Tag Archives: environment

#432893 These 4 Tech Trends Are Driving Us ...

Posted on May 19, 2018 by Android

From a first-principles perspective, the task of feeding eight billion people boils down to converting energy from the sun into chemical energy in our bodies.

Traditionally, solar energy is converted by photosynthesis into carbohydrates in plants (i.e., biomass), which are either eaten by the vegans amongst us, or fed to animals, for those with a carnivorous preference.

Today, the process of feeding humanity is extremely inefficient.

If we could radically reinvent what we eat, and how we create that food, what might you imagine that “future of food” would look like?

In this post we’ll cover:

Vertical farms
CRISPR engineered foods
The alt-protein revolution
Farmer 3.0

Let’s dive in.

Vertical Farming
Where we grow our food…

The average American meal travels over 1,500 miles from farm to table. Wine from France, beef from Texas, potatoes from Idaho.

Imagine instead growing all of your food in a 50-story tall vertical farm in downtown LA or off-shore on the Great Lakes where the travel distance is no longer 1,500 miles but 50 miles.

Delocalized farming will minimize travel costs at the same time that it maximizes freshness.

Perhaps more importantly, vertical farming also allows tomorrow’s farmer the ability to control the exact conditions of her plants year round.

Rather than allowing the vagaries of the weather and soil conditions to dictate crop quality and yield, we can now perfectly control the growing cycle.

LED lighting provides the crops with the maximum amount of light, at the perfect frequency, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

At the same time, sensors and robots provide the root system the exact pH and micronutrients required, while fine-tuning the temperature of the farm.

Such precision farming can generate yields that are 200% to 400% above normal.

Next let’s explore how we can precision-engineer the genetic properties of the plant itself.

CRISPR and Genetically Engineered Foods
What food do we grow?

A fundamental shift is occurring in our relationship with agriculture. We are going from evolution by natural selection (Darwinism) to evolution by human direction.

CRISPR (the cutting edge gene editing tool) is providing a pathway for plant breeding that is more predictable, faster and less expensive than traditional breeding methods.

Rather than our crops being subject to nature’s random, environmental whim, CRISPR unlocks our capability to modify our crops to match the available environment.

Further, using CRISPR we will be able to optimize the nutrient density of our crops, enhancing their value and volume.

CRISPR may also hold the key to eliminating common allergens from crops. As we identify the allergen gene in peanuts, for instance, we can use CRISPR to silence that gene, making the crops we raise safer for and more accessible to a rapidly growing population.

Yet another application is our ability to make plants resistant to infection or more resistant to drought or cold.

Helping to accelerate the impact of CRISPR, the USDA recently announced that genetically engineered crops will not be regulated—providing an opening for entrepreneurs to capitalize on the opportunities for optimization CRISPR enables.

CRISPR applications in agriculture are an opportunity to help a billion people and become a billionaire in the process.

Protecting crops against volatile environments, combating crop diseases and increasing nutrient values, CRISPR is a promising tool to help feed the world’s rising population.

The Alt-Protein/Lab-Grown Meat Revolution
Something like a third of the Earth’s arable land is used for raising livestock—a massive amount of land—and global demand for meat is predicted to double in the coming decade.

Today, we must grow an entire cow—all bones, skin, and internals included—to produce a steak.

Imagine if we could instead start with a single muscle stem cell and only grow the steak, without needing the rest of the cow? Think of it as cellular agriculture.

Imagine returning millions, perhaps billions, of acres of grazing land back to the wilderness? This is the promise of lab-grown meats.

Lab-grown meat can also be engineered (using technology like CRISPR) to be packed with nutrients and be the healthiest, most delicious protein possible.

We’re watching this technology develop in real time. Several startups across the globe are already working to bring artificial meats to the food industry.

JUST, Inc. (previously Hampton Creek) run by my friend Josh Tetrick, has been on a mission to build a food system where everyone can get and afford delicious, nutritious food. They started by exploring 300,000+ species of plants all around the world to see how they can make food better and now are investing heavily in stem-cell-grown meats.

Backed by Richard Branson and Bill Gates, Memphis Meats is working on ways to produce real meat from animal cells, rather than whole animals. So far, they have produced beef, chicken, and duck using cultured cells from living animals.

As with vertical farming, transitioning production of our majority protein source to a carefully cultivated environment allows for agriculture to optimize inputs (water, soil, energy, land footprint), nutrients and, importantly, taste.

Farmer 3.0
Vertical farming and cellular agriculture are reinventing how we think about our food supply chain and what food we produce.

The next question to answer is who will be producing the food?

Let’s look back at how farming evolved through history.

Farmers 0.0 (Neolithic Revolution, around 9000 BCE): The hunter-gatherer to agriculture transition gains momentum, and humans cultivated the ability to domesticate plants for food production.

Farmers 1.0 (until around the 19th century): Farmers spent all day in the field performing backbreaking labor, and agriculture accounted for most jobs.

Farmers 2.0 (mid-20th century, Green Revolution): From the invention of the first farm tractor in 1812 through today, transformative mechanical biochemical technologies (fertilizer) boosted yields and made the job of farming easier, driving the US farm job rate down to less than two percent today.

Farmers 3.0: In the near future, farmers will leverage exponential technologies (e.g., AI, networks, sensors, robotics, drones), CRISPR and genetic engineering, and new business models to solve the world’s greatest food challenges and efficiently feed the eight-billion-plus people on Earth.

An important driver of the Farmer 3.0 evolution is the delocalization of agriculture driven by vertical and urban farms. Vertical farms and urban agriculture are empowering a new breed of agriculture entrepreneurs.

Let’s take a look at an innovative incubator in Brooklyn, New York called Square Roots.

Ten farm-in-a-shipping-containers in a Brooklyn parking lot represent the first Square Roots campus. Each 8-foot x 8.5-foot x 20-foot shipping container contains an equivalent of 2 acres of produce and can yield more than 50 pounds of produce each week.

For 13 months, one cohort of next-generation food entrepreneurs takes part in a curriculum with foundations in farming, business, community and leadership.

The urban farming incubator raised a $5.4 million seed funding round in August 2017.

Training a new breed of entrepreneurs to apply exponential technology to growing food is essential to the future of farming.

One of our massive transformative purposes at the Abundance Group is to empower entrepreneurs to generate extraordinary wealth while creating a world of abundance. Vertical farms and cellular agriculture are key elements enabling the next generation of food and agriculture entrepreneurs.

Conclusion
Technology is driving food abundance.

We’re already seeing food become demonetized, as the graph below shows.

From 1960 to 2014, the percent of income spent on food in the U.S. fell from 19 percent to under 10 percent of total disposable income—a dramatic decrease over the 40 percent of household income spent on food in 1900.

The dropping percent of per-capita disposable income spent on food. Source: USDA, Economic Research Service, Food Expenditure Series
Ultimately, technology has enabled a massive variety of food at a significantly reduced cost and with fewer resources used for production.

We’re increasingly going to optimize and fortify the food supply chain to achieve more reliable, predictable, and nutritious ways to obtain basic sustenance.

And that means a world with abundant, nutritious, and inexpensive food for every man, woman, and child.

What an extraordinary time to be alive.

Join Me
Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital.

Abundance-Digital is my ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs—those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

Image Credit: Nejron Photo / Shutterstock.com Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#432878 Chinese Port Goes Full Robot With ...

Posted on May 18, 2018 by Android

By the end of 2018, something will be very different about the harbor area in the northern Chinese city of Caofeidian. If you were to visit, the whirring cranes and tractors driving containers to and fro would be the only things in sight.

Caofeidian is set to become the world’s first fully autonomous harbor by the end of the year. The US-Chinese startup TuSimple, a specialist in developing self-driving trucks, will replace human-driven terminal tractor-trucks with 20 self-driving models. A separate company handles crane automation, and a central control system will coordinate the movements of both.

According to Robert Brown, Director of Public Affairs at TuSimple, the project could quickly transform into a much wider trend. “The potential for automating systems in harbors and ports is staggering when considering the number of deep-water and inland ports around the world. At the same time, the closed, controlled nature of a port environment makes it a perfect proving ground for autonomous truck technology,” he said.

Going Global
The autonomous cranes and trucks have a big task ahead of them. Caofeidian currently processes around 300,000 TEU containers a year. Even if you were dealing with Lego bricks, that number of units would get you a decent-sized cathedral or a 22-foot-long aircraft carrier. For any maritime fans—or people who enjoy the moving of heavy objects—TEU stands for twenty-foot equivalent unit. It is the industry standard for containers. A TEU equals an 8-foot (2.43 meter) wide, 8.5-foot (2.59 meter) high, and 20-foot (6.06 meter) long container.

While impressive, the Caofeidian number pales in comparison with the biggest global ports like Shanghai, Singapore, Busan, or Rotterdam. For example, 2017 saw more than 40 million TEU moved through Shanghai port facilities.

Self-driving container vehicles have been trialled elsewhere, including in Yangshan, close to Shanghai, and Rotterdam. Qingdao New Qianwan Container Terminal in China recently laid claim to being the first fully automated terminal in Asia.

The potential for efficiencies has many ports interested in automation. Qingdao said its systems allow the terminal to operate in complete darkness and have reduced labor costs by 70 percent while increasing efficiency by 30 percent. In some cases, the number of workers needed to unload a cargo ship has gone from 60 to 9.

TuSimple says it is in negotiations with several other ports and also sees potential in related logistics-heavy fields.

Stable Testing Ground
For autonomous vehicles, ports seem like a perfect testing ground. They are restricted, confined areas with few to no pedestrians where operating speeds are limited. The predictability makes it unlike, say, city driving.

Robert Brown describes it as an ideal setting for the first adaptation of TuSimple’s technology. The company, which, amongst others, is backed by chipmaker Nvidia, have been retrofitting existing vehicles from Shaanxi Automobile Group with sensors and technology.

At the same time, it is running open road tests in Arizona and China of its Class 8 Level 4 autonomous trucks.

The Camera Approach
Dozens of autonomous truck startups are reported to have launched in China over the past two years. In other countries the situation is much the same, as the race for the future of goods transportation heats up. Startup companies like Embark, Einride, Starsky Robotics, and Drive.ai are just a few of the names in the space. They are facing competition from the likes of Tesla, Daimler, VW, Uber’s Otto subsidiary, and in March, Waymo announced it too was getting into the truck race.

Compared to many of its competitors, TuSimple’s autonomous driving system is based on a different approach. Instead of laser-based radar (LIDAR), TuSimple primarily uses cameras to gather data about its surroundings. Currently, the company uses ten cameras, including forward-facing, backward-facing, and wide-lens. Together, they produce the 360-degree “God View” of the vehicle’s surroundings, which is interpreted by the onboard autonomous driving systems.

Each camera gathers information at 30 frames a second. Millimeter wave radar is used as a secondary sensor. In total, the vehicles generate what Robert Brown describes with a laugh as “almost too much” data about its surroundings and is accurate beyond 300 meters in locating and identifying objects. This includes objects that have given LIDAR problems, such as black vehicles.

Another advantage is price. Companies often loathe revealing exact amounts, but Tesla has gone as far as to say that the ‘expected’ price of its autonomous truck will be from $150,0000 and upwards. While unconfirmed, TuSimple’s retrofitted, camera-based solution is thought to cost around $20,000.

Image Credit: chinahbzyg / Shutterstock.com Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#432671 Stuff 3.0: The Era of Programmable ...

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Android

It’s the end of a long day in your apartment in the early 2040s. You decide your work is done for the day, stand up from your desk, and yawn. “Time for a film!” you say. The house responds to your cues. The desk splits into hundreds of tiny pieces, which flow behind you and take on shape again as a couch. The computer screen you were working on flows up the wall and expands into a flat projection screen. You relax into the couch and, after a few seconds, a remote control surfaces from one of its arms.

In a few seconds flat, you’ve gone from a neatly-equipped office to a home cinema…all within the same four walls. Who needs more than one room?

This is the dream of those who work on “programmable matter.”

In his recent book about AI, Max Tegmark makes a distinction between three different levels of computational sophistication for organisms. Life 1.0 is single-celled organisms like bacteria; here, hardware is indistinguishable from software. The behavior of the bacteria is encoded into its DNA; it cannot learn new things.

Life 2.0 is where humans live on the spectrum. We are more or less stuck with our hardware, but we can change our software by choosing to learn different things, say, Spanish instead of Italian. Much like managing space on your smartphone, your brain’s hardware will allow you to download only a certain number of packages, but, at least theoretically, you can learn new behaviors without changing your underlying genetic code.

Life 3.0 marks a step-change from this: creatures that can change both their hardware and software in something like a feedback loop. This is what Tegmark views as a true artificial intelligence—one that can learn to change its own base code, leading to an explosion in intelligence. Perhaps, with CRISPR and other gene-editing techniques, we could be using our “software” to doctor our “hardware” before too long.

Programmable matter extends this analogy to the things in our world: what if your sofa could “learn” how to become a writing desk? What if, instead of a Swiss Army knife with dozens of tool attachments, you just had a single tool that “knew” how to become any other tool you could require, on command? In the crowded cities of the future, could houses be replaced by single, OmniRoom apartments? It would save space, and perhaps resources too.

Such are the dreams, anyway.

But when engineering and manufacturing individual gadgets is such a complex process, you can imagine that making stuff that can turn into many different items can be extremely complicated. Professor Skylar Tibbits at MIT referred to it as 4D printing in a TED Talk, and the website for his research group, the Self-Assembly Lab, excitedly claims, “We have also identified the key ingredients for self-assembly as a simple set of responsive building blocks, energy and interactions that can be designed within nearly every material and machining process available. Self-assembly promises to enable breakthroughs across many disciplines, from biology to material science, software, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, construction, the arts, and even space exploration.”

Naturally, their projects are still in the early stages, but the Self-Assembly Lab and others are genuinely exploring just the kind of science fiction applications we mooted.

For example, there’s the cell-phone self-assembly project, which brings to mind eerie, 24/7 factories where mobile phones assemble themselves from 3D printed kits without human or robotic intervention. Okay, so the phones they’re making are hardly going to fly off the shelves as fashion items, but if all you want is something that works, it could cut manufacturing costs substantially and automate even more of the process.

One of the major hurdles to overcome in making programmable matter a reality is choosing the right fundamental building blocks. There’s a very important balance to strike. To create fine details, you need to have things that aren’t too big, so as to keep your rearranged matter from being too lumpy. This might make the building blocks useless for certain applications—for example, if you wanted to make tools for fine manipulation. With big pieces, it might be difficult to simulate a range of textures. On the other hand, if the pieces are too small, different problems can arise.

Imagine a setup where each piece is a small robot. You have to contain the robot’s power source and its brain, or at least some kind of signal-generator and signal-processor, all in the same compact unit. Perhaps you can imagine that one might be able to simulate a range of textures and strengths by changing the strength of the “bond” between individual units—your desk might need to be a little bit more firm than your bed, which might be nicer with a little more give.

Early steps toward creating this kind of matter have been taken by those who are developing modular robots. There are plenty of different groups working on this, including MIT, Lausanne, and the University of Brussels.

In the latter configuration, one individual robot acts as a centralized decision-maker, referred to as the brain unit, but additional robots can autonomously join the brain unit as and when needed to change the shape and structure of the overall system. Although the system is only ten units at present, it’s a proof-of-concept that control can be orchestrated over a modular system of robots; perhaps in the future, smaller versions of the same thing could be the components of Stuff 3.0.

You can imagine that with machine learning algorithms, such swarms of robots might be able to negotiate obstacles and respond to a changing environment more easily than an individual robot (those of you with techno-fear may read “respond to a changing environment” and imagine a robot seamlessly rearranging itself to allow a bullet to pass straight through without harm).

Speaking of robotics, the form of an ideal robot has been a subject of much debate. In fact, one of the major recent robotics competitions—DARPA’s Robotics Challenge—was won by a robot that could adapt, beating Boston Dynamics’ infamous ATLAS humanoid with the simple addition of a wheel that allowed it to drive as well as walk.

Rather than building robots into a humanoid shape (only sometimes useful), allowing them to evolve and discover the ideal form for performing whatever you’ve tasked them to do could prove far more useful. This is particularly true in disaster response, where expensive robots can still be more valuable than humans, but conditions can be very unpredictable and adaptability is key.

Further afield, many futurists imagine “foglets” as the tiny nanobots that will be capable of constructing anything from raw materials, somewhat like the “Santa Claus machine.” But you don’t necessarily need anything quite so indistinguishable from magic to be useful. Programmable matter that can respond and adapt to its surroundings could be used in all kinds of industrial applications. How about a pipe that can strengthen or weaken at will, or divert its direction on command?

We’re some way off from being able to order our beds to turn into bicycles. As with many tech ideas, it may turn out that the traditional low-tech solution is far more practical and cost-effective, even as we can imagine alternatives. But as the march to put a chip in every conceivable object goes on, it seems certain that inanimate objects are about to get a lot more animated.

Image Credit: PeterVrabel / Shutterstock.com Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#432563 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...

Posted on April 21, 2018 by Android

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Pedro Domingos on the Arms Race in Artificial Intelligence
Christoph Scheuermann and Bernhard Zand | Spiegel Online
“AI lowers the cost of knowledge by orders of magnitude. One good, effective machine learning system can do the work of a million people, whether it’s for commercial purposes or for cyberespionage. Imagine a country that produces a thousand times more knowledge than another. This is the challenge we are facing.”

BIOTECHNOLOGY
Gene Therapy Could Free Some People From a Lifetime of Blood Transfusions
Emily Mullin | MIT Technology Review
“A one-time, experimental treatment for an inherited blood disorder has shown dramatic results in a small study. …[Lead author Alexis Thompson] says the effect on patients has been remarkable. ‘They have been tied to this ongoing medical therapy that is burdensome and expensive for their whole lives,’ she says. ‘Gene therapy has allowed people to have aspirations and really pursue them.’ ”

ENVIRONMENT
The Revolutionary Giant Ocean Cleanup Machine Is About to Set Sail
Adele Peters | Fast Company
“By the end of 2018, the nonprofit says it will bring back its first harvest of ocean plastic from the North Pacific Gyre, along with concrete proof that the design works. The organization expects to bring 5,000 kilograms of plastic ashore per month with its first system. With a full fleet of systems deployed, it believes that it can collect half of the plastic trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—around 40,000 metric tons—within five years.”

ROBOTICS
Autonomous Boats Will Be on the Market Sooner Than Self-Driving Cars
Tracey Lindeman | Motherboard
“Some unmanned watercraft…may be at sea commercially before 2020. That’s partly because automating all ships could generate a ridiculous amount of revenue. According to the United Nations, 90 percent of the world’s trade is carried by sea and 10.3 billion tons of products were shipped in 2016.”

DIGITAL CULTURE
Style Is an Algorithm
Kyle Chayka | Racked
“Confronting the Echo Look’s opaque statements on my fashion sense, I realize that all of these algorithmic experiences are matters of taste: the question of what we like and why we like it, and what it means that taste is increasingly dictated by black-box robots like the camera on my shelf.”

COMPUTING
How Apple Will Use AR to Reinvent the Human-Computer Interface
Tim Bajarin | Fast Company
“It’s in Apple’s DNA to continually deliver the ‘next’ major advancement to the personal computing experience. Its innovation in man-machine interfaces started with the Mac and then extended to the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and most recently, the Apple Watch. Now, get ready for the next chapter, as Apple tackles augmented reality, in a way that could fundamentally transform the human-computer interface.”

SCIENCE
Advanced Microscope Shows Cells at Work in Incredible Detail
Steve Dent | Engadget
“For the first time, scientists have peered into living cells and created videos showing how they function with unprecedented 3D detail. Using a special microscope and new lighting techniques, a team from Harvard and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute captured zebrafish immune cell interactions with unheard-of 3D detail and resolution.”

Image Credit: dubassy / Shutterstock.com Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#432539 10 Amazing Things You Can Learn From ...

Posted on April 18, 2018 by Android

Hardly a day goes by without a research study or article published talking sh*t—or more precisely, talking about the gut microbiome. When it comes to cutting-edge innovations in medicine, all signs point to the microbiome. Maybe we should have listened to Hippocrates: “All disease begins in the gut.”

Your microbiome is mostly located in your gut and contains trillions of little guys and gals called microbes. If you want to optimize your health, biohack your body, make progress against chronic disease, or know which foods are right for you—almost all of this information can be found in your microbiome.

My company, Viome, offers technology to measure your microscopic organisms and their behavior at a molecular level. Think of it as the Instagram of your inner world. A snapshot of what’s happening inside your body. New research about the microbiome is changing our understanding of who we are as humans and how the human body functions.

It turns out the microbiome may be mission control for your body and mind. Your healthy microbiome is part best friend, part power converter, part engine, and part pharmacist. At Viome, we’re working to analyze these microbial functions and recommend a list of personalized food and supplements to keep these internal complex machines in a finely tuned balance.

We now have more information than ever before about what your microbiome is doing, and it’s going to help you and the rest of the world do a whole lot better. The new insights emerging from microbiome research are changing our perception of what keeps us healthy and what makes us sick. This new understanding of the microbiome activities may put an end to conflicting food advice and make fad diets a thing of the past.

What are these new insights showing us? The information is nothing short of mind-blowing. The value of your poop just got an upgrade.

Here are some of the amazing things we’ve learned from our work at Viome.

1. Was Popeye wrong? Why “health food” isn’t necessarily healthy.
Each week there is a new fad diet released, discussed, and followed. The newest “research” shows that this is now the superfood to eat for everyone. But, too often, the fad diet is just a regurgitation of what worked for one person and shouldn’t be followed by everyone else.

For example, we’ve been told to eat our greens and that greens and nuts are “anti-inflammatory,” but this is actually not always true. Spinach, bran, rhubarb, beets, nuts, and nut butters all contain oxalate. We now know that oxalate-containing food can be harmful, unless you have the microbes present that can metabolize it into a non-harmful substance.

30% of Viome customers do not have the microbes to metabolize oxalates properly. In other words, “healthy foods” like spinach are actually not healthy for these people.

Looks like not everyone should follow Popeye’s food plan.

2. Aren’t foods containing “antioxidants” always good for everyone?
Just like oxalates, polyphenols in foods are usually considered very healthy, but unless you have microbes that utilize specific polyphenols, you may not get full benefit from them. One example is a substance found in these foods called ellagic acid. We can detect if your microbiome is metabolizing ellagic acid and converting it into urolithin A. It is only the urolithin A that has anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. Without the microbes to do this conversion you will not benefit from the ellagic acid in foods.

Examples: Walnuts, raspberries, pomegranate, blackberries, pecans, and cranberries all contain ellagic acid.

We have analyzed tens of thousands of people, and only about 50% of the people actually benefit from eating more foods containing ellagic acid.

3. You’re probably eating too much protein (and it may be causing inflammation).
When you think high-protein diet, you think paleo, keto, and high-performance diets.

Protein is considered good for you. It helps build muscle and provide energy—but if you eat too much, it can cause inflammation and decrease longevity.

We can analyze the activity of your microbiome to determine if you are eating too much protein that feeds protein-fermenting bacteria like Alistipes putredinis and Tannerella forsythia, and if these organisms are producing harmful substances such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, p-cresol, or putrescine. These substances can damage your gut lining and lead to things like leaky gut.

4. Something’s fishy. Are “healthy foods” causing heart disease?
Choline in certain foods can get converted by bacteria into a substance called trimethylamine (TMA) that is associated with heart disease when it gets absorbed into your body and converted to TMAO. However, TMA conversion doesn’t happen in individuals without these types of bacteria in their microbiome.

We can see the TMA production pathways and many of the gammaproteobacteria that do this conversion.

What foods contain choline? Liver, salmon, chickpeas, split peas, eggs, navy beans, peanuts, and many others.

Before you decide to go full-on pescatarian or paleo, you may want to check if your microbiome is producing TMA with that salmon or steak.

5. Hold up, Iron Man. We can see inflammation from too much iron.
Minerals like iron in your food can, in certain inflammatory microbial environments, promote growth of pathogens like Esherichia, Shigella, and Salmonella.

Maybe it wasn’t just that raw chicken that gave you food poisoning, but your toxic microbiome that made you sick.

On the other hand, when you don’t have enough iron, you could become anemic leading to weakness and shortness of breath.

So, just like Iron Man, it’s about finding your balance so that you can fly.

6. Are you anxious or stressed? Your poop will tell you.
Our gut and brain are connected via the vagus nerve. A large majority of neurotransmitters are either produced or consumed by our microbiome. In fact, some 90% of all serotonin (a feel-good neurotransmitter) is produced by your gut microbiome and not by your brain.

When you have a toxic microbiome that’s producing a large amount of toxins like hydrogen sulfide, the lining of your gut starts to deteriorate into what’s known as leaky gut. Think of leaky gut as your gut not having healthy borders or boundaries. And when this happens, all kinds of disease can emerge. When the barrier of the gut breaks down, it starts a chain reaction causing low-grade chronic inflammation—which has been identified as a potential source of depression and higher levels of anxiety, in addition to many other chronic diseases.

We’re not saying you shouldn’t meditate, but if you want to get the most out of your meditation and really reduce your stress levels, make sure you are eating the right food that promotes a healthy microbiome.

7. Your microbiome is better than Red Bull.
If you want more energy, get your microbiome back into balance.

No you don’t need three pots of coffee to keep you going, you just need a balanced microbiome.

Your microbiome is responsible for calorie extraction, or creating energy, through pathways such as the Tricarboxylic acid cycle. Our bodies depend on the energy that our microbiome produces.

How much energy we get from our food is dependent on how efficient our microbiome is at converting the food into energy. High-performing microbiomes are excellent at converting food into energy. This is great when you are an athlete and need the extra energy, but if you don’t use up the energy it may be the source of some of those unwanted pounds.

If the microbes can’t or won’t metabolize the glucose (sugar) that you eat, it will be stored as fat. If the microbes are extracting too many calories from your food or producing lipopolysaccharides (LPS) and causing metabolic endotoxemia leading to activation of toll-like receptors and insulin resistance you may end up storing what you eat as fat.

Think of your microbiome as Doc Brown’s car from the future—it can take pretty much anything and turn it into fuel if it’s strong and resilient enough.

8. We can see your joint pain in your poop.
Got joint pain? Your microbiome can tell you why.

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is a key pro-inflammatory molecule made by some of your microbes. If your microbes are making too much LPS, it can wreak havoc on your immune system by putting it into overdrive. When your immune system goes on the warpath there is often collateral damage to your joints and other body parts.

Perhaps balancing your microbiome is a better solution than reaching for the glucosamine. Think of your microbiome as the top general of your immune army. It puts your immune system through basic training and determines when it goes to war.

Ideally, your immune system wins the quick battle and gets some rest, but sometimes if your microbiome keeps it on constant high alert it becomes a long, drawn-out war resulting in chronic inflammation and chronic diseases.

Are you really “getting older” or is your microbiome just making you “feel” older because it keeps giving warnings to your immune system ultimately leading to chronic pain?

Before you throw in the towel on your favorite activities, check your microbiome. And, if you have anything with “itis” in it, it’s possible that when you balance your microbiome the inflammation from your “itis” will be reduced.

9. Your gut is doing the talking for your mouth.
When you have low stomach acid, your mouth bacteria makes it down to your GI tract.

Stomach acid is there to protect you from the bacteria in your mouth and the parasites and fungi that are in your food. If you don’t have enough of it, the bacteria in your mouth will invade your gut. This invasion is associated with and a risk factor for autoimmune disease and inflammation in the gut.

We are learning that low stomach acid is perhaps one of the major causes of chronic disease. This stomach acid is essential to kill mouth bacteria and help us digest our food.

What kinds of things cause low stomach acid? Stress and antacids like Nexium, Zantac, and Prilosec.

10. Carbs can be protein precursors.
Rejoice! Perhaps carbs aren’t as bad as we thought (as long as your microbiome is up to the task). We can see if some of the starches you eat can be made into amino acids by the microbiome.

Our microbiome makes 20% of our branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) for us, and it will adapt to make these vital BCAAs for us in almost any way it can.

Essentially, your microbiome is hooking up carbons and hydrogens into different formulations of BCAAs, depending on what you feed it. The microbiome is excellent at adapting and pivoting based on the food you feed it and the environment that it’s in.

So, good news: Carbs are protein precursors, as long as you have the right microbiome.

Stop Talking Sh*t Now
Your microbiome is a world class entrepreneur that can take low-grade sources of food and turn them into valuable and useable energy.

You have a best friend and confidant within you that is working wonders to make sure you have energy and that all of your needs are met.

And, just like a best friend, if you take great care of your microbiome, it will take great care of you.

Given the research emerging daily about the microbiome and its importance on your quality of life, prioritizing the health of your microbiome is essential.

When you have a healthy microbiome, you’ll have a healthy life.

It’s now clear that some of the greatest insights for your health will come from your poop.

It’s time to stop talking sh*t and get your sh*t together. Your life may depend on it.

Viome can help you identify what your microbiome is actually doing. The combination of Viome’s metatranscriptomic technology and cutting-edge artificial intelligence is paving a brand new path forward for microbiome health.

Image Credit: WhiteDragon / Shutterstock.com Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots