ZOE Science & Nutrition
How 'boosting' your immune system increases inflammation and 4 ways to support balance instead | Dr Giulia Enders
07 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
Chapter 2: Why might being sick feel like a failure?
It's 3am and you're wide awake. Streamy nose, sore throat and the distinct feeling that your body has let you down.
Chapter 3: What is the problem with only treating gut health?
But what if it hasn't? What if the sneezing, the runny nose, the fever, all of it, is actually your body doing exactly what it should? And what if the symptoms we spend so much energy suppressing are in fact the whole point? That's the idea at the heart of Julia Ender's new book, Organspeak.
Chapter 4: How does the immune system actually work?
Julia is a gastroenterologist and an author whose previous book, Gut, sold 8 million copies and helped convince the world that gut health was worth taking seriously. Now she's turned her attention to the whole body and the remarkable language it uses to communicate with us. Today, she joins us to completely reshape how we think about illness, immunity, and what it means to feel well.
By the end of this episode, you'll know whether to reach for a decongestant the next time you have a cold, why boosting your immune system might be a very bad idea, and which simple habits genuinely do keep your immune system in balance. Julia, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me.
So we have a tradition here at Zoe where we always start with a quick fire round of questions. And we have these very strict rules.
Chapter 5: Should you stop cold symptoms or let them run their course?
You can say yes or no, or if you have to, a one sentence answer. Okay. Does drinking Coke increase your risk of rheumatoid arthritis? Yes, it does. Is boosting your immune system a good idea? 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.
Chapter 6: What role does sleep play in immune health?
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. I had a skin disease, and the doctor would prescribe me corticosteroid creams, and it would make it better for a little bit, but then it just come back.
And I thought to myself, well, I'm in this body for, I think, another 70, 80 years maybe, and I know nothing about it. And this is a bit odd, isn't it? I should know more.
Chapter 7: How can stress impact your immune system?
So I started reading and trying to find ways to, you know, get my skin healed back up again. And then during that time, I read about the gut and I was completely blown away.
Chapter 8: What dietary choices support immune system balance?
It's so intelligent. It's so versatile and it mediates so many important processes. So then I studied medicine and every time the gut came up, I was there. You know, I really listened. And then I thought more people should know all these things. They're so helpful and also interesting and sometimes funny. And well done. That really tipped it off.
And so clearly, you know, that took you all the way through. You became a doctor. You became a gastroenterologist. But in your latest book, Organs Beat, you've sort of expanded to other parts of the body. So you've sort of cheated on the gut a little bit here. Yeah. What's inspired you to do that? It was the work in the hospital.
After I finished my studies, I went to work in a hospital specialized on gut disorders. And after a while, I just had to come clear and face reality, which meets you there in the hospital, which was I'm not a good doctor if I only focus on the gut. I'm missing out on all these connections, on all these other things that influence the gut.
I realized after a while that there was a group of my patients with irritable bowel syndrome where they would sleep poorly. And I would repeatedly hear this when I was questioning them in the beginning. And so I got into reading about the brain and sleep, for example. And I realized, oh, there is a part of sleep that is really important for pain threshold and how much pain we feel.
So this could influence it. And also the gut homeostasis and how everything's repaired during the night. In the body, everything is connected. And in research, we always try to, like, tidy it up and separate it all to have, like, good, nice and clean results. But you can't do that in the hospital because, you know, there the human is built.
back together again so so yeah and then there were other things like people coming in with belly aches or even appendicitis more often when the air quality was poor in the city i was working in and we had that often because we had lots of cruise ships coming and it was hamburg so you know i started reading about the lung and air quality and this is sort of like how it took off and things kept piling up and made me want to say something again like that felt with the first book
So how has that experience changed the way that you think about, I guess, health and disease? The way I see the body now, I think, is a bit more sophisticated. Suddenly, I started to have this respect for other things. Why are they put in this place? What are they especially good at?
And how can I actually make use of that in my day-to-day life and really have a more cooperative and appreciative relationship to these organs? And this has made me, I think, more appreciative, but has also drastically changed what I think I am and what others are. I think it's also important to just see this miraculous, crazy thing of being alive sometimes.
Just let it shine through a little bit. That has done that to me. I love just hearing the enthusiasm, but also you don't sound like a typical doctor. Like I feel like a typical doctor does like carve this up into pieces, try and identify the one bit that's broken and then say, okay, this is the thing that we need to do in order to. And that's important too.
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