“I want to confess something, I am more microbial than I am human”, said Professor Jeffrey Gordon as he began his talk on TEDxGatewayArch, in which the expert from Washington University in St. Louis (USA) discussed the relationship between the gut microbiota and child malnutrition. Prof. Gordon explains a range of issues in the video, including the important role played by the hundreds of trillions of microbes living in our digestive system – our gut flora – in our health and growth during the first years of life.