Your gut may reveal clues about how well you’re aging that your birth date can’t.
A new study published in Nature Communications analyzed 1,199 adults ages 20 to 72. Researchers compared participants’ gut bacteria with their age, inflammation levels and other measures of health. Surprisingly, differences in gut bacteria were more closely linked to most of those health measures than chronological age was.
“People of the same chronological age can have very different inflammatory and metabolic profiles,” study author Carsten Eriksen, Ph.D., said of the findings. “This suggests that chronological age alone does not capture the biological processes underlying healthy or unhealthy aging.”
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One Type of Gut Microbiome Stood Out
The researchers found one gut pattern that looked particularly unfavorable.
It’s called Bacteroides 2, or B2. People with this pattern tended to have less variety among their gut bacteria. They also showed more inflammation, poorer heart and lung fitness, and less favorable measures of metabolic health.
The biggest surprise appeared among younger adults.
People with the B2 pattern showed signs of inflammation normally associated with aging much earlier. Eriksen described it as an “inflammaging-like phenotype already in early adulthood.”
In a summary of the research, he said other microbiome groups “did not reach the inflammatory levels of a 20-year-old B2 individual until ~37 years later.”
That doesn’t mean someone with B2 is literally 37 years older. It means certain inflammation levels seen in young adults with B2 weren’t observed in other groups until much later in life.
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Your Gut Isn’t an Aging Test
The researchers also tracked participants’ health records for up to nine years. B2 was associated with a greater risk of developing health problems, while a more diverse gut microbiome was associated with lower inflammation and lower overall disease risk.
But there’s an important catch.
“This is observational. We cannot infer causality,” Eriksen cautioned. In other words, the study doesn’t prove that gut bacteria caused these health differences—or that changing your microbiome can slow aging.
Still, unlike your birthday, Eriksen noted that “gut microbiota composition is in principle modifiable.”
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from Men's Journal https://ift.tt/BZgeG2t
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