Better gut health from food
Microbes
All life is totally dependent on microbes. They break down the minerals in the soil, forming complex chemicals essential for life. They are part of our bodies, particularly in our gut where they form a real brain with intelligence which controls much of our bodily function, particularly appetite. We need the good bugs.
But there are bad bugs which make us sick or kill us so we try and kill them first. But we also kill off the good bugs on which our lives depend.
Our great challenge is to find a way of breeding the good bugs, on which our lives depend, while controlling the bad bugs.
Our intelligent control system
Our bodies are smart – deficiencies lead to food cravings and getting fat and sick.
Modern diseases, like diabetes, dementia, cancer and heart attacks have increased with our modern food.
These are related to the amount of fat in our bodies. The now obsolete view was that weight could be controlled simply by eating less and exercising more.
Medical researchers at the forefront of medical science now understand that our bodies have a set point for weight and will adjust our appetite and energy expenditure to maintain that set point. Extreme diet may reduce fat in the short term but raise the set point so in the long term lead to an increase in body fat.
The new thinking is that deficiencies (such as lack of beneficial microbes, gut and brain food, essential minerals, omega 3, etc.) in our modern food system lead to a rise in the set point so we end up fatter and sicker than ever.
The modern approach, which is slowly being accepted, is not simply to cut down on food intake but to ensure that our food contains all the essential ingredients so the set point is naturally lowered. This is the new approach of “avoiding deficiencies”.
Fresh is more than not gone bad
The solution sounds easy – eat food, freshly picked, grown in soil teeming with beneficial microbes and nutrients – Gbiota food.
This is what our ancestors did (without knowing it) and how we have survived to date.
This is fine for people with a garden and the time and expertise to grow some of their own food. We know how to grow food in soil full of essential nutrients and beneficial microbes and many people have already set up their own Gbiota beds for their own use.
Watch these four videos:
These home gardeners have the benefit of being able to pick and eat their food without delay, before the beneficial microbes die.
Society has changed
But what about people living in flats or who simply do not have the time to grow their own Gbiota food?
Go to any supermarket and you can’t help but be impressed by the vast array of foods from all over the world. You may also notice the number of wobbly bums and tums and think that all these people are simply overeating. They may well be – but the issue is far from simple.
We measure energy by calories and carbon by grams
It is now common to use calories as a measure of the amount of food we eat. Calories are a measure of the amount of energy that the food is potentially capable of generating when eaten. But calories give no idea of the chemical composition of the food. That requires us to look at the number of grams of specific chemicals in our food.
The 80%, 15% and 5% balance
The bulk of the food we eat is purely for energy. Food contains carbon and hydrogen which is simply burned off to provide energy – it is just fuel to deliver calories as heat or mechanical energy.
Some eighty percent of the food we eat is simply burned as fuel for energy. Our modern food industry has done an incredible job of providing us with low cost, readily available and tasty fuel.
But we also need food containing complex chemicals to replace our body parts as they wear and age. Farmers are very good at using fertilisers to provide just the right amount of nutrients to grow plants but we humans are much more complex than plants, so a plant may be very healthy and look great on the supermarket shelves but still be missing some key nutrients that we as complex humans need.
This is not a technical problem but one of economics and selling. A customer has no idea of the nutrients in a plant at the supermarket so the supermarket focus is on having good-looking fruit and vegetables for sale.
We don’t need a lot of these complex chemicals and only about 15% of our diet is used for replacing body parts.
But we also need to feed our brains, both of them – the one in our head – and the other in our gut. Our gut brain is particularly important as it controls our appetite and hence largely how much food we eat.
Why our intelligent control system is so important
Of course we do have will power and can go on a diet but our intelligent control system is incredibly powerful and persistent and eventually most people fail to override their food cravings.
This food for our gut brain may only be some 5% of our total diet but is incredibly important.
In the past there was no problem in getting enough gut food. People were simply eating fresh fruit and vegetables, picked and eaten straight away before the critical microbes died. Then we changed our food production system with a long delay from when the plants are harvested to when they are eaten.
We changed a system that was working (for money)
Our diet naturally contained an adequate supply of pre and probiotics which kept us healthy but then we changed the system so it no longer worked.
Of course there are some exceptions – frozen peas which are frozen straight after picking would still have beneficial microbes still alive but frozen, ready to be thawed and eaten.
We don’t have to change the entire system back to pre-industrialised agriculture – there are simply too many people on earth – but we do have to make the change so just a small percentage of our diet acts as natural pre and probiotics.
Changing the system (to one that works)
And that is where our couple of plastic boxes come into play.
In the system I have been developing there are two players, the customer and the grower.
The customer
The customer probably lives in a flat, with a couple of kids and a full time job and has no time for messing about growing plants even if they had a garden.
She will probably order online a box of living plants, ready to be harvested.
The grower will deliver the box and normally pick up an old box – plus hopefully a bag of waste food and organic waste.
At home the customer actually has another box which is the water container. She fills this with water and places the soil box on top.
The soil box has pieces of rope dangling down which go into the water, which will then wick up into the soil box.
The bottom box is simply filled with water and may contain enough water to last for much of the plants’ life but it is sensible to check the water level just once a week.
The simplest (and often the best) system is to use the tipping method. The tips of the plants are trimmed and can be used to make a green smoothie, or the tips are simply used as accoutrements by sprinkling onto the meal.
When the plants are reaching the end of their lives she simply orders a replacement box from her grower.
Now the customer can have access to fresh plants which they can pick and eat straight away.
Dead simple and convenient. The key point is that the plants are full of nutrients and beneficial microbes and act as both pre and probiotics which are genuinely fresh as they are just picked and eaten.
It probably works out cheaper than buying already harvested plants from the supermarket and all that is needed is a balcony, verandah or windowsill with sunlight.
If the box has a transparent lid it can be used to make a micro greenhouse in winter or to give some protection from pesky flies in summer.
The top box is filled with what looks like soil but we call Wickimix and it is full of beneficial microbes happily feeding away on the nutrients in the soil, which brings us to the role of the grower.
The grower
But now comes the tricky bit – where does all this Wickimix come from?
Making Wickimix is the prime job of the grower. It is true that you can get all the nutrients we need from chemical fertilisers. The fact that much commercial food is lacking in key trace elements is simply that the customer has no way of knowing if the produce contains these critical trace elements – the plants look fine and healthy – but it costs extra money to include those trace elements.
But what you don’t get from a bag of fertiliser is the beneficial microbes. We need these for two reasons – the first is that the microbes (particularly the fungi) are needed to break down the minerals into the complex and soluble chemicals we need and secondly those microbes in the soil find their way into our gut to form our intelligent gut brain.
So where does Wickimix come from? The answer is simple – a local grower who has set up Gbiota beds to recycle waste organic material by breeding the beneficial microbes.
Making Wickimix
So what goes into Wickimix? A bit of clay makes a really good base as the fine particle size of clay gives a large surface area for nutrients to cling to.
But then we need organic waste. People who are into composting, which can become a bit of a cult culture, know full well that to get a good high-temperature compost requires very careful balance of carbon, nitrogen and air for the compost to work so they are very selective about what goes into their compost.
Then we need the critical minerals and an inoculant.
Low and high temperature composting
Gbiota beds are very different; they use in-ground composting which is a much slower process but virtually any organic waste can be used. It does not use high temperatures but relies on the mass of creatures which live in the soil. There are just an incredible number of different sorts of creatures and there will be some creature which will process any organic waste.
Ultimately microbes will finish off the process but these may be the microbes inside their guts, with the creature, whatever sort it is, starting the first phase breaking down and feeding on the organic material.
Just go and ask my friends the ants and termites who have got this down to a fine art.
People often ask me where the microbes which end up in our guts come from. The answer which most people don’t like to think about is from the guts of creatures living in the soil.
It is a long chain, from the soil creatures, to their guts, to the soil then into the plants we eat and finally into our guts.
I am sure there are many advertising executives who would baulk at the idea of selling worm pooh or bug pooh as a health food, even if indirectly, but it is simply the way the world works and has worked for millions of years.
Breeding microbes
The purpose of a Gbiota bed is to breed beneficial microbes while controlling the harmful microbes. This is done by creating the conditions where the beneficial microbes simply out compete the harmful microbes.
The key tool is to control the moisture level so the mix is moist but not too wet. This is achieved by a subsurface irrigation system and allowing the water to spread by wicking action.
A certain amount of local soil, hopefully clay, is mixed with organic waste, minerals and inoculant to start the process. They look like a conventional raised bed but with the gap between the beds filled with the raw materials and just left to compost, when the Wickimix is dug up and put into the Gbiota boxes.
Typically the local grower would load the Wickimix into the boxes and grow the plant to the stage where they are ready to eat and collect the old boxes when the plants get old, with possibly a bag of food waste for recycling back into Wickimix.
The local grower system is really the way to go. The Wickimix can be loaded into the box and delivered fresh and relatively cheaply locally. This means a change in thinking about how a small proportion of our food is managed.
From centralised to local
The question is how to bring about that change? Well it is simply a fact of life that we have to implement major changes in the way the world works. The days of mass central production are numbered as this is the only way humans will survive when there are over eight billion people on this earth.
The days of extracting raw materials from finite resources will disappear into the history books and we will live in a world based on local recycling.
We can see this already happening in many areas of our lives, just look at electricity where mega coal mines and massive power stations are being replaced by local electricity produced by wind or solar power.
The message that we need to get out is that this is the way to have a prosperous, wealthy and sustainable society.
And that message will come from individual people seeing the need for change and getting our politicians and leaders of big business to be part of implementing this change.
Making change happen
It is never easy to change a system, particularly if it appears to be working. But it is not. Every eight seconds someone has a limb amputated from diabetes which is largely the result of our modern food system.
But humans are the dominant species on earth for a number of very simple reasons. We are intelligent and cooperative, adaptable and willing to change if needed.
But change does not just happen; it starts with a handful of people, the pioneers who see the need for change and make it happen. Maybe on a small scale and against serious obstacles – but they make it work. Then other people see it working and follow suit until it becomes mainstream with just a few people bucking the trend.
And that is how I see the change to a local gut food system happening.
These pioneers may be consumers who want change and persuade local growers to provide Gbiota boxes or it may be growers who see an opportunity for change to create a business while making the world better able to handle the inevitable food crisis.
But it will be individual pioneers who will start the process of change.
If you want to be part of this process of making the world both sustainable and prosperous please contact me at colinaustin@bigpond.com.
I live in a flat and my wife is diabetic, how can you help?