Gut Microbiome May Be a Secret to Reversing Aging

A new study in mice showed how a microbiome transplant made them… younger?

Want to make this guy younger? It seems to be possible! Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

Table of Contents

· Why we care about examining the gut microbiome
· Transplanting the microbiome of a young mouse… into an old mouse
· What does this mean for us?
· In summary: a “young” microbiome revitalizes its host, even if the host is old

How do we measure age? For most of us, it’s the number of times that our planet has circled around the Sun since we’ve been born, but many scientists also look at other measurements.

One method is to look at biological age, a measurement of how well an individual’s biology is holding up. We see a bunch of changes in our body as we get older, such as:

• Our skin loses its elasticity and becomes weaker and wrinkled
• Our eyesight worsens
• Our muscles grow weaker (and it’s more difficult to build muscle)
• Our immune system grows weaker and is less capable of handling infections
• Our organs weaken, including our brain (scary but true fact: your brain loses mass and shrinks as you age!)