the Wickimix to prepare Gbiota boxes with plants ready to harvest, which they could sell, on a swap-over basis, to local people who have little to do other than water and harvest their plants and supply clean kitchen waste to the council collection service.

This is a social issue project but just look at the economics.

In Australia, 4,400 people a year have a diabetic amputation which costs about $40,000 in total cost to our health system. That works out at $176,000,000 per year.

This money could be better spent in other areas of our health system but some of this money should be used to help the local councils who would provide the waste collection and processing.

It just needs coordinating all these activities to make it happen.

Does it work

Colin Austin © 30 April 2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.

Overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, and dementia all have a common underlying cause – the wrong fat in the wrong place.

This is not because we have turned into little piggies and overeat, it is because our modern chemical industrial food system is deficient in phytonutrients and beneficial microbes.

Phytonutrients are the complex chemicals in living plants. One tomato has over a thousand phytonutrients, we have no idea what they all do but we do know that they work as a system and are vital to health.

Our gut has trillions of cells, the number of different species that we know about seems to increase with every scientific paper but the current number is close to ten thousand species. Again we have no idea what each individual species does but we do know they work as an integrated system and are vital to health.

We do know they communicate with each other to form a supercomputer in our gut which controls and regulates our bodies.

Our gut-brain, our intelligent control system that regulates our bodies, senses this deficiency and sends out signals creating food cravings so we overeat and then we get fat and sick.

This is a natural protection mechanism. It senses a shortage in some food components, decides this is an emergency, so it better start storing food.

The way it does that it by sending our signals to make us crave food so we eat more so food is available for storing as fat.

You can easily solve this by growing your own gut-brain food, even if you live in a flat with no garden. It has to be done the right way to breed the living beneficial microbes but is easy to do and it inexpensive.

The main input is waste food so is actually cheaper than buying dead food from the supermarket.

But the question everyone wants to know is if it really possible that growing a few vegetables on your patio can really resolve those chronic diseases.

Well let’s clear up a few points, the bulk of the food we eat is simply used by our bodies as fuel. Our modern food system is highly efficient in producing enough energy food to feed the eight billion people on earth.

There is no question of us growing all the food we need, just enough to cover the deficiencies, which is around 5% of our food intake.

But can just growing a small amount of living food on our patios really resolve the epidemic of chronic disease?

People are all different, some people appear to be totally resistant to chronic disease and remain fit and healthy throughout their lives while other people are highly sensitive and it appears there is nothing we can do to help them.

Life is not meant to be easy.

But for the vast majority of people, we can help to a greater or lesser degree.

Let us take the case of a person who is in the very early stages of diabetes. They may not even be aware of what is happening to their bodies but fat is starting to build up in their muscles so it is more difficult for the essential sugars, which are the fuel for the muscles, to enter.

The body is adapting perfectly well by the pancreas making more insulin to drive the sugars into the muscles. The only symptom they may be aware of, if there are no medical tests undertaken, is that they are putting on a bit of extra weight as insulin is the hormone which leads to putting on weight.

At this stage, we just have a single step of persuading our gut-brain to stop storing extra fat so the chances of improvement are very high.

However, at some point, fat starts to build up in the pancreas, which makes it more difficult to produce insulin.

If we take action early in this stage the pancreas will still be in good condition and able to produce insulin but it is now a two step process of persuading our gut brain to remove the fat from the pancreas and then fire it up to produce more insulin.

If this is caught early the chances of success are still good.

However, if the pancreas has been clogged with fat for a long period it may have begun to atrophy with a much lower chance of returning to duty.

There is truth in the old adage that prevention is better than cure, so fix your gut-brain.

The good news is that if changing your diet to feed ‘living’ food to your gut-brain is actually cheaper than buying ‘dead’ food from the supermarket and as food waste contributes about 10% of greenhouse gases is better for the planet.

That is what the Gbiota social movement is all about – we show you how. Go to www.gbiota.com.

Making it easy

Over the years I have written up many posts on how to make Gbiota boxes and beds – so many that it’s all a bit confusing so I have gone back over these posts, selected out the key bits of information and created one single post.

This is part of my campaign to save 100,000 people from diabetes amputation.

Basic principles

People get diabetes from deficiencies of phyto-nutrients and beneficial microbes in our modern diet.

Our intelligent control system, our gut brain, that regulates senses these deficiencies, sends out signals for us to eat more, then stores this as fat which in the case of diabetics goes to the pancreas so it can no longer makes insulin and bingo we are diabetic.

The solution which will work for most people is to feed our gut brain.

Will it work for you? I have no idea, genetics play a part in diabetes – you just have to try it and see.

But it is simple and inexpensive.

– make soil (Wickimix) a combination of clay (chemistry works on the particles surface), minerals (volcanic rock dust), organic waste (from your kitchen), creatures of the soil (like worms, soldier flies and other wrigglies which have a gut biome just like us) and inoculant (good bugs).

– set up an irrigation schedule so the water never becomes stagnant and floods and drain the soil so it breathes expelling old stale air and sucking in fresh air.

– grow a broad spectrum of plants

– pick and eat them while still fresh before the beneficial microbes die.

Chronic or non-infectious diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia are the most common causes of sickness and death. The statistics are horrifying with eight million people are year having a limb amputated from diabetes from what we are told (wrongly) is an irreversible disease.

It never used to be like this – what went wrong?​

Chronic diseases all have the common feature of the wrong fat in the wrong place.

And what are we told? Eat less exercise more.

This assumes our bodies have no intelligence and just work on a simple basis of energy in and energy out.

Our bodies are much more complicated than that.

The deficit theory

We are not simply little piggies that eat too much – we overeat when we sense a deficiency in our diet and our gut-brain decides we need to fix that deficit.

Our bodies, actually our gut-brain, has real intelligence and can detect deficiencies in our bodies and hits the red alarm bell sending out messages for us to eat more.

When it senses that we have all the multitude of nutrients that we need it sends out signals saying you are full – stop eating.

Our super-computer

Out gut-brain is like a super-computer in our gut with trillions of cells communicating with each other and making decisions.

If we have the wrong microbes in our gut it does not work as it should and does not tell us to stop eating – that is probably the most common cause of obesity.

What works?

The only effective way of providing the essential microbes is by growing plants in living soil, full of beneficial microbes and nutrients. This is the way we used to eat so has been tested over thousands of years.

Chronic diseases have only reached epidemic proportions since we changed our food system.

Growing gut-brain food is simple, anyone can do it, even people living in an apartment and it costs less than buying food from the supermarket.

Social movement

We know how to grow gut-brain food. The question is how to get that message out to the millions of people at risk of chronic disease amidst a barrage of manipulative advertising.

This will only happen with a social movement.

People need to talk to real people who are growing their own gut-brain food so they can see for themselves that this works in the real world and is not a figment from the fake world of the digital society.

With eight million people having a limb amputated from diabetes, with the increasing impact of climate change and degradation of our soils, this is one of the most critical issues facing the future of humanity.

I, just one eighty-four year old man, can do little to change this.

But what I can do is provide the mechanism for people who are growing their own gut-brain food to tell their story. We are the dominant species on earth because we are intelligent and cooperative.

Join a social movement so we all have food that makes us healthy – read more here.

Food crisis

Food is one of the major threats to humanity, not an absolute lack of food – we produce more than enough energy food, carbs, fats and sugars, to feed the entire world now and well into the future.

Right now our food is deficient in essential minerals but even more important is food to feed out gut-brain which regulates our appetite and hosts much of our immune system.

Across the globe people are getting fat and sick, and it is not simply because we overeat. The real reason is that our gut-brain senses these deficiencies, decides we need to store more fat and sends out signals so we overeat.

Gbiota.com is our technical web site which shows how to feed our gut-brain by breeding beneficial microbes in the soil, which is used to grow plants which, if eaten fresh, before the microbes die, will feed out gut brain.

But it is no good having the technology if it is not widely adopted.

Gbiota.club is the social media site where people, concerned about the food crisis, can exchange information and practical experiences and create the needed social movement to create change.

Grow your own gut-brain food if you want a long and healthy life

Gbiota.com is a site for concerned thinkers. Concerned about our food system which right now is making us fat and sick and with the combination of climate change and degradation of our soil, threatens the food supply for every person on this earth.

In these modern times most people die from some chronic disease, overweight, diabetes, heart attack, dementia etc.

If you want a sporting chance of living a long and healthy life then you need to understand how the way your food is grown affects your health.

If you think that you can spend thirty seconds looking at some web page then buy some pill and then live a long and healthy life then I suggest you check out those mushrooms you are eating, because that is delusional.

You need to spend fifteen minutes reading how the way your food is grown affects your health then change what you eat – not that difficult but certainly not trivial either.

You can read Rethinking food and diabetes here, then either

– sign up as a grower which give you full access to this site, we don’t sell any product – we just show how to grow food

or

– sign up as a consumer and buy from a local Gbiota grower.

Food crisis

Food is one of the major threats to humanity, not an absolute lack of food – we produce more than enough energy food, carbs, fats and sugars, to feed the entire world now and well into the future.

Right now our food is deficient in essential minerals but even more important is food to feed out gut-brain which regulates our appetite and hosts much of our immune system.

Across the globe people are getting fat and sick, and it is not simply because we overeat. The real reason is that our gut-brain senses these deficiencies, decides we need to store more fat and sends out signals so we overeat.

Gbiota.com is our technical web site which shows how to feed our gut-brain by breeding beneficial microbes in the soil, which is used to grow plants which, if eaten fresh, before the microbes die, will feed out gut brain.

But it is no good having the technology if it is not widely adopted.

Gbiota.club is the social media site where people, concerned about the food crisis, can exchange information and practical experiences and create the needed social movement to create change.

This is the covering letter and text to my video save 100,000 diabetic amputations

I have set myself the target of saving 100,000 people from a diabetic leg amputation before the end of 2025.

I know how to do this, I am an engineer and engineers take the best available science and turn this into a practical solution.

But that is not enough, I am also an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs ensure that this practical solution is adopted.

I have a track record I was a pioneer of computer-aided engineering and built up a multi-million dollar company from my back bedroom which ensured that my pioneering technology was adopted globally.

I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators.

The best of science tells us that the epidemic of diabetes, and other chronic diseases is the wrong fat in the wrong place and the underlying cause is our diet, not eating too much fatter sugary food but a deficiency of phyto-nutrients and beneficial microbes which power our gut brain.

I can do it but I need serious help from people who see this as a worthwhile cause and are prepared to commit some of their time.

It is not a question of money, the average cost of a leg amputation is $48,000 so saving 100,000 amputations saves $4,800,000,000 and that is not counting the personal costs and the solution is cheaper than buying food from the supermarket.

What we need is fresh thinking and committed time – priceless.

I have made a video to explain this, please watch

https://youtu.be/bks1TI9Zum8

and if you can help email me at colin@gbiota.com

I made this video to help resolve one of the biggest problem facing mankind, our food supply and consequent health.

My short term objective is to save 100,000 people before the end of 2025 from having a limb amputated from diabetes. This video shows how, technically, this can be done – if I can find a way of getting the message out.

When I ask for help from internet marketing experts they tell me I am doing it all wrong, in our modern information society people are dumb donkeys with the attention span of a grass hopper.

Prove them wrong.

True it is long and there are no car chases, sex scenes, half naked ladies frolicking in water falls, or pub fights to grab you attention but I have compromised by adding this preview in the hope that it will inspire you to watch the video through.

This is what to expect.

Stage 1 analyse the facts

First I analyse the facts, and come to the highly controversial conclusion that the issue it not an excess of sugar and fats but a deficiency in gut-brain food.

Simply eating less is not the solution – we need to eat more, of the right sort of food that feeds our but-brain which regulates our bodies.

A healthy gut-brain needs the right sort of microbes in our gut.

Stage 2 develop a solution

But I am an engineer, I use science as a tool to provide solutions which will work for the eight billion people on earth.

So secondly I have to take my analysis and work out a practical solution.

Pro-biotics, even if they work, which is doubtful, is not a practical solution. We need to eat plants grown in living soil full of the beneficial microbes. But the majority of people live in cities, often in apartments with no garden. Where do they get the living soil?

When I suggest that they should put out a tray of bird seeds and the birds will deliver, free of charge, little capsules full of nutrients and beneficial biota people think I am a nutter.

Pigeon pooh has a far wider range of beneficial microbes than any commercial pro-biotic.

Just add it to the soil mix and grow plants full of living biota. Eating fresh baby greens, as a juice or salad before main meals could be the difference between you becoming fat and sick, and like eight million people every year having a limb amputated from diabetes.

Am I a green nutter?

At this point you would be quite justified in thinking I am some sort of green nutter. I can live with that, but I don’t want you missing the message that could save 100,000 legs from amputation.

So not for my ego but for credibility for my augments let me just say I was a pioneer of computer aided engineering, I solved complex coupled partial differential equations that had never been solved before.

I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s, leading innovators and build up a company that was the countries leading exporter of technical software.

I was recognised as the world leader in my somewhat niche area of computational fluid flow. I was jeered at when I suggested that some flow problems could be solve by using flow channels smaller which goes against common sense but was proved to be correct.

So please just hesitate when I suggest that pigeon pooh may be the practical solution for providing the eight billion people on earth a healthy gut.

Stage 3 How to create a paradigm shift

The scars on my back from trying to introduce paradigm changes ideas show I have learned a bit about how to create change.

So now comes the third and biggest problem of getting widespread adoption.

Innovators, by themselves, rarely change community attitudes.

That is done by a social change where other people try the new technology for themselves, find it works, tell others who form a second tier, then a third and forth tiers develop and what was thought of as a nutty idea becomes the accepted norm.

But even these three stages are not enough, targets have to be set and plans developed to reach those targets.

Stage 4 Setting targets

So let me, before you get down to the body of the video, let me tell you my targets are and how to reach them.

My immediate target is to save 100,000 people from having a limb amputated from diabetes before the end of 2025.

As eight million people a year have a limb amputated this may seem a puny target but it achievable and once the rock starts to roll down the hill it will pick up its own inertia.

So how does the plan shape up.

Diet, and feeding the gut-brain, may be the big issue but genetics still play a part, may be a small part, so some people will not avoid having a limb amputated.

So to save 100,000 amputations we need to 150,000 diabetics.

There is no way I can help 150,000 diabetics myself so lets work backwards.

5,000 people, knowledgeable in the Gbiota technology of growing gut-brain food could each act as coaches to groups of 30 diabetics giving us the support structure for the 150,000 diabetics.

So how do we get 5,000 trained coaches? Well I have been working on the Gbiota technology for many years now and could name at least 200 people who would make excellent coaches to the coaches giving the right incentives.

Motivation

So what is in if for them? The same as what is in it for me.

In a world which has gone crazy where so many people seem obsessed with greed, money and power and kill other humans on an industrial scale the feeling that you are one of the last few humans in existence that is prepared to work for the benefit of other humans.

Humans are the most successful creature on the planet because we are intelligent and naturally cooperative. We enjoy cooperting.

Ok lets start the video

My name is Colin Austin, the founder of the Gbiota movement. I am eighty-four years old, fit and healthy. Most days I go for a long walk in the neighbouring bushland, ride my bike and dig my garden.

I don’t blow my top when medical experts, half my age, tell me how to increase my life span – that is until they start telling me things which are wrong and make things worse rather than better.

Infectious diseases

Let me tell you about life. When I was a kid people worried about infectious diseases. We did not get vaccinated, if a local kid came down with a childhood infection, like chicken pox, our mums would set up a chicken pox party so we kids caught chicken pox, or whatever, and would develop immunity.

It was like a right of passage.

The disease we feared most was polio, I had an aunt who predated Sigourney Weaver in Aliens by having an iron exoskeleton so she could clump around.

Modern non-infectious or chronic diseases, like diabetes, no doubt existed but were rare and most people, including myself, did not even know they existed.

But over the years we made dramatic improvements in medical science overcoming many of these infectious diseases.

But then we replaced these infectious diseases with an epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases, in particular diabetes, heart attacks and dementia. This did not happen by some fluke of nature, it was man-made – unintentional, but still man-made.

Science developed a whole range of powerful technologies, like Mass spectrometry and DNA testing which gave us an insight into these chronic diseases. Biochemistry became a highly sophisticated science telling us the most intricate details of the chemicals in our bodies.

The wrong fat in the wrong places

The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of these chronic diseases, fat in the pancreas prevents the production of insulin, plaque in the arteries prevents the supply of oxygen to the heart and amyloid plaques lead to dementia.

Eat less exercise more

Medical scientists applied the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of mass, normally the domain of engineers like myself, to the human body with disastrous results.

This led to the widespread view that we got fat because we ate too much and the solution was to eat less and exercise more.

Now while we can debate the wisdom of applying these engineering laws to the human body it totally misses the point.

The real reason why we get fat

Of course, these basic laws apply to the body as well as everything else but eating too much is not the reason why we get fat.

Biochemistry may be an exceptionally powerful tool it is still just a tool which does not get the real reason why we get fat.

It is the wrong tool. A hammer is a very good tool but is not a good tool for smashing open a bottle of wine.

While our bodies must conform to the fundamental laws of physics they are not the driving force that make our bodies work.

Intelligent control system

Our bodies have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly how much and what sort of food we want to eat. It starts learning from birth when mum teaches us that her breasts are a good source of food.

It continues learning throughout life. It can sense if we are short of a particular nutrient and learns what type of food will satisfy that need.

We see this in action every time we dig our gardens on a hot summer day. We sweat and lose that complex combination of salts needed in our blood. So when we take a break we do not crave sweet food, even though we have used a lot of energy, we crave foods that will replace those salts.

We see this in people who have been deprived of food – like in wartime. Our control system learns and when food becomes available it sends out signals for us to eat as much as we can and store more fat.

We repeat this with calorie-restricted diets, we are training our control system that it needs to store more fat.

Not little piggies

This is a crunch point, we do not store fat simply because we are little piggies and eat too much, we store fat because our control system is attempting to protect us from food deficiencies by sending out signals, hormones and electrical signals saying ‘eat more’ so it can store more fat.

Eating more is not the cause of people getting fat, it is enabling our control system to store more fat.

Chronic diseases

This is a big deal, chronic diseases have largely replaced infectious diseases as a major health threat. They are now the dominant cause of death, I am told that 80% of deaths are from chronic diseases.

The social and financial costs to modern society are huge.

Eight million people have a limb amputated from diabetes. This may not affect life span but it certainly affects health span and the quality of life.

Deficiencies in our diet

The underlying cause is deficiencies in our modern diet. Our modern food system is a highly efficient producer of bulk or energy food, sugars, fats and carbohydrates – enough to feed the entire world with energy food but it has two fundamental deficiencies.

The simplest to solve is a lack of trace minerals which is easily solved by taking the appropriate supplement – far from ideal – much better to eat the right sort of food but supplements can work.

This is highly profitable for the food and supplement industry which is dominated by large profit-orientated companies so it happens.

Dominant deficiency – gut-brain food

But by far the most important is the food that feeds our intelligent control system – our gut-brain.

Our gut has trillions of cells which communicate with each other providing genuine intelligence.

Our gut brain controls our appetite, manufactures many of the complex chemicals our bodies need and powers much of our immune system.

If you want to have a long and healthy life you just have to feed your gut brain.

Feeding our gut-brain

We need to feed the existing microbes in our gut. This is relatively simple, their main food is fibre which is readily grown.

But that is not enough – we also need to be introducing new microbial life into our gut.

That is much more difficult.

Microbes breed like crazy – there is no problem about breeding microbes. 

Good v Bad bugs

But we need to breed the right sort of microbes – there are a whole spectrum of beneficial microbes we need but there are also harmful microbes which can make us sick or even kill us.

We can solve this by creating the conditions which favour the beneficial microbes so they out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.

This is a key part of the Gbiota system but is not our invention – it has been going on naturally for millions of years.

This is relatively easily done, even people living in apartments can grow their own gut-brain food.

One bug year is equivalent to one human year

Microbes may breed very fast but they also die very fast – an hour in the life of a microbe may be equivalent to a human year.

Do it yourself

This is not a problem for the home growers who can have plants growing in containers in their home so they can just pick and eat.

But it is a major problem for the current food system which is based on large centralised growing, often in mono-cultures and with an extended distribution system.

In the short term, people can grow their own gut-brain food. This is a solution for many people but everyone on this earth needs to have a healthy gut-brain.

Local growers

Longer term we need a system of local growers, a totally different scenario from our current food system which is dominated by a small number of very large corporations who dominate the market.

Gbiota – aim number 1

Gbiota’s first aim is to show people how to grow their own gut-brain food.

It is neither desirable nor practical to set up a global operation supplying gut-brain food as a supermarket shelf item.

Profit v health

The big question that people have to ask themselves is this – across the globe people living in a modern society are getting sick and dying from non-infectious diseases which is the result of deficiencies in our food system dominated by a few mega companies dominated by short-term profits.

Is this really what we want?

Our current food system is however very efficient in producing large quantities of energy food, sugars, fats and carbs which are our primary food source.

It is difficult to believe that they would have the desire, let alone the capability of creating a local industry to provide the relatively small, but essential, amount of gut-brain food needed to supply the community with gut-brain food.

Sustainability

We can go to the supermarket and think that the shelves will remain full of food way out into the foreseeable future – so why worry?

The eight billion people on earth generate an outstanding amount of waste which is full of nutrients that have typically been mined and there is a finite supply.

Phosphorous is essential for plant growth and is top of the list for critical minerals which will be exhausted, certainly in the lives of our current children. But this applies, in a less urgent way, to all the nutrients we currently mine.

In the short-term, we can recycle food waste – which is precisely what the Gbiota system does.

But in the longer term we will need a major revolution in recycling waste which is likely to come from reprocessing seaweed which effectively captures all the organic waste which we dump into the sea.

Gbiota aims number 2 – Community action

We can learn a lot about how social movements occur by studying the climate action movement.

This is closely analogous to the food industry with a small number of mega corporations in the fossil fuel industry that were making large profits and had the capacity to influence Governments.

But a climate action started from a little school girl sitting out in the freezing cold outside the Swedish parliament with a grotty cardboard sign.

Now let’s be clear, politicians even from the Swedish parliament, let alone from around the world, did not stop to talk to Greta Thunberg.

But a few people just passing by stopped to talk and thought she had a point.

Then these people talked to other people creating a second tier who in turn created a third then a forth tier. And soon there was a global climate movement which the politician could not ignore.

We must learn from this because having a food supply that keeps us healthy is a sister to climate change.

In a country like Australia which can go from below freezing at night to 40ºC in the day a couple of degrees of warming may not seem worth while worrying about. But it affects rainfall and coupled with the degradation of our soils will inevitably lead to a food crisis.

This will cause unimaginable difficulties, mass migration of desperate starving people, political instability within countries and conflict between countries.

Have no illusions this is something that we all must take steps to avoid, and we have two overridingly powerful weapons – the power of public opinion and the power of the wallet.

So if you share these views why not join the Gbiota movement. You can start by joining the free section of the gbiota.com web. Later you can upgrade, learn how to make Gbiota beds and boxes and participate in our community.

Food crisis

Food is one of the major threats to humanity, not an absolute lack of food – we produce more than enough energy food, carbs, fats and sugars, to feed the entire world now and well into the future.

Right now our food is deficient in essential minerals but even more important is food to feed out gut-brain which regulates our appetite and hosts much of our immune system.

Across the globe people are getting fat and sick, and it is not simply because we overeat. The real reason is that our gut-brain senses these deficiencies, decides we need to store more fat and sends out signals so we overeat.

Gbiota.com is our technical web site which shows how to feed our gut-brain by breeding beneficial microbes in the soil, which is used to grow plants which, if eaten fresh, before the microbes die, will feed out gut brain.

But it is no good having the technology if it is not widely adopted.

Gbiota.club is the social media site where people, concerned about the food crisis, can exchange information and practical experiences and create the needed social movement to create change.

Grow your own gut-brain food if you want a long and healthy life

Gbiota.com is a site for concerned thinkers. Concerned about our food system which right now is making us fat and sick and with the combination of climate change and degradation of our soil, threatens the food supply for every person on this earth.

In these modern times most people die from some chronic disease, overweight, diabetes, heart attack, dementia etc.

If you want a sporting chance of living a long and healthy life then you need to understand how the way your food is grown affects your health.

If you think that you can spend thirty seconds looking at some web page then buy some pill and then live a long and healthy life then I suggest you check out those mushrooms you are eating, because that is delusional.

You need to spend fifteen minutes reading how the way your food is grown affects your health then change what you eat – not that difficult but certainly not trivial either.

You can read Rethinking food and diabetes here, then either

– sign up as a grower which give you full access to this site, we don’t sell any product – we just show how to grow food

or

– sign up as a consumer and buy from a local Gbiota grower.

.

There are hundreds of posts and videos on this site.

This post arranges the key posts into a convenient learning schedule

This is a members only site – to enter you need to join first then login each time you want to enter.

The story so far

Twenty-four years ago my arteries clogged up and I needed an emergency triple bypass. Fifteen years later my wife, Xiulan, a medical doctor became diabetic, her foot started turning black and we were told she needed to have her foot amputated.

Statistically, I should be dead, but I am not, I am fit and healthy and Xiulan still has both her feet.

What happened?

We wanted to know more and what we found was that chronic or non-infectious diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia are the most common causes of sickness and death. The statistics are horrifying with eight million people are year having a limb amputated from diabetes from what we are told (wrongly) is a irreversible disease.

Chronic diseases all have the common feature of the wrong fat in the wrong place.

The tank theory

And what are we told? Eat less exercise more. This is what I call the tank theory, there is food going into your tummy and food being used.

If you eat more than what you use the tank overflows and you store fat and end up with one of these horrible chronic diseases.

This assumes our bodies have no intelligence and just work on a simple basis of energy in and energy out.

Our bodies are much more complicated than that.

The deficit theory

It is not simply we are little piggies and eat too much food it is because we have a deficit in our diet. and we need to fix that deficit.

Our bodies, actually our gut-brain have real intelligence and can detect for deficiencies in our bodies and hit the red alarm bell sending out messages for us to eat more.

When it senses that we have all the multitude of nutrients that we need it sends out signals saying you are full stop eating.

You may have heard of drugs like Ozempic which work by reducing appetite. Our bodies naturally produce natural hunger suppressants without the side effects of drugs (or cost).

Our super-computer

Out gut-brain is like a super-computer in our gut with trillions of cells communicating with each other and making decisions.

If we have the wrong microbes in our gut it does not work as it should and tell us to stop eating – that is probably the most common cause of obesity.

The Food, drug, and supplement industries

The food industry is the worlds largest industry with estimated revenues of around $15 trillion dollars. It is extremely efficient in producing high-calorie food in vast quantities which is highly profitable but is low in essential trace minerals and even more importantly deficient in the microbes needed to power our gut-brain.

The drug and supplement industries try and overcome this deficiency which they do well in supplying trace minerals and specific chemicals.

Together these industries spend billions of dollars in very clever advertising to sell their products, but the fact remains that every year the number of people suffering from chronic diseases, stemming from the wrong fat in the wrong places, steadily increases.

What works?

The only effective way of providing the essential microbes is by growing plants in living soil, full of beneficial microbes and nutrients. This is the way we used to eat so has been tested over thousands of years.

Chronic diseases have only reached epidemic proportions since we changed our food system.

Growing gut-brain food is simple, anyone can do it, even people living in an apartment and it costs less than buying food from the supermarket.

You may think that a system which costs less and reduces the risk of having a leg amputated from diabetes would be widely adopted – the benefits are so overwhelming – but that is not the case for a simple reason.

Showing people how to grow gut-brain food does not generate the billions of dollars to compete with the advertising budgets of the mega industries.

Social movement

We know how to grow gut-brain food. The question is how to get that message out to the millions of people at risk of chronic disease amidst a barrage of manipulative advertising.

This will only happen with a social movement.

People need to talk to real people who are growing their own gut-brain food so they can see for themselves that this works in the real world and is not a figment from the virtual world of the digital society.

With eight million people having a limb amputated from diabetes, with the increasing impact of climate change and degradation of our soils, this is one of the most critical issues facing the future of humanity.

I, just one eighty-four year old man, can do little to change this. Last time I looked at my bank account I did not see billions of dollars just lying there for me to run an advertising campaign.

But what I can do is provide the mechanism for people who are growing their own gut-brain food to tell their story.

The communal web

I have taken three steps so people can communicate.

I have added a plugin to gbiota.com which enables external people to make posts. I have to restrict use to protect against spammers, (the curse of the modern web), but it is free but you must sign in to post.

I have spent the last twenty-five years working on sustainable food production for health because I don’t like bingo or bowls and want to feel that in the last years of my life, I making a useful contribution to society, my grandkids and now my great grandkids.

In return, I ask you contribute by sharing your experiences with growing gut-brain food.

I have also been working on turning my second web gbiota.club into a viable website. The big advantage of this site is that it allows users to form local groups to share information and experiences.

I also have been re-activating my Facebook page Gbiota Club which has the big advantage of reaching a wider audience.

Read more at New pages at gbiota.com

Contact me at colin@gbiota.com

		
	

		
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Food crisis

Food is one of the major threats to humanity, not an absolute lack of food – we produce more than enough energy food, carbs, fats and sugars, to feed the entire world now and well into the future.

Right now our food is deficient in essential minerals but even more important is food to feed out gut-brain which regulates our appetite and hosts much of our immune system.

Across the globe people are getting fat and sick, and it is not simply because we overeat. The real reason is that our gut-brain senses these deficiencies, decides we need to store more fat and sends out signals so we overeat.

Gbiota.com is our technical web site which shows how to feed our gut-brain by breeding beneficial microbes in the soil, which is used to grow plants which, if eaten fresh, before the microbes die, will feed out gut brain.

But it is no good having the technology if it is not widely adopted.

Gbiota.club is the social media site where people, concerned about the food crisis, can exchange information and practical experiences and create the needed social movement to create change.

What Food crisis

What food crisis? For most of us there is plenty of food in the Supermarkets, at least for now.

But it is energy food, which is essential, but we need more, we need to feed our gut-brain which controls our bodies, in particular, where and how much fat we store.

This is the underlying cause of chronic or non infectious diseases overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, and dementia.

Modern food, relying on chemicals is inert, dead, lacking the essential microbes on which our bodies depend.

If we want to the increase the chance of a long and healthy life we need to feed out gut-brain and we know exactly how to do that.

But that means a change in thinking, creating a balanced Eco-system, breeding the beneficial microbes in the soil under favourable conditions so they out-compete and out-breed any harmful microbes the grow plants in this soil and eat fresh before the microbes die.

Gbiota.com is where people can go to learn how to do this.

We get fat because our gut-brain decides we need to store more fat (probably because we are not feeding our gut-brain). It sends out signals for us to eat more which enables us to get fat. The cause is the gut-brain – eating more is the enabling factor.

There are plenty of people who eat huge amounts and never get fat  – and vice versa.

We need to feed our gut-brain

However, this is a very different way of growing food which many people find scary. Fortunately, there are many people with a permaculture background who are successfully using these methods.

Gbiota.club is a social media site where people can make contact with these successful growers, learn from them and share experiences. It is a free site but it is private site to protect against the scammers and abusers that permeate the modern web.

So join the gbiota club and join or form a local group.

People with no growing experience of a garden can grow gut-brain food in containers even if they live in an apartment but they do have to learn how.

Our longer term aim is for local growers to supply these containers with growing plants that just need watering and feeding which makes it even easier.

Not little piggies

Deficiencies not surplus

We don’t get fat and sick because we are little piggies and stuff ourselves with chicken wings, chips and ultra-processed foods.

We get fat because we have deficiencies in our diet, this is sensed by our intelligent control system, our gut-brain, which regulates our bodies.

Sensing problems it hits that big red alarm bell sending out messages – hormones and electrical signals – saying we have an emergency, eat more food and store it wherever possible.

This has led to an epidemic of chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia which all have the underlying cause of the wrong fat in the wrong places.

The conventional medical advice to reduce overweight is to go on a calorie- restricted diet which works in the short term. But it is training our gut-brain that it needs to store more fat so longer term, when the calorie-restricted diet begins to pale, ends up making us store even more fat.

Feed our gut-brain

The solution is to feed our gut-brain with gut-brain food, a combination of fibre which is simple, and the beneficial microbes which power the intelligent system in our gut.

The trillions of cells in our gut communicate with each other acting like our internal supercomputer which help regulate our bodies.

Breeding these beneficial microbes is a challenge, it is easy enough to breed microbes – they are a randy lot – the challenge is to breed the beneficial microbes without breeding the harmful microbes. This is what the Gbiota technology is all about.

Eat fresh

But it is even more difficult as microbes have a short life, a microbe hour is equivalent to a human year so we only have seventy to eighty hours to eat this gut-brain food.

This can only be done by growing your own gut-brain food or getting a cooperative local grower to grow for you. It simply cannot be done with the extended transport time in our modern food distribution system.

This means a change in the way our food system works, but this is perfectly manageable as gut-brain food is easy to grow, even for people living in a flat, and anyway only needs to make up about 5% of our total diet.

Paradigm shift

A far bigger challenge is creating this paradigm shift in the way we think about food from one of restricting calories to one of avoiding food deficits.

This is made even more difficult by the billions of dollars spent in manipulative, but effective advertising by the food, drug and supplement industries and the advice from our respected medical professionals of eat less and exercise more.

Motivation

I feel highly motivated to change this for the simple reason that my wife, a qualified medical doctor and surgeon is diabetic, her foot started to turn black and the medical advice was that she needed to have her foot amputated.

Had we followed our medical advice she would almost certainly have had her foot amputated but we changed her diet to include gut brain-food and she still has both her feet.

Eight million amputations per year

Eight million people (which if you get overwhelmed by the big numbers that float around our modern world is an awful lot of real people). It has become my mission in life to reduce that number.

Think about this – every eight seconds someone has a limb amputated from diabetes, think how much better the world would be if we could just make that one every minute, or even one every hour – possible but how can we make it happen?

Making it happen

We know how to grow gut-brain food. The critical factor is moisture level, the soil must be just moist enough so the beneficial microbes will breed but not too wet when the harmful microbes breed.

My professional expertise was in computational fluid flow, which involved solving complex coupled non-linear equations which I assure you is not going to become the latest craze among modern teenagers so Taylor Swift does not have to lose any sleep. But it did mean that I was selected as one of Australia’s leading innovators.

But it does mean that I understand how water moves through the soil and plants and I also understand how Ecosystems work – that is the essence of the Gbiota technology.

We know how – but how to apply

So technically we know how to grow gut brain-food but technology is useless unless it is applied for the benefit of the community.

So how do I get this message out to the wide world and save people from having their legs chopped off from diabetes?

Even if there was a way I could tell those eight million people who are going to have a limb amputated they are unlikely to believe me, I am an engineer, not a medical doctor.

Show not talk

Let me tell you it is a waste of time writing long technical articles full of facts.

Sad to say facts are very much out of fashion but people will believe what they see with their own eyes.

Fortunately, it is very easy to see if eating gut-brain food works, if you are diabetic you can see this with your blood sugar reading and if you are not diabetic you can feel those food cravings disappear and you lose weight.

Start small and grow fast

So what I have to do is persuade a small group of people to grow their own gut-brain food, see for themselves the benefits and, this is the key bit, show their friends and contacts so they start eating gut-brain food and then they show their friends and contacts.

You don’t have to be brilliant at mathematics to know about exponential growth 2 4 16 256 65,536 4,294,967,296 that’s the adult population of the world in 5 clicks.

Form groups

But to get this to work we need a way that people can form groups and communicate with each other – that is why I have formed the Gbiota club where people can make contact with other people in a similar situation and share information and experiences.

If interested please drop me an email at colin@gbiota.com

Eco-balance

Colin Austin © 10 April 2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.

Humans are not naturally fat

Humans have evolved to be naturally not fat – it is not good in the survival stakes. Our bodies naturally sense when we are full and our gut manufactures hormones which make us feel full and stop eating.

So-called obesity drugs, like Ozempic, are humans attempt to simulate the actions of our natural hormones.

But modern food is deficient in both certain trace minerals and more importantly the microbes that form our gut-brain.

Gbiota shows how to grow gut-brain food so we produce those hormones naturally.

The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

Breeding microbes is easy

Breeding microbes in the soil is easy – they don’t need any help – they do it all by themselves.

The snag is there are beneficial microbes, the goodies, that will keep us fit and healthy so we can expect a long and healthy life but there are also harmful microbes, the badies, which can make us sick and even kill us.

So the challenge is how to breed the goodies without breeding the badies.

You may have noticed that you don’t get many mangrove trees growing in the desert or many cacti growing in the hot tropics – and if you try you won’t have much luck.

Living things will automatically select conditions which suit them, that is what we call Eco-balance and is the basis of the Gbiota technology.

We just have to work out the conditions that favour both the goodies and the badies will thrive in, then create the conditions that favour the goodies.

Food, Water and air

Food, water, and air are the dominant factors. In general, the beneficial microbes prefer moist, not wet, conditions with plenty of air while the harmful microbes breed in wet, or totally saturated conditions.

But making the soil moist is not that simple. Water tends to cling to soil particles and not move through the soil – one area can be nearly saturated while other areas close by are still dry.

How to achieve a more uniformly moist soil, without being too wet, is a key part of the Gbiota technology which I will talk about later, but let me first talk about a topic with a delightful name.

The cocktail effect

When thinking about Ecosystems we have to look at how the entire system works, and not just individual components of the system.

Plants, soil creatures, and microbes have a very close and complex relationship. Living plants create sugars as part of the photosynthesis process which they exude from their roots to attract and feed specific breeds of microbes and fungi.

Fungi

These microbes and fungi are far more efficient at collecting minerals from the soil. Fungi, in particular, will exude enzymes which they force into rocks so the minerals become bio-available and feed the plants.

Plants also die and there is a whole range of creatures which recycle this organic waste. Worms and ants are the most common but there are many recyclers, some visible, some microscopic which will feed on this organic matter.

Some have teeth and can bite into the organic waste, while others have gizzards to grind them up but they all have a gut, just like us, which is part of the digestion process. These are important for our gut health.

But we have to think about the system as a whole. We could waste a ton of money on mycorrhizal inoculants which simply die if there are no plants to form that symbiotic relationship.

Or we could simply plant some sunflowers which form a very strong relationship with mycorrhizal fungi it just takes a few fungi to be in the soil and they will rapidly breed up with the help of the Sunflowers – all for free.

Companion plants

Plants also have symbiotic relationships with other species. Anyone who has tried to grow broccoli will know that the flies, and their maggots love broccoli. It is pretty much a losing battle.

I don’t use toxic chemicals as I do not want to kill off the microbes I am trying to breed so I have an ongoing battle with netting to keep the flies off my plants.

If I have a whole box devoted to broccoli this can be a losing battle, so I often use a seed mix with maybe twenty or so varieties of seeds.

Some will be resistant to flies so at the very worst I will end up with some crop, but even better some plants when attacked by flies produce chemicals to fend off the flies and in the process will provide some protection for my broccoli.

Water and soil blood

People who write about how water moves through the soil (and that includes me) will use the word water.

But that is not correct. If we are interested in how food is produced we must think about what happens on the surface of the soil particles – this is where the action starts.

Generally, water is attracted to the soil particle surface although there are some soils which are hydrophobic, meaning they repel water.

These are often soils under gum trees. In the weird logic of EcoSystems, gum trees survive fires by having leaves full of oil which deprive the air of oxygen so there may be a monster fire but the trees themselves survive.

How many humans would have thought of the idea that to protect trees from fires fill the leaves with oil – not many I think. One up to nature.

But in normal soils, the chemical, physical, and biological action is on the surface of the soil particles.

Certainly, water is attracted to the soil particle surface but it is not simply water, it is a complex combination of water, chemical and microbiology.

This is transferred through the soil to feed the plants, in the same way that blood circulates around our bodies distributing food and complex chemicals to all parts of our bodies.

I call this soil blood so when I am talking about water moving through the soil I am talking about how soil blood moves through the soil.

I have written an article on how water moves through the soil which you can read here

Water stays put

But the key point is that water (actually soil blood) does not readily move through the soil but will cling, by surface tension, to the soil particles and will only move when wet with water in the larger cavities, less bound to the soil, and so can readily move.

Even with drip tape, which is supposed to be the wonder solution to irrigation, the soil has to reach saturation (actually over field capacity) to move.

To breed our beneficial microbes we need the soil to be uniformly moist. We could work out the precise amount of water we need to make the soil moist and apply just the right amount but we will end up with some soil too wet while the rest is too dry.

It is not distributed uniformly throughout the soil

I use the word soil, but really it is soil loaded with a very high level of organic waste that we are using to breed the beneficial microbes. If we leave this soil-waste mix saturated for any length of time we will breed the harmful microbes.

This is the problem we have to solve. At least we know what not to do.

What not to do!!!!!

We must not keep on topping up the soil with water, that will just mean that some areas are continuously too wet while other areas are too dry. Nobody wins.

What to do!!!!

Seeding

If you are seeding the entire box then don’t flood the whole box. Different seeds have different requirements, some must be saturated before they germinate others germinate with just a bit of moisture so just apply to suit the variety.

Very little water is used when seeding so be careful not to flood as this will leave stagnant water in the base of the box, which is where you would normally put the organic waste (until the worms do their thing).

I prefer to have some plants growing so typically will have some water-hungry plants like spinach growing in the corner of the boxes.

Regular watering

When the plants have developed a root and leaf structure there will be a transpirational load on the system eg it will be using water so we can start using the proper Wicking or Gbiota irrigation protocols.

Most people have a habit of going out to their garden and if looks a bit dry then apply a bit of water. This is not the way to operate a Wicking or Gbiota box.

These need to operate in a different way. Instead of applying different amounts of water with a fixed irrigation schedule, we let the box semi-dry out and then apply a fixed amount of water.

This is why I recommend having a vertical filler pipe so you can see the water level, when there is no liquid water it is time to irrigate.

Typically we will apply about 15% of the soil volume. 20litres is a good size for a Gbiota box as then they can be lifted and moved about so we need to apply 3 litres of water.

With great foresight, the dairy industry anticipated a demand for three litre bottles and introduced them to keep all the Gbiota growers happy. (Actually, that’s me just being silly but it would be a miserable world without a bit of fun.)

Step 1 If you have not already drained the box turn the swivel tube down and catch and soil blood in the bottle.

Step 2 Turn the swivel pipe upwards and pour the water into the box. If you have been operating for a while the water caught in the milk bottle will be genuine soil blood with a deep brown colour. This is full of nutrients and a wide selection of living creatures.

I like to start by pouring some of the water over the plants so the leaves absorb some of the nutrients and biota.

The rest I will pour into the compost tube.

Step 3 Check the water level, if it has not reached the top of the swivel tube (which should be about 1/3 of the height of the box) add more water.

Step 4 Wait until the water has all been used up. If it has not been used after a week then twist the swivel tube down and drain the box and start over again.

Labile compost

Organic matter that has not been properly composted is called labile (young) compost and may be full of growth inhibitors and is certainly not good for growing plants.

Hot composting is the standard solution, but requires careful control of the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio and ensuring that quality of the organic material. I will try and pre-compost my organic waste if I can but it does not breed the microbes that our guts need.

The Gbiota method is to cold compost by burying and allowing the creatures of the soil to process the organic waste in their guts which will breed the right type of microbes.

The organic waste is buried, covered with mature soil and planted so the plants exude nutrients to feed the microbes.

This is easy to do in Gbiota beds and can be done by putting a lid on the box, flipping over, filling the base with organic waste then flipping the soil on the lid back onto the box.

Just pretend you are making pancakes.

Compost tubes

Perhaps a more practical way is to use compost tubes, this is great if you have boxes on the patio which are too heavy to flip.

Make up a box full of nutrients (eg chicken manure, rock dust and dolomite).

Make a compost tube (any tube about 100mm in diameter) by cutting at about 45% on one end and flat at the other.

Find a suitable lid like a yoghurt container.

Just dig a hole and insert the compost tube into the hole.

As you generate kitchen waste just fill the tube and add some of the nutrient mix and worms if there is none in the box and unless you have a particular affection for flies seal with the yoghurt container (or whatever).

Keep on doing this until the level in the compost tube is at soil level, pull out the tube while pushing the compost mix into the soil.

Dig another hole somewhere else, and use the soil to cover the old hole and seed.

This is a simple way of getting the labile compost to the base of the box while having plants growing on top.

Irrigating

If the swivel tube is up twist down and allow to drain. (I normally have the swivel tube in the downward drain position after I have irrigated).

When you are irrigating first give the foliage a flush, pour any excess soil blood into the compost tube and if there is excess into the filler tube.

Add additional water (if needed) so liquid reaches the top of the swivel tube.

Allow a period (at least an hour but not more than a day) for the soil blood to wick throughout the bed.

Twist the swivel tube to allow the box to drain catching the soil blood (which should be dark brown) into your recycled milk bottle (or whatever).

In my subtropical climate of Bundaberg, I do this once a week.

There is more than enough liquid to last at least a week in my hot dry climate but I still make this a weekly routine when I am at home because I like to flush, but there is more than enough water to last longer so if I am on a trip I don’t worry.

Flood drain and recycle

Flooding expels the stale air and draining suck is fresh air into the soil.

The cycling ensures the soil blood is never stagnant.

These are the two basic rules of the Gbiota system.

Compost – Bin or bury?

Preamble

Stuart (from the Gbiota club) asked an interesting question on traditional compost and Gbiota composting.

Simple enough question but raises a whole bunch of issues.

It gets to the very heart of what Gbiota is all about so I need to write an extensive reply.

Let me explain that Gbiota.club is a social site where people can share and discuss information. Normally members would just make a post or comment on an existing post.

However, this is such an important issue that I am writing a comprehensive reply which is too big to go into a social media site so I am just providing a link to the post which I will publish in gbiota.com – the technical site.

Clicking on that link will take you to gbiota.com where, if you like you can read the post then simply click on gbiota.club and go back to where you started.

Back to Basics

Stuart’s question gets to the foundation of what the Gbiota is all about – which is about how to grow gut-brain food so our gut-brain works the way it should.

It is just a sad fact of life that our modern food system is not working the way it should, which means reduced health span (the length of time we are fit and healthy – not the same as life span) and is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic of non-infectious diseases.

The underlying cause is the wrong fat in the wrong place which raises the question of why our bodies should store fat in the wrong places – or simply, why do we get fat?

The common answer, from both the lay public and experts in the field, would be that we eat too much and that is simply not consistent with the facts.

That raises an even more important question, why is it that people, even experts believe things to be true, even when they are not consistent with glaringly obvious facts.

This is particularly important in this modern information age when we are just saturated with wave after wave of information leading to mental saturation – one of the great hazards of modern life.

Why we believe what we believe

I would refer you to a most interesting book, What the Fact? Finding the truth in all the noise by Professor Seema Yasmin who has a whole string of accolades after her name.

It is a really good read which helps us understand this chaos we call the information age. The key point boils down we tend to believe what the group we associate with believes rather than the facts.

If we are in a group that believes that climate change is a hoax then we will tend to believe climate change is a hoax regardless of the facts and the daily bombardment of floods, drought, and extreme weather which saturate our news will not change that view.

If you live in Russia, where many people believe that Ukraine is likely to daily invade Russia, then that is what you will tend to believe, despite the obvious fact that the Ukrainian army is tin pot in comparison with the Russian army.

If the consensus from the lay public and experts is that we get fat because we consume too many calories then there is great pressure to accept that view, despite being in clear contradiction to hard facts.

So let’s explore why we get fat and perhaps more importantly why we believe that it is just excess calories.

Why we get fat?

Scientists have known for a long time that we have an intelligent control system that regulates our bodies – they even have a name for it ‘homeostasis’.

We can see our head brain working, right now you have two eyes that are recording a picture in each eye which, like in a camera, is upside down.

Your brain is flipping these the right way up and more remarkably converting these into a single three-dimensional image which tells you that the door is farther away from you than the screen. Pretty smart.

How does it do that? Well, I am sorry to disappoint – I have absolutely no idea.

Now this is important, you don’t have to know how something works to know that it happens. More on that later.

Let us look at the argument that we get fat because we eat too much. We eat food, too much food so there is more food in our stomach than what we need so we end up with a fat bum.

I can tell you with confidence that the food in our stomachs does not just flow into our bum, they are the same height and fluids will naturally flow downwards.

If, when we overate we ended up with fat feet I would not have an argument but we end with fat in an area higher than our stomach so something is taking that fat from our stomach and putting it somewhere else.

According to Newton’s first law if you want to make something budge you have to apply a force, so there is some mechanism at work.

Things don’t just happen, there is always a reason, whether we understand that reason or not.

We know what that is, fat goes from our stomach and into the blood and is deposited somewhere else and that is controlled by our intelligent control system.

We know that this control system is made up from our head brain and our gut brain which work together as a single unit.

We know that our gut is a real brain with the trillions of cells communicating with each other to create real intelligence.

How does this work?

I am ancient, I was a pioneer in the computer revolution whey before Bill Gates.

I wrote code that solved coupled (actually tripled) non linear partial differential equations. When we wrote code back then we actually had to understand how computers work, which bit of memory was being used. Just to draw a line we had to write in machine code.

It was like working on a vintage car, you had to know how it worked at the very basic level.

So when you ask me how this gut-brain works you may reasonably expect an answer.

Sad to say I have no idea how this gut-brain works at the code level, sorry about that but I can say with total confidence that our gut-brain is deciding where and how much fat we store, it does not just happen.

It may be that our gut-brain sees we are short of food or lacking some critical nutrient and so decides that it needs to send out signals for us to eat more.

It may be that the species of microbes in our gut brain has changed.

But we can say for sure that our gut brain decides where and how much fat we store – even though we have no idea of the code that drives it.

Correlation not cause

If our gut-brain senses a deficiency it sends out signals for us to eat more and then sends out more signals to say where this fat should be stored.

The driving force is our gut-brain. There may be a correlation between how much food we eat and getting fat but eating too much is not the driving force it is an enabling factor.

We can go on a calorie restricted diet which dis-enables our body to put on fat and we can actually lose weight in the short term, but really all we are doing is training our gut brain so that it needs to send out instructions for us to store yet more fat, so we end up fatter than ever.

The punch line

The punch line is that we don’t get fat because we over-eat, we get fat because of a deficiency in our diet so our gut brain is sending out the wrong signals.

This leads to the apparently absurd argument that if we are putting on fat we should eat more not less. But we need to eat food that will feed out gut brain which will then stop sending out signals for us to eat more and so we may end up eating less overall.

Modern food

Our modern food system is often blamed for the epidemic of chronic diseases, and I am certainly not going to leap to their defence of using artificial fats and sugars.

The real issue is the lack of gut-brain food.

The solution – feed your gut brain

OK, you may still be with me but I have not answered the question which is what is gut-brain food and where do we get it?

Oddly enough that is a straightforward question to answer, for some million years, since the very first hominoid appeared on earth we have been eating gut-brain food, plants grown in living soil (full of beneficial microbes) and eaten while fresh (before the microbes die).

It is only in the last fifty years, since we have adopted a diet of highly processed, but infertile food, that we have had a significant problem.

But we cannot simply go back to eating what our ancestors ate, they certainly had plenty of microbes in their food, but some of these were harmful so people died from infectious diseases.

So the challenge is how do we grow food, full of beneficial microbes but without the harmful microbes that make us sick or kill us?

Back to Stuart’s question?

Breeding microbes is easy, we have been doing it for years by composting.

That is important because if we are to survive as a species we have to recycle organic waste.

Hot composting is a sophisticated process that effectively recycles organic waste while killing off most of the pathogens, but it does require careful balancing of ingredients with the right carbon to nitrogen ratio, and turning to ensure adequate air.

The high temperatures, typically well over 60°C kill of the pathogens, but unfortunately our guts do not operate at 60°-plus temperatures so is not ideal for breeding gut biota.

Cold composting typically ends up with a horrible smelly mess, riddled with pathogens so we need a different approach and that is using the creatures that naturally live in the soil.

Worms are highly efficient recyclers but there are numerous other creatures, some like the beetles, saw-bugs, and soldier fly larvae we can see but under a microscope, soil is just teaming with creatures.

This is a different approach than using microbes to process the waste, it is using creatures to consume the waste which they process using the microbes in their guts, similar to the microbes we need in our guts.

Virtually anything organic can be processed by burying in the soil as there will be some creature that will consume the waste. Even wastes like orange peel will be reprocessed by fungi.

This is a much better method for breeding gut biota, the only disadvantage is that it is slower than high-temperature composting but that is not a real issue as the soil above can be used for growing plants to eat.

Eco-balance

In the natural environment, there is always a balance, it is the same with our gut. We do not have to eliminate every single pathogen. Most people have the harmful E-Coli in their gut but the numbers are so small it does not matter.

If we can manage the conditions the beneficial microbes will simply out-compete and out-breed the harmful ones.

This is done in the Gbiota system by ensuring there is an adequate food supply and the right moisture conditions which we achieve by a combination of flood and drain and circulation of the soil blood (water plus microbes and nutrients).

Beds or boxes

Decomposition is really best done in Gbiota beds to produce Wickimix which can be used in boxes, my longer term aim is to encourage local growers to set up to produce boxes filled with Wickimix and plants ready to eat on a swap over basis.

But first, we need to build up a user base of home growers who do not have the luxury of gardens and growing experience.

Compost tubes are a ‘hear and now’ technology that anyone, even people living in a flat can use.

I have tried hard to find a way that people living in a flat can recycle their waste but unfortunately, the flies seemed to defeat me until I decided to regenerate an old idea of compost tubes

I now have boxes with compost tubes on my verandah.

I find that my favourite Yoghurt tube makes a tight fit when pushed into the tube so I can just put my household waste directly into the tube and effectively seal with the Yoghurt container.

I have boxes on my veranda and can simply load my waste directly into the compost tube.

I do have a nutrient box containing manure, rock dust, blood-and-bone (excellent for trace minerals), and dolomite (to balance the PH) which I add to the tube to help decomposition.

Of course, I load the boxes with worms when I make the box and they are more than happy to breed away.

Baby greens

Baby greens are particularly effective for flat dwellers as they grow rapidly, are more nutritious, and tasty to eat raw when just picked.

It is actually better to start meals with a starter of freshly picked baby greens (or a baby green shake). This lines the stomach and acts as a damper to the sugar spikes causing the roller coaster sugar spikes in diabetics.

This is easy and cheaper than buying food from the Supermarket.

The big challenge

The big challenge is to get this message out to the wider population. No one can predict the improvement to community health until we actually do it, but this is not some approach that is going to cost thousands of dollars and runs a high risk.

There is always a risk in life, how can we be sure that people are going to put their waste into the compost tube where it is sealed and not just throw it onto the surface of the soil. Hoever the risk is small in comparison to the harm of a non-functional gut-brain and the resultant chronic diseases.

Science with its focus on proof is one of the great tools of our modern society but when there are eight million people a year having a limb amputated from diabetes, and an even bigger number dying from heart attacks it is time to be pragmatic and take action.

I hope you agree with me and will help in getting the message out to the public. You may never know or meet the people who you may save from having a limb amputated but it is not a bad feeling to think that you made that contribution to the community.

Better than wasting your life playing Bingo and waiting to die, that’s why I do this, so join the club.

Food, Health and wealth for all

Colin Austin ©25 March 2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.

Summary

I present a plan that will lead to a better life so we and our grandkids can live a happier and healthier life – the plan is about future food which affects us both physically and physiologically.

Right now we are facing a health crisis, both physical and psychological, from deficiencies in our food system. In the future we face an even greater crisis from climate change, degradation of our soils, and exploitation of nutrients.

This article outlines my plan for a food system that is both healthy and sustainable.

Modern societies across the globe are suffering from an epidemic of chronic diseases and social tension from being hangry (angry from hunger). The underlying cause is we are not feeding our gut brain which regulates our appetite and how much and where we store fat.

We know how to grow gut-but plants must be grown at home so plants can be harvested and eaten before the beneficial microbes die.

To make this widely available we need to set up a system where local growers produce boxes with plants growing and ready for harvesting. These could be ordered online and delivered on a swap-over basis.

This will not just happen by itself, we need a social movement to inform people about the importance of gut-brain food which has sufficient momentum to create the new industry of sustainably growing gut-brain food.

Here is the plan.

The creative creature

Humans are incredibly inventive creatures. With our modern technology, we should all be happy, healthy, and wealthy – but we are not.

We are terrible at applying this great technology for the benefit of all.

Modern technology gives us the potential to produce food and goods at an incredible rate. If we were to apply that technology for the uniform benefit of all we would only need to work for two or three days a week and the rest of the time could be spent in any way we choose, taking the kids to the beach, bush walking, dancing and music of whatever takes our fancy.

We did try that once in the sixties with the hippie movement but that was really for the children of the rich and we did not have the productivity that we have now.

So where are we now?

Take a walk around any shopping centre. Look at the people, many are overweight, not just the older people even some young kids are fat.

Look at the shops, supermarkets full of energy food then the other shops selling pills and health foods. Both the food and pharmaceutical industries spend billions of dollars in advertising to get us to buy their products supposedly to keep us healthy but we keep on getting fatter and sicker – what is going on?

There is something missing in our food so we feel hungry and overeat so we end up fat and sick.

Hangry

But food does not just affect our physical state it affects our mental state. There is a well document effect called hangry – when we don’t feel satisfied we quickly get angry.

Look at the state of the world and how it has changed. There was a time when most people lived in relatively peaceful and stable democracies or at least beneficial autocracies.

Now more people live in aggressive autocracies than peaceful democracies. People flee these countries creating the great social challenge of our time – refugees escaping the aggressive autocracies or simply because they are hungry from not having enough food.

This puts great strain on traditionally stable democracies.

Does being hangry play a role? Will climate change and the destruction of our topsoil aggravate this social instability?

It is unlikely to lead to the extinction of the human species see survival but it will certainly create the greatest threat to our social cohesion, see time to act and rethinking food and diabetes and the many other articles at New Posts

Understanding how food affects us both physically and physiologically is critical for the future quality of life.

The thermodynamic machine

There is nothing wrong with energy food, it is what is missing in our food that matters.

Think of our bodies as a thermodynamic machine like a car. We fill it with fuel which it turns into energy just like our bodies do with energy food.

But however expensive and powerful the car it will just sit there not moving until a driver comes along and tells it to start up, go forward or backwards, faster or slower, and turn left or right.

The car needs a driver to tell it what to do.

We need a gut-brain to regulate our bodies as much as a car needs a driver.

Our intelligent control system

We need a driver, we are not a jellyfish just going with the flow, we have an intelligent control system sending out instructions to tell our bodies what to do.

Some instructions are fully conscious, we decide whether to go to the footy or the beach, we do not consciously decide our heart and breathing rate, our temperature, or whether to store a load of fat in our bums (which is what bums are for) or elsewhere.

This intelligent control system is a combination of our head brain and our gut brain.

It is what is missing that matters

Our gut brain, working with our head brain, forms forms our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies. It regulates all aspects of our bodies, from heart and breathing rates, temperature, our immune system, and most relevant our appetite and where and how much fat we store in our bodies.

The wrong fat in the wrong place is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, and dementia.

This is a huge problem, in some countries two-thirds of adults are overweight, eight million people a year have a limb amputated from diabetes, heart attacks are the most common cause of death.

Our gut brain decides

We need fat, it is essential for life so we need to store it somewhere in our bodies.

I guess many people who would like to be able to consciously decide where and how much fat is stored. Move a bit from this area and put it over there and we don’t need this bit of fat at all.

But that is not the way our bodies have evolved, instead, we have a totally automatic system with the gut-brain in control. This worked perfectly well when we were eating gut-brain food which we have done naturally since the very beginning of humanity.

We may think we can manage how much fat we store by going on a highly restrictive diet but all we are doing is teaching our gut-brain that it needs to store more fat for future bad times.

So as soon as we stop our diet our gut-brain piles on the fat.

Would it not be better to feed our gut-brain so it works properly?

Just feed our gut-brain

With all our modern technology we should expect a long and healthy life – but we are not getting it simply because we are not feeding our gut-brain.

The bulk of the food we eat is just used for energy. At this moment our current food system can supply all the energy food we need but is not supplying gut brain food.

We need to supplement our current diet with gut-brain food.

We know how

The tragedy is that we know exactly how to grow food to feed our gut-brain, grow plants in soil full of breeding microbes feeding on organic waste. (See gbiota.com).

It is cheaper than buying plants from the supermarket, the limitation is that the plants must be grown at home so they can be picked and eaten fresh before the beneficial microbes die.

Technology is not the problem, the challenge is how to get the message out to the wider population.

Future vision

It is easy to imagine a system with local growers producing Gbiota boxes, with living plants ready to be harvested, being ordered and delivered on line. Very practical and economic – but how do we make that happen?

We’ve stopped believing

Conventional internet marketing is not the solution, I know I have tried. It is simply swamped by the mass of promotions for magic pills which are claimed to resolve all problems – but don’t.

I talk to leaders in Internet Marketing, it is just full of fuzz, special offers, buy two get one free, quizzes – just a box full of manipulative tricks. May be great for selling Tee shirts but no use for changing the food system.

People understand this and have stopped believing what they see on the web – sad but true.

Taking pills does not fix a deficiency in the food. We have to fix our diet and eat gut-brain food.

Leading research scientists are well aware of the importance of gut health but it takes time for this knowledge to permeate to the front line doctors who are chronically stressed for time.

So how do we change the food industry? It won’t be done by manipulative advertising, it needs a social change.

Looking for a model

We can learn a lot from looking at the history of the climate change movement.

Scientist, Governments, and the fossil fuel industry have known that greenhouse gases cause climate change for well over a hundred and twenty years.

The fossil fuel industry, who have great influence on the Governments, tried to confuse the issue by putting climate change into the not-proven category – and it worked. Nothing happened.

It did not seem to matter how many scientific papers were published, the public was not convinced, and without public pressure, Governments continued to do nothing.

Then it all changed, Greta Thunberg – a young schoolkid, entered the scene. She did not write some seminal paper, or some super sophisticated computer program or hold an audience to the world’s leaders, but she was the catalyst for change.

So look for inspiration from the Greta Thunberg story.

If you have not heard the story she sat outside in Sweden’s freezing cold with a cardboard placard for three weeks with people just walking past.

Then a few people started to take notice, and they told their friends and before you could say ‘green house gases’ there was a social movement which pressurised Governments around the world to act.

Greta herself did not do the grunt work to create the climate movement but she did inspire her followers who made it all happen.

Neither the fossil fuel industries nor the Governments would have acted were it not for Greta’s followers creating a global movement.

Greta created a social movement – and it worked.

The food crisis

The climate crisis and the food crisis, are closely linked. The biggest threat to our food supply, long term, is from a combination of the climate crisis and the degradation of our soils.

However, the food crisis is more complex.

At this moment we are producing adequate energy food to feed the entire world but with the combination of climate change and the degradation of our soils that could rapidly change.

The ‘here and now crisis’ is we are not feeding our gut-brain. If we think of the driver-less car analogy it is like the bulk of the population having no control over where and how much fat we store in our bodies which is the cause of the current epidemic of chronic diseases.

That is scary stuff so how do we make the needed change to happen?

Learning from climate change

Neither the food industry or the Governments are going to change the food industry – even though they know it needs changing. It was public pressure from Greta’s followers that led to action – it will be public pressure that will lead to the creation of a local food supplying gut-brain food (using Gbiota boxes).

The message is clear, we have to create a social movement campaigning for a healthier food system.

The Internet advertising executives who tell me about the techniques they use, the special offers, etc say that people will not act for the public good.

They are wrong.

We are the dominant creature on this earth simply because we are naturally cooperative and will work for the public benefit.

True there are some people who operate purely for their own benefit, and although they can cause a great deal of harm, they are very much in the minority.

We just need to figure out how to create a social movement for a better food system.

Show not talk

Fortunately it is easy to tell if a diet incorporating gut-brain food is working.

You don’t have to be a microbiologist or run expensive tests.

If you don’t feed the gut-brain it sends out signals which make us crave food so we keep on eating hoping we will just happen to eat some gut-brain food.

As soon as we eat gut-brain food it is satisfied and stops sending out these food craving signals.

One of the essentials of science is to be able to measure what you are trying to study. There is no scientific measurement for food cravings although you know full well that you have a food craving.

But if you follow your gut feeling you will naturally not eat as much and this is something you can measure. You will just eat less without any fancy diet.

So what is the plan?

Let me work my way through the thought processes of developing the plan.

Scale

The first is to recognise the scale.

There are 8 billion people on this earth and they all have a gut and so need gut-brain food. We used to talk about developed, developing, and underdeveloped countries.

When I was a kid I was living in a modern society but there were still local farms supplying their community.

That has all changed. Now most people live a modern lifestyle with food produced in large and highly industrialised farms, highly processed in a factory system and distributed in global food chains run by mega-corporations.

There is a long delay from time from when food is harvested to when it is eaten. It may be labelled fresh but that is just marketing and really means it has not gone rotten. The beneficial microbes have long since died and that is why we have the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.

We cannot go back to the traditional small local farm.

The ultimate aim

I see the ultimate aim is to have small local growers, either inside or close to our urban centres.

They will not be like the old local farms but sophisticated operations producing gut-brain food, using advanced technology which will involve recycling organic waste as a primary input.

Have no doubt there is no way we can support the current level of population unless we recycle organic waste, which is a much more sophisticated technology than the old compost bin in the backyard.

They will produce gut-brain (Gbiota) boxes with both living soil and plants which they will distribute using on-lining ordering and distribution.

People will harvest the plants and swap boxes when finished.

This will supply genuinely fresh (eg with living microbes) food and will probably be more more economic than our current food system.

But that won’t happen overnight, so we have to start from where we are now.

Where we are now

We have a small, but enthusiastic, number of Gbiota growers. I chat with them on a regular one-to-one basis but they are not (as yet) talking amongst themselves as a group.

There is widespread understanding of the importance of gut health to overall health in the general community. But there is widespread promotion that you can fix your gut biome by simply taking a pill or eating some wonder plan. That is not consistent with real-world observations,.

Kale was promoted as such a wonder plant, which it is, but not if it is grown in sterile soil relying on synthetic fertilisers and spends days from harvest to eating.

Such wonder foods will not have much impact on the gut biome – but may be better than eating a packet of chips.

Most people have stopped believing all the marketing hype on the Internet so there needs to be a better and more believable information channel.

Gbiota.club

We already have people who are growing and eating Gbiota food.

The first step is to give the existing Gbiota users a way they can communicate with each other to form an integrated team.

I am asking them to sign up to join the gbiota.club website and start putting up posts (called activity) with a little chat and photos of what they are doing.

Gbiota.club is a private website. When I first set up gbiota.club it was a bit of a mess as it was inundated with scammers and dubious operations trying to sell pills on my site.

I was very discouraged and let the site stagnate but now I can see it could be the solution.

It will remain a free site but people will have to sign in to access. If I get scammers, abusers or operations trying to sell pills I can (and will) simply remove them.

How could be internet, one of the modern world’s greatest innovations deteriorate so rapidly?

But genuine users can send out invites to their friends and contacts to join.

It may be slow going at first but once it gets under way it should build up steam.

Gbiota boxes made easy

People need a way that they can experience firsthand the benefits of eating gut-brain food.

The post Gbiota boxes made easy shows how people, even if they are living in an apartment, can grow their own gut brain food.

This will not lead to mass adoption but all innovations start with a group of entrepreneurial pioneers who do the trailblazing.

Our biggest obstacle may be the disenchantment with the internet as a reliable source of information but our biggest advantage is that it is easy and inexpensive to people to experience eating gut-brain food first hand.

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Why we need to act

The modern epidemic

People across the globe are suffering an epidemic of chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, and dementia. It is the biggest health threat facing humanity (See Survival).

The underlying reason for this epidemic of chronic diseases is the wrong fat in the wrong place.

Why we get the wrong fat in the wrong place

Everybody has an intelligent control system that regulates our bodies.

It is a combination of our head and gut brains.

We cannot change our head brain, but we can train it and maybe change how it is expressed (Epigenetics) essentially we are stuck with it.

But we can change our gut brain, simply by what what we eat.

Our intelligent control system

Our gut is an integral part of the control system regulating our appetite, how much and where we store fat in our bodies, and also our immune system.

Our gut has intelligence from the trillions of microbes in our gut communicating with each other, just like in a computer.

These microbes, are living creatures which come from the soil.

In our modern diet, which is focused on highly processed foods, there are no living microbes.

The result is that our gut brain does not work as it should.

Feed our gut brain

The Gbiota technology was developed so almost all people, including those living in apartments, could be eating plants, grown in living soil, freshly picked and so full of beneficial microbes.

This technology would improve the lives of billions of people across the globe.

Every eight seconds someone has a limb amputated, we could prevent them losing their foot but we have to tell them how. That is what this web is all about.

Modern food

People say our modern diet of ultra-processed foods makes us overeat so we get fat and sick – but it is not that simple.

It is not what is in our food but what is not in our food.

Our intelligent control system – our gut-brain regulates our bodies.

If we feed it gut-brain food it works well and we have a good chance of a long and healthy life. If we don’t feed it gut-brain food it goes into panic mode and sends out instructions to store fat.

It creates food cravings to make us overeat. Overeating is not the cause of getting fat and sick, it is the enabling factor – the cause is because we are not feeding our gut-brain.

Feed our gut brain

The solution is to feed our gut-brain. We know how to do that, it is simple and inexpensive, the gbiota.com website shows how. Gbiota does not receive any external funding, it is a community benefit organisation so gbiota.com is a subscription site – but $40 a year is pretty good value to prevent having your foot amputated from diabetes.

Does it work?

That is difficult because it is not black and white. Our gut-brain is made up of the combinations of the brains in our head and gut.

The trillions of cells in our gut communicate with each other so our gut has real intelligence.

Some people, on one extreme, have a head brain which makes them totally resistant to becoming fat and sick, they can eat whatever they like and they will always be fit and healthy while at the other extreme, some people will become fat and sick and may have a limb amputated from diabetes however careful they are.

Life is not fair.

Most people have a choice

But the vast majority of people have a choice whether they become fat and sick or fit and healthy by eating gut-brain food.

Fortunately it is very easy to tell if eating gut-brain food will work for a particular person, just try it and see if the food cravings disappear.

Fake advertising

But the real problem is persuading people to eat gut brain food. This is difficult with the barrage of false information and manipulative advertising which has invaded our world.

People have simply stopped believing in the electronic barrage.

But they still believe people they trust. If people start eating gut food and the food cravings disappear they can tell their friends and contacts. It is much easier to make changes as part of a group, sharing information and experiences and even food.

That is what the gbiota.club website is all about – a place where people can exchange information and real-world experiences.

Members registered on gbiota.club also receive the Newsletter to keep them updated on the latest technological advances.

And gbiota.club is free, no one is monitoring your behaviour so they can sell you something. It is a private social media site with standards of behaviour – no advertising and no abuse.

Join the movement to avoid the food crisis

Our food system is moving into a crisis from a combination of climate change and destruction of our top soils.

If you want to help that by joining the Gbiota social movement then start by registering at gbiota.club. If you are already using the Gbiota system then register at gbiota.club and share your experiences with other people who may benefit from you experiences.

Just post in ‘activity’. If you have any problems then just email me at colin@gbiota.com

Colin Austin © 14 March2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.

Gbiota boxes – made easy

Why?

Developing a simple Gbiota box for people living in apartments has been the focus of my development work – Why?

The world is very different to when I was born. Back then infectious diseases were the biggest health issue. We were obsessed with germs, they had to be eliminated at all costs and adopting a chemical approach, swapping manure with chemical fertilisers, toxic sprays and antibiotics we have been successful in killing them.

What we failed to appreciate at that time that we were also killing of the beneficial microbes in our gut which form part of our in intelligent control system which has resulted in non-infectious or chronic diseased being the biggest health problem across the globe.

The first technical challenge was how to control the harmful germs without harming the beneficial microbes.

Nature has taught us the principle of Eco-balance, simply create the right conditions so the good microbes out compete and out breed the harmful ones. That is the essence of the Gbiota technology.

For people with a garden and some growing skills this is easy and is already widely adopted but the epidemic of chronic disease affects everyone, particularly the majority of people living in cities, probably in an apartment.

In the future I can see a system where people living in an apartment can just order on line a Gbiota box, with plants already growing and have them delivered to the door and requiring little effort other than watering.

But we are not there yet, these local growers need to see a demand so I need to develop a user base of city dwellers. Once there is a user base with these early adopters, there will be a clear demand for growers.

So here is the simplest way of making a Gbiota box which is perfectly practical for anyone with a bit of pioneering spirit, or not wanting to have a foot amputated from diabetes.

Selecting a box

There is nothing magical about the box, I know there are many Wicking boxes on the market, often at high prices, but what matters is the soil not the box – almost any box will work fine.

The main considerations are depth and size.

About the minimum depth for a box is 200mm and I doubt if many people will be growing a giant red gum in a flat so I see no point in making it deeper than 300mm. Most of my boxes are just 250mm and even then I don’t fill right to the top.

There is a lot of nutrient in the Wickimix (the soil in the Gbiota box) so there is no need for a massive root system.

Many people make large Wicking Beds (and Gbiota beds are just a version of Wicking boxes) but the reality of life is that the box is a closed system and the soil will deteriorate with time . This is much easier done with a small box than a large box (see gbiota 101).

My preference is for a 30 litre box and leave an air gap of about 50mm from the top which I can lift with a level 1 grunt, but it depends how strong you are.

There is nothing special about the box but it needs to be UV resistant and reasonably tough. You can buy a suitable box and fittings from from any hardware store.

Drill a hole as low as possible in the centre of the box

Clean the hole to make a good seal.

Insert the grommet

Apply a little ‘oral lubricant’ to the fitting

Note there is a small and large ridge, the small ridge goes into the rubber grommet

A little wriggle and a big push and she is in.

Fit the swivel tube assembly, make sure the swivel is rotating from the plastic pipe and not the grommet.

Cut a length of slotted ag pipe so it fits neatly into the base of the box.

Drill a large hole for the vertical filler pipe.

I used to just bend the pipe but this way you can see the water level in the box, this is important for irrigation scheduling.

We are going to have two filler pipes, one for water the other compost. I tried all ways of handling waste that could be used in a flat but the flies beat me so I went back to the old compost tube system.

I put a layer of organic waste in the base, grass clippings are great, but use whatever you can lay your hands on.

Now I load the nutrient mix, this a combination of manure, rock dust and trace minerals.

Next job is to add Wickimix which is the growing medium where the plants will put down their roots. Wickimix is made by microbes converting dirt into living soil.

My aim is to encourage local growers to produce Wickimix for sale but in the mean time people can initially fill their boxes with commercial potting mix which will be converted into Wickimix by the microbes. More details in the articles on soils and inoculants.

The box is then seeded in the normal way but as the soil is full of nutrients seeding can be more dense than normal.

Initially I top water so the seeds germinate but later most of the water will be applied from below.

The key to the Gbiota system is controlling the moisture level. If it is left full of water for any length of time harmful microbes will breed.

The swivel tube is used to drain the box. We call the liquid that drains out ‘soil blood’ as it does the same job as blood does for us, circulate nutrients and oxygen around our bodies.

If you look at soil blood under a microscope you see it is full of microscopic creatures.

As the soil blood drains out it suck fresh air into the soil but to ensure there is no stagnant water the box is left for a period after draining.

Organic waste is loaded into the compost tube and capped with Wickimix (or soil) and if needed worms then flooded with soil blood which pushes the nutrients into the base of the box.

Soil blood be applied to the plants as nutrients and microbes will be absorbed by the leaves.

We apply a fixed volume of soil blood at every irrigation typically 15% of the soil volume. We use a highly sophisticated device for this called on old milk bottle.

We are into recycling.

We control the amount of water input by varying the irrigation times. If I am at home I will drain shortly after irrigating but if I need to go away I can leave the draining until I return which increases the time between irritations.

Controlling the moisture and nutrients levels is the core of the Gbiota system, there are many articles on this website on this topic and I am always writing fresh articles.

You can always contact me at colin@gbiota.com

Survival

Colin Austin © 14 March2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.

Humans, the great survivors

Humans are the great survivors. We are the dominant species on Earth, spreading across the globe to every corner of the Earth that is vaguely habitable.

Now we are under threat, what could possibly be a threat to this great survivor species? To answer that we have to ask what makes us so good at surviving.

We are not naturally well equipped, we don’t have big teeth or claws like a tiger, we cannot run fast like an antelope and we don’t even have the reaction time of a fly.

Yet I can walk down Bundaberg main street, I am not attacked by a tiger but I could easily be killed by another human being. Not with a knife in some desperate attack but by the driver of a car, not intentionally but either me or the driver not paying attention.

The danger of the unintended error.

That is the big threat, humans just not bothering to pay attention, killing each other or even the entire species.

And what is this great threat that will kill us? Not the atomic bomb, not some local conflict spreading from Ukraine or Gaza to World War 3 but something as simple as friendly as food.

But first, why have we been so good at the survival game?

What makes humans so good at surviving?

Intelligence and cooperation.

All creatures have some form of control system so they search for food, and run away from danger.

But humans have an intelligent control system, far superior to any animal. It regulates every action in our bodies, it has sensors throughout the body that receive information, either by chemicals or electrical signals, processes this information, just like a computer processes information, then sends out action signals.

Air

We need air to breathe, if we are short of oxygen our bodies sense this and send out signals telling our lungs to breathe faster and our heart beats faster to distribute the oxygen.

Our immune system

Every time we breathe we suck in air which will certainly contain some microscopic life that could kill us, yet this is examined by our immune system, and the results reported to our intelligent control system which then decides whether this is a threat, and if the answer is yes, sends signals to our immune system saying ‘deal with this one’.

This happens so automatically we don’t even think about it, but it does not just happen, it is the result of our intelligent control system working so well that we are just not aware of it.

Temperature

This happens with every bodily function, think about temperature.

Our bodies only work over a very limited temperature range, if it gets to cold our intelligent control system sends our signals to shut down the blood flow to our extremities so we lose less heat, our fingers may turn white and we will burn more energy to create heat, shivering and flapping our arms about.

Food

Now think about food, in our affluent Western lifestyle we have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with maybe snacks in between. We don’t think about it much, we just do it, largely out of habit.

But we have two levels of thought, the conscious one saying choosing steak or fish or even vegetarian but then there is the subconscious thinking by our intelligent control system – which is much more intent.

Let us have a look at what is going on under the bonnet with an intelligent control system.

Self-learning

As soon as we are born our gut-brain starts going through a learning process.

We hear a lot these days about artificial intelligence which needs to go through a process of learning and when it is adequately trained can make quite remarkable predictions. When I have finished writing this I will run it through an AI program to check for all those typos and grammatical errors everyone makes.

But it won’t check for any illogical thinking, it takes a human brain to do that.

Human bodies have been using a much superior form of artificial intelligence for many thousands of years.

How our intelligent control system works

It is amazing that the most important system in our bodies, our intelligent control system does not have a proper name, the nearest is homeostasis but that does not describe what it does, so I call it simply our gut-brain.

Our gut-brain works just like AI Artificial Intelligence, except it has real intelligence from our head brain.

Whenever we eat our gut-brain learns. It understands that we need food to provide energy, food to grow or replace our body parts as they age, and food for our gut-brain itself.

If we are short of a particular essential nutrient, some phytonutrient or mineral like zinc, and we eat a food that provides that missing nutrient our gut- brain learns and remembers this, so when we are short of that specific nutrient again, it sends us signals making us crave that particular food.

Baby

Baby will start to hunt around to find something to suck on, hopefully find mum’s breast and have a good feed.

You may say that is just instinct, but it is not. We come pre-prepared with genes from our Mum and Dad which forms part of our intelligent control system, and that part says suck.

If sucking feels good, then the baby will continue sucking.

But breast milk, in addition to containing babies food also contains another mystery substance. That mystery has now been solved as it is food for the baby’s gut biota.

The baby acquires microbes from mum during birth (hopefully) but microbes have a short life so it was essential to develop a system of feeding them.

Solution – put microbe food into breast milk.

Designing the gut

If someone were designing the human body from scratch they would quickly see the need for a gut, with microbes to process the food to make it bio-available to the body.

It is not obvious, at first, that the gut should become a second brain. But with a little thought, the benefits are obvious. The gut is where we receive our food, which until very recently was contaminated with many harmful microbes – germs.

So making the gut a centre for the immune system makes perfect sense. But the immune system needs an intelligent controller, at a minimum to decide which microbes are beneficial and which are harmful and need dealing with.

Intelligent control systems are common in nature, bees, ants, and slime moulds which have intelligent control systems, existed long before humans came on the scene. They are based on the ability of microbes to communicate with each other to form an intelligent system.

The microbes already existed in our food so it was natural that we should develop a second intelligence system in our gut.

We were lucky that the designer, in this case, nature, linked the two intelligence centres together so they worked as an integrated system.

How can nature be so clever?

Our intelligent control system is one of the wonders of the world so how did it develop?

It did take a long time, something like a billion years but time is not enough – it needed something else.

I am in the innovation business so I have to learn how innovation happens. It is not the nice logical process that is normally projected. See Innovation.

If I wanted to give it a posh name I would try something like beneficial variable randomised events but I am not into posh names so I better name would better names would be ‘stuff up’ or ‘mistakes’.

Why we need sex

This is how nature develops such amazing systems and why we need sex.

There are a few creatures that reproduce without sex, stick insects are a common example. The offspring are just like their parents and their offspring will be just like them. That is the way it is and will go on for maybe millions of years.

To develop and change we need variability. Look at all the couples you know, some will be very similar – same ethnicity, social background, and physical characteristics while others will be very different, particularly of different races and colour. Why? Because it is natural to pick a partner that will bring diversity to the offspring.

Darwin may have been a great scientist but his ideas show how totally cruel natural selection is. Create diversity and some offspring will not be successful and die out, which is cruel, while others will evolve into future generations which are substantially different.

The species will survive

I choose the words in my opening remarks carefully. I very much doubt that humans will become extinct due to some unintended error. A nuclear war could be touch and go, but the amount of energy released by the meteor crashing into the earth that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs was much greater than our atomic bombs.

But some creatures survived and evolved into a new spectrum of creatures – including us. When I find the keys to my time machine, which being old I have misplaced, I will zap forward a million years and expect to find some version of humanity existing.

Some will survive even the worst disaster and breed to create new versions of the human species.

What I worry about is humans committing some unintended error which results in my great-grandkids being exterminated.

Unfortunately, it is not a question of if we commit an unintended error – the combination of climate change and destruction of the microbiology in our top soils will lead to widespread deaths of a significant proportion of the population.

Why I am so sure?

Because it is happening right now. When I was a kid people died predominately from infectious diseases. The figures are startling, three out of five babies born would die from an infectious disease before the age of 5, and another would die in the teens but admittedly not primarily from infection. Young boys do daft things and kill themselves.

Now we have made major improvements in the technology of combating infectious diseases.

In some areas the Black Death wiped out half the population, we had absolutely no defence against it other than primitive isolation.

Covid, bad as it was (or is), did not wipe out people on anywhere near that scale.

We are now suffering from an epidemic of chronic diseases, the scale is vast. In some areas two-thirds of the population are overweight, 8 million people a year have a limb amputated from diabetes – the fastest growing disease of all, heart attacks are the most common cause of death, dementia is rampant.

What is the underlying cause?

The underlying cause is simply that we changed our food system so we now no longer feed our gut brain. This is not some devious plot, as thought by the conspiracy theorist, but a simple unintended error with disastrous consequences.

When I was a kid we had little protection against infectious diseases. There were little in the way of vaccines and no available antibiotics. If one kid came down with chicken pox, mumps or measles there would be a party and mum would take us to the party so we caught whatever was going around.

We all knew about germs and anything to avoid germs was automatically good.

Diabetes and other chronic diseases, existed but were rare, certainly not an issue in decision-making.

Swapping infectious diseases for chronic diseases.

Under these conditions producing food that was germ-free, and probably cheaper was considered an improvement. In any case, there was no technology available for killing the harmful microbes without killing the beneficial ones.

So we moved from a people getting sick and dying from infectious diseases to one where people got sick and died from chronic diseases.

It may be one of the worst decisions that mankind has made but it was certainly an unintended error.

But if it man made then we can fix it.

If we get fat and sick it is not simply because we eat too much, it is because we are not feeding our gut brain the right food so it tells us to eat too much, then we get fat and sick.

We just have to learn how to grow gut-brain food with the beneficial microbes but without the harmful microbes.

Now we have defined the problem it has been relatively easy to solve.

The two-stage fix – first information

Before we can make physical changes there must be wide-spread public education about the importance of the gut-brain, how it works, and that we need to feed it.

Modify our diet

We don’t need to make massive changes to our diet, the bulk of the food we eat is simply burned off as energy food and our current food system does an effective job of supplying energy food.

We do need to start eating gut-brain food. That is not difficult – it simply means breeding beneficial microbes in organic waste, adding essential minerals, and growing plants that are eaten fresh.

We just need to create the conditions where the beneficial microbes out compete and out breed the harmful microbes (see Rethinking food and Diabetes)

Fresh is an issue. The beneficial microbes have a short life and die within a short period after picking. You often hear how much tastier food that has just been picked is. That is not some fluke, the beneficial microbes are alive and well.

People with a garden can readily grow gut-brain food, with a little instruction.

But nowadays the majority of people live in apartments or large houses with small blocks so there is no real space for growing.

That is why I developed the Gbiota box system – so people living in an apartment with no growing experience could have fresh gut-brain food growing at home.

Colin colin@gbiota.com

I am busy working on this post which aims to direct readers to the most appropriate page

Last updated 15 March 2024 with list of all files and list of recent files about growing- at bottom of this post

The number of articles on this web has grown to over 260 and the number of videos to 135. This is so much information that it is overwhelming and difficult for readers to find the information they need.

I understand I need to start organising this information better by breaking it up into groups and subgroups.

I usually don’t touch a post after it has been written as people never know what has changed. This post Map is totally different, it is a dynamic post which I will probably be changing most days.

Creating sub-groups

The biggest issue seems to be that many members have decided they want to make Gbiota beds or boxes and are looking for instructions on how to make and manage them.

I already have a section of growing but this is still massive so I need to break this down into subgroups.

For example, there are three distinct categories of growers.

– home growers with a garden who want to make both Gbiota beds and boxes

– people living in an apartment who just want to make boxes and recycle all their waste to make Wickimix (Gbiota soil)

– people living in an apartment who just want to buy a box already planted and just need to know about watering

– growers who create Wickimix and boxes to supply to apartment dwellers

All of these groups need to know about how to water Gbiota beds and boxes and the principles are the same for all groups. They all need to know about avoiding the soil blood (water full of nutrients and microbes) becoming stagnant and going putrid and how flood and drain breathes the soil.

Some members would like to know about how water moves through the soil and want to learn more about wicking, osmosis, tensile strength of water, diurnal cycles etc. while others are just not interested and don’t want to be bamboozled by a lot of unnecessary information.

This meant that the Growing section can be broken down into at least six separate sections.

Reorganising all this information is my current project which will take some time.

Important

But you can help me work out these subgroups. All you have to do is email me at colin@gbiota.com describe your situation so I can see if you fit into one of the above categories and what you want to know. Then I can refer you to the appropriate posts (or write a new one if needed).

This helps both of us, it helps me to work out what categories I need and you get the links to the appropriate articles.

Oh if your name happens to be Elon Musk I have no ideas about setting up Gbiota boxes on Mars.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

In the mean time you may like to look at some of these posts.

Colin

List of recent file about growing

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/05/gbiota-101/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/03/gbiota-overview-2024/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/08/inoculants/

Gbiota soil

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/16/tribox-story/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/08/gbiota-intro/

https://gbiota.com/2023/10/29/gbiota-biobox-practise/

https://gbiota.com/2023/10/29/gbiota-biobox-theory/

https://gbiota.com/2023/10/03/what-plants-to-grow/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/20/tribox-how-to/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/24/gbiota-easy-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/10/how-to-gpots/

Upgraded Beds

List of all files – latest first

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/14/survival-2/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/12/map/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/11/newsletter-11-march-2024/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/06/letter-to-obesity-centre/

https://gbiota.com/2024/03/03/innovation-and-managing-ignorance/

https://gbiota.com/2024/02/28/learning-plan/

https://gbiota.com/2024/02/26/rethinking-food-and-diabetes/

https://gbiota.com/2024/02/19/support-our-gut-health-movement/

https://gbiota.com/2024/02/19/diabetes-start-with-the-soil/

https://gbiota.com/2024/02/14/the-gbiota-project/

https://gbiota.com/2024/02/05/growers-and-gut-biota/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/31/recycle-to-survive/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/28/learning-experience/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/26/become-a-gbiota-supplier/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/21/help-wanted-with-digital-marketing/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/19/creating-change/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/18/prevention-better-than-cure/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/18/health-starts-in-the-soil-5/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/18/support-plastic-sheeting/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/18/support/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/18/prevention-better-than-cure/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/18/health-starts-in-the-soil-5/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/18/support-plastic-sheeting/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/17/solving-the-food-crisis/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/13/the-best-pro-biotic-ever/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/09/11396/ (Food matters)

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/06/hello/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/05/gbiota-101/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/03/gbiota-overview-2024/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/try-it-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/true-brain/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/fire-and-food/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/conflict-and-aggression/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/modern-epidemic/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/27/help-me-help-you/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/26/fire-water-and-technology/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/25/fat-and-sick/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/20/health-starts-in-the-soil-4/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/11/try-it/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/08/inoculants/

https://gbiota.com/2023/12/06/what-science-tells-us/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/27/gbiota-movement-4/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/20/gbiota-soil/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/17/about-gbiota-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/16/tribox-story/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/15/survival/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/12/gbiota-meaning/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/11/invisible-extinction/

https://gbiota.com/2023/11/08/gbiota-intro/

https://gbiota.com/2023/10/29/gbiota-biobox-practise/

https://gbiota.com/2023/10/29/gbiota-biobox-theory/

https://gbiota.com/2023/10/03/what-plants-to-grow/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/26/why-we-need-to-change/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/22/our-choice/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/20/tribox-how-to/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/18/gbiota-tri-box-intro/

https://gbiota.com/2023/09/08/future-of-food/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/24/gbiota-easy-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/21/good-men/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/17/homeostasis/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/17/gbiota-food-for-health/

https://gbiota.com/2023/08/10/how-to-gpots/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/25/diabetes-project/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/25/about-us/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/13/missinformation/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/13/diabetes-gut-food-project/

https://gbiota.com/2023/07/12/growing-gut-food-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/30/gut-and-diabetes/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/30/qldgov/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/19/newsletter-19th-june-23/

https://gbiota.com/2024/01/16/bill-bryson/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/14/gbiota-movement-3/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/08/fat-wrong/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/05/food-waste/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/02/people-over-profits/

https://gbiota.com/2023/06/02/real-and-fantasy/

https://gbiota.com/2023/05/18/invite-to-medical-research/

https://gbiota.com/2023/05/15/lamborghini-and-our-gut/

https://gbiota.com/2023/05/04/the-wickimix-story/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/24/feed-your-brains/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/17/unks-and-ununks/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/09/sues-story/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/09/upgraded-beds-introduction/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/04/upgraded-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/02/new-posts/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/02/welcome/

https://gbiota.com/2023/04/02/food-for-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/28/the-food-crisis/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/21/chat-with-george/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/19/george/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/13/marys-mini/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/08/the-side-hustle/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/08/it-worked/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/08/frustration/

https://gbiota.com/2023/03/02/our-gut/

https://gbiota.com/2023/02/27/our-gut-brain-2/

https://gbiota.com/2023/02/13/what-is-the-gbiota-project/

https://gbiota.com/2023/02/13/what-is-it-all-about/

https://gbiota.com/2023/02/01/the-story-of-our-guts/

https://gbiota.com/2023/01/10/better-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2023/01/05/health-starts-in-the-soil-3/

https://gbiota.com/2022/12/15/gbiota-bed-update-4-dec-2022/

https://gbiota.com/2022/12/11/overview-2/

https://gbiota.com/2022/12/07/diabetes-trial/

https://gbiota.com/2022/11/14/health-span/

https://gbiota.com/2022/11/10/trench-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2022/11/02/gbiota-boxes-update/

https://gbiota.com/2022/11/01/wwwww/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/31/the-plan/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/24/food-and-floods/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/24/crazy-world/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/21/key-points/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/17/no-dumb-donkeys/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/14/soaker-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/12/in-grounds-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/10/food-for-health-3/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/10/community-food-2/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/05/welcome-to-worm-pooh/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/05/how-gbiota-beds-work/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/04/water/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/03/food-and-the-gut-biome/

https://gbiota.com/2022/10/03/prologue/

https://gbiota.com/2022/08/22/health-starts-in-the-soil-2/

https://gbiota.com/2022/08/16/action-plan/

https://gbiota.com/2022/07/19/bit-of-a-mess/

https://gbiota.com/2022/07/16/community-growers/

https://gbiota.com/2022/07/13/meet-you/

https://gbiota.com/2022/07/06/bioboxes/

https://gbiota.com/2022/06/30/lettuce/

https://gbiota.com/2022/06/29/about-gbiota/

https://gbiota.com/2022/05/30/elowyn/

https://gbiota.com/2022/05/05/energy/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/31/time-travel/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/28/why-gbiota-boxes/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/22/i-am-a-person-2/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/21/bioboxes-basics/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/16/the-paradigm-shift/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/11/gut-health-4/

https://gbiota.com/2022/03/04/home4mar22/

https://gbiota.com/2022/01/17/local-gut-food/

https://gbiota.com/2021/12/06/get-real/

https://gbiota.com/2021/11/25/join-the-gbiota-club-2/

https://gbiota.com/2021/11/24/rethink-food/

https://gbiota.com/2021/11/19/community-food/

https://gbiota.com/2021/11/18/making-soil-in-gbiota-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2021/11/13/gut-health-3/

https://gbiota.com/2021/11/11/mother-bed/

https://gbiota.com/2021/11/08/action-plan-for-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2021/10/29/gbiota-movement-2/

https://gbiota.com/2021/10/27/header/

https://gbiota.com/2021/10/15/growing/

https://gbiota.com/2021/10/14/getting-started/

https://gbiota.com/2021/10/13/gbiota-club/

https://gbiota.com/2021/10/12/food/

https://gbiota.com/2021/10/08/alice/

https://gbiota.com/2021/10/03/ecobalance/

https://gbiota.com/2021/09/28/homesep21/

https://gbiota.com/2021/09/24/get-started/

https://gbiota.com/2021/09/22/gbiota-box-story/

https://gbiota.com/2021/09/13/opportunity/

https://gbiota.com/2021/09/07/introduction-to-gbiota/

https://gbiota.com/2021/09/06/gbiota-boxes/

https://gbiota.com/2021/08/27/immune/

https://gbiota.com/2021/08/24/delta/

https://gbiota.com/2021/08/10/updateaug21/

https://gbiota.com/2021/08/03/anthropocene/

https://gbiota.com/2021/07/10/overview/

https://gbiota.com/2021/07/05/gut-biology-sources/

https://gbiota.com/2021/07/05/index/

https://gbiota.com/2021/07/02/what-food-does/

https://gbiota.com/2021/07/02/food-and-innovation/

https://gbiota.com/2021/07/02/principles-of-gbiota-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2021/07/02/spreading-the-benefits-of-gbiota-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2021/06/21/changing-the-food-system/

https://gbiota.com/2021/06/14/community-supported-agriculture/

https://gbiota.com/2021/06/02/the-gbiota-story-continued/

https://gbiota.com/2021/06/02/making-soil/

https://gbiota.com/2021/05/26/the-wicking-gbiota-story/

https://gbiota.com/2021/05/11/food-and-becomng-adult/

https://gbiota.com/2021/05/05/greta-foodberg/

https://gbiota.com/2021/04/13/making-soil-101/

https://gbiota.com/2021/04/09/feed-your-gut-brain/

https://gbiota.com/2021/03/30/our-gut-brain/

https://gbiota.com/2021/03/24/adapting-to-the-food-crisis/

https://gbiota.com/2021/03/21/school-garden-project/

https://gbiota.com/2021/03/10/health-and-life-span/

https://gbiota.com/2021/01/23/videos-2/

https://gbiota.com/2020/12/15/aquaponics-by-igor/

https://gbiota.com/2020/11/03/making-a-gbiota-bed/

https://gbiota.com/2020/10/30/the-essence/

https://gbiota.com/2020/10/29/news-flash-30-oct-20/

https://gbiota.com/2020/09/26/growing-gut-food/

https://gbiota.com/2020/09/10/gbiota-club-how-it-works/

https://gbiota.com/2020/09/08/gbiota-easy/

https://gbiota.com/2020/09/04/dis-enabling/

https://gbiota.com/2020/08/10/eliminating-covid-19/

https://gbiota.com/2020/08/07/1848/

https://gbiota.com/2020/08/04/intelligent-control-2/

https://gbiota.com/2020/07/29/choosing-a-gbiota-smoothie/

https://gbiota.com/2020/07/28/sugar-blockers/

https://gbiota.com/2020/07/27/alernative-food/

https://gbiota.com/2020/07/23/creating-and-alternative-food-system/

https://gbiota.com/2020/07/12/history-of-food/

https://gbiota.com/2020/07/06/blogs/

https://gbiota.com/2020/07/05/nundah-cafe/

https://gbiota.com/2020/06/23/wake-up-call/

https://gbiota.com/2020/06/01/gbiota-club-introduction/

https://gbiota.com/2020/05/20/gbiota-club-home/

https://gbiota.com/2020/05/19/protection-from-the-corona-virus/

https://gbiota.com/2020/05/18/about-the-gbiota-club/

https://gbiota.com/2020/04/24/home24apr20/

https://gbiota.com/2020/04/24/join-the-gbiota-club/

https://gbiota.com/2020/04/21/making-soil-work/

https://gbiota.com/2020/04/15/qa15april20/

https://gbiota.com/2020/04/01/q-and-a/

https://gbiota.com/2020/03/30/germination/

https://gbiota.com/2020/03/29/quick-gbiota-beds/

https://gbiota.com/2020/03/28/fresh-food-revolution-2/

https://gbiota.com/2020/03/18/corona-virus-2/

https://gbiota.com/2020/03/17/pioneer/

https://gbiota.com/2020/03/17/mission-2/

https://gbiota.com/2020/03/17/gbiota-movement/

https://gbiota.com/2020/03/12/corona-virus/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/28/i-am-a-person/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/28/gbiota-for-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/power-of-the-cluster/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/soil-destruction/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/tipping/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/aunti-maud/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/micro-farms/
https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/health-and-diabetes/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/gut-health-2/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/health-starts-in-the-soil/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/our-intelligent-control/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/xiulans-story/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/mission/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/truth/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/guts/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/paradigm/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/gbiota-beds-manual/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/food-for-health-2/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/understanding-food/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/food-basics/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/intelligent-control/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/food-for-health/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/the-information-age-2/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/technology/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/blue-zones/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/gbiota-green-smoothy/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/27/making-the-change/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/26/why-we-need-the-gbiota-club/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/26/gbiota-food-for-gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/26/continuous-monitoring/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/26/alternative-food/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/03/rock-dust/

https://gbiota.com/2020/02/02/gbiota-health-starts-in-the-soil/

https://gbiota.com/2020/01/31/gut-health/

https://gbiota.com/2020/01/28/gut-biology/

https://gbiota.com/2020/01/27/hello-world/

Gbiota Newsletter

11 March 2024

Why start a Newsletter

I have many friendly followers whom I chat with regularly. They know me well enough to be frank and they say

“Colin, we know you are trying to persuade people of the benefits of eating healthy food full of living beneficial microbes, but we already know that, and what we want is more detailed information on how to set up Gbiota beds and boxes.

You have a lot of good stuff on your web but there are so many articles that it is almost impossible to find what we are looking for and things keep on changing.”

I know they are dead right, but I spend much of my time experimenting trying to find better ways.

Anyone with experience in experimentation knows that most experiments fail but occasionally there is one that really works.

That happens to me all the time, but I cannot write up the full documentation until I have tested that it really does work so I have to go back and retest, maybe several times until I am sure I can tell people this really works.

So I thought I would write a Newsletter which is really a lab diary that tell people what I did today and see if this is popular with my readers.

Here is my first write up and I look forward to the feedback.

Types of users

My largest group of users are home gardeners, they have an area where they can set up Gbiota beds to create the Wickimix soil which is really the heart of the Gbiota system.

This group does not have any real problems, they are typically experienced gardeners, and if they have any issues they can email or ring me or set up a video chat where I can talk them through their problem.

That seems to work pretty well.

The second largest group are people who live in an apartment, don’t have much gardening experience, and seem a bit reluctant to ask for help.

The third group is community or commercial growers who have plenty of expertise and can easily make Gbiota beds to supply either Gbiota box or Wickimix.

I want to expand this group and they could help the apartment dwellers. But to do that I have to increase the number of apartment users.

Today’s experiments

Today I am working on how to make Gbiota better for people living in an apartment.

Boxes OK

There does not seem to be much of a problem with making the boxes, they are just a box you can buy from a hardware store, they do need a few holes to be drilled but that does not appear to be an issue.

Growing plants OK

Neither does the actual growing of the plants seem to be a problem, they are probably already growing house plants anyway.

The big issue is creating the Wickimix. The main input is organic waste – in an apartment it is typically waste food.

Nutrients OK

But Wickimix needs other ingredients. It needs some soil as most of the action is on the surface of the soil particles, clay is really good as the fine particles have a huge surface area.

But it also needs a source of nitrogen, gardeners may have access to fresh chicken manure which is the best as it is full of microbes but it is possible to buy processed chicken manure which is nice and clean but has lost a lot of the microbes.

Next it needs minerals, a home grower may buy in bulk and store but an apartment dweller can still buy packets, and supplements like blood and bone can also be readily purchased.

There does not seem much alternative to buying these from the store, mixing them all up, and putting them into a box that can be easily stored so no problem.

In addition, of course, we need worms which are an integral part of the Gbiota system.

Pongy food waste – not OK

The real problem for the apartment dweller is how to handle the pongy food waste.

With a garden this is no problem, a couple of compost bins or rotating bins work fine but having compost bins in an apartment is very not OK.

The smell problem can be solved by sealed containers but those pesky flies still seem able to smell out a delicious fly meal – at least in Sunny Queensland where I live.

Two experiments

So I have two experiments.

In the first, I have two boxes. One contains the nutrients mix the other is for the waste. When I have some waste I simply put it into the second box and cover it with the nutrient and worm mix from the first box.

In the second experiment, I go back to an old system, the compost tube.

This is a pipe (about 100mm) that goes right down to the base of the box. This gives two input pipes, one for the water (or more correctly soil blood) while the second is for the organic waste.

When I put any organic waste into the compost tube, I cover with the nutrient mix and also flush with water. This takes any decomposed material to the bottom of the box where the friendly worms kindly distribute it throughout the box.

Easy access

If I can get enough apartment dwellers to start eating food full of beneficial microbes this will encourage commercial growers to start producing Wickimix and Gbiota boxes which will make access available to many more of the population and cut down the number of people having a foot amputated from diabetes, which is what Gbiota is all about.

Wait and see

Now it is just a case of wait and see. From the viewpoint of the Gbiota system they will both work fine in breeding the beneficial microbes, the question is which is the most user-friendly for an apartment dweller.

Let me know

I now want to find out if this style of chatty newsletter works for my reader base so please drop me an email and let me know what you think.

Colin

What they said

I recently circulated ‘Rethinking food and diabetes’ to those organisations around the world, with responsibility for managing diabetes in their various countries.

This is my reponse to what they said.

This describes a simple and inexpensive way that people can breed, in organic waste, the beneficial microbes which power our control system which regulates our bodies, then grow plants which they eat fresh to feed their gut-brain.

As eight million people a year have a limb amputated from diabetes this has major social benefit.

Those that bothered to reply said that this has not gone through the rigorous scientific evaluation and suggested I should set up a global trial to prove the technology actually works.

This would cost millions of dollars and there is simply not the money in showing people how to recycle their organic waste to breed these beneficial microbes and grow a few plants on their back patio.

So that will just not happen.

So I wrote a second article, ‘Innovations and managing ignorance’ giving case histories of how innovative technology achieves widespread adoption in the real world.

The punch line was that there was no need for them to endorse the technology, all they had to do was make diabetes sufferers aware that this option existed and let them decide.

We know that this technology is effective in some cases. But they are right, we have no idea whether 5% or 95% of amputations could be avoided – but even 5% of 8 million is 400,000 – that is a lot of legs not amputated.

But the issue of how we manage innovation could be critical to the survival of our species, if we continue to develop technologies on the basis of profits rather than public benefit we could wreck what keeps us alive.

I am not just a lead innovator, I am one of those woke, left of centre greenies who put the community benefit ahead of profits, and proud to argue the case.

Read on and join me.

.

Innovation and managing ignorance

Rethinking food and diabetes

I recently wrote an article rethinking food and diabetes that described a simple and inexpensive technology which could dramatically reduce the eight million amputations that occur every year.

You may think that this would be met with great enthusiasm by both diabetics themselves, those professionals responsible for managing diabetes, and the Governments who spend trillions of dollars in their health care budgets on diabetes.

The lead balloon

That is not what happened, it can only be described as a lead balloon – but why?

As our society depends on innovation to solve many of the problems modern civilised society faces, this is a question that needs answering.

There is a basic misconception about the process of innovation with the model of some scientist working away in the lab, coming up with some discovery which is then commercialised and adopted for the benefit of the community.

I am a successful innovator, I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of the countries leading innovators and I can tell you that is just not the way innovations normally occur.

The nature of innovation

Suck is and see

Take something as simple as a bicycle. Was the bike invented because some enterprising applied mathematician studied the theory of gyroscopic couples and the self-centering action of the offset in the forks and so invented the bicycle.

It is not at all instinctive that a two wheel bicycle could be made a stable means of transport, but it was discovered by people tinkering around with no understanding whatever of gyroscopic couples – that came later when it was found that the bicycle was something that was really practical

Was steam power, still the dominant source of power, developed because Carnot developed the theory of thermodynamics, and the Carnot cycle which explains how steam power actually works, which led to the development of the steam engine?

No – a few Englishmen like James Watt were playing around with steam power which was proving incredibly effective. The French government, worried, as ever, that those pesky English were getting ahead, paid the University of Paris, where Sadi Carnot was a professor to study thermodynamic theory.

Look at most of the innovations that we take for granted and they started off by some cantankerous person defying conventional thinking, showing that something both worked and was useful.

Then, after it had been shown to work and be useful, the two key tests was the scientific method applied to develop the underlying science which typically led to major improvements.

From the lab

Of course, there are many innovations that do originate in the lab, WiFi, the semi-conductor, and penicillin all came from fundamental research but were accidental discoveries that were applied in totally different fields.

Swapping fields is a feature of innovations and does involve risk.

Innovation involves risk

There is no better example than Barry Marshal and his work on H Pylori where he put his life at risk to solve a serious illness.

Good on you Barry – nice to know we have not all been turned into dumb donkeys.

The dreaded Silos

The dreaded Silos are one of the great obstacles to innovation – may be essential for fundamental research but deadly for the process of applied science and innovation.

Take my participation in Diabetes. I was a pioneer in computation fluid flow and was regarded as an expert in that specialise field which has nothing to do with diabetes.

But when I made a career change to study Ecology, an area where I have had a lifelong interest but no formal qualifications.

By chance, my background in fluid flow turned out to be highly valuable in my development of the Wicking bed which enabled plants to be grown with minimal water.

Still, nothing to do with diabetes.

But it is well known that wet conditions benefit the development of infectious diseases. Just read the story of building the Panama Canal where a major problem was that the workers died at such a high rate from infections in the hot and wet conditions.

Still, nothing to do with diabetes.

The power of serendipity

But it turned out that the technology of growing plants in moist (rather than wet) conditions, favours the growth of beneficial microbes rather than harmful pathogens.

This is highly relevant in the battle against diabetes.

Our built-in intelligent control system

My innovation to reduce the number of people having their legs chopped off is based on a simple observation that the body has an inbuilt intelligence that regulates what and how much we eat and where and how much fat we store.

This is not a hypothesis – this is an observation of what happens in the real world.

This is a very simple observation. If I go out into my garden and work away and sweat, as happens in Queensland, I develop a craving for something salty. This is just a fact.

But what is going on here? I sweat and lose salts from my body. Somehow my body senses this. I don’t know the mechanism that tells my body that it is lacking in salts but there is no doubt that it does.

Our intelligent control system learns

But, and here comes the punch line, my body, or rather my intelligent control system has learned over time that if I eat certain foods or drinks I replace these salts.

Now just slow down and think about this, what we see playing out in the real world is a natural example of what we see in artificial intelligence. My intelligent control system has learned, by observation and deduction, that certain foods satisfy my body.

It then sends out signals so I have this craving to eat (or drink) specific foods.

We see this demonstrated over and over again, starve people, like the Dutch in the war, and when food becomes available they put on large amounts of fat.

We see this in people who try and lose weight by inappropriate diets.

There is no question that our bodies come equipped with a natural intelligent control system that regulates our bodies.

This is just beyond argument even though we have no idea how it works.

We have no idea how it works

But the problem is we have no idea how it works. In my younger days, I used to write sophisticated software, solving partial differential equations and writing self-learning software. I could be described in Australian slang as a gun coder.

But, and here is the crunch, I, and no one else, have any idea how this intelligent code works. It is just too sophisticated. Maybe in a few decades some bright researcher will uncover the mystery but, for now, we simply have no idea.

Act or wait?

So we have two options, we can just wait for a few decades until this mystery is solved.

But just do a bit of simple maths – at eight million amputations per year for a couple of decades that is 160,000,000 possibly unnecessary amputations.

Pure and applied science

Or we can recall one of my favourite quotations.

Science is the art of managing truth, engineering is the art of managing ignorance.

An engineer’s job is to apply science.

Every time an engineer designs and builds something there is a risk it will not work, airplanes fall out of the sky (remember the Comet), cars crash, and bridges and buildings fall down.

It is a question of managing risk. Engineers talk of safety factors, that is the one time engineers showed any expertise in public relations because they are not safety factors at all – they are ignorance factors because we do not have a complete understanding of what we do so we allow for that ignorance.

Reducing amputations

So let’s get back to my solution for reducing the number of amputation from diabetes.

The diabetes epidemic is man made. For all human existence, we have eaten gut-brain food. Then we changed our food system and the epidemic arrived.

A seven years old would say then let’s go back to eating gut-brain food.

Perhaps the simple logic of a seven year old is why it is so difficult to get this idea accepted.

Just grow gut-brain food

My solution is simple, grow plants in living soil full of beneficial microbes and nutrients, and eat the plants while they are still fresh so they feed the gut-brain which forms our intelligent control system.

What are the benefits, risks, and negatives?

Well, the first we know for sure by observation – we will use a lot more toilet paper because eating fresh greens will open up our bowels. We can manage that by buying toilet rolls in large packs – not a big deal.

There is a risk that soil may be left stagnant for long periods of time which are the conditions which favour the growth of harmful microbes.

In the Gbiota system, we have a drainage system so the soil is drained regularly. About as easy to manage as putting on a seat belt.

Plants need to be picked and eaten fresh so it does mean growing at home which is marginally more work than throwing a bunch of aging veggies into a supermarket trolley. But they are cheaper so that is not a big deal.

So what are the benefits? A substantially reduced risk of having your foot chopped off and generally better management of your health.

Risk-adverse

The general view of the medical profession is that this is not a tried and proven method that has gone through the normal scientific verification process.

This is true but is looking at the problem from the point of view of proven science.

But the science will never become tested until a significant number of people try it and see if it works (which is easy – all diabetics measure their blood sugar levels and anyway the real test is does it stop food cravings which the person knows).

Just one

I, acting alone, will never make any impact on the number of amputations. I am just one person. What I have to do is convince one, yes just one, diabetic professional that the benefits far out way any risks.

They have the professional recognition to make things happen, but where is this single person? I cannot find him or her.

Have we all become so overwhelmed by the power of the digital revolution with its collection of data which it uses to manipulate our thoughts?

Have they won and turned the human species into dumb donkeys?

What I am asking for

So what am I asking from the medical profession?

Well, I am not asking for them to endorse this as an approach that has been subject to the normal rigorous testing – I am saying that they should be informing patients that there is this approach they can read about for free on my web gbiota.com and they should be the ones that decide whether the benefits out way the risks.

It is their foot that could be chopped off so they should decide – is it moral not to make this information to their patients?

This is also probably the only way of getting a large scale trial that will provide the scientific evidence to satisfy the requirements for scientific rigour.

Solving the food crisis

Learn about the Gbiota technology of growing plants without toxic chemicals by creating the right conditions so the beneficial microbes out breed and out compete the harmful microbes – Eco balance.

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Gbiota explained in my latest video

Support our gut health movement

Most people are just looking for some quick fix eg a pill when in reality changing the gut biota is quite a deal.

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Solving the food crisis

Learn about the Gbiota technology of growing plants without toxic chemicals by creating the right conditions so the beneficial microbes out breed and out compete the harmful microbes – Eco balance. 

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‘Prevention better than cure’ looks at our gut brain.

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‘Health starts in the soil’ looks at the critical issue of soil biology

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‘The worlds best pro-biotics’ looks at the important role the mums play

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Wanted regenerative growers

There are three articles here about regenerative growers – just follow the links at the bottom of each post.

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Colin Austin  © Creative commons this document may be reproduced but the source should be acknowledged. Information may be used for private use but commercial use requires a license.

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Rethinking food and diabetes

Colin Austin © 26 February © 2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.

Preface

Gbiota.com is a site for concerned thinkers. Concerned about our food system which right now is making us fat and sick and with the combination of climate change and degradation of our soil, threatens the food supply for every person on this earth.

In these modern times most people die from some chronic disease, overweight, diabetes, heart attack, dementia etc.

If you want a sporting chance of living a long and healthy life then you need to understand how the way your food is grown affects your health.

If you think that you can spend thirty seconds looking at some web page then buy some pill and then live a long and healthy life then I suggest you check out those mushrooms you are eating because that is delusional.

You need to spend fifteen minutes reading how the way your food is grown affects you health then change what you eat – not that difficult but certainly not trivial either.

You can read Rethinking food and diabetes here, then either

– sign up as a grower which give you full access to this site, we don’t sell any product – we just show how to grow food

or

– sign up as a consumer and buy from a local Gbiota grower.

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Part 1 Why we need gut-brain food

Grow your own gut-brain food if you want a long and healthy life

We have a gut-brain which regulates our bodies – we need to feed it gut-brain food.

If we don’t feed our gut-brain, which controls our appetite, we do not get the signals saying stop eating, instead we get food cravings.

Then we overeat and get fat and sick. We do not get fat and sick simply because we overeat – we get fat and sick because we are not feeding our gut brain so we get food cravings.

We need to eat plants, grown in living soil, full of beneficial microbes and nutrients – and eat fresh before the microbes die.

That is the way the real world works, no amount of virtual reality, computing power, artificial intelligence or manipulative promotion will change the way the real world works.

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The Gbiota technology

The Gbiota technology creates living soil, with a broad spectrum of beneficial microbes and essential minerals to grow plants that we eat to give us a healthy gut-brain which regulates our bodies so we live a long and healthy life.

This is a major issue for humanity. The population has exploded and we have increased food production dramatically, but with energy food which is lacking gut- brain food and key nutrients. This is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.

We need to fix our food system, avoiding deficits and ensuring sustainability.

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Diabetes strikes

My wife, Xiulan is a medical doctor, a surgeon, but she became diabetic, her foot started to turn black and our medical advisers were saying they may need to amputate.

I am an engineer and innovator. I was selected as one of the countries leading innovators by the Australian Institute of Engineers.

I know that the key to being an innovator is to really understand the underlying reasons, keep on asking why, why, why until you get to the underlying reason.

Diabetes is caused by fat in the wrong place, at first in the muscles and then in the pancreas.

But why does our bodies create fat in the wrong place.

The answer is not because we eat too much but our gut-brain decides we need to store more fat.

But why does our gut-brain decide we need to store more fat.

Answer because it detects a deficiency in our diet, either some critical mineral or lack of microbes in our food.

The solution is simply to eat food, grown in living soil, teaming with beneficial microbes and nutrients.

But here comes the big snag. Growing plants in living soil is easy and inexpensive. Why is that a snag.

We live in an age of hype and super sophistication. People just do not believe that a complex disease like Diabetes can be overcome in such a simple and inexpensive way.

This is really sad as every eight seconds some unfortunate person has a limb amputated and that could probably have been avoided.

I would very much like to change that, you can help by first reading my article Health – starts with the soil.

Then actually create soil full of beneficial microbes and minerals, grow plants and eat them while they are really fresh before the microbes die.

You will know if it works and as you will feel satisfied and not craving food.

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Our gut-brain

Our gut-brain decides how much and where we store fat and then regulates our appetite – how much we want to eat.

We cannot be healthy without a working gut-brain.

We need to feed our gut-brain so it works properly.

Gut brain-food starts in the soil with the creatures of the soil, the worms, beetles, insects, larvae fungi and microbes eating organic matter breaking down rock particles to provide bio-available nutrients.

This is a natural process which has been going on for millions of years, until recently, when we adopted toxic chemical which kill of the beneficial soil life so we no longer feed out gut brain.

A poor gut brain is the underlying cause of the epidemic of modern diseases, overweight, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

There are far sighted growers who understand this well and adopt regenerative farming to create a healthy soil so the beneficial microbes enter the plants which we eat.

But that is not enough, the beneficial microbes breed incredibly fast but they also have a short life span. Within three days of harvesting they will be dead.

The Gbiota system solves this by loading the regenerated soil into boxes so instead of buying already harvested plant people can buy boxes (which they swap over) with growing plants which they pick and eat at home while still genuinely fresh.

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Avoid toxic chemicals

Many people are quite rightly worried about the toxic chemicals in their food.

A far bigger problem is that these toxic chemicals kill of the beneficial microbes in the soil which eventually form our gut brain which regulates our bodies.

A poor gut brain is the underlying cause of the epidemic of modern diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks dementia etc.

The Gbiota system does not use toxic chemicals but creates the conditions where the beneficial microbes out breed and out compete the harmful microbes – Eco balance.

Many people grow plants in Gbiota boxes which is quite practical but some people simply do not have the time so they can buy a Gbiota box with plants already growing and ready to harvest.

This is important as the beneficial microbes have a short life of about three days. You can buy the very best organic produce but if you don’t eat shortly after harvest the benefits will be lost.

With a Gbiota box you have growing plants in your home ready to pick and eat.

We do not sell any food, we just teach people how to grow their own Gbiota food or help commercial growers set up viable businesses selling Gbiota food. 

To access this information you need to register.

Sign up to become a Gbiota member and we can show you how to grow Gbiota food or if you want to become a Gbiota grower we will help you set up a viable local business producing Gbiota boxes.

Either way you will need to sign up with a valid email address, we will not bug you but we do create a new post every week so you need to click on the notify me of new posts at the bottom of every post and sign in as a valid member.

Part 2 Creating a paradigm shift

Two hundred years ago the great Mathematicians like Newton and Leibniz knew how to solve coupled partial differential equations, but they could not do it – there was too much computation.

Fifty years I realised that, even with the primitive computer of that time that I could write software which would solve these equations. No great deal here, any competent mathematician could have done that.

But I realised that I could now calculate out how to direct flow away from easy to fill areas of a mould to the difficult areas to fill.

After a battle for acceptance this totally changed the way the  industry worked and I was recognised as one of the countries leading innovators

Today I realised that our bodies have a highly sophisticated control system but it needs the right species of microbes to work effectively but that the wrong species make us sick or even kill us.

But I saw that I could use the principles of Ecosystems to control the conditions, particularly the moisture levels so the beneficial microbes would simply out breed the harmful ones.

I now believe that if this technology was widely adopted it could go a long way to resolving the epidemic of chronic diseases, particularly diabetes which results in a limb being amputated every eight seconds.

But I need help in getting this message out to the world.

He’s a nutter

We have known for at least twenty years that Diabetes gets serious when fat levels in the Pancreas increase preventing the Pancreas from making insulin.

All the experts say the solution is to go on a diet and reduce food input. This is so instinctively obvious, you are fat so eat less, and is the accepted view of the experts in the field so how could it possibly be wrong?

If some guy comes along, who is not a dietitian or even medically qualified and said ‘Look you have been trying that for twenty years, and it has not worked, Diabetes is the fastest growing of all diseases – it is time for a rethink and instead of eating less, eat more, maybe of a different type of food but still more’.

Your immediate reaction would be, quite justifiably, to say this guy is a nutter and move on.

Well, I am that nutter and I have been here before.

Looking at problems a different way

Some fifty years ago, when computers were driven by punched cards, I saw the potential that this would change the way engineers went about their business.

I was an early pioneer of computer- aided engineering.

I wrote up a software simulation of hot plastics flowing into a cold mould, actually quite sophisticated involving solving non-linear simultaneous equations of heat transfer and fluid flow. But no one needed to know anything about that to use my software.

This simulation showed that the way the industry was thinking about designing plastic moulds had serious defects. It was based on the perfectly obvious and common sense thinking that if the mould failed to fill the solution was to make the flow channels bigger – what could possibly be wrong with that?

My simulation enabled me to rethink the whole process and in many cases the solution was to make the flow channels smaller – not bigger.

The rethink was that some areas of the mould were very easy to fill, while other areas were more difficult. What was needed was to restrict the flow into the easy-filling areas so diverting the flow to the more difficult-to-fill areas.

The net result – to fill the mould make some flow channels smaller.

Sounds totally ridiculous.

How crazy is that? The mould wont fill so make the flow channels smaller, time to call the nurse with the straight jacket.

I labelled this flow balancing and my software, which predicted flows and pressure enabled engineers to calculate how to make the required restrictions.

I bought an around-the-world airline ticket on my credit card to run a lecture tour about my thinking.

In the sophisticated cities of the world, I was the butt of many jokes about some wild Australian, where Kangaroos hop along the main street, and was widely regarded as a nutter.

But a few, very few, entrepreneurial far-sighted engineers, the early adopters asked ‘What if he is right?’

And they tried it and it worked. It literally changed the plastics industry and I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of the countries top innovators.

Plastics to Eco-systems

But I was getting a bit concerned about the plastics industry so I sold the company I had formed to exploit the technology I had developed which gave me the money to work in the area I really wanted to work in – how Eco-system actually work.

My wife Xiulan, a medical doctor became diabetic and her foot started to turn black and needed amputation.

I thought I should apply what I had learned about Ecosystems to the human body and the soil in which we grow our food.

That showed me that the conventional way we were thinking about Diabetes was too restricted, the classic Silo effect, and that the solution to Diabetes may be to eat more, not less food.

Not more of the same food but food that had been grown based on Eco-logical principles.

Control systems

The thinking was analogous to my thinking fifty years ago. Our bodies have evolved an intelligent control system to regulate our bodies. If you are swinging from branch to branch to avoid being eaten by some ferocious monster below you don’t want to be heavy and fat.

We have evolved over some million years to be naturally lean and healthy.

My first job as an engineer was working for a company that made control system for power stations so I know how control systems work.

If our bodies sense a deficit in our diet it goes into overdrive, sending out hormones to make us feel hungry so we eat more. We have evolved this capacity as part of our survival mechanism.

What we are missing in our modern diet is the beneficial microbes that power our gut-brain.

Kill the germs

But just as it seems obvious, and accepted wisdom, that to make a mould fill we need to make the flow channels bigger it is equally obvious that harmful microbes, the pathogens or germs that can makes us sick or kill us should be avoided at all costs.

We are very good at killing germs.

This thinking is perfectly natural, ever since we invented agriculture and lived in cities we have died from infectious diseases.

The statistics are horrifying, out of five babies born three would die before they reached the age of five, and a further child would die in adolescence, largely from infectious diseases.

Lock up the nutter

Anyone who suggests that we should start breeding microbes to go into our food is clearly a nutter, a pubic danger, and should be confined in an institution.

But what happens if that nutter has also developed the technology where we can breed the beneficial microbes that keep us fit and healthy while avoiding the harmful microbes which make us sick or kill us?

Eco-balance

This is what the Gbiota technology is all about, creating the conditions so the beneficial microbes out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.

That would mean completely rethinking our ideas on diet and restricting calories, instead of restricting our food intake, carefully controlling calorie intake it means eating additional food to feed the gut-brain.

In practice, when the gut-brain senses that there are no deficiencies it will stop sending our signals (hormones) saying eat more and will send out different hormones saying you are full and feel satisfied so actually may eat less than before.

This is what I call the deficit theory of nutrition, if the gut-brain senses there is a deficit it will make us eat more to fill that deficit and if it senses no deficit it will say stop eating you are full.

This is in direct contradiction to the current paradigm on how to combat diabetes (and other chronic diseases).

Where are the entrepreneurial thinkers?

To make this change we need entrepreneurial thinkers in the health field to become the early adopters.

Now I don’t have to fly around the world on a lecture tour, I can just write this article here and put it on the internet.

The article is in several parts.

The early parts describe the technology of thinking about the soil and human body as Eco-systems, just another technical presentation.

Do we need adoption?

The later parts are about the much more difficult process of getting widespread adoption. And boy oh boy do we need adoption.

Every eight seconds some unfortunate soul has a limb amputated from Diabetes, not very nice for the person and costs the global health system trillions of dollars, and in most cases this is avoidable.

We live in the information age, which would be good if it were not for the fact that it leads to humans being monitored and controlled and turned into dumb donkeys for the benefit of a few.

But if you have escaped being transformed into a dumb donkey please read on, if you are not convinced of the need for action then I have done a bad job of telling this story.

Part 3 – the technology

The population explosion

Advances in medical and hygiene technologies have allowed an incredible increase in the human population from one to eight billion people in two hundred years.

The increase in the need for food has been met by an equally dramatic increase in energy food production, actually faster than the increase in population.

But modern synthetic food lacks microbes and trace minerals to feed our gut-brain. Our gut brain is the intelligent control system that regulates our bodies resulting in a global epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases, particularly overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, and dementia.

Restore the gut brain

The Gbiota technology aims to restore the gut-brain that regulates our bodies.

This is a simple and effective technology, which is remarkably inexpensive, that solves the problem – at least technically.

It is here and now – ready to go.

Changing the food system

This does involve making some changes to our food system which is much more challenging.

As is so often the case, adoption is a much bigger challenge than developing the technology in the first place.

It is not just about growing vegetables

Yes, we do grow vegetables. But that is not the point. Let’s face it, if you just want a cabbage, and aren’t bothered about beneficial microbes, you can buy one from the supermarket at an amazingly low price.

It looks perfect, without a blemish, and is certainly attractive to buy – which is exactly what the supermarkets want.

But it is dead, inert lacking essential microbes, and probably low in minerals, particularly the trace minerals that the plants don’t need but we do.

The lack of beneficial microbes and trace minerals does not lead to a long and healthy life.

Soil blood

When we used traditional agriculture the soil was living, teaming with microbes, and generally had a good distribution of minerals.

The water in the soil was not pure but full of microbes and dissolved minerals. We call this soil blood as it fulfils the same function as human blood.

These would enter the plants and then our bodies when we ate the plants. This gave us a healthy gut-brain which regulates our bodies.

But we suffered greatly from infectious diseases.

Then we changed our agricultural system to rely heavily on chemicals which replaced the microbes and many of the trace, but essential nutrients.

We swapped from dying from infectious diseases to dying from non-infectious diseases.

Not an ideal swap!

Aims of the Gbiota technology

The Gbiota technology aim is to create living soil with a broad spectrum of beneficial microbes and minerals, to grow plants that we eat to give us a healthy gut-brain that regulates our bodies so we can expect to live a long and healthy life (that is is the easy bit) but without breeding harmful microbes which will make us sick or kill us (that is the hard bit).

This is a major issue for humanity. The population has exploded and we have increased food production dramatically, but with energy food which is lacking gut-brain food and key nutrients. This is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.

We need to fix our food system, avoiding deficits and ensuring sustainability.

Most of the food we eat is simply used for energy, our current food system is supplying energy food in large quantities.

What is lacking is food to feed our gut-brain.

How Eco-system work

The soil and our gut are both complex Ecosystems.

It is tempting to think that we could develop some magical pill that would solve the gut-brain issue – just take a pill and everything works fine.

But Ecosystem depends on conditions.

Let me take a very simple example to illustrate the point. In nature, there are two great recycling species – the ants and the worms.

Ants v worms

Ants have evolved to flourish in dry conditions while worms flourish in wetter conditions.

I may decide that I want to use worms to recycle and buy the very best worms available and add them to my soil.

If I fail to keep the soil moist then ants will just appear, as ants do, and the worms will die providing food for the ants.

Change the conditions – change the microbes

That is the way natural Ecosystems work. It is necessary to have the species to start with, but in most cases that species already exists but the conditions are just not right for it to flourish so it remains a fringe species, but change the conditions and they will become the dominant species.

This happens in everyone’s gut. We all have E-coli in our gut but it does us no harm as the conditions favour other species which simply out-breed and out-compete the harmful E-coli.

But change the conditions and we get sick or may even die from E-coli.

This is the fundamental principle underlying the Gbiota technology.

It is not about carefully breeding the required beneficial microbes under laboratory conditions and encapsulating them in a pill, it is about managing the conditions so the beneficial microbes out-breed and out-compete the harmful microbes that inevitably exist.

Dynamic populations

We could have a DNA test to determine the species in our gut. If life just continues as normal with no change we could go back a month later and have a retest and expect to get a similar result.

But they may be the same species but they are different microbes, the great grandchildren of the original microbes.

This is a dynamic population if you went to Guangzhou or Mumbai fifty years ago you would find a predominately Chinese or Indian population and that is still true today, different individuals but similar people.

The conditions have not changed – the population remains stable.

Do the same with say London or Melbourne and the change would be obvious. Different individuals with different characteristics.

This is the underlying thinking behind the Gbiota technology, change the conditions, and everything changes.

Essential for life

All living creatures require three basics – air, water, and nutrition.

But each species requires very different proportions.

Plant Watercress or Mangroves in the desert and they will soon be replaced by Cacti or Spinifex without any human intervention in the same way that Nut grass and dandelions proliferate in my garden with no external help from me.

Simple, effective, and inexpensive

This approach leads to simple, effective, and inexpensive solutions which you may think would make adoption so easy.

But at times humans can only be described as weird, the immediate reaction is how can a solution so simple and inexpensive work?

So the immediate reaction is to reject the idea and look for some complex solution that does not work.

You don’t have to look far into our modern world of computing where the ideas seem to be to make everything so complex that it does not work.

Eco-systems in practice

Sharing Nutrients

We need to feed the beneficial microbes and that is just so easy.

Microbes are just everywhere, on every surface and just floating about in the air and they eat organic waste. This provides them with energy and many of the minerals that microbes need.

But microbes appreciate, (unlike many humans), that they are part of an Eco-system where individual parts of the Eco-system contribute to the system as a whole.

We have fungi, which have extremely fine hyphae that can create intense pressure ,coupled with enzymes which can dissolve rocks and create nutrients that are available to the Eco-system as a whole.

Plants also form part of that Eco system, capturing energy from the sun, which they use to make sugars which they exude from the roots to feed the microbes in the soil, while the microbes and fungi provide nutrients to the plants.

Powered by organic waste

What does it cost us to manage this system? We need to collect organic waste, any organic waste which would otherwise be converted into greenhouse gases in waste tips. We also need minerals, typically in the form of rock dust which is readily available as a waste product from quarries.

Again we do not have to worry about sustainability. There are mountains of rocks and more are created everyday from larvae flow.

If ever there was an example of turning an unwanted waste into something really useful – this is it.

Water and air

I need to talk about these together as they are linked.

Good soil is made up of about half solids – minerals and organic matter. The more organic the better but it is continuously being used as food for the soil creatures (which is good) but is easily oxidised (which is not so good if you care about greenhouse gases).

The remaining space is just that – voids typically with a spread of sizes.

The very fine pores will be filled with water (actually soil blood) which is so firmly attached to the soil particles that neither the plants or the microbes can break it free from its attraction to the soil.

That is why plants die when there is still water in the soil. Growers talk about the wilt point for this lower level.

Then there are the medium-sized pores where the plants, microbes, and fungi can readily extract the moisture from the soil for productive use.

Then there are the large pores where the soil can not hold the water so it readily drains away. Growers talk about field capacity.

Creatures of the soil

In addition to these large pores there are channels made by the creatures of the soil, particularly worms but also rotting root systems which provide channels through the soil.

These are very important for the Gbiota technology and is one of the many reasons we rely on worms to make it work.

These creatures have a gut, just like us, with similar microbes.

Good and bad bugs

The Gbiota technology is all about preferentially breeding the good bugs over the bad bugs by managing the conditions.

We know exactly the conditions that will preferentially breed the bad bugs.

In the soil we have soil blood, this magic fluid containing dissolved nutrients and a broad spectrum of microbes.

If we let this become stagnant it makes ideal conditions for breeding the bad bugs. These are the bugs that will make us sick or kill us.

There are also bugs that will make growing plants more difficult – in particular there are the root-eating nematodes. I think with a name like that I do not need to explain the damage they can cause.

Rule 1 – not stagnant

So we know that rule number 1 is that we must never allow this soil blood – full of a broad spectrum of both beneficial and harmful microbes and nutrients to become stagnant for any length of time.

Rule 2 – breathe the soil

But just keeping the soil blood moving is not enough, we also have to ensure it is full of oxygen.

How we do this is the essence of the Gbiota technology.

So let me stop talking theory and get down to the nitty gritty of how it works.

Gbiota beds and boxes

We use the same principles in both Gbiota beds and boxes but we have to apply these principles in different ways.

Beds

Gbiota beds are, as their name suggests are in-ground beds. We have recently suffered major flooding from climate change so I now use raised beds so they are really on-ground beds.

They have several advantages, technically they encourage a wide range of creatures to enter the system.

I talk a lot about microbes, which are incredibly small and have short lives, and fungi, which can be incredibly large (the largest living creature extending over several kilometres) but the mid-sized creatures are also incredibly important to a living Eco-system.

These creatures, the worms, soldier fly larvae, beetles, slaters, saw bugs, spiders, etc all have a gut, just like us, to digest their food. As we are trying to breed microbes for our gut they are an important part of the scene.

These naturally find their way into the Gbiota beds, we don’t have to do anything – they just come naturally.

Boxes

Gbiota boxes are a lot smaller so don’t have the production capabilities of beds but they do have the big advantage that they can be used at home to grow plants.

This is incredibly important. The microbes work on a different time scale to us. I use the ratio that one hour of a microbes life is equivalent to a year of human life.

If you buy a vegetable from the Supermarket it will have been grown in soil with the nutrients provided by chemical fertilisers so there will be minimal microbial life in the soil and hence the plants.

But what there is will have died by the time they end up on the table.

The overriding advantage of the Gbiota boxes is that they allow people, even with no growing skills, to have growing plants at home which they can pick and eat before the microbes die.

This is a crucial part of the Gbiota technology.

Combo

These are not competing systems, my preferred system is to use beds to create the living soil then to use this soil (Wickimix) in Gbiota boxes.

This is the system I use at home, if for no other reason, it is much easier to protect boxes from the invading insects which are an inevitable part of growing without toxic chemicals.

Gbiota boxes

I am going to describe the Gbiota boxes as it is easier to explain how they work. Gbiota beds are based on the same principles but the mechanics are a bit more complex.

There is nothing special about the Gbiota boxes, they are just regular storage boxes that you can buy from any hardware store.

They will be exposed to sunlight so they should be UV resistant. Black plastic boxes are loaded with carbon black which is a dirt cheap way of making them UV resistant.

There are some UV resistant clear boxes but most cheap clear boxes will become brittle within a few weeks in direct sunlight.

Size is important as they need to be transported and carried. A 20 litre box is about the maximum that can be easily handled but I often just partially fill a 30 litre box which I can use as a terrarium with a lid for germination then just drape a fly screen over the top.

I drill a hole in the side as low as I can then use a rubber grommet and connector to make a swivel tube.

I cut a piece of Ag pipe to fit neatly into the base.

I used to just bend the Ag pipe to make a filler, now I either cut the pipe at 45º and similarly with the vertical pipe or just drill a large hole in the base pipe.

Either way, allows me to view the water level in the base of the box which is an important part of managing the system.

I then fill the base of the box to about a third of the height of the box (eg about 100mm) with organic waste. I then add a nutrient mix, containing minerals, manure, and trace minerals, (typically available in blood and bone) on top with of course the worms to process the organic waste.

In the ideal situation, I will then fill the box with soil created in a Gbiota bed (Wickimix) but if not available any good soil.

I wet out from above then seed as normal.

Nothing much new here, it is the operation that is important.

Operation

I have to wait until the seeds have germinated and put down a reasonable root system before I can start operating the box according to the Gbiota principles.

I set the swivel tube to the vertical position and fill the box to the top of the swivel tube through the filler pipe.

This has to fit around normal living so I typically do this over the week-end.

After the seeds have germinated and put down roots I water from underneath.

I leave the swivel tube in the up position and allow the water (soil blood) to wick up to the roots of the growing plants. I do not top water but if the boxes are outside and it rains the surface is wetted.

At mid-week, which is the maximum length of time I want the soil blood to be stagnant I twist the swivel tube down and catch the soil blood in a suitable container (eg milk bottle – I am into recycling) for reuse on the next cycle.

Most of the soil blood will drain out but there will still be some soil blood left in the base so I wait until that has all been used up. This is why I like to be able to view the water level through the filler pipe.

Flood, drain, and circulation

Just think what is happening here. When I flood the base of the bed I am expelling the stale air that always accumulates in the soil from the biological action. Rotting organic waste can make growth inhibitors – who wants that?

When I drain the bed I am sucking fresh air back into the soil in the box. I am breathing the soil.

The soil blood is also being aerated every time I cycle creating the conditions which preference the beneficial microbes.

Reloading

When the crop has finished I refill the box by putting the lid back on, turning the box upside down, lifting the box off and reloading with fresh organic waste then flipping the old soil back into the box so the structure of the soil is not disturbed.

Gbiota beds

Gbiota bed work on the same principles as boxes, partial flood and drain and recirculate. But the mechanics are a bit different.

Now my strategy is to level the ground, hopefully, this give me a bit of top-soil I can use later.

Then a lay out lengths of Ag pipes in rows. At the filler end, I pack some soil so the pipe will be above the height of the raised bed when complete.

At the other end, I make a leaky dam, just a bit higher than the pipe thickness, sufficiently dense so that it takes some time (hours) for the water to drain out when it goes back to a sump below the bed level.

A sump pump in the sump has a float valve so when the sump is nearly full the pump automatically switches on and feeds the ag pipe from a manifold.

This will flood the area around the pipe and when the pump switches off water will wick to the rest of the bed and drain back to the sump through the leaky dam.

Operation is like the boxes, wet the soil and seed as normal then surface water, if needed, until the plants have put down roots.

Then irrigate from underneath using the subsurface pipes.

All pretty straightforward.

Part 4 Adoption

As is common in the world of technology and innovation developing the technology is the easy bit, getting widespread acceptance and adoption is the difficult bit.

It means discarding paradigms that appeared to have worked well for many years (even if they have been total failures as with diabetes which is the fastest- growing of all diseases) and changing the way we go about our lives.

Abort the calorie theory

The calorie theory of diet has dominated professional thinking for many decades. This says that it is possible to calculate (or look up in a chart) how many calories a particular individual needs.

Even superficially it does not sound that convincing, people are very different and engage in very different levels of physical activity, and even an individual will use vastly different amounts of energy from day to day.

But the real weakness of this approach is that it is in direct conflict with our intelligent control system which regulates our bodies.

If this control system decides, for whatever reason, that there is a shortage of food it will shut down activity in the body to conserve energy.

If we deprive the body of food we are training our intelligent control system to store more fat when food becomes available. Not what we want!

If there is a surplus of food our control system will direct us to burn up more energy.

Calorie restriction v intelligence control system

The calorie theory is in direct conflict with our control system which is continuously monitoring, in real-time by a sophisticated sensor system, how much energy we have available and how much we are using.

A healthy gut-brain system will outperform a set of pre-calculated tables every time, we just have to feed the gut-brain.

But the calorie theory is a paradigm that lingers on.

The food system

The food system underlies re-solving Diabetes. I was a kid in the war, everyone ripped up their lawns and grew vegetables fertilised with organic waste, and if you were lucky enough to be able to access it, that valuable resource – manure.

40% of the fruit and vegetables were grown in home (or Victory) gardens and diabetes was so rare as to be unknown. (But infectious diseases were a major issue).

Much food came from local farms.

Since that time there has been a continuous trend to smaller blocks, bigger houses and people living in cities so we have been forced to buy food through the supermarket system.

Despite what the adverts say this food is not fresh, it started off low in microbes, and by the time it is eaten any microbes that happened to exist have long since died.

Consequently, we are not feeding our gut brain and now Diabetes and other non-infectious diseases are at epidemic levels.

It is just plain naive to think we can solve this with some magic pills without resolving the food system.

In developing the Gbiota technology I was very aware of the need to change our food system.

At this moment there is abundant energy food readily available so changing energy food is not a priority. This may change with the twin evils of climate change and the degradation of our soils.

Grow gut-brain food

The immediate issue is to ensure that gut-brain food is readily available at an affordable price.

It is perfectly practical to use Gbiota boxes to grow gut-brain food although this does mean the consumer must be willing to recycle organic waste at home and to have enough boxes to provide all the gut-brain food needed with a full growing cycle at home.

But if gut-brain food is to become universally available (eg feeding 8 billion people) we need a system of local growers who recycle organic waste to produce Wickimix which is loaded into Gbiota boxes, plants grown to the start of harvest stage and then delivered to the home grower who only has to water, pick and eat then swap the boxes over for fresh ones.

Regenerative growers are out there

In my understanding there are plenty of regenerative growers who are well capable of providing this service but are reluctant to set up businesses because there is no immediate demand for gut-brain food from their local community food.

This is hampered by the widespread promotion of magic pills which is promoted by very skilful manipulative advertising by the manufacturers and passive endorsement by health professionals.

Community awareness

This will only change when there is wide-spread awareness in the community that we need to be eating real gut-brain food grown in soil containing both beneficial microbes and critical minerals.

This will not happen overnight (or even in my life time as I am 84).

It may seem that in the internet age this would readily happen but the wonderful world of virtual reality is not a help.

An ocean of fake products

There is so much manipulative promotion of clearly fake products that the public confidence in the internet as a source of reliable information has declined.

The controllers of the virtual reality world have been very successful in making people believe that all they need do is follow the lead of some cute-catch phrase.

I have spent money on advertising on the Internet, the response has been dramatic with thousands of people visiting my web each day, but they don’t invest the time to understand the complexity of the human body as an Ecosystem which is the core of the Gbiota technology.

Learning from a previous paradigm shift

For that, we can learn from the adoption of the flow balancing technology all those years ago which came about because a few entrepreneurial (actually intrapreneurial) engineers, working for large and influential companies, seeing the benefits and showing that this works.

What we need right now are entrepreneurial people, preferably in the health area, to lead their communities to this new way of thinking.

It is the age old formulae of show and tell. Start eating fresh plants grown in living soil full of beneficial microbes and nutrients, see for yourself how this reduces food cravings, then just tell your friends and contacts.

This is the way we will get this technology accepted, it could save an awful lots of limbs being amputated which is my measure of success.

That is why I wrote this rather long document if you have read this far and the shoe fits then please email me at colin@gbiota.com.

Support our gut health movement

Most people are just looking for some quick fix eg a pill when in reality changing the gut biota is quite a deal.

Faecal transplants

The only sure way of changing your gut biota is by the delightful process of a faecel transplant – having someones else’s pooh poked up your bum.

That won’t catch on.

Magic pills

Just buying food or supplement is not viable, the beneficial microbes die quickly and if any are still alive they will be  killed by the acid in the stomach.

Eating plants that have been grown in biologically active soil works pretty good as the vegetables protect the microbes while passing through the gut which has evolved to be highly acidic and kill of pretty much everything.

Real food

Eating fresh plants is by far the most effective and economic way of changing the gut biota.

You can learn how to grow plants as gut-brain food using the Gbiota technology, that is what people are currently doing but it does requires dedication.

Much easier is just to buy from a local Gbiota grower and have a Gbiota box with plants already growing delivered to your door.  But to set up a network of Gbiota groweres means you have to register your interest.

Growers need confirmation

It is just a fact the growers are not going to invest their time in setting up the needed growing facilities to produce real gut brain food unless there are people out there willing to buy who have not been duped in thinking that they can buy some magic pill made from some mythical plant in the Amazon jungle or Himalayan mountains.

Social movement (driven by the people)

This is a social movement to enhance community health by setting up a network of local growers who are applying the Gbiota technology.

Our aim is to set up this network of independent local growers who can breed beneficial microbes in the soil to create Wickimix – a soil loaded with beneficial microbes and nutrients.

This is loaded into Gbiota boxes based on Wickingbed principles so people can enhance their gut biota by having vegetables growing at home, which they can pick and eat while still fresh before the beneficial microbes die.

This enhances their gut biota which regulates their bodies, particularly how much and where we store fat which is the under lying cause of the modern health epidemic.

This is described in our strategy document.

Please read and if you support our aims then please register your support here.

Showing your support encourages growers to invest their time and money in setting up Gbiota beds.

Diabetes – start with the soil

The wonders of the modern age

People, across the globe, are getting fat and sick – why?

Chronic, non infectious diseases like diabetes, heart attacks and dementia used to be uncommon – certainly not at the modern epidemic levels.