We Americans are obsessed with staying young. The accoutrements of anti-aging, including cosmetics, medications, workshops, yoga and exercise routines are positioned to garner 271 billion dollars in sales by 2024. Over the past few years a radical new youth promoting protocol has started to attract attention. It’s been recognized for decades that, as with general health, the key to decelerated aging is in our microbiome (aka gut bacteria)
Recently European researchers have found that an effective way to restore and maintain a healthy youthful microbiome is with fecal microbial transplantation or FMT, a novel and perhaps shocking procedure that involves taking stool from a healthy person and placing it in the colon of an unhealthy recipient. First practiced by the ancient Chinese, who called fecal transplants yellow soup, FMT, still considered an experimental treatment by the FDA, can be performed via colonoscopy or enema.
Writing in an article in the journal Nature, medicine researchers found that, when bacteria from the droppings of healthy mice were put into the guts of elderly ones, within weeks signs of aging began to slow down. The older mice stopped losing weight, had improved blood sugar markers and lived 15 percent longer than untreated mice.
That’s not all. There’s literature that suggests that FMT, also known as “bacteriotherapy”, can be helpful in treating IBS, obesity, liver diseases, neurological disorders and Alzheimer’s dementia. If you’re interested in learning more about fecal transplantation, having one performed by a doctor or even doing one at home, there’s lots of good FMT information on the Healthy Home Economist website www.healthyhomeeconomist.com.
