Several years ago, Giulia Enders, then a medical student, provided us with an insight into our innermost places, in particular the digestive organ, in her bestselling book “Gut – The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ”. The book is not only an entertaining and well-informed read, it also has an exiting previous history, related by the author on the first pages. She was born by caesarean section and could not be breast-fed. “If I had known more about the gut back then, I could have placed bets on what illnesses I would contract later in life.”

A lack of good bacteria does indeed seem to make people sick. Giulia Enders was lactose-intolerant, got fat and thin again and suffered from skin sores. The turning point came when she “ceased to treat [her] skin like the skin of a person with a dermatological problem and began to see it as the skin of a person with an intestinal condition”. She changed her diet and managed to get her condition under control. Today, she is among the most successful and best-known authors who provide authentic reports on and convincing arguments for the importance of healthy bacteria for our body.

Here, the gut plays a key role. If its villi-covered wall were smooth, our small intestine would be some 4 ½ miles or seven kilometres long. “The surface area of our digestive system is about one hundred times greater the area of our skin”, Enders emphasises in her book which also reports on many of the studies covered by this website.

Each of us is a world of our own, as Giulia Enders writes. Similar to the billions of people inhabiting our planet, trillions of bacteria live on and inside us, with the greatest share by far found inside the gut. This is not just natural, but healthy. It is crucial that there should be many good bacteria among them – “since they take up space – space that could otherwise be populated by more dangerous germs”.

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