Half the western population is suffering from some chronic or long term illness. The ultimate cause can be traced back to poor gut health, driven by our modern chemical industrial food system. This system produces vast quantities of cheap, convenient energy food but kills the microbes which should end up in our gut.

Our gut microbiome originates in the soil, which should contain thousands of different species of beneficial microbes that move into plants and then into us.

We can go to the supermarket and buy a cabbage wrapped in plastic, or we can grow beneficial microbes wrapped inside a cabbage by breeding those microbes in the soil first.

This site shows how – but in this digital age many people hope to solve complex problems with a simple slogan. Let me save you a lot of time by saying that if that is what you are looking for, you are on the wrong site.

There are many posts here, but just two describe how we can establish communities who enjoy better health by feeding their gut brains: Food for Health and Community food. Read these to see how we can modify our food system to make us healthier and more resilient in a changing climate.

Grow gut brain food

In the last eighty years the global population has trebled and we all have to eat.

The modern food industry has increased the production of energy food 40% faster than the increase in population.

There is ample energy food, which is really just fuel. The fact that there are millions of people starving is not because of a lack of energy food but due to inequality, politics and distribution failures.

Some 80% of the food we eat is simply burned for fuel, but we also need food to feed our gut brain, which controls how our bodies work and supplies the complex chemicals to replace our body parts as they age and wear.

Sadly that is lacking in our modern food system. Read Food and the Gut biome here.

This has led to a massive supplement industry to supply all those chemicals and, more recently, microbes which are essential for health.

Taking pills to make up for deficiencies in our diet is an expensive and not very effective way of correcting these problems. It is far cheaper and more effective to grow plants in nutrient rich, biologically active soil so they naturally contain those complex chemicals and microbes.

That is what this web site is all about – we do not sell anything; we supply information on how to grow food which will make us healthy.

I accept that there is a mass of information on this web site which can be confusing for new readers.

How this site is organised

This is how I have organised the web. There are three areas – food, Gbiota news and videos – which contain many articles. These are published under the Creative Commons system. They are totally free and can be copied and reproduced without further permission; the only requirement is that the original source (for example www.gbiota.com) is acknowledged.

Posts are arranged by time with the latest up front so you can easily read the latest posts by clicking on the relevant links.

Some posts may be older but are critical to understanding food, so I have set up links to these important posts here, here and here. Once I have published a post I generally do not like to change it; however, the post Key Points is dynamic and updated regularly, so it is worth checking.

We do not sell anything but we spend a lot of time and money experimenting on how to grow food that enhances health. This is a public service site – everyone should have access to food that keeps them healthy. To help cover costs, the section on growing, which contains the nitty gritty of how to grow food that will make us healthy, is a subscription area. Please subscribe to see what it is all about – you can unsubscribe at any time.

I am focused on how to grow food that will enhance our health, specifically plants that act as pre and probiotics to enhance our gut brain and increase our health span.

The Internet is one of the great innovations of our time, giving people access to information in a way never possible before. It is also a treacherous place, with information that may be well intentioned but wrong, and sometimes just fake information designed to get your money. If you are thinking about joining the Gbiota healthy food movement, go to Key Points and decide if you agree with our analysis of food and health.

If yes, please join the Gbiota food movement so we can all enjoy a food system that makes us healthy.

The calorie obsession

The conventional food paradigm is focused on calories – trying to manage the number of calories we eat – yet you only have to walk through the local shopping centre and see the number of wobbly bums and tums to realise that it has been a total failure.

More scientifically you can look at the statistics on chronic or non-infectious disease which are at epidemic levels. Every twelve seconds someone has a limb amputated from diabetes. It is not just older people – our kids are getting fatter and sicker.

Our gut brain has evolved over millions of years to be the intelligent control system for our bodies. We need to change the food paradigm to focus on feeding our gut brain – our intelligent control system.

This is how the web site works.

Latest posts

Most of my readers are returning readers, so here are links to my latest posts:

Wicking-soaker beds describes a much simpler version of the original flood and drain beds which I introduced in 2015 and so are more suited to the home grower. They were also designed to better cope with the current weather extremes of floods and droughts.

Coming posts

I am in the speculative research business – undertaking those apparently daft projects which challenge the conventional paradigms and are unlikely to be financed by conventional research organisations.

Naturally such projects have a high failure rate – sometimes because the technology just does not work but more often because it is not acceptable to the community.

I publish these posts so my readers can comment. While I can undertake trials to see if the technology is sound, it is very difficult for me to know if it is acceptable.

It seems that my regular readers are willing to pass on their views on whether an idea will fly or sink.

Food and floods looks at what we can do to grow food with the current wave of flooding which is so damaging to current food production and could cause major shortages of fresh fruit and vegetables.

It is simply much more challenging to grow food in waterlogged soil than with a simple water shortage, where there are established techniques to grow at least some food.

Welcome to new readers

We welcome new readers but there are things that need to be said upfront. We live in the information age where we seem to expect a simple solution to any problem. Let me tell you there is no simple solution to working out how to feed some eight billion people food that will keep them healthy and increase their health span.

While the population has trebled over the last eighty years, our production has increased 40% faster. We have been highly successful in increasing our production of caloric food but have created a disaster in producing food that will feed our intelligent control system.

This has been a disaster for young and old alike. Now I am ancient – a genuine oldie – so I can tell you what it is like being old. You accept that you are going to die – it is just a reality – but what you want is to stay fit and active until it is time to crawl into your compost bin and die.

What you really want is to stay fit and active until that time. But that is just not happening with our modern food system. Who wants to stay fixed in a wheelchair, dribbling into the blanket, peeing your pants and having no idea of the names of your grandchildren who come to visit you?

We made some bad decisions on food. There are hundreds of articles on food and health on this site and if you are a new reader you would find this totally overwhelming.

So this is what you can do:

I have made a post called Key Points which gets to the essence.

Then go to No Dumb Donkeys and read the handful of articles I have selected as giving a good overview of what we are banging on about.

If you want to find out a bit about me then read My Story.

Crazy world gives a bit more history and is worth a look.

Health span and The plan are also good reads.

We don’t sell anything, we just do a lot of experimentation and write lots of articles on growing food for health. All this costs money so we are a subscription site. To access all the information you will need to register, but you get fourteen days free.

If this site is not for you then just cancel and you will pay nothing, but we will mail information to you on new posts for the next three months, after which you will not be bothered.

Welcome aboard if you decide to stay – and have a good life if this is not for you.