The Wickimix story

Chop my foot off – no way

My wife Xiulan is a medical doctor, a gynaecologist and surgeon, so I was a bit surprised when she was diagnosed as diabetic. At that time I knew nothing about diabetes but when her foot started to turn black and the doctors started talking about amputation I knew I had to do something.

I am an engineer, not a doctor but I have been in the innovation business for a long time and was selected as one of the top one hundred Australian innovators by the Institute of Engineers for my pioneering work on computer simulation.

I knew how the process of science and technology actually worked, so I felt I should at least try.

In my book Water, Wit and Wisdom I talk about the process of innovation. It is often not about being particularly clever but about challenging the conventional paradigm or wisdom.

I was not selected as among Australia top innovators because I was particularly clever, rather my flow simulation showed that the conventional paradigm was just not working and fought the battle of getting a new paradigm accepted – a bloody process.

Science and engineering

There is a big difference between science and engineering. A scientist will work at the limit of knowledge in a highly specialist area trying to push the boundaries of understanding that one step further.

An engineers job is to find practical solutions to real problems, he or she uses science as a tool, often having to understand a spectrum of sciences, fill in the holes in knowledge when needed and come up with a solution that works.

There is a saying that science is the art of managing knowledge, engineering is the art of managing ignorance.

Things rarely work first time, it is part of the job of an engineer to be a perfect pain, keep on digging away to find the real reason why something is not working – then fix it.

 

Type 2

 

Professor Roy Taylor of Newcastle University in his book Reversing Diabetes gives a fundamental explanation of the mechanics of diabetes.

It was pretty easy to find the basic cause of diabetes (type 2). At first, probably before the person is aware that they are becoming diabetic, fat begins to build up in the muscles so sugar in the blood finds it more difficult to enter the muscles.

That is the job of Insulin so the pancreas just churns out more insulin and everything seems to be working fine.

That’s pre diabetes.

But then fat begins to build up in the pancreas so insulin production is blocked and that is when the trouble starts.

Blood sugars rise so the blood gets thicker and cannot get through the finer blood vessels which is why the extremities like the feet start turning black .

By then it can be too late to fix so there is no option other than amputation.

That was the road Xiulan was on.

Why daddy why?

That is when the engineers habit of being a total pain comes in, keep on asking questions like a four year old, until the real reason comes to light.

The first question is why do people get (or rather store) fat? A common simple answer is because they eat too much of the wrong sort of food, but that is not a real answer, we have to ask the question why do people eat too much of the wrong sort of food.

Now this is where the fun starts because people start talking about conspiracy theories and how the food industry is producing food full of sugars, fats and flavourings which are addictive.

Now there may be some truth in this but again it is back to the questions, why do people keep on eating all this bad food if they know full well that it may end up with them having a limb chopped off.

People are not that stupid and there is no law saying you must eat this food.

DNA testing blows conventional wisdom

 

Tim Spector in his many books such as The diet Myth has been a pioneer in rethinking diet and health.

He is a genuine paradigm buster challenging the conventional thinking which is focused on the amount of calories we eat.

And this is where things get really interesting.

The view in the scientific community was that the gut was just an organ for digesting food.

Then along come DNA testing machines so scientist could see all the different varieties of organisms that make up our gut biota.

And that is where a bit of an explosion has been occurring.

I read the literature and not that many years ago the scientists were talking about a handful of species, then it grew to a thousand and now I read of tens of thousands – it is mind boggling.

But what is exciting is that the scientist were discovering what they first called association(meaning a likely connections) that this particularly species was associated with people getting fat.

Then they did tests on a large number of people and were able to identify clear correlations (meaning that there is a definite connection but no indication of a mechanism).

Will Bulsiewicz is another paradigm buster, like many medical doctors he appreciated the benefit of a plant base diet but also realised the link between the biota in the soil and in our gut.

This is important.  Bugs breed fast but die fast so to improve gut health we need plants growing in soil teaming with nutrients and we need to eat them shortly after harvesting.

The real reason we get fat

That leaves the $64,000 question ‘Why do some species of microbes make people store fat while other species do not?’

I am not a micro-biologist but I was a pioneer in computer technology, in those fun days when we had to write machine code and had things like peek and poke looking inside the computer so we could actually understand what the computer was doing.

This actually boils down to something very simple – the ‘if then else condition’.

If is is cold wear a jacket, but trillions of such statements give the impression of intelligence. (Humans are more analogue and deal in concepts which is real intelligence).

But, I thought, there are trillions of cells in our guts, maybe they can communicate with each other, maybe in a simplistic way, but building up to an intelligent system. We see this in nature with ants, bees and my favourite – slime moulds.

 

Intelligent control systems

My very first job as an engineer was working for a company that made control gear for big plants like power stations – information would come in from sensors, be analysed by the control system which would then send out signals to crack this or that valve a bit more open or shut.

Could our gut be like this intelligent control system controlling whether we are fat or skinny?

Then I read that the micro-biology experts in the field were talking the same language with set points.

Dr Andrew Jenkinson is a medical doctor who has appreciated that we don’t get fat simply because we are eating too many calories but that we have a control system which decides on a set point and ensures we maintain that set point.

We don’t get fat simply because we eat too much, our intelligent control system decides what the set point should be and pressurises us to eat the amount of food to reach that set point.

We may have no idea of the mechanics but our gut decides that we should store this amount of fat and would send out hormones to make us hungry so however much we may try in the long run we would end up at that set point.

Nice theory but my job as an engineer is not to develop theories but to work out how to apply them to solve a problem.

And the problem in this case is to stop people having their limbs chopped off from diabetes which happens every eight seconds.

Chop, chop every eight seconds

Just think about this, every eight second some unfortunate person has a limb chopped off and this may be preventable.

We can be a bit stronger than ‘may be’ as this scale is totally new, fifty years ago very few people suffered from diabetes but now it is the fastest growing of all modern diseases.

Back to being a four year old and asking what has changed? We certainly know how our food has changed but there was no DNA machines back then.

But there are still societies living an earlier life style, and of great interest people living in the blue zones where people live to a ripe old age, which is good, but what is even better are fit and healthy right to the end (health span rather than life span).

We got a double whammy in asking that question. Yes these people had a far healthier gut that modern people and they were doing this simply by food, basically eating a diet with a high plant content but the plants were grown in soil that was full of microbes and minerals and eaten fresh, shortly after harvesting.

Pretty simple really, and that is what the Gbiota project is all about.

How innovation really works

We live in an era where the theory of how innovation happens is very different to the way it actually does happen.

Many of the great innovations we take for granted now, originated by someone doing something and showing it is actually important and works first and then studying, in a detailed scientific way actually how it works.

How innovation actually works is the theme of my book Water, Wit and Wisdom which is really focused on the water crisis but talks about how innovation is often paradigm busting.

Good bugs and bad bugs

The key issue is that there are certainly many if not most micro-organisms which are more than desirable – they are essential for life – what I, being a crude engineer, call the good bugs.

But there are also micro-organisms which can cause us a great deal of harm, the black death, cholera, and I believe there has recently been another baddy causing humanity a great deal of harm.

The classic approach has been to try and kill of the bad bugs. May be not as extreme as then President Trump suggesting we inject bleach into our blood stream but still the same philosophy of killing off the badies. That has been the mainstay of our approach over the last fifty years.

But look at the people in the blue zones, they are living, and staying healthy to a ripe old age. What is their magic secret?

Well this is the age of internet marketing to I abhor phrases like magic secrets which is just a way of conning people into buying things. So what were they doing?

If you asked them they probably could not tell you as even they do not know but we can use the knowledge we have from the study of Eco systems to understand why it worked.

Eco system v Trumps bleach

Every Eco system is made up of many different species competing to breed.

Darwin talked about the survival of the fittest (best adapted) but actually it was the survival of the randiest, the species that survived were the ones that could out breed the others – and that really depends on the conditions.

With all due to respect to Donald Trump it is very difficult to kill off the bad bugs without killing of the good bugs. But it is relatively easy to create the conditions where the good bug out breed the bad bugs. It happens all the time without us even thinking about it.

E-coli is a really nasty bad bug which virtually everyone has in their gut. But it is normally not an issue as the good bugs simply out breed and suppress it so it is never a real problem.

 

Gbiota beds

This is the basic principle of the Gbiota beds. It is very easy to breed bugs, they are a randy lot and you almost cannot stop them breeding. The key is to create the conditions so the good bugs out breed the bad bugs and the key to that is breathing the soil and controlling the moisture level.

These can be used to grow plants which can then be picked and eaten fresh before the good bugs die off and the bad bug take over.

Not space age technology and there are many home growers who are doing precisely this.

But there are some eight billion people in the world and they all have guts and are prone to becoming diabetic or suffering from the other diseases which come from our poor gut health and they can’t all have Gbiota beds in their apartments.

Gbiota boxes

So we need another option and that is Gbiota boxes. This is a two stage system.

Local growers who have the land and skills set up Gbiota beds with the prime aim of making Wickimix.

This is a growing medium full of the beneficial creatures and minerals which is loaded into Wicking boxes which are small enough to fit into apartments, balconies or any restricted space.

People can then have plants growing in Wickimix in their own home which are full of beneficial microbes which they can pick and eat while still fresh.

There are plenty of people who would prefer not to have a foot chopped off from diabetes, what we need now to make this work are local growers who can produce Wickimix – that growing medium full of living creatures and essential minerals.

If this could be your scene please contact me as colin@gbiota.com