The Fountain of Youth May Be Found in Your Gut
Reversing aging by rejuvenating the microbiome
The key to longevity may lie in your gut microbiome. It’s no secret that ultra-processed, low-fiber Western diets and antibiotic overuse can wreak havoc on our symbiont bacterial communities. But attempts to “rewild” our guts are riddled with problems.
For one, there is no singular blueprint for a healthy microbiome. Moreover, introducing unknown bacterial strains into an unwitting host can create mismatch conditions that may lead to a greater risk of disease.
If not rewilding, how about rejuvenating? That’s the approach several scientists argue for in a recent paper by Ke et al.
The authors suggest that banking stool while we’re healthy could potentially offer a way to hit “system restore” should we deal with dysbiosis in the future.
The basic idea is that you save your stool while you’re young and healthy, and that cryopreserved sample might come in handy later in life if your microbiome ever gets off-kilter.
This process would allow you to reintroduce your own healthy microbiome in the event of a disruption, and you would essentially serve as your own donor (autologous FMT).
