How healthy is your gut bacteria?

Imbalanced gut bacteria may be responsible for the chronic inflammation - or 'inflammaging' - that accompanies old age and almost all diseases of the elderly.

Inflammaging is a catch-all term for the tendency of elderly people to have generalized inflammation. It is thought to be related to evolved changes that the immune system undergoes as a person gets older. It isn’t clear whether aging causes inflammation or inflammation causes aging, but the two go hand-in- hand, and susceptibility to many diseases goes along with both of them. Inflammaging is a chronic inflammation condition associated with aging, which is linked to most serious age-related health conditions, like stroke, dementia and cardiovascular disease.

Changing your diet to maintain healthy gut bacteria could help to protect you from nearly all age-related diseases, new research suggests. Imbalanced gut bacteria may be to blame for many age- related diseases, according to the new study from University Medical Center Groningen, The Netherlands. The researchers found that the poorly balanced gut bacteria in older mice could induce ‘inflammaging’ in younger mice when it was transplanted to them.

Probiotics and a gut-healthy diet could help to protect you from inflammation and age-related diseases. Scientists know that elderly people tend to have different gut bacteria profiles from younger people. This new research suggests that this change in balance is linked to inflammaging, which is in turn related to most late-onset diseases and disorders.

It was suggested that aging leads to an imbalance in gut bacteria, such that there are more ‘bad’ bacteria than good in the our stomachs. The proliferation of the bad bacteria leaves the gut lining more permeable to toxins that can contaminate the bloodstream and lead to disorders like inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, diabetes, anxiety, autism and even cancer.