Dr Giulia Enders on gut resilience, postbiotics and how science is catching up with ancient wisdom

There are people in this world who possess a truly rare gift. They carry extraordinary depth of knowledge and are genuine experts in their field, and yet they have the ability to explain even the most complex ideas in a way that feels accessible to everyone. 

Dr Giulia Enders is exactly that kind of person. Author of the bestselling book Gut, which has sold over eight million copies worldwide, Dr Enders’ expertise has arguably transformed our understanding of why the gut is so important to everyday wellness. 

In fact, it was this very book that inspired me to leave my career in finance, go back to study, and qualify as a nutritional therapist. Interviewing her today truly feels like a full-circle moment.

Dr Enders’ latest book, Organ Speak, builds on the success of ‘Gut’ by bridging the gap between biology and daily life. As she prepares to launch her new book, we caught up with her to discuss why the gut lining depends on more than diet, why more bacteria isn't always the answer and her top three foundations for gut health. We also touch on where gut health is headed, human resilience, and why she believes modern science is now confirming what our ancestors already knew intuitively.

I hope this conversation inspires you as much as her work once inspired me.

Giulia's new book, Organ Speak, is available now 

Organ Speak
Organ Speak Audio Book

Dr Giulia Enders on gut health today and postbiotics 

Uta: Giulia, welcome and thank you so much for being here today. Let's dive straight in. You've appeared on Netflix, sold millions of books, and speak at literary festivals all over the world. And yet you chose to finish your medical degree and continue working in a hospital. Why was that important to you?

Giulia: I've always found real value in working directly with patients and with colleagues. When I spend a longer stretch of time at the hospital, I sometimes miss having the space to explain things properly. That's when I feel the pull to write again, or to do more science communication.

But it works the other way around too. When I'm deep in science communication, I miss the reality of clinical work and actually seeing who the knowledge helps, and how.

Uta: Your book Gut has sold over eight million copies. That's no longer just a popular science book, it's a cultural phenomenon. It personally changed my life, as I've mentioned, inspiring me to begin an entirely new career. Why do you think it resonated with so many? 

Giulia: It landed at a time when social media and digital life were really taking hold. And these are technologies that pull us away from our bodies. We spend whole days as a brain in front of a screen. Meanwhile, something as physical as digestion had become deeply taboo. Nobody talked about it.

I would never force anyone to. But if you never do, there comes a point where you genuinely don't know what's normal anymore. Is this feeling okay? Am I the only one? The book became a kind of gentle doorway into the subject — at home, on the sofa, with no pressure. And what helped, I think, was that I'd already made that journey myself. It wasn't shocking or wild to me anymore. I found it genuinely fascinating and I think I was able to pass that on, and perhaps take a little of the shame out of it. Because when curiosity enters the room, shame tends to lose its grip.

Uta: When Gut was published, the conversation was all about probiotics and adding more good bacteria. A decade on, the science seems to have broadened. Where does the thinking stand today?

Giulia: It's expanded and I think that's a good thing. Probiotics remain a valuable tool, and there are still plenty of areas where we need more research. Even with probiotics, I'd say we're still fairly early in our understanding. We know more than we did in the very beginning, but we're still exploring.

What's come alongside them is prebiotics. For most people in everyday life who simply want to support their gut, prebiotics are sometimes even more important than probiotics. Because you might already have good bacteria, you're just not feeding them. Creating balance can be as simple as eating more of the things that the good bacteria love, in a way that also appeals to you.

And then postbiotics have entered the picture, alongside things like plant-based antimicrobials. The view has widened and softened. I find that quite interesting.

Uta: So what exactly is a postbiotic?

Giulia: A postbiotic isn't a living bacterium. It might be, for example, heat-inactivated bacteria. Just their cell walls. Sometimes those walls already carry signals that the immune system can read. Or it might be metabolic byproducts. You culture bacteria, collect what they've produced, filter it, and isolate a specific protein: this one does something interesting in the gut. And then you deliver precisely that. It tends to be very targeted, very focused on what might actually work.

Dr Giulia Enders on how to support your gut lining

Uta: The gut lining is something you also touched on. It's become increasingly central to our understanding of many modern conditions. What happens when it isn't functioning as it should?

Giulia: I love the metaphor of having a thick skin. In daily life, if you have a thick skin, not much bothers you. And it works similarly with the gut. When the mucous layer is thick and stable, a lot rolls off it. The classic example most people have experienced is gastritis. Suddenly everything becomes sensitive, things that never bothered you before cause discomfort.

And the gut lining in modern life is under real pressure. Many processed foods contain additives like polysorbate 80 and methylcellulose, substances that make food smooth and uniform, but also disrupt the mucous layer. Not ideal.

Then there are life transitions. Menopause, for instance, is a time when hormonal changes affect mucous membranes throughout the body, not just in the uterus. Oestrogens support the building of the mucous layer; progesterone stabilises it. When progesterone falls away during menopause, many women suddenly experience bloating, digestive discomfort, a shifted gut microbiome. It can come as a real surprise. But their bodies need adjusted habits to support a mucous layer that is now, temporarily, more vulnerable. Something they never had to think about before, because their hormones were doing that work for them.

Uta: What can we do day-to-day to support the gut lining?

Giulia: Stress is a major factor. When we're very stressed, blood flow to the digestive organs reduces and with less blood flow, less mucus is produced. It's as simple as that. So stress management is absolutely part of this picture.

Then the food additives I mentioned such as polysorbate 80, methylcellulose. I do look at ingredient lists, especially with meat substitutes, where these turn up surprisingly often. And sleep. A lot of repair happens during sleep. The gut gets to rest, nothing is being added to it, and it can restore itself.

Uta: And can postbiotics support the gut lining specifically?

Giulia: Yes, certain bacterial components and metabolites actually stimulate mucus production; they signal the gut to produce more. Akkermansia is an interesting example, because it actually digests a little of the mucous layer itself. And when the gut notices something consuming its mucus, it sometimes simply makes more. Good microbes, in that way, help you produce more of what you need. And I can absolutely imagine postbiotics being able to do the same.

Dr Giulia Enders' tips for supporting a sensitive gut 

Uta: There is a growing body of research suggesting that simply adding live bacteria isn't always the right approach, especially for people with a sensitive gut. Can you explain why?

Giulia: What I've seen quite a few times is that some people have too many bacteria in the upper part of the small intestine, what we call SIBO. This can have various causes: diabetes, insufficient peristaltic movement, a diet very high in sugar and soft drinks. When bacterial density up there is too high and food arrives, those bacteria ferment everything and produce gases. You end up with a bloated upper abdomen, unable to properly release it. Adding more bacteria in that situation can make everything worse.

Then there are people whose gut lining is so sensitive that live bacteria seem to irritate it. Something I've observed particularly in post-infectious IBS, where an infection has already disrupted things. Others simply experience such significant bloating from probiotics that they can't continue taking them.

These are the moments that made me think: you can't always just throw good bacteria at the problem. Sometimes you need to address the underlying issue first, or find a gentler path.

Uta: If you could give the Ancient + Brave Community three things they could start this week to support their gut health, where would you begin?

Giulia: I would always start with: what am I putting in? Take a gentle look at how much coffee, how many sugary drinks. And does my food actually come from the ground or a tree or has it been through a factory twice? That's the simple, simple beginning.

Then: what's coming out? The feedback. How does my stomach feel? How regular am I? What is my body actually telling me each morning? That's learning to listen to the organ.

And then: the right kind of rest. The gut does its best work when we're calm. That means real pauses in a busy day, even two or three minutes, morning and afternoon. And it means sleep. These are foundational, and they often come as a surprise to people, because they're already buying supplements and trying new powders. But so much is possible through the basics: what goes in, and do I rest well?

Uta: I love that you say that. It's something we talk about a lot at Ancient + Brave. It's not always about what more you can do or which supplement to add next. Sometimes it's about less. Starting with the foundations, and trusting the body to do what it does best.

Dr Giulia Enders on the power of human resilience 

Uta: Our bodies have been solving problems for thousands of years. Wounds heal, immune systems adapt. Do you believe we are fundamentally more resilient than we tend to think? And if so, what stops us from trusting that inner strength?

Giulia: I do. I think there's enormous power in a body that we work with rather than against. So much comes down to knowledge, mindset, and how we relate to our own physical reality. Of course, it's sometimes right to be cautious, to question whether something is a good sign or not.

Sometimes we only notice our body when something goes wrong. But when we're constantly fed information about illness, we understandably start looking for problems everywhere. That’s why I love to also explain what’s working well, where the body is being genuinely brilliant in the way it goes about things. 

When we know that about ourselves, it changes how we feel in our own skin.

Uta: How do you actually work towards trusting that inner strength more?

Giulia: For me, it almost always comes back to understanding more. Take emotions, for example. We so often think: "I got so angry. That's bad." But anger isn't inherently bad. What we do with it might be more or less helpful but anger itself is just the body giving you energy, telling you something matters. That something is worth standing up for. That in itself is never wrong.

How quickly and thoughtfully we respond to it - that's where there might be room to grow. That's what emotional intelligence is really about. Not "body bad, emotions useless." But rather: how can we use this better?

Ancient Wisdom meets Modern Science

Uta: Fermentation as a technology goes back thousands of years. Narezushi in Japan, kimchi in Korea, kefir across the Caucasus. Are we only now, scientifically, understanding what ancient cultures already knew intuitively?

Giulia: In earlier times, whole communities would dance around fermentation vessels to encourage them to bubble  or leave them in silence for the gods to work their magic. All sorts of wonderful stories. And today we can look through a microscope and say: ah, yes, Leuconostoc, a sauerkraut bacterium.

Uta: "Ancient wisdom meets modern science" really does feel like the defining frame for gut health right now. Where do you see the research heading over the next five to ten years?

Giulia: What's already becoming clear is this trend towards axes — interconnections. We have the gut-brain axis, the gut-liver axis, the microbiome-immune-brain axis, and with that, the microbiome-mood connection. This is, in a beautiful way, repairing something the Enlightenment partially broke. The impulse then was to separate everything. To study this molecule, this organ, this system in isolation. But in a hospital, you quickly see that's not how it works. In a real human being, everything is interacting.

And now the science is moving towards understanding how gut and immune system can work together to stabilise mood, to build resilience to stress, to really use the multiplayer option. That's where a lot of the most exciting research is heading right now, and it genuinely makes me happy.

Dr Giulia Enders' new book, Organ Speak

Uta: Your first book was about the gut. Your new book is about every organ — muscles, the immune system, skin, the brain. Was writing Organ Speak a zooming out — or more like following a thread the gut had set in motion?

Giulia: Definitely following the thread. Working in hospital, I kept noticing that I couldn't afford to stay too fixed on the gut alone. I'd miss too many fascinating connections. A significant number of my IBS patients sleep really badly, they tell me right away in the first appointment. So I started reading more about sleep and the brain. A colleague noticed that when air quality was poor, more people arrived with stomach pain, even more cases of appendicitis. And so I started reading about the lungs and air pollution. That's how it built.

But the deeper motivation for a different kind of book came from language. I started noticing how many words we borrow from technology and economics when we talk about our bodies. It needs to function. It has to run again. I'm broken here. Something about that began to trouble me. To understand this interconnected being — a human being — as something more than a machine. I think that would do a lot of people good. And it feels like a real counterweight to the noise out there.

Uta: The title Organ Speak suggests our bodies are constantly trying to communicate with us  and that we've somewhat stopped listening. When did we lose that fluency? And how do we find it again?

Giulia: A large part of it is the sheer noise of information coming from outside. It's in direct competition with the attention available for what's happening within. There are studies suggesting we scan somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 words a day through news, emails, social feeds. That's a third of the entire Lord of the Rings, every day. That is, of course, competition for an inner life that is far quieter, far more subtle.

But at some point after my first book's success, I realised: half of my lived experience is actually how I feel from the inside. Why am I not directing a little more attention there? Not just arranging the flat nicely so I feel comfortable but doing the same for my interior. It's one of those silent, overlooked areas.

Uta: What is the one sentence from Organ Speak that you would want someone to carry with them?

Giulia: Perhaps simply this: to understand what a precious thing we already have in having a body at all. It is the most valuable thing a human being will ever possess. That might sound a little sentimental. But it's true. I see it again and again in hospital — in people facing serious illness, or who know their life is approaching its end. Suddenly they realise it again, with absolute clarity. I think it would help us all to remember that a little earlier, from time to time.

Uta: I agree completely. The more at peace I am with my own body, the more I can appreciate it, the better I feel. It really is that simple.

Uta: And finally who would you most recommend Organ Speak to?

Giulia: I think there are genuinely two different groups. There are people who know a great deal about health already — they have the tips, the knowledge — but who might benefit from developing a different feeling towards their body. A way out of the constant "I need to optimise." And then there are people who know very little about their body and will simply think: oh, now I finally understand a little more. Both, I hope, will find something here.

Uta: Giulia, thank you so very much. This conversation has been a genuine joy. I've learned so much, and the passion you bring to understanding how we work as human beings. It's truly inspiring.

Giulia: It was a real pleasure to be here with you. Thank you!