Dr. Giulia Enders

And the immune system in our old age is educated and very different than one in the younger ages where it will just inflame and have a fever right away.

And then in an older age, it'll say, oh, I know this bug.

I don't even care to, you know, inflame anything or have a fever.

It's gone.

In your book, you use this term, the microbe cloak.

Can you explain what this microbe cloak is and what you mean by that?

Well, what is a cloak?

The fun thing is you can change a cloak, right?

You can take it off and then you can put another one on.

And if it's raining, you might want to use a waterproof one.

And if it's really light out, you might want to lose a very light, nice one or something, you know.

And this is the cool thing about bacteria and what actually our relationship with them is.

Because let's be real, from like those millions, billions of bacteria that are out there, very few make us sick.

With viruses, it's the same thing.

Each time we breathe, we'll breathe in hundreds, thousands of viruses, and they won't do anything to us because they just really don't care to infect us.

To get the full picture, you would have to say they must have other jobs, and it can't be their main job to make us sick.

And really, it isn't.

And when you look at bacteria, their main job, numerically speaking, just mathematically, is really borrowing some of their unique features, like giving them to us,

for free in you know exchange for maybe living on us for a couple of minutes hours or years and that is a nice thing because we can interchange them like a cloak as i said if we go to another country and there's suddenly a weird new food that we're eating oftentimes on that food sitting ready to digest some of the fiber or particles are already bacteria and while we digest we keep them as for as long as we need them and when we go back to our country then you know

After a while, they're gone because we don't need them anymore.