The Gbiota Biobox is designed to do one simple but powerful thing: turn cheap, everyday organic waste into living soil that feeds your gut brain, not just your stomach.

In this post I want to show just how easy it is to grow gut–brain food. But before I start, let me explain why it is so important to have a healthy gut brain and how the food cycle works.

Energy, nutrients and gut food

We need food for energy, food to maintain and repair our bodies, and food to feed our gut brain. Go back in time and our food was naturally full of nutrients and microbes but low in energy, so we evolved to crave energy foods – sugars and fats.

Then, some fifty years ago, our food system changed. It became full of energy food but low in nutrients and microbes.

Our gut brain is intelligent. It sees that we are low in critical nutrients and microbes, so it sends out signals for us to eat more food – but we just eat more energy food, so we get fat and sick. This has led to the modern chronic diseases like heart attacks, strokes, dementia and, fastest growing of all, diabetes.

So we need to change our diet. We can still keep eating energy food, which is cheap and readily available, but we need to add food that contains the essential nutrients and, above all, food that feeds our gut brain – our control system.

Nutrients are easy to get; there are literally mountains of rocks full of minerals. But we cannot digest rocks. We need microbes in the soil to break them down and make them bio-available, and most importantly, we need to breed the microbes which will form our gut brain.

Breeding microbes

Breeding microbes is easy. They breed incredibly fast in soil with waste organic material – the stuff we generally consider waste and which is essentially free.

But there are beneficial microbes which make us healthy, and bad microbes – germs – which can make us sick or even kill us.

Generally, beneficial microbes need to breathe air and breed better in moist but aerated conditions, while the harmful microbes breed faster in anaerobic conditions without air.

If we eat plants grown in soils that are full of nutrients and living microbes, then we can expect to be healthy.

How water moves through the soil is actually a complex subject, but to grow plants that will keep you healthy, you don’t need to know that, or even the species of microbes in the soil. There are thousands of species, and even expert microbiologists don’t really understand how each specific species affects our health.

Breathing the soil – flood and drain

What we do need to understand is the principle of partial flood and drain, which is at the core of the Gbiota technology.

It is really very simple: we flood the base of the soil and, as we flood, we wet the soil and expel all the stale air in the soil. Then we let the soil drain and, as the water drains away, it sucks fresh air into the soil so it actually breathes.

Dirt to soil – composting

The other thing we really need to know is a bit about how dirt is turned into soil.

Take a lump of clay. When it is dry, it is like a lump of concrete and nothing can grow in it. When it is saturated with water it forms a sticky, gluey mess with no air, and only a few very specialist plants can grow in it – hardly any food plants.

Dirt is turned into soil by the living soil creatures, and it is essentially a two-stage process.

Stage 1 – in-soil composting (labile compost)
In the first stage, the soil creatures feed on organic material and produce sticky chemicals which make the soil particles stick together and form aggregates – small granules – so the clay behaves more like sand, with plenty of spaces for water and air to flow through the soil.

But this process of in-soil composting produces many toxic chemicals – growth inhibitors – which prevent plants from growing properly. We call this labile compost, meaning fresh and still “hot”, and it is not good for growing.

Stage 2 – mature soil
As the soil compost matures it becomes less toxic, so plants can readily grow. This is the second stage of composting. The plants then exude sugars from their roots which feed the beneficial microbes.

This creates the essential life cycle on which we all depend. The plants capture energy from the sun, which they use to create sugars that feed the soil life, and the soil life then breaks down the rock particles to make the nutrients that the plants – and we – really need.

The Gbiota process follows this two-stage process and is really very simple. The Biobox is just a convenient way to make that cycle happen on a balcony, in a backyard, or anywhere space is tight.