Enhancing gut health with plant biota and minerals

Our gut controls our body – it needs to be fed gut food

The Paradigm battle

Changing paradigms is always difficult. Established paradigms were adopted because they worked really well and we understood how they worked.

Then along comes a new paradigm, fresh but untested and not well understood – how can it ever get accepted against the might and power of the well tried and tested established paradigms.

In the wonderful world of food the established paradigm, based on chemistry, has been incredibly successful. In my life time, incredibly short on a geological time scale, we have increased food production by a factor of 4.3 – just totally stunning. At the centre of this success is nitrogen – we learned the chemistry of how to capture nitrogen from the air to make fertilisers and whoom! food production just went through the roof.

You have got to admit it is pretty spectacular.

But is came at a cost – obesity, diabetes, heart attacks dementia just the first entries in a list of chronic non-infectious diseases before we even start talking about soil degradation and green house gases.

We have tried to overcome the health issues by following the proven success of the chemistry paradigm. We have recommendations for calorie intake, how many micro-grams of this mineral, vitamin and nutrient we should be consumed per person.

And has it worked? No – a spectacular failure – these chronic disease are getting worse in developing countries and are now spreading across the globe to hamburger munching remote tribes.

Then along comes a new paradigm – still in short pants, not understood or tested. The paradigm of biological intelligence. It says that inside our bodies, largely in our gut, there are trillion of cells which communicate with each other to create a very real and powerful intelligence which manages our bodies.

We have no idea of how the underlying code, which makes this super computer so smart, actually works.

But on every Sunday across Australia there are millions of trials which show this working.

It is dad sweating away in the garden. The sweating is causing a loss of critical salts in the body. Somehow – and no one knows how – this is sensed by our super computer which decides action is needed. It sends out a message creating a craving in sweaty dad – for a beer and some salty nuts.

Somehow, again we have no idea how, our super computer has played with Dads taste buds so those salty nuts are just so tasty they are totally irresistible.

But our super computer works 24/7 so soon detects that the salt levels are now back to normal so it modifies the taste buds so those nuts just don’t taste as good as they did a few minutes ago.

How it does this no one knows, but for sure we know it does it. Any one can test this on themselves.

We know this because dad stops stuffing himself with nuts and goes inside to check on the footy results.

But the new paradigm – the biological intelligence paradigm,

(which says there is a super computer inside us which is far better at regulating our bodies based on conditions sensed inside the body)

– is far better than the old paradigm – the chemical paradigm

(which says we can regulate our bodies by measuring out set weights of certain chemicals).

But how do new paradigms become accepted?

It does not happen simultaneously – it is more like a spreading wave.

Was there a time when factories, schools and shopping centres had paddocks outside where customers could leave their horses and the very next day all the paddocks were replaced by car parks and all the horses replaced by cars? I think not.

It happened over years – it all started with Lady Bertha Benz who decided to take a trip in hubbies Carl’s car from Mannheim to Pforsheim to visit relies, she arrived and returned safely and as they say the rest is history.

Bertha was probably more inventive than her more famous husband (by law all the patent had to be in her husbands name) but the paradigm then, and probably still is, that the automotive industry could not possibly have been created by a woman.

How will the new paradigm of biological intelligence prevail. Bertha Benz (who was quite a character) is long dead but there will be some new pioneer who will understand the importance of biological intelligence and realise that the key is to feed her gut biology.

She will try it and it will work and she will tell her friends and they will try it and before long eating gut food will be as normal as grand daughter borrowing grand dads car to go to a party.

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