Join the Gbiota Club
The Gbiota club is a social movement and practical system designed to help people access real food grown in nutrient-rich, biologically active soil, while supporting regenerative farmers and building healthier communities.
Why Join the Gbiota Club?
When you join the Gbiota club you support your gut, immune, and hormonal systems by eating real food grown in living soil.
Our guts do much more than help digest our food. There are trillions of cells in our guts made up of thousands of species. Each cell communicates with its neighbours, creating what is in effect a super computer inside us—our gut brain. This gut brain talks to our head brain to form an intelligent system which works 24/7 to control many bodily functions.
The earliest diets were nutrient-dense and gut-supportive, but low in energy.
Energy System
This intelligent control system regulates our energy. It decides whether we feel full or empty, sending signals such as “you are hungry, eat more” or “you are full, eat less.” It also decides where and how much fat we store. Some people are naturally fat, others skinny—this is the direct result of decisions taken by this control system.
Poor control of our energy system leads to diseases like diabetes, obesity and dementia—conditions that cause premature death for millions of people.
Immune System
Our guts are a central part of the intelligent system that controls our immune function. For some people, the coronavirus is little more than a sniffle; others die—sometimes because the immune system gets out of control and attacks the body itself.
Hormones
Our gut, as part of this intelligent system, helps control our hormone balance, influencing whether we feel happy or depressed. If our hormones did not make us feel good after sex, our species would have died out long ago.
Look After Your Guts
You have to admit it—those trillions of cells in our guts are pretty important.
They do not live very long, days or at most a few weeks. If we feed them the right food, beneficial bugs breed up and we stay healthy. If we feed them the wrong food, harmful bugs that damage our health thrive.
The food that makes our beneficial bugs grow is called prebiotics.
We may also need to replace good bugs by eating food that contains them. These are probiotics.
Plants, particularly green vegetables and fruit, are natural pre- and probiotics. We have been successfully eating them for millions of years and they remain the best source of pre- and probiotics.
But the biology and minerals that support a healthy gut come from the soil. Plants need to be grown in nutrient-rich, biologically active soil. Accessing this food does not happen by chance—we must make an effort to grow or buy these plants. That is what the Gbiota club is all about.
How the Gbiota Club Works
The Gbiota club works on the principle of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). A local Gbiota coordinator gathers a group of consumers together to provide purchasing power. They then approach growers to:
- Add essential trace minerals and microbial starters to the soil.
- Feed beneficial biology with organic waste.
- Avoid toxic chemicals.
This creates a truly sustainable food system.
Consumers buy directly online at reasonable prices, with produce delivered to their home or to a central hub.
Gbiota is actively seeking local area coordinators. They are rewarded by knowing they are providing a valuable community service and also receive a commission on sales so they can build a viable business.
What Is the Gbiota Club?
The Gbiota club is people coming together as a cooperative group, concerned about their health and the future of the planet, working together:
- To buy fresh produce loaded with essential minerals and beneficial biology and free from toxic chemicals.
- From growers willing to adopt regenerative farming practices that continuously improve soil quality by recycling organic waste and creating a sustainable farming system.
Manifesto
We, the people, tell our farmers we want real food and are willing to pay a fair price.
Real food is grown in nutrient-rich soil with all the trace minerals essential for health, with living soil full of beneficial biology—as shown by an abundance of earthworms—and free from toxic chemicals.
We want our food to give us a healthy gut that not only digests food, but also provides a strong immune system to protect us from infection and supplies the hormones and chemicals essential for long-term health.
We want this now, for our grandkids and their grandkids. It must be sustainable, recycling all food and organic waste and storing carbon in the soil so we live on a sustainable earth.
The measure of success is our health—now and for future generations—not the profits of multinational corporations.
We understand that no single person, no corporation, and no government can deliver this alone. We need to band together in cooperative groups, as a social movement, to protect ourselves, future generations, and the earth on which we all depend.
The Gbiota club is such a social movement.
Objectives
The immediate objective is to establish local groups with enough buying power to purchase food from cooperating local growers—food grown in nutrient-rich, biologically active soil and free from toxic chemicals—with assurance that it meets agreed quality standards at a fair price.
To achieve this, the Gbiota club needs local area coordinators who will grow their groups, negotiate supply with local growers and organise transport.
Local area coordinators gain the satisfaction of contributing to members’ health and receive an equitable commission on all sales.
Who Started the Gbiota Club?
I am Colin Austin, and I am inviting you to become a member of the Gbiota club—or better still, a local coordinator.
Our food provides far more than energy. This is discussed in the food section of the Gbiota website, particularly here: https://wickingbed.com/2020/02/27/understanding-food/
We also need food to repair and replace body parts and to feed our gut biology, where most of our immune system lives. Our gut provides intelligent control for many body functions (including where and how much fat we store) and produces a wide range of essential hormones and chemicals.
We don’t call this the Gbiota (Gut biota) project for nothing—our guts are a critical part of our health system.
Modern Food Is Deficient in Three Ways
1. Mineral Deficiency
Modern food is deficient in key trace elements essential for human health. Plants need only a limited range of minerals, while humans require a much wider range. There is no economic incentive for farmers to add these extra trace minerals to the soil, as plants will still grow without them.
Key minerals commonly lacking include chromium, copper, fluoride, iodine, iron, manganese, molybdenum, selenium and zinc. As a result, our soils and hence our food are deficient in essential minerals.
2. Healthy Guts
Our guts are one of the most essential organs in our bodies. The diversity of biology in our gut comes from the food we eat, particularly plants that act as both pre- and probiotics. We need food grown in nutrient-rich, biologically active soil.
3. Toxic Chemicals
Toxic chemicals used in industrial agriculture may not be directly toxic to us in small doses, but they can be highly damaging to our gut biology and are a major threat to our long-term health.
First Aim of the Gbiota Club
The first aim of the Gbiota club was to develop technology for growing food that provides key trace minerals and microbiology for the gut—without using toxic chemicals that damage gut biology.
Key Message
The simple message is: we should be eating food grown in nutrient-rich, biologically active soil.
The most cost-effective way of doing this is with Gbiota beds, where a nutrient-rich compost tea floods and drains through the root zone, supplying abundant nutrients and air—both essential for plant health.
Second Aim of the Gbiota Club
The second aim is to make this technology widely available. Information is provided free of charge for anyone with the skills, land, resources, and time to grow Gbiota food for their own use.
The technical details of growing food using Gbiota methods are in the “Growing” section of the website, starting here: https://wickingbed.com/2020/04/21/making-soil-work/
Third Aim of the Gbiota Club
The third aim is to make Gbiota food readily available at a reasonable price for people who do not want to set up Gbiota beds and simply want to buy food from accredited growers.
This presents logistical challenges. It costs more on farm to add essential trace minerals, support beneficial microbiology, and avoid toxic chemicals than it does to farm using industrial chemical methods.
Authenticity
The major problem is ensuring authenticity.
It is impossible to tell just by looking whether a plant contains the critical trace minerals and biology or is free from toxic chemicals. Buyers need a system to ensure that the food they buy is authentic Gbiota food at a reasonable price, and growers need assurance that if they go to the extra effort and cost, they will receive a fair return.
Measuring Mineral Content
Technology for measuring mineral content in soils and plants is well established and available to growers. Consumers need access to test results and reference guidelines to check whether food complies with agreed standards.
Worms – The Canary in the Coal Mine
Our understanding of the links between soil, biology, and the pathway from soil to our guts is still developing, and formal specifications will take time.
However, there is a simple, practical indicator: worms. Worms are great recyclers and soil builders. As microbiology breaks down organic matter, it passes through worms and is transformed into vermicast, a powerful soil conditioner that creates the crumb structure of healthy soil.
Worms both help create and signal biologically active soil. Abundant worms are a simple indicator of healthy biology.
How the Gbiota Club Operates in Practice
The Gbiota club is based on CSA principles. At its heart is a local Gbiota coordinator who forms a group of members genuinely wanting food grown under Gbiota principles—essentially a buying cooperative.
With purchasing power, coordinators can approach local growers to produce food using Gbiota principles and organise pickup and delivery to members’ homes or central points.
Because customers buy online directly from growers and share transport costs across many growers, the final price can be lower than under traditional systems, even if on-farm costs are higher.
More details are available in the Gbiota section of the website, starting here: https://wickingbed.com/2020/04/24/join-the-gbiota-club/
Why Join the Gbiota Club Now?
Instead of listening to marketing claims, consider the message from leading medical experts: diet is the key to a healthy gut and immune system, and we need major changes to what we eat.
One cardiologist interviewed on the BBC about coronavirus explained that people with a healthy gut and immune system from eating a healthy diet are roughly ten times less likely to die from the virus than those with poor diets.
Imagine how different the world would be if death rates from coronavirus were cut to one tenth, and most people experienced little more than mild symptoms.
Coronavirus is a wake-up call that we must change our diets. That is what the Gbiota club is about.
What Should We Eat?
There is no shortage of well-researched information linking diet and health. For example:
Much of the literature is technical and detailed, but the central message is clear—we know what to eat to be healthy.
Michael Pollan summed it up: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
I use a few more words: “Eat real food, grown in nutrient-rich, biologically active soil, free of toxic chemicals.”
The challenge is not knowing what to eat—it is accessing that food.
How Do We Access Healthy Food?
That is what the Gbiota club is all about—making healthy food widely available at a reasonable price.
If you don’t believe there is a problem, try asking your local supermarket for vegetables rich in chromium, copper, fluoride, iodine, iron, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, zinc, Acidobacteria, Chloroflexi, Verrucomicrobia and Planctomycetes.
The likely response: “Sorry—next please.”
It’s not the checkout operator’s fault. It’s the system. So we need to change the system.
Changing the System
Many people understand the importance of diet for health and want to eat better food.
Many growers want to grow healthy food and regenerate their soil so it not only remains sustainable but continuously improves, with higher nutrient content, better structure, and increased carbon storage.
The Gbiota club brings these people together so they can cooperate in creating an alternative to the profit-dominated food system.
This change will not come from giant corporations or governments. It will come from individuals cooperating together—that is our strength as a species.
Cooperative Society or Profits – Which Do We Choose?
For the last twenty years I have been promoting a social philosophy. Humans are now the dominant species on earth, with the power to decide what sort of society we want and how we treat the planet.
This philosophy is based on two ideas:
- We succeed because we cooperate.
- We can communicate, learn, and pass knowledge to the next generation.
I often tell the story of how we came down from the trees and learned that if we collectively threw stones at dangerous beasts, they would leave us alone. Cooperation is our core strength.
How to Join the Gbiota Club
You can read more about how the club works, about food and health, and about growing methods using the Gbiota menus:
- Gbiota club posts (how it works), starting with: https://wickingbed.com/2020/04/24/join-the-gbiota-club/
- Food and health posts, starting with: https://wickingbed.com/2020/02/27/gbiota-green-smoothy/
- Growing methods using Gbiota beds, starting with: https://wickingbed.com/2020/04/21/making-soil-work/
I hope this introduction to the Gbiota project persuades you of its importance for your own health and for the kind of society we want to live in.
If so, all you need to do to join the Gbiota club is email me at colinaustin@bigpond.com, indicating whether you want to be a consumer, grower, or local area coordinator, and your approximate location (nearest city).
If you want to read more about why to join the Gbiota club, see: Read more about why to join the Gbiota club
