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Research scientists have discovered that your microbiome—the complex ecosystem of microbes that live in your intestinal tract—controls not only a range of aspects about your physical health, but also your state of mind.
Now a team working from University College Cork in Ireland has shown that what goes on down there also could reverse key symptoms of aging.
The group took poop from young adult mice, made it into a liquid, and used a tube to feed the slurry to elderly mice twice a week for eight weeks.
As a control, the researchers also fed poop from old mice to other old mice and fecal matter from young mice to other young mice.
At the end of the period, the microbiomes of old mice receiving poop from the young had much more beneficial flora than old mice usually do.
In the targeted mice, the hippocampus—the part of the brain associated with learning and memory—came to physically and chemically resemble those of their younger counterparts.
Also, the supercharged elders were able to find their way through mazes faster than their untreated elderly colleagues and remember the fastest way through them later, just as easily as young mice did.
In other experiments, old mice given young mice’s poop also became more social; that didn’t happen in this particular test.
TRENDPOST: The experiment is among the first to give clear evidence that taking pains to keep your microbiome healthy can slow, and perhaps reverse, key elements of the aging process.
Even better, humans have the option of doing that by eating a healthy diet and taking well-chosen supplements instead of regularly downing a poop shake.