Has the world gone crazy? Wars, food shortages, floods and droughts, prices through the roof, epidemics, the internet – one of the most important innovations of our era has sunk to become the home of mass manipulation to sell us things that don’t work or we don’t need, just to make some mega corporation or wealthy individual even richer.
Have we turned into a race of dumb donkeys to be led unthinkingly to some catastrophic end?
I can’t do anything about most of these problems, but there is one I can do something about – food that will make us healthy.
Man made
The facts are simple – we evolved to have a gut brain which controls our body – it makes us want to eat the right amount, of the right sort of food. It has been working fine for millions of years, then, just to make more money we changed our food system so that our gut brain stopped working as it should. Now we have an epidemic of chronic diseases – diabetes, dementia, heart attacks etc.
What sort of society are we that puts profits ahead of the health of the population? In this web site I show how we can stop being dumb donkeys and grow food that will actually keep us healthy.
Every twelve seconds someone has a limb amputated from diabetes – this is man made and just plain wrong. So why not join me in my campaign for food that makes us healthy.
No dumb donkeys
We live in the digital age where we seem to expect that any problem can be solve by a few minutes search on the internet. If you think this is the way to feed eight billion people food that will keep them healthy (so they don’t get fat and sick and have their legs chopped off from diabetes) and all in the middle of climate change with floods and droughts and a global political system which is decidedly wobbly, then you are wrong and this is not the site for you.
Life wasn’t meant to be easy.
But I have prepared a series of posts which analyze the key issues, to develop a plan and appropriate technology to solve this horrendous problem.
Key points
When I am creating a project I find it useful to make a list of the key points. I have done this with the Gbiota project but I asked myself why keep this hidden so I am publishing this here.
No Dumb donkeys
This is where the action is so read here
Colin Austin tells it straight about Wicking Beds
Read My Story
To find diamonds you have to shovel a lot of dirt, but this is where the diamonds are.
In 1995 I started to promote Wicking bed. I did not invent them, but I did puzzle out how they worked. You can see them all over in the dry desert regions of Australia. They starts with a spoon shaped clay pan. That fill up with what is technically know as stuff – sand, silts and debris blown or washed in.
In the rare event of rain water will filter down to the clay layer and form an underground water source and voila you have a natural Wicking bed.
There is one about a hundred metres from my home but they are everywhere.
And they just took off and people are making them across the globe. But like many things in our modern world they got more complicated and just degenerated into self watering beds, good and saves time and work but missed the key point.
That took me the best part of twenty years, to 2015 to puzzle out.
Way back at the start of the Wicking bed story I was totally unaware of gut biology – I just got hungry and ate – pretty simple.
But then I began to learn the importance of gut biology and our micro-biome and the amazing job it does.
It is a real brain with the trillions of cells communicating with each other just like in a super computer.
It controls our appetite, the manufacture of the complex chemicals to replace our body parts as the age and wear and host much of our immune system.
I learned that you simply cannot be healthy without a healthy gut biome. But I learned more – our gut biome comes originally from the soil and creatures of the soil, they enter the plants which we eat which are effectively natural pre and pro biotics.
And the conditions they like is with the soil moist but not wet – which is exactly what we get in these natural Wicking beds and the people with the healthiest gut biome are those eating plants from these natural Wicking beds.
Unfortunately our modern food system kills of these beneficial microbes but anyone with a bit of a garden can grow their own pre and pro biotics.
This is even easier with the Wicking-Soaker bed.
Grow your own gut food at home
We know, from research conducted by our top brains at many or the worlds respected research institutions that our gut is incredibly important to health. It contains trillions of cells which act as a brain, communicating with our head brain, to control our appetite, manage the production of the complex chemicals needed to replace our body parts as they age and wear and trains much of our immune system.
We know from studies of the gut of people living a traditional life style, the few remaining hunter gatherers and from the blue zones Okinawa, Sardinia, Nicoya, Ikaria, and Loma Linda where people lead a healthy life right up to a ripe old age that they have a far healthier gut than people eating a modern diet – yet they do nothing other than eating plants, just after picking, and grown in biologically active nutrient rich soil.
They may live longer but what is truly remarkable is their health span, fit and healthy till the end.
All these people have very different diets, what they have in common is they are eating food grown in soil which has been developing by microbial action over millions of years. It is the difference between dirt and soil.
We are a warm blooded creature that evolved from the tiny animals could burn food at night to keep them warm and active to hunt at night when the ferocious dinosaurs had no energy.
Some 80% of the food we eat is simply burned to provide energy and to keep us warm, some 15% is used to replace our body parts as they age and wear and only a tiny amount, may be just 5%, is used to feed our gut brain.
We know that our modern food system aims to provide energy food. It is based on chemical industrial agriculture and involving long distribution chains has killed of the beneficial microbes, is low in critical minerals and had led to chronic diseases like obesity, heart attacks and dementia. This has created a multi billion dollar supplement industry.
Would it not be healthier, and certainly a lot cheaper just to eat healthy food full of the beneficial microbes and essential minerals.
But how to grow this food in a modern society where we have been destroying the soil microbes and worse how do we do this with the extremes of weather, the floods and droughts, we are now experiencing. This is the great challenge of our era.
It is simply a question of feeding the microbes and maintaining the required moisture level – not too dry and not too wet – Goldilocks moisture. This is the challenge taken up by Colin Austin a world leader in fluid flow.
Colin pioneered the use of computer to solve complex fluid flow problems. He built up Australia leading exporter of technical software, a world leader in its field and was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of the top one hundred innovators and was globally recognised as a leader in fluid flow.
He went on to pioneer Wicking beds to provide a more effective way of watering plants when water is in short supply. He has now extended the Wicking bed technology to breed the beneficial microbes which enhance our gut biology and our health.
And where so we start? Not the corporate farm just interested in profits but the home gardener, happy to turn dirt into soil for the benefits of a longer health span.
This is a simple technology which enables any home gardener to grow plants which act as as pre and pro biotics for gut health.
You can learn how you can do this yourself in your own garden by subscribing to the Gbiota web site. It cost a fraction of what you would pay for pro-biotic pills and uses the technology perfected and tested over thousands of years by nature.
This gives access to hundred of articles Colin has written over time but the key ones are the five article about growing gut food.
The first article looks at how food affects our health. Our modern food system is deficient which we try and compensate for by supporting a massive supplement industry rather than just eating healthy food.
The second article looks at the peculiar properties of water and how it moves through the soil and into the plants – taking the beneficial microbes with it. Life is totally dependant on water – you can’t drink oil or eat mobile phones.
The third article looks at how to get that magic Goldilocks moisture level, moist enough for the beneficial biota to breed but not too wet for the harmful bugs to be a problem.
The forth article gets down to the nitty gritty of how to build and operate a classic Gbiota in ground bed to grow pre and pro biotics.
The fifth article looks at the latest technology the Wicking Soaker bed
The next article will look at how to build a Gbiota box. While in ground beds are preferred people living in flats simply do not have access to a garden but a Gbiota box provides a practical alternative.
This is a technology that’s on the move and further articles are planned to keep people up to date on important issues such as how to grow plants with the current weather extremes and what plants are best to grow for gut health.
In addition to these technical articles you get a Newsletter telling you about the latest developments and can get support by email or video conference.
With this support you can grow you own plants as pre and pro biotics, a method tested over thousand of years by nature and at a fraction of the cost.
A gbiota bed or box box enables people to grow gut food at home to enhance their gut biota.
We now know just how important our gut brain is – it controls our appetite, the manufacture of the complex chemicals to replace our body parts as the age and wear and host much of our immune system.
It is a real brain with the trillions of cells communicating with each other just like in a super computer.
Modern DNA testing gives us the ability to monitor the thousands of species in our gut – from that we learn how dramatically our gut health has declined with our modern food system. Hunter gathers tribes, natives in the blue zones where people live to a ripe old age and people from a traditional life style have a far healthier gut than us.
These have very different diets but they have two things in common – they eat plants that are freshly picked and are grown in biologically active nutrient rich soils.
We can try and offset the disadvantages of our modern diet by spending a lot of money on supplements which may or may not work but would not it be better just to eat the right sort of food.
This has been the focus of Colin Austin, selected as as one of the top one hundred innovators by the Institute of Engineers.
Twenty five years ago he started to promote Wicking bed – he then developed Wicking beds to grow gut food by breeding beneficial biota in nutrient rich organic waste. He called these Gbiota beds.
The original version worked very well were somewhat complicated involving pumps and timers and, although automated, needed skills and time to operate properly.
So he has now introduced a simplified manual version which virtually anyone can use to grow their own gut food at home.
He does no sell any physical product – he just provides the technology and support for people to set up their own beds.
Read more here or go to food in the menu – all this information is free.
To access information on how to make Gbiota beds go to “growing” in the menu.
We don’t sell anything so we have made this a subsciption area to recover some of the cost of experimention, but there is a fourteen day free trial.
Any problems just email me here. I am not some mega corporation – but a real person who thinks that people should have access to food that will make them healthy without being manipluated by deceptive advertising.
