How we got fat wrong

Every eight seconds some sad soul has a limb amputated from diabetes. What makes this so terrible is that this largely avoidable if the latest medical thinking were widely applied.

Even worse is that this is not limited to diabetes, the other three of the modern day killers – heart attacks, strokes and dementia could also be aided. It is all to do with fat and the clogging of our vital organs – in the case of diabetes our pancreas and in the case of the other big killers our blood vessels and brain.

Our intelligent control system

So what is the story. Our bodies are more than chemistry and biology – above all we have an intelligent control system which regulates our bodies and if this intelligent control system is not working properly then we get fat and sick.

This intelligent control system, which is made up largely from our gut and head brains, is learning continuously from birth and takes decision based on this life long training. It is part of our subconscious thinking so we are not readily aware of what it is doing like we are with our conscious thinking.

It dominates how our bodies work.

It start from the very second we are born. Baby has to learn to breath and it has about a minute to learn. From then on our control system will monitor our blood oxygen level for the rest of our life making us pant if we are climbing the stairs or slow down when we go to sleep.

We have to train our intelligent control system and that training is one of the keys to health. For example if baby does not start to breathe doctor may give it a little slap to get it going.

Baby has about three days to learn to eat. Baby is born with a built in layer of fat to keep it alive that is why it look chubby. And again it has to be taught and will continue to learn what and how much to eat for the rest of its life.

Hopefully mum with teach her baby by showing it where the food supply is and where it can happily suck away until full – then probably nod off for a little sleep – as babies do.

The calorie trap

But babies have a habit of turning into children and then adults and then our conscious brain may say you are getting a bit fat and on the advice of a friend or health professional you decide to go on a diet by restricting calorie intake.

Now that may work for a bit, after all if you are cutting back on your food intake there may just not be enough food to meet your energy needs so you will loose weight and may be happy to have a young and slim looking figure – at least for a bit.

Keeping you alive

But think how you are training your intelligent control system – you are teaching it that it may experience food shortages. Your intelligent control system may be subconscious but it is not stupid and has a couple of million years of evolution behind and its number one mission is to keep you alive for as long as possible.

So what does it do to keep you alive when it finds a food shortage? The very first thing it does is cut down on any unnecessary energy expenditure and then write down in its little virtual note book ‘danger food shortages can occur’ and as soon as food becomes available it will start to store fat.

We need to store some fat

Our bodies have evolved to store fat, we store it under our skin over most of our body but our main food storage is our bum, it is the human equivalent of the camels hump. We humans have come to associate a moderate amount of fat storage as looking healthy and attractive which is why so many people aim to look that way. Not too fat and not too skinny just that little bit of cheeky chubbiness – the Goldilocks weight.

Starving ourselves on a calorie restricted diet is not the way to go – so what do we do? The answer is not to stuff yourself with chicken wings and chips but to learn to train our intelligent control system. We do not try to override it but to train it.

The marvel of the world

Why should we not try and override out intelligent control system? Because it is the marvel design of the world.

Let us imagine an engineering design school having a competition for the design of the best living creature, one student submitted a tiger and another a human being.

The student who submitted the tiger would win hands down, low centre of gravity, the whole body can be used for propulsion and powerful jaws for killing and eating food.

The poor student who submitted the human would probably be expelled from the course as a total incompetent.

High centre of gravity perched on top of two skinny poles with tiny feet clearly incapable of providing balance – sorry fail.

But for one thing – our subconscious intelligent control system.

Training our intelligent control system

After learning to breathe and eat our baby next has to learn to walk. Balancing on two long skinny legs should in theory be just about impossible but baby develops this intrinsic sense of balance so it can stand, walk and later run, jump and dance and even carry a cup of coffee up a flight of stairs without spilling.

And we do it without even thinking or even being aware we are doing it.

It is only when we fall asleep standing up and fall over that we are reminded just how effective our intelligent control system is – keeping us upright against the obvious physical laws.

Then our baby learns to talk, play musical instruments and other totally amazing things.

Our subconscious intelligent control system has turned a design failure into a success with just a few flaws – our totally unnecessary aggressiveness to other humans being the flaw that may still let the cockroaches be the ultimate winner.

Don’t override out intelligent control system

We make a big mistake by trying to override this incredible system. Just look how silly it is by doing some totally useless calculations.

Let us imaging climbing a twenty metre high flight of steps and do an energy balance. If we weight say 80kg then the energy needed is 80 * 20 = 1600 Kg metres of energy. If we assume that our body is 25% efficient we would then need to eat 1600/.25 = 6,400 Kgmetres of energy or one and a half serves of chicken wings and chips.

I could also calculate how many breaths I would have to take to provide the oxygen needed.

But if I was to run up the steps my efficiency would change so I would need more fuel and it tell me nothing about all the nutrients, minerals, vitamins etc so this is really a very silly approach.

Yet our intelligent control system is perfectly capable of doing all this work for us without us even thinking about it.

Looking after our intelligent control system

All we have to do is look after our intelligent control system and our gut brain is an integral part of our control system.

We have to make sure that our gut has a good selection of appropriate microbes and then we have to feed them.

Anyone who reads anything about gut biology will see that it is incredibly complex with thousands of species in our gut and we really have no idea how they are working as an integrated system, we can just see correlations between certain species and being lean and healthy or fat and sick.

But we do not actually need to have a total understanding of this immense complexity (although that may come with time). Our gut brain is the results of thousands of years of evolution and we can see how the microbes first grow in the soil (or more precisely the creatures like worms and soldier fly larvae) that live in the soil) then move into the plants which we eat and become natural pre and pro biotics neatly packed for us to eat and face the journey through the acid in our stomach and into a gut proper.

 

Fresh is not gone bad

If it is all so simple why should there be any problem? The fact is that for thousands of years humans have eaten plants full of beneficial microbes which we just picked and ate.

Then we stopped.

We changed our food system from one based on growing locally and pick and eating to industrial chemical farming with poor microbes to start with and delays from picking to eating.

Microbes may breed like crazy but they also have a short life, one hour in the life of a microbe is equivalent to a human year so the plants must be eaten while fresh.

Within a day of pricking the microbes will have started to die off and it is just a reality of modern life that plants on a supermarket shelf are at least a week old even before we buy them.

Good and bad microbes

Microbes breed in the soil in decaying organic matter aided by the plants exuding sugars which attract and feed the microbes.

It is just a fact of life that there are beneficial and harmful microbes and the harmful one can make us sick or even kill us, they don’t mean to, they just want to breed in us but they sometimes get it wrong and we end up dead.

But if we get the conditions right, that magic balance of water, air and nutrients, then the beneficial microbes will simply out breed and out compete the harmful microbes.

The Gbiota technology

That is what the Gbiota technology is all about, growing plants in soil teaming with beneficial microbes and nutrients which are eaten fresh.

This has to be a local operation so customers can buy from local growers.

Gbiota can’t supply fresh food across the globe but what we can do is to provide the technology on how to grow plants to act as pre and pro biotics (gbiota.com) and the mechanism where people can readily buy plants which are natural pre and pro biotics fresh from a local grower (pickandeat.shop).

Action plan

The first step is to email me at colin@gbiota.com letting me know whether you are interested in being a buyer or grower and the region where you live.

In this age of misinformation let me assure you I am a real person and look forward to hearing from you.

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