Why?
I have been on this earth for 83 years. I have had a great life that many would envy, I have always had access to healthy food, I am fit and healthy and I may not be an elite athlete but go for a walk of several kilometres in my local nature reserve which calms me from the stress of life and I see the lizards, birds and duck doing their thing.
I see the ducks waddling along and it reminds me of the many overweight people in the shopping centre who walk in the same way and that is all to do with soil and modern food.
I am now a great grand dad, I want my grand kids and their kids to have a good life like me but I look at the world and worry about the future. We can certainly produce food on a grand scale but it is making us fat and sick and destroying the planet and eight billion people can’t follow Elon Musk and zap off to Mars.
But I have spent many years studying how to grow food that makes us fit and healthy without destroying our planet – but how do I persuade people, many people, to change the way they eat so they are fit and healthy living on a sustainable planet.
It is pointless prattling on about it – it needs hard evidence and many people committed to making the change. That is what TheTrial is all about.
Scientific trials
Randomized double blind placebo control (RDBPC) studies are considered the “gold standard” of epidemiologic studies. They are clearly the way to go if the object is to test some particular feature – say a new drug. But this is not the way to trial for this project where an observation trial is simply more practical.
Just make changes and sit back and watch anything and everything that happens.
But we do have to control the changes that are made, make sure we have a representative number of people in the trial and have some idea of what we are looking for but still be prepared to notice things that are not on the items to be observed.
Controlled changes
Please watch my video https://youtu.be/0BOnJUXSyTU which explains the basic concepts. We want to incorporate into our diet food that has been grown in nutrient rich, biologically active soil. (For shorthand I call this Gbiota food). But the bulk of the food that we eat is simply burned off for energy so we only need to replace a proportion of our current diet with the Gbiota food – at a minimum just 5% but preferably some 20%.
People in the trial will choose what and how much they change in their diet. We just ask that they tell us.
What we are looking for
Ideally we would like to know if people on this diet live a long and healthy life (life span) and are fit and healthy until a ripe old age (health span). It is just a reality that we don’t want to wait for half a century to get the answer so we look for indicators.
The first and most important is appetite (actually food cravings). Our modern diet is deficient in both beneficial microbes and key minerals, our intelligent control system senses these deficiencies and makes us hungry, really food craving. So we want to know if these food cravings disappear.
This is purely subjective – do you feel satisfied or are you continuously craving more food?
In the scientific world it is nice to have things we can measure – put a number on – and the critical items we can measure are weight and waist measurement.
Perhaps even more important – but still subjective – is how well do we feel?
Do we feel full of energy and life is fun and worth living or do we just want to slouch on the couch.
Soil – Food – Health
The benefits are obvious – in the recent pandemic there were various studies which showed that people eating healthy food were less affected by the virus and recovered faster.
But health is more than the lack of disease – it is about having energy and a zest for life and you can’t talk about energy without mentioning two words – fat and sugar (or rather glucose).
Our muscles and brain run on glucose, which actually is a rather low grade energy but very mobile so can easily be turned into energy very quickly, but fat is the way our bodies store bulk energy which it can readily turn into glucose to provide immediate energy.
Without fat we die – the simple but brutal truth – but too much fat can lead to a spectrum of diseases – diabetes, heart attacks, cancer, dementia and more.
Fat comes from the food we eat so how can we grow food that will ensure we have just the right amount of fat?
And that is when the fun starts.
The calorie myth
For years we have been accustomed to the calorie myth – we can simply control our weight, and hence fat levels, by simply controlling the number of calories we eat.
It is totally ingrained in all the advice we are given – eat less and exercise more. Sounds sensible – easy to apply – but it just does not work.
We can certainly lose weight by going on a diet but unfortunately the weight just does not stay off – it slowly creeps back on.
So what is going on?
Our bodies are much more intelligent than we give them credit for – we have two rather smart brains with a mind of their own.
Two brains
We have two brains, one we all know about in our head (and read the text books and they will tell you that there is the hypothalamus in our brain which controls our weight).
But we also have another brain in our gut, which is made up of trillions of cells which talk to each other to form a super computer.
Both brains talk to each other and decide how much fat we should store by regulating the amount of food we should eat.
We may think that our head brain is just controlled by our DNA that we were born with but we now know that there is epigenetics which can turn off or on part of our genetic code.
But when it gets to our gut brain we can expect (and get) some weird effects.
We may not be able to change our DNA but we can certainly change the microbes in our gut, simply by what we eat. And if we change our gut micro-biome it will work in a different way and give us different answers.
We have no idea
And what makes it really bad is we have no idea how our gut brain actually works, let alone how our gut and head brain work together.
But we do know they have been evolving together over millions of years with just one aim – to keep us alive and breeding – and they do it very well.
They are powerful
If our brains notice that it is getting cold then they will send out messages to store more fat. If you just happen to be a brown bear reading this and are smarter than the average bear (and with internet access) then you know when it gets cold your body will automatically store massive amounts of fat and you will settle down to a mega snooze until the warm weather comes.
This is totally automatic and beyond your control so sleep well.
It is the same with us humans – if our brains jointly decide to store more fat then that is what will happen. We may try and fight it but they will just go on making us more and more ravenous with food cravings we cannot resist and slow down our bodily mechanism so we really are a couch potato.
We may fight it for a bit by going on and sticking to a tough diet but eventually our brains will win.
Cutting calories just does not work long term and may even work against us.
Our brains may decide we need more fat so we cut down on calories which may make our brain really panicky about not putting on weight so they will step up the action so we get even fatter.
Experts talk about changing the set point meaning the amount of fat our brains decide we need to store.
Avoiding the deficits
In many cases our brains, what I call our intelligent control system, will sense some deficit in our diet. It is unlikely to be a simple lack of calories – our food is just full of calories.
But it could be a deficit in the minerals we need – like magnesium, iron, zinc or selenium – so it sends out the “eat more” signals.
It may be a lack of omega 3. We evolved to have a high ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 so it sends out messages to eat more greens.
It is even more likely to send out “eat more” messages if we are not feeding our gut the sort of food we need so we end up with sugar-craving monsters inside our gut.
Satisfying the deficits to keep our brains happy is the most effective way of reducing the amount of fat they decide to store.
Things can go wrong
But things can go wrong, there is this magic hormone called leptin which is produced by the fat cells and tells our brains that there is plenty of fat so stop sending out food craving signals.
Sometimes our bodies just fail to produce leptin, and at other times we become resistant to leptin so we just don’t get the message and get fat.
It can work the other way too. We cannot change our DNA but we can train our brains and if we give them bad food experiences they may just decide not to eat at all – or hardly at all.
I read that there are some six hundred chemicals produced by our fat cells – we have no idea what they do or how they work. We just have to accept that our bodies have been evolving over millions of years to produce a highly sophisticated machine which is intent on survival of the species.
Keeping our brains happy
We may not fully understand how our brains work but we can make sure that we avoid any deficit by eating fresh food grown in nutrient rich biologically active soil and avoid scaring our brains so they go into emergency mode and tell us to store all the fat we can.
Crazy diets, restricting essential food components, are a great way of scaring our brains.
The new paradigm of avoiding deficits
If our intelligent control system senses a lack of critical nutrients it will make us hungry and eat more and we will get fat. What I did not tell you is that the eating patterns we establish when young will affect us for the rest of our life.
To get the essential nutrients, grown fresh in our diet, we need to establish food clusters with both growers and consumers.
Growing the food
The technology of growing food in nutrient rich, biologically active soil is the easy bit. I have been working on this for years – there is a mass of information on the web and I am set up to support growers via email or teleconference.
While I have a good knowledge of the principles of growing healthy food there is an issue with local climate and soils and I cannot be expected to know how to grow every plant in every climatic condition. This requires local expertise which I will talk about in clusters or local groups.
Who should participate in the trial?
It is important to have a representative selection of people in the trial. I already have a good following of what I call home growers – people who have their own garden and have already set up Gbiota beds.
Don’t get me wrong – I am very happy to have these people as part of the trial but they are already probably eating a healthy diet and are therefore not really representative of the population as a whole – but they can play a key role as ambassadors for the trial and also they may consider becoming community or commercial growers to supply other members.
We really want people who are not eating a good diet and probably have some health problems – even if it is just a bit of a tum. These people are unlikely to be actively looking for a solution but the home growers can provide a critical service by inviting their friends and contacts (real and virtual) to join the trial.
Schools and the education system
The most important group we should focus on is our kids through the school system. Dietary preferences are formed early in life but the effect may not be evident until later in life when they are more difficult (but not impossible) to change.
Health is not just about managing sickness, it is about being full of energy and active with a zest for life. Our kids are bombarded with advertising for highly processed food which will leave them like waddling ducks in later life.
We accept that sport is a critical part of the school curriculum, we should place a similar emphasis on healthy eating.
Many schools are well set up to grow the foods needed for a healthy gut with their own grounds or if the school does not have grounds then cooperative parent groups who can grow this food.
But we should not forget the influence that kids have on their parents who are at the age when the effects of poor gut health become evident.
Educating the kids may be the most effective way of educating the wider population.
Mechanics and organisation
The key challenge is to get people who are not – as my grand kids would say – into gut health, to join the trial. That is where existing home growers can play a critical role.
And then – when they have decided to join – how do we give them access to Gbiota food? And as an important footnote fresh – the sooner the plants are eaten after picking the better. (This is the big weakness of our modern food system.)
I see there are three groups:
- those who just want to buy fresh Gbiota food (customers)
- those that have a garden and would be happy to set up their own Gbiota beds (and become home growers)
- those that would be happy to have a Gbiota box (probably flat dwellers) so they can have plants growing at home ready to be picked. They just need access to growers who can supply either the nutrient rich biologically active soil (I call Wickimix) to put into Gbiota boxes or Gbiota boxes ready to go.
Clusters or local groups
There are people who can grow and eat their own Gbiota food without any external help.
But there are many more people who need access to either fresh Gbiota food or Wickimix (the nutrient rich biologically active soil) to use in their own Gbiota boxes. This is a much larger group (in fact the bulk of the population) and a group that would most benefit from eating Gbiota food.
At this moment there is no established infrastructure to solve this problem so we have to solve it ourselves.
We can do that using social media to connect people. However there is no such thing as a free lunch and the whole basis of social media is that although it appears to be free it is a simple but devious way of collecting information on individuals which can then be sold to advertisers which would include those organisations selling junk food or pills of dubious benefit.
It must be recognised that devious promotion is a prime factor in our health crisis.
This would certainly put many people off from participating in the project.
I have therefore set up a private social media site where people can communicate with each other and trade among themselves in a secure and private environment.
First step
The first step for anyone interested in joining this project is to join this social media group (labelled Community in the menu).
They can register as either:
- just interested,
- a potential customer (e.g. hoping to join a group in their area)
- a home grower (which means they want to make contact with like-minded people in their area)
- a community grower (which means they would be willing to supply either Gbiota food, Gbiota boxes or Wickimix to other members – they would expect to be paid but more as a social contribution, in essence a paying hobby)
- a commercial grower (which means they are running a commercial business supplying either Gbiota food, Gbiota boxes or Wickimix to other members for profit)
Money
A project like this costs money to run and is a community run and financed project (meaning there is no external funding).
However fortunately this is not an expensive project to run – actually only about $5 per month. Customers do not make a direct payment but they are expected to buy their own Gbiota food.
Home growers are expected to pay $5 per month directly for technical support.
Community and commercial growers pay a fee for technical support and to cover promotion costs. This would be recovered by sales to customers.
It is important to maintain integrity so I have trade marked the name Gbiota and growers paying their membership fee (and correctly applying the technology) are automatically entitled to use that name.
Let me get personal here – I have financed this project myself up to date, something I am very happy to do because I have had a fortunate life, particularly as a leading innovator which has generated money in the past.
But I have made the great mistake of growing old – my attempts to find that magic switch to turn off the ageing process have failed. This is my legacy project for my own and other grand kids and I want this to be a viable operation long after I have climbed into my compost bin to make my final contribution to the soil.
If you want to contact me just email me at colin@gbiota.com.
