Dr. Giulia Enders

Not necessarily, no.

Does a runny nose help you recover from a cold?

In a way, yes, it does.

Can poor sleep harm your immune health?

Yes, definitely.

And finally, what's one fact about the immune system that just blows your mind?

That it is actually comparable to consciousness and far more connected than AI networks are.

It is in a way cellular intelligence at work and at its best.

Whenever I get a cough or a cold, I immediately feel like my body's letting me down.

Like it's a failure, I'm failing, and like my immune system is not doing what it should.

And I was really struck that in your new book, you're sort of completely reversing that way of thinking.

You wrote a previous book that was called Gut that was a huge hit.

There were about, I think, 8 million copies sold.

But particularly for me, I actually read that book at just the time that I met my co-founder, Tim Spector.

And at that point, I knew nothing about the microbiome.

I knew very little about the gut.

And your book helped convince me, basically, that Tim was not mad, that the gut health was really important, the microbiome was really important.

And so this thing was really credible.

What first drew you to this topic of gut health?

It was, at first, a very personal experience.