How can we age well? We all want to do it, and we’ve all seen how aging can go sideways for many people. Many of us see our parents aging, and the inevitable decline that we all face.
Fortunately, we have a ton of research at our disposal that our parents and grandparents never had. Research into healthy aging and slowing down age-related decline has never been greater.
At the same time, we’ve entered a revolution into what we actually are. We’re not a single organism made up of a single set of genes that regulates our biology.
We’re actually a super-organism, made up of our genes along with the genes of trillions of microorganisms that inhabit the nooks and crannies of our body. Known as the microbiome, these microorganisms contribute nearly 46 million genes from our mouth and gut alone. For reference, humans have about 25,000 genes.
As a result, our microbiome has a substantial impact on our overall health. It impacts our mood, cognitive function, physical performance, immune function, metabolism, and basically anything else you can think of. Therefore, it also likely plays a pivotal role in healthy aging.
How the gut microbiome helps us age well
One of the major factors promoting poor aging is inflammation. As we grow older, we see an increase in inflammation often referred to as inflammaging.
Though inflammation is essential to a healthy immune response, inflammaging is a chronic inflammation that takes a toll on us. As a result of steady, unrelenting inflammation, our cells, organs and tissues progressively accumulate damage.
Our gut is a rich source of inflammation. And as we age, changes in our gut microbiome destabilize the gut environment. Consequently, inflammation in the gut causes a breakdown of the intestinal barrier, allowing bacteria to move from the gut and into the blood.
Fortunately, a lot of this is driven by age-related changes in our behavior. As such, there are things we can do to help maintain a healthy microbiome.
This not only helps stabilize the gut, decreases inflammation, and seals up that intestinal barrier, but also helps us age well.
Decreasing age-related decline by promoting a healthy microbiome
To help you learn how to build a healthy microbiome that will help you age well, we’ve started a new series on Youtube. In this series, we’ll touch upon the various things you can do to help build a diverse, healthy, and stable microbiome to promote healthy aging.
During each 60-second video, we’ll touch upon a topic to help you build a healthy microbiome. If you want more information, we’ll provide you with a curated list of videos on these topics so you can dig in further. To access this list, click the 3 dots in the lower right-hand section of the video to access the description,
Our goal with this series is to help you understand how essential your daily rituals and habits are to help build a healthy microbiome and promote healthy aging. We’ll also provide actionable steps that you can use to build a healthy gut and help slow down age-related decline.
To make sure you get access to these videos as they drop, subscribe to our Youtube channel either by clicking the red Youtube but in the righthand margin of this blog or the red subscribe button on the bottom righthand corner of the video.
So let’s get started with our first video…