With all our modern technology and automated production capacity, we should only need to work a couple of days a week to have everything we need and live a healthy life right to the end of our natural life.
But we are not so what went wrong? There is nothing wrong with the technology – we just don’t know how to apply it for the benefit of the community.
That is where I come in. I am 84 years old, fit and healthy, and spend my time reading a range of scientific papers and conducting speculative research to find better ways of growing food – the sort of experiments that no self-respecting funding agencies would support so I pay for myself.
Most of my experiments fail, that is what is meant by speculative, I just hide them so no one sees but occasionally one works or at least leads to a new way of thinking. That is the prize.
It is a formula that has worked well for me and has led to me being recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators.
The aim is simple, to find a way to feed the eight million (and growing) people on Earth sustainably so they live a long and healthy life.
I do this for my great-grandkids and I am happy for the rest of the world to come along for the ride.
I try to integrate all this expertise into a simple system, which I call the Gbiota system because the focus is on breeding a healthy gut biota. This could help all people live a long and healthy life, maybe your great-grandkids.
I invite you to join me in this journey, just sign up to join the Gbiota movement, it is free, or better still join as a paying member, set up your own Gbiota beds and demonstrate that this is a technology that really works. We live in a world of disinformation so no one believes anything so show them for real that this works.
There are a lot of very clever and dedicated people working in this area writing many sophisticated articles, I try to explain these in the hundreds of articles on my web. You are welcome to study these but let me try and break it down into the basics which you can apply if you don’t have the time.
I am going to keep this as simple as I can but there are two concepts I really have to explain, and you need to understand if you are going t live a long and healthy life.
Firstly why infectious and non-infectious diseases are so very different and
secondly the important difference between static and dynamic equilibrium in living communities.
I made this diagram to illustrate a concept, it is based on real data, as far as it is available.
As you can see there are two lines, the red one for infectious diseases, which we know a lot about and are right, and the green one for non-infectious diseases which we think we know a lot about but sadly are wrong.
What I have done is looked at global data and which vary throughout the world so I have picked out the region where the epidemic is most severe and looked for information on the percentage of people who were affected, eg seriously ill or died.
I go back a million years when humanoid creatures first appeared on Earth. I have no actual data, and the batteries on my time machine are flat, but I can look at modern members of the ape family to take a guess – not very scientific but until the batteries are charged the best I can do.
Some two hundred thousand years ago the first humans appeared as hunter-gatherers. There are still modern day hunter-gatherers we can study and we know they are intelligent and take care of their health by eating a broad spectrum of healthy food and not contaminating the soil with sewage so were a pretty healthy bunch.
Ten thousand years ago we started to grow much of our food from agriculture, largely growing grains which provided us with a lot of energy food but was low in the essential trace minerals and vitamins needed to replace our body parts as they wear and age.
But we still collected wild herbs so at first it was not too bad but there was a gradual decline in health with the combination of increased population density and poor sanitation led to a steady decline in health and ever-increasing cases of infectious diseases.
This reached a peak with the black death in 1347 which wiped out 50% of the population in seriously affected areas and even higher is some cases.
After that, we gradually improved sanitation and medical science but there were still serious outbreaks of cholera and flu. The worst case (not shown as it was highly localised) was the construction of the Panama Canal where up to 80% of the imported labourers died.
We all know about the modern epidemics but with modern medical science and hygiene, they are not as damaging as previous epidemics.
But all those years suffering from these horrendous infections have given us an instilled fear which has led to even worse consequences – non-infectious diseases.
Non-infectious diseases
The main non-infectious diseases are obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
Let me put this in perspective, these non-infectious diseases are a far bigger cause of ill health and death than any infectious disease. The biggest killer is heart attacks but diabetes is the fastest growing. The half a billion people with diabetes dwarfs the 7 million people who have died from Covid. Every year 8 million people have a limb amputated from diabetes.
They are largely man-made (yes meaning that man’s failure to properly understand the issues has resulted in the best part of 8 million people having a limb amputated). This must be the biggest failure in the global health system and the biggest failure of Governments to educate their populations on the simple steps that can be taken to avoid this catastrophe.
I cannot find words to describe this failure (actually I can but I can put them into print)
How we screwed up so badly
Ask any medical doctor what is the cause of these non-infectious diseases and they may say the wrong fat in the wrong place, they may talk about adipose tissue but that is what they mean – and there is no issue – they are right.
Now go along to a dietitian to learn what causes us to store fat and they may well explain that it is an imbalance between calories in and calories consumed.
You could argue that this is technically correct, there is truth in the old saying to go on it must go in but it is completely missing the difference between cause and enabling.
Absolutely true you have to eat enough to enable your body to store excess fat but it is not the cause.
The frustration is that this was described over seventy years ago in the scientific literature (this is not me telling you this) and has been dutifully ignored as an inconvenient truth. This is all covered in the body of the web which you can read at your leisure, for now I want to stick to the main theme.
Good bugs and bad bugs
For very good reason we do not like bad bugs that make us sick and kill us.
It is totally understandable that we should want to kill them but we don’t want to kill the good bugs.
So let me talk about the good bugs that live in our gut.
We understand what they do from the viewpoint of biochemistry.
We understand how they digest our food making the nutrients available to our bodies, we understand how our gut bugs form a powerful chemical factory manufacturing a range of essential chemicals essential for life.
We understand how they train much of our immune system to inspect and sort out any unwelcome visitors. This is not a rarity, every time we breath in we inhale on average some four fungal spores and a host of microbes which our immune system quietly taps on their shoulder and says sorry no admittance.
We know from direct observation these bugs provide all the beneficial services but we really have no idea how it does this.
We do know about swarm intelligence which we see widely in nature and can only assume that it works in a similar way.
One individual cell has very little intelligence in isolation, but if can communicate, even at a basic level with a neighbouring cell it can create a bit more intelligence than the two cells combined.
But we have trillions of cells in our gut biome which all communicate together and with our head brain creates a powerful control system.
We can observe to see how this works but to explain this I need to diverge and talk about our conscious and subconscious intelligence.
Our conscious brain, the one you are using right now, is very slow and clunky compared to our subconscious brain.
Just think about any simple action, walking, riding a bike, catching a ball, we go through a training period as we grow and learn to do these actions automatically and at high speed.
Think about eating, every time we eat something our subconscious brain learns that food and the effects it has on our bodies.
If a particular food provides us with a mineral that our bodies need it will associate that food with that mineral so if we are short of that mineral our control system will send out signals, in the form of hormones and electrical signals so we have a desire to eat that particular food.
It is a remarkable system the result of millions of years of evolution.
If our intelligent control system detects that we are short of certain types of food it will decide that we need to store more food. This is why we get fat.
We can prevent getting fat by restricting our food intake, the very opposite of enabling – disenabling. This is training our intelligent control system to store yet more fat.
Our modern food system
There is a widespread view that our modern food system of ultra-processed food is at the core of the epidemic of noninfectious diseases, with good reason.
But it is not simply because it is full of sugars and fats which overload us with calories. It is because there are deficiencies in our diet, deficiencies in the beneficial microbes in the soil make essential minerals bio-available which our intelligent control system senses and in the beneficial microbes which form part of our intelligent control system.
Gut-brain food and the community benefit movement
I realised that this was more than growing food, what mattered was the type of food. We all have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies, particularly our appetite so we want to eat the right sort of food in the right amount.
But to work this control system needs to be fed gut-brain food which means eating fresh plants grown in living soil full of beneficial microbes.
Our modern food system does not feed our gut-brain which is the underlying reason for our modern health epidemic of non-infectious diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia. The result is that 75% of people are dying before their natural life from non-infectious diseases.
This led me to spend the last thirty years developing the Gbiota system so virtually anyone can grow gut-brain food in Gbiota beds of boxes, at home, even if they live in an apartment.
The technology is described in this web but right now the issue is to create a social benefit movement of people who believe that it is in their and the community’s interest for all people to have access to healthy food that will feed their gut-brain.
