Summary

How life works

The two great synergies

Life starts with energy which come from the sun. There is lots of it, in one hour enough energy falls on the earth to power humans for the whole year.

This energy is picked up by the plants which takes carbon from the atmosphere and hydrogen from water to make energy fuel – carbohydrates. There is plenty of carbon in the air and plenty of water in the oceans, it just needs the sun to make rain which tends to be too much or too little.

Plants exude sugars from their roots to attract and feed microbiology, this collects water, minerals and complex chemicals from the soil and feed to the plants. This is one of the two great synergies in the world.

Some of this microbiology enters the plants so when we eat plants – or animals that eat plants – we get energy fuel, minerals and complex chemicals and microbiology.

This second great synergy is between creature, great and small, and the microbiology in the soil and in their guts. We need this microbiology to digest our food and replace our body parts.

We need sugars to power our bodies but we need just the right amount. If there is too little sugar there is not enough energy to power our bodies, if there is too much then the sugars will cause our body part to at first turn black, rot and then die. This is the curse of diabetes which years ago was very rare but is now common as we stop feeding our guts.

Fortunately our bodies are very clever at controlling our sugar levels. It does this by sending our signals and hormones, but these don’t just appear. The trillions of cells in or guts communicate with each other and our head brain to form a brain which takes the decisions to release the signals and hormones which control our body.

How we have moved from our evolutionary base

But these trillions of cells need to be fed and replaced. They have a short life, measured in days, they breed rapidly inside us – if they are fed the right food – and we are continuously eating food which contains their food and replacement micro-biology.

We don’t need a lot, nowhere near the amount of food we need for energy but is totally critical for our health.

That is why we need to eat gut food – Gbiota food.

In our evolutionary era we had plenty of gut food which came from nutrient rich biologically active soil, we had all we needed so we did not evolve to crave gut food. However energy food was in short supply there is not much energy food in the wild – so we evolved to crave energy food.

But the food for modern humans has changed – our modern food system has the technology of  producing the energy food we crave in large amounts but there is little incentive to produce the gut food – which we only need in small quantities – but it absolutely essential for our health.

Our bodes are smart enough to sense this lack and so send out signals for us to eat more – and we end up overeating on energy food rather than gut food.

Profits and social responsibility in the modern food industry

This is the great contradiction of modern food – too much of the wrong sort of food and not enough of the food we really need.

The food industry is the worlds largest industry and invested heavily in technology to improve production – with great success. In the last eighty years energy food production has increase by 4.5 while the population has increased by just over 3.

It has also produced the type of food that people have evolved to crave – sugary fatty foods. No one could criticise an industry which increases production to give people what they want.

In a capitalist society it the accepted norm that companies are in business to maximise profits for their shareholders and the market will resolve any issues. Again no one can criticise an industry for following the accepted norm.

It would be fair criticism that the industry has engaged in a marketing campaign to convince the buying public that their food is healthy, meaning complete, when it only supplies part of our dietary needs. This is simply deception.

This would not be important if the product was not life critical, say like computer games, but food is different – we all need to eat and the modern food industry has created an epidemic of chronic diseases. This need correction.

The Gbiota movement

The Gbiota movements prime focus must be to develop the technology and understanding of healthy eating but this only leads to results if the community is educated about food and there is the opportunity to buy food from growers who believe that companies have a responsibility to the community as well as making profits.

That is why the immediate aim of the Gbiota movement is to recruit people who appreciate that this is a cause and not just a profit opportunity and are prepared to act to make the world a better and healthier place. Interested contact me

Don’t worry about the earth – worry about us

 Our earth has been spinning around the sun for some 4 billion years and we can expect it to be still spinning around the sun in another 4 billion years or more.

But will there still be people on it? A lot depends on whether we can feed the billions of people who inhabit the earth now and in the future.

We may think of some cataclysmic failure from fire or flood from global warming, but it may be totally unspectacular.

Our health is totally dependent on the microbiota in our guts which in turn is dependent on the microbiota in the soil.

We are systematically destroying our soil microbiota and we have no idea how this will affect the ability of the human species to survive.

Weakened immune systems are making us more susceptible to epidemics like Covid – that could just be a warning shot across our bows.

Maybe we should take soil and gut biology a bit more seriously – as though our lives actually depend on these minute critters.

 But I don’t want this to be a story of doom and gloom. Humans are the dominant creature on earth because we are smart, innovative and cooperative.

But we are also empathetic. I have four grand children – right now too young to have children themselves but that will come in the next decade or so, may be too late for me to see my great grand children.

But I want my great grand children to have the right sort of food to eat and I want them to live in a society where they can be free of the wars, conflict and socials tensions I have had to put up with in my life.

We may live in the digital age and expect immediate answers to our problems but that is not the way the world works. We have to understand the problems then work away at the solutions.

The Gbiota technology, like all science and technology, is based on established building blocks. Here is the basic science on which Gbiota beds are based

The first is the role of our guts. We understand that our guts

– form part of an intelligent control system which determines our appetite (e.g how much we eat,)

– manufactures some of the essential complex chemicals needed to replace our body parts

– is home to much of our immune system.

The second is that our gut biology or Gbiota is determined by the soil biology in which the food we eat is grown. At birth we received a major burst of biology from our mums and then from breast feeding but after that our gut biology is determined by what we eat.

Plant will absorb energy from the sun which they use to make specific sugars which they exude from their roots to attract and feed specific microbes to the local rhizosphere or root zone. Later these will enter the plant and hence our guts.

A spinach leaf may contain some eight hundred different species of micro biology. Other plants will supply a different range of species so by eating a varied diet we can build a very complex gut biology.

Eating healthy food is more effective – and much cheaper – than taking pills to make some company very rich.

Thirdly in our evolutionary period as hunter gatherers there was a natural abundance of both biology and minerals in the soil which led to a healthy gut micro-biome. In this period there were less than a million people on earth so there was no issue – if an area became depleted we just move on to a fresh area. We continued this until recently with the great expansion in the US.

Fourthly in the last sixty years or so we have adopted chemical industrial agriculture. This has been amazingly effective in the production of food as fuel made up from carbon and hydrogen. While population has increase by a factor of 3 fuel food has increased by a factor of 4.5 so there is an apparent abundance of food with our supermarkets brimming full of convenient and tasty food.

However the lack of the soil biology which created healthy gut biology has led to an epidemic of chronic diseases stemming from overeating because our bodies are not satisfied – such as diabetes, heart attacks, dementia etc.

There is no suggestion that this has caused the current Covid epidemic but it has certainly enabled the virus to spread and cause so much problem throughout the world.

All this is well understood by conventional science and provides the basis for the Gbiota technology. There are numerous papers on these subject some of which are linked here in references.

The purpose of the Gbiota technology is to regenerate our soils at a fast enough rate so our current population of 8 billion people (and growing) can have access to healthy soil and gut biology and trace minerals now we have reached the limit of our available land.

It is much more than a better way of growing a few cabbages it is facing the problem of how our great grandchildren are going to enjoy a healthy life on this planet.

But it is not sufficient to just develop the technology – we have to plan how this can be implemented in a way that benefits the community as a whole and not just monopolist corporations. A network of micro farms supplying the local community seems the most practical approach.

This web is structured rather like a book with this being the preface. The next post is like the introduction giving an index of how the Gbiota technology actually works. This then links to more specialist post going into greater detail.

Forward anthropocene

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