About food

Before describing how Gbiota beds work I need to have a bit of a preamble about food..

Energy food

The bulk of the food we eat is just burned for energy. We are really just a walking talking thermodynamic machine just like any other thermodynamic machine from a steam engine to a rocket ship.

We are also a warm blooded creature so we need fuel just to keep us warm. It has been estimated that 80% of the food we eat is simply burned as fuel.

It is dead simple – we just burn carbon and hydrogen to give of carbon dioxide, water and lots of energy. It really does not matter what the food is, sugar, carbohydrates, fats or whatever – it is just energy.

Body building food

But unlike a steam engine we are continuously replacing our body bits from birth until death. Some bit we replace very quickly, like hair – other bits like teeth we do not change much throughout our life.

When people say I am not the man I used to be they are right, every three months or so on average I have a new body.

The chemistry is complex but bio-chemist with their sophisticated tools like mass spectrometers have it pretty well sorted out.

They can tell us what chemicals our bodies needs and what foods we should eat – easy enough to look them up to see the range of common and trace minerals we need from simple calcium, through magnesium and zinc etc to the trace minerals like selenium.

But we don’t just need the mineral which is generally insoluble – we need a very specific compound containing that mineral. That specific compound may be produced in our gut or it may be produced in the soil by the microbes or fungi.

That is the second type of food and while it does not seem to have been rigorously investigated we can guess that some 15% of the food we eat is just for replacement

 Gut and Brain food

Now comes the difficult bit, our bodies have a built in control system – it is a combination of our two brains – one in our head and the other in our gut. We can’t separate them as they work so closely together.

And whatever people may like to tell you we have no idea how this control system actually works.

We do know that in our gut and head brain there are trillions of cells which communicate with each other to provide intelligence and take decisions. It is like having a super computer inside out bodies continuously taking decisions.

We run up a flight of stairs and begin to pant and puff and our heart rate starts to increase, we feel tired and our muscles seem to not want to work.

That is all decided by our intelligent control system and we know a bit about this by studying the chemical and electrical signals racing around our bodies.

But we have really no idea how the code that drives this control system actually works.

It is a bit like having a mobile phone. I am not good at mobile phones but I have flotilla of grand daughters who – with a great deal of eye rolling and muttering about stupid oldies – will show me how to use them. They do this because they understand that while oldies may appear to be stupid they can actually be useful acting as free Uber drivers, driving instructors or later as lenders of cars to go to their parties.

So with a bit of a struggle I can actually use my phone – but I still have no idea of the code that is driving the phone.

And I probably never will – it is the nature of code. You see at one time my day job was writing complex computer code to solve coupled simultaneous equations to solve engineering problems, particularly fluid flow which was my speciality. I knew the basic mathematics – that has been known since the days of Newton and Fourier but I did not know how to solve these non-linear coupled partial differential equations directly.

So I had to use a method then called predictor corrector, then the name changed to self learning then artificial intelligence or pattern recognition. But whatever flash term is the fashion of the day it is still basically organised trial and error.

You make a guess for the answer and put that into the equations and get an error. Based on that error you make another guess and with a bit of luck the error is smaller so you make a third guess. As you do this you build up a picture of how they work so can make better and better guesses until you have a solution which is good enough.

So you write up the code and the calculations are so complex that you have absolutely no idea how it is going to work. So you test and re-code until you get it to work and then you may have something that is useful.

That is what it is like with a mobile phone.

But our brains are a level of complexity higher. With a computer the chips are standardises and you know how they should work. Our gut brain is another story – there are not just trillions of cells but there are thousands of different sorts of cells which work in different ways.

But – and this is the crunch line – they keep on changing with what we eat and so will give different answers.

At least with a mobile phone I can plug it into any charger and it will work the same. Now imagine if the food that the mobile phone lives on – electricity – varied from day to day and charger to charger.

One day you could take a selfie and you would look like a beautiful princess – the next day you recharge your phone on a different charger and take a similar selfie and you look like a frog.

That is what we face with when we think about food to feed our gut brain. We change our food, our gut biota changes and thinks in a different way – one day we have food cravings and want to eat all the time – then we change our diet and change our gut biome and feel full and can’t stand to eat another thing.

Observations of real experiments show this is what happens but how can we expect to understand why it is happening.

But we know this is what happens by experiments of fat and skinny mice. If we change their gut biota (by the simple process of pooh swapping) we can make a fat mouse skinny and a skinny mouse fat.

We can do the same with humans by a more refined process of faecal transplanting.

Good and bad bugs – ecological balance

It is just a fact of life that are beneficial and harmful microbes or more directly good and bad bugs. Throughout human history we have face the dangers of bad bugs with the bulk of the people dying from some infectious disease before they reached maturity.

But some eighty years ago we began to develop the technology of killing off the bad bugs, with antibiotics and toxic chemicals and our food system became relatively inert – free from any bugs (good or bad). This seemed to work and we dramatically reduced the death rate from infectious diseases and the population exploded – trebling in less that my life span.

But we learned the hard way that when we killed off the good bugs that we fell prey to chronic or non infectious diseases.

Learning how to breed the good bugs while controlling the bad bags is the great technical challenge we face.

The solution can be termed ecological balance.

Douglas Adams wrote : “The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42.

This may be very profound but it still does not answer one question. Over some million years we have developed a brain – an intelligent control system which decides what and how much we should eat.

Then humans – with all their wisdom developed a food system which destroyed this brain – this wonder of nature – with a crappy food system and substituted it with a complex system of weird and wonderful diets – often requiring us to measure out every calorie and micro gram of each ingredient that we eat which has left us fatter and sicker than ever.

It is a great pity Douglas died before he could explain this mystery to us all.

Gbiota food

Gbiota food is really about growing food to feed our brain. To do that we have to feed the microbes that already are living in our gut – that’s a pre-biotic.

But we also have to breed new microbes in the soil, which will go into the plants that we will eat and hence from part of our gut brain – that’s a pro-biotic.

To breed these microbes we have to feed and water them – for that we need the food that the microbes want to eat and that will include many of the minerals that we need as well.

Now the snag is that there are good bugs which will make us strong and healthy and bad bugs which at best just want to use as a comfy home to breed in – but unfortunately they often get it wrong and kill us.

To breed the good bugs – without the bad bugs taking over – we have to manage the conditions, which means food and water.

Food is the easy bit of that battle – water is the difficult bit. Bugs just don’t breed well without any water. The good bugs like it moist but not too wet (aerobic) while the bad bugs breed when it is wetter (anaerobic).

We need that magic Goldilocks moisture level.

I need to talk about that most mysterious substances we take for granted – water.