Want to shave decades off your age? Look to your gut

Being healthy and active as you enjoy your golden years is one of the most important blessings you can have as you age.

But even if you have a beautiful home, terrific grandkids, and good friends and relatives, you can’t benefit from the fruits of a lifetime of hard work unless you’re in good shape — both mentally and physically.

And according to the latest research, both can be found in one place: your own gut.

Ponce de León may have never found the Fountain of Youth, but it looks like a group of international researchers has come a lot closer to locating it than ever before.

And, best of all, you can take advantage of their findings right now — no traveling to faraway places required!

Gut instincts

Not sporting a single white hair and getting rid of those frown lines may help you to look younger than the candles on your birthday cake indicate, but the real key to aging well comes from deep inside your body.

Because some cutting-edge research is now telling us that having a healthy gut — meaning having a thriving colony of “good” microbes in your intestines — is the cornerstone of aging well.

The research is so compelling that you might want to toss all your face creams and hair dyes right in the garbage can!

Researchers from two large health institutes, one in Canada and one in China, carefully analyzed the gut “microbiota” of over 1,000 people considered to be “extremely healthy.”

And they found something pretty amazing.

Those who were still going strong in their 80s, 90s, and beyond had the same gut makeup as healthy folks who were decades younger!

Head investigator Greg Gloor, a professor at Western University in Ontario, summed up the study by saying, “If you are ridiculously healthy and 90 years old, your gut microbiota is not that different from a healthy 30-year-old.”

While that’s a stunning scientific finding, the $64,000 question is this: If you’re “up there” in years and not that healthy right now, is there a way you can fix things up?

Well, these researchers found that “resetting” your gut health to a younger age could be possible!

They say that they believe that “food and probiotics” can be used to “improve biomarkers of health.” Put simply, by paying more attention to your gut, you can positively shift the odds of becoming one of those ridiculously healthy people!

You may already take a daily probiotic, and that’s a great start. But there are some other things you can do to up the ante.

For example:

• Bag some broccoli. A recent study found that cruciferous veggies, such as broccoli, contain a compound that helps your good gut flora to thrive. The amounts found to be useful in this study were over three cups a day — but before you say that’s ridiculous, the researchers also commented that Brussels sprouts have triple the amount of this compound. Plus, you can vary that with other foods such as coleslaw. Good things add up just as fast as the bad things do!
• Count your CSUs, or “colony-forming units.” A good probiotic will give you a number right on the front of the bottle, and you should be aiming for one with multiple strains and around 20 billion CFUs.
• Stock up on yogurt. But choose your yogurt carefully, as there are many brands heavy on sugar (or even worse, aspartame) and low on cultures. Make sure your yogurt contains live and active cultures of Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacteria. Other probiotic foods include kefir, a yogurt-like drink that contains many more strains of beneficial bacteria, and cultured veggies like sauerkraut and tempeh (fermented soy). Tempeh is quite tasty when cut into cubes and used in a stir-fry!
• Don’t forget the prebiotics! These plant-based fibers keep your good gut bacteria nourished. These foods include garlic, leeks and onions, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, dandelion greens (a spring treat), and bananas.

But remember, if you’ve taken antibiotics recently, especially multiple courses, you’re starting at a deficit. These drugs kill the bad bugs, but they can wipe out the good ones as well.

And now that we know how important this is, it’s obviously worth the effort.

“A healthy gut means healthy aging” Ana Sandoiu, October 16, 2017, Medical News Today, medicalnewstoday.com