Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2026/03/gut-brain-cognitive-decline.html

by mustaphah • 4 months ago

386 179 4 months ago

med.stanford.edu

fnord772• 4 months ago

... in mice. So if any of this held in humans, I think you'd see reversal of old-age memory problems in people treated with antibiotics that kill Parabacteroides goldsteinii.

As far as I know, no such effect has been observed.

And this article claims inflamation from that strain, the NIH claims otherwise: "Parabacteroides goldsteinii is a next-generation probiotic gut bacterium with significant anti-inflammatory and metabolic benefits, often reduced in obese or diseased states. "

vidarh• 4 months ago

It's possible the specifics are different but that the overall idea still could work for humans. It seems worth at least exploring.

fnord772• 4 months ago

Probably not worth exploring. I've seen "breakthroughs" for dementia/cognitive decline like this for the past 25-30 years.

Not a single one of them has gone anywhere.

maxall4• 4 months ago

I smell bad data. This sounds too good to be true and most studies of this kind have turned out to be false a few years down the line.

Edit: one of many examples: https://www.science.org/content/article/journal-retracts-inf...

IshKebab• 4 months ago

It doesn't seem to link to any data at all so we can't check, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they used the "standard" P=0.05.

I think for something this unexpected you'd want a much lower P.

theusus• 4 months ago

Mice mice mice. Tell me when you test on humans

BizarroLand2• 4 months ago

In theory you would never test on humans directly. You would go through various order testing and slowly work your way up to a final verification on human subjects that has almost no chance of going wrong and that the worst possible outcome is that nothing happens.

behehebd2• 4 months ago

We there yet?

Importantly, vagus nerve stimulation is approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for depression or epilepsy and to aid stroke recovery.

inanutshellus3• 4 months ago

Everyone's "poo-pooing" the article because the title doesn't mention mice, but, FWIW, stories of gut biota affecting humans behavior have been documented for a while.

Memory gain is noteworthy, which is the article's "wow" factor, but everyone's just knee-jerk smirking so ... here's a few random articles to gross you out about the wild world of trading microbiota and, for better or worse, changing your personality:

  * "My butt made me crave candy."[1]
  * "Gee, I'm not bipolar anymore thanks to my husband's butt juice infusion."[2]

Crazy, right?

   [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-behavioral-microbiome/202404/hacking-an-individuals-personality-through-their-gut-contents

   [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-28/faecal-microbiota-transplant-credited-with-curing-bipolar/105541522

hbcondo7142• 4 months ago

I would recommend the site https://gutbrainaxistherapeutics.com for learning more about Microbiota Transplant Therapy (MTT) and its opportunities, especially for Autism and Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome.

y-curious4• 4 months ago

I’ll dig in more but my first question when I see this: who are the donors exactly? Like who decides what the ideal gut microbiome is and that John Doe is the guy to provide his fecal matter to the masses?

Aurornis14• 4 months ago

I would not recommend that site as a good resource.

Microbiome transplant therapy is a domain full of grifters right now who will push it to vulnerable populations desperate for hope, like parents of autistic children. The real research results are much less promising for difficult conditions.

idiotsecant3• 4 months ago

There is zero evidence that poop transplants have any effect on autism, let's be clear here.

alpineman• 4 months ago

Fecal transplants...people will do anything to avoid eating a balanced, largely/wholly plant-based diet with a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.

1shooner2• 4 months ago

This seems to be a recent anti-science meme to dismiss studies that use mouse models. I'm sure there is an interesting line of discussion about the strengths and limits of those models, but that's probably a complex, nuanced thread to pull, not something you blow off with a hand-waving internet comment.

inanutshellus3• 4 months ago

To some degree the other posts are just pointing out the misleading "assumed protagonist" of the title (which doesn't mention mice) but I was surprised to see that the majority of posts boiled down to "eek! mice!"

znpy• 4 months ago

I bet it started with people trying to 1-up other commenters via the usual “achtually…” and then proceeding with the “in mice” notice.

MarkusQ• 4 months ago

It's not anti-science, it's anti-science-journalism-hype.

Science depends on accurately reporting facts, being clear about the limits of your findings, and seeking explanations that survive scrutiny. Science journalism has other priorities that are often in conflict with those of science.

asdff• 4 months ago

I wish I could filter the word mice or mouse out of hn comments because as you say every single one are low effort gotcha's that I will never get my time back from.

It is like these armchair scientists don't understand that the actual scientists know the limits of the model system better than they do.

jimkleiber• 4 months ago

There was a South Park episode about this years ago where everyone was trying to get it from Tom Brady.

SmirkingRevenge• 4 months ago

The Spice Melange

zinkem• 4 months ago

I believe this research is totally true-- I had a lot of memories come back after

1. I stopped drinking heavily and using other drugs, i.e. marijuana

2. managed my diet to avoid heartburn without medication

3. schedule my meals so it was easier to sleep at night (always eat something for breakfast when I wake up)

I did not need any "poo infusion" or anything.

I had a gal bladder removal that didn't fix the problems the doctors thought it would and got a lot smarter about the kinds and variety of food I eat.

I believe alcohol in particular was really screwing up my gut biome and entire digestive system.

y-curious4• 4 months ago

What did you do for heartburn? Just looking for ideas. I noticed reducing gluten helped me personally a lot

XorNot• 4 months ago

Your hypothesis here though is full of complicating factors.

For example

I stopped drinking heavily and using other drugs, i.e. marijuana

Like the primary change you made was to cut out using a whole bunch of drugs with known, significant neurological effects.

Aurornis14• 4 months ago

1. I stopped drinking heavily and using other drugs, i.e. marijuana

Heavy alcohol use and marijuana are both known to impact memory and recall directly.

Discontinuing both of those explains changes in memory. Attributing this to microbiome changes does not follow.

wafflemaker3• 4 months ago

The really crazy thing that happened to me when I changed diet to a more gut-biome friendly* is that (like I craved sweets before) I started craving vegetables and oatmeal. Like there was a regime change in my gut and the new guys pushed the buttons to get more of their food.

(less/no simple sugars, much more vegetables and starches/fibers, regularly eating 4 corn/20 plant oatmeal few times a week)

meindnoch7• 4 months ago

So, you stopped being an alcoholic and pothead, and your memory improved?

Wow, it must be those gut microbes!

grvdrm3• 4 months ago

Fascinating to hear. I am trying to cut alcohol - still not entirely successful.

But I've been able to cut for months at a time. Whenever the cut happens, I feel my brain sort of "return" roughly a week or two in.

I'm not sure how to explain it other than something like fog clearing. Obviously makes some intuitive sense when you read it.

However, as someone that has consumed alcohol somewhat regularly (sometimes more, sometimes less) since college, it's bizarre to think about that consumption in retrospect. In effect, years and years of "fog" - it makes me wonder how different or similar life would have been without that fog.

Can't change the past now, but a data point and strong signal for the future.

baldrunner2049• 4 months ago

weird. gal bladder removal made me a lot smarter too. no, really. cuz it didn't fix my problems either. well, it did but in an unexpected way. because it forced me to ask myself the real questions. so i started fixing my life, bit by bit. trial and error.

theorem of indirection, i guess.

eek2121• 4 months ago

Not only are there tons of papers, there are off-label treatments (some that have improved more than 80% of the folks I'm about to mention), and this isn't just about age related decline, but cognitive impairment in general. Long COVID, ME/CFS, TBIs, and other conditions are widely considered to have a similar origin. If you are interested in this stuff, I encourage you to look up all the scientific papers on this. It is fascinating stuff.

slibhb• 4 months ago

In my opinion, gut microbiome stuff is massively overhyped.

Here's a study that tried fecal transplants to treat mental illness (and found no effect): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41785480/

The pattern with this stuff is that, when a blinded study is carried out, there's usually no effect.

andrewl• 4 months ago

Replying to slibhb, while the research involving mental illness is not conclusive, fecal transplants are a known and accepted treatment for persistent C. diff (Clostridioides difficile) infection. Just for the record.

butILoveLife• 4 months ago

You are probably right on the specifics, but serotonin is produced/located in the gut, and its an incredibly important neurotransmitter.

One day people will figure out how to use these correctly.

esperent• 4 months ago

Here's a meta analysis of 12 studies showing that FMT has a significant effect in reducing depression:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12536323/

It also found the effect was greater in people with IBS.

systemsweird2• 4 months ago

I think mainstream is mostly looking at the microbiome stuff wrong. Your microbiome is the downstream proxy of good lifestyle habits, not generally something to directly manage. Good diet, exercise, reducing stress, and sleeping well will improve digestion and all the downstream variables like microbiome, physical health, and mental health.

This is basic ecology, the bacterial population dynamics in your colon are a direct result of substrate availability. If it’s primarily fiber, polyphenols, and other indigestible plant compounds reaching the colon you’ll likely have a healthy microbiome. If instead you malabsorb food from poor lifestyle factors and have macronutrients reaching the colon they’ll probably fuel blooms of pathogens. I think microbiome researchers need to talk with ecologists more to help advance the field out of the myopia it’s in.

FMT does appear useful for special cases of infection like c-diff, but I think that’s led people to believe it’s a generally health promoting practice, when the research simply does not show it.

meindnoch7• 4 months ago

The pattern with this stuff is that, when a blinded study is carried out, there's usually no effect.

It must be the case that these microbes need the subject to be aware of their presence! Maybe the microbes have consciousness, and for the treatment to work, the microbes' consciousness has to entangle (via quantum mechanisms) with the subject's consciousness? Blind studies prevent this quantum entanglement to form, that's why the treatment stops working. We definitely need more research in this direction!

RobotToaster• 4 months ago

They found a 15 point MADRS change in the placebo group, that's huge, it's only a 60 point scale, and more than the average SSRI produces. Either the procedure itself is doing something or something isn't right with the study.

Also one issue with all of these studies is they only look at averages and don't do subgroup analysis. It may be that a few patients have an underlying condition causing depression that is highly responsive to these interventions, while it has no effect on the others.

bitexploder6• 4 months ago

Most of the serotonin we produce comes from our gut.

Aurornis14• 4 months ago

Serotonin produced in the gut doesn’t get into your brain.

This factoid is repeated everywhere but it’s misleading without knowing that gut serotonin is a different pool than brain serotonin and they have different functions.

The brain synthesizes its serotonin locally within the brain.

idiotsecant3• 4 months ago

The blood brain barrier is a deny by default firewall. If there is no transporter configured for a particular molecule, it doesn't get through. There is no transporter for serotonin

harry8• 4 months ago

"Reversing memory loss in mice via gut-brain communication"

And nobody is bothered by the story. And it gets less clicks. People get cranky when they have been suckered.

biophysboy• 4 months ago

There are a lot of HN users that think they are better at science because they know about p-hacking and the limitations of animal models.

youknownothing2• 4 months ago

"butt juice infusion" xD

seethishat• 4 months ago

IMO people should eat more fiber. A lot more fiber. It cleans the gut, the liver, absorbs cholesterol, slows insulin response and makes you feel full longer. The microbes in our guts need it to function.

Rather than jumping from one fad diet to another, just eat what you like and be sure to get a lot of fiber each day.

jstanley2• 4 months ago

eat what you like and be sure to get a lot of fiber each day

Sure sounds like another fad diet.

nomel• 4 months ago

The charitable interpretation is "just eat more fiber, regardless of the rest"

vablings• 4 months ago

This has been the recommendation for general health for as long as I have been alive. Fiber is really important and there are plenty of easy healthy options that are cheap, unlike the astroturfed beef checkoff primal diet

lelele• 4 months ago

Sure sounds like another fad diet.

Yeah! A fad lasting millions of years of human evolution, however.

memonkey• 4 months ago

The post is about a scientific study and your response is your opinion with nothing else to back it up?

igleria• 4 months ago

they IMO are trying to help by giving good ideas to keep a healthy gut. Add that to the study and at least to me, it´s a nice idea.

btw people, do drink water to keep up with the fiber. Otherwise it might not help.

behehebd2• 4 months ago

To do this eat stuff that grows and not further processed.

skirmish• 4 months ago

Don't be simplistic. Mold on old bread grows and is natural, yet you should not eat it all day.

rossdavidh• 4 months ago

Agreed, but I think the mechanism relates to different microbes. If there are two microbes in your gut, and type A requires a dose of high-calorie, low-fiber food coming down the pipe every day, and type B is not able to reproduce as fast as type A but is able to live on high-fiber food, this tells you two things:

type A cannot have been living in humans thousands of years ago, but type B might have

type A benefits from making your brain worse at choosing healthy foods, and type B does not

Which kind would you rather have in your gut?

cromka• 4 months ago

Let me also introduce you to the new kid on the block, the resistant starch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6IcMW5Khh4

grvdrm3• 4 months ago

Roughly what I follow. I pour chia seeds into everything I eat. Also: edamame, goji berries, green peas. Etc etc. My particular motivation is 1) health, but 2) I lift quite a bit and try to get as much protein from food as possible.

mustaphah7• 4 months ago

Yeah, it's a mouse study, but there are tons of human studies backing the whole gut-brain connection. There are even a bunch of books on it [1][2].

What's really cool is that the paper used low-dose capsaicin (just 5 μg/kg injected), and it completely restored hippocampal FOS activity and memory in older mice. Basically, that's the same stuff you get in cayenne pepper supplements - pretty easy to get your hands on.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28837738-the-mind-gut-co...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35210457-the-psychobioti...

jrapdx3• 4 months ago

I've long regarded the great variety of chilis as its own distinct food group. But wonderful as they are for flavoring food, quite often in my home, I'm not sure how much of an effect orally consumed capsaicin has on memory functioning.

Conceivably parenteral capsaicin has different effects on hippocampal integrity or physiology than achievable with ingestion. I'm not familiar enough with disposition of capsaicin in the gut to comment further. My question is whether capsaicin passes from gut into the circulation in any appreciable quantity. I suspect it doesn't but I couldn't say I know for sure. I'll have to add it to the already long list of things I need to look up.

mustaphah7• 4 months ago

Chili could work [1], but not too much of it [2]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27079706/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31137805/

Aurornis14• 4 months ago

What's really cool is that the paper used low-dose capsaicin (just 5 μg/kg injected), and it completely restored hippocampal FOS activity and memory in older mice.

There are countless papers published where simple ingredients produce miracles in mice. Most of them don’t replicate.

If you look up most food ingredients you can find someone, somewhere claiming to have used it to produce amazing outcomes in mice. After you read a lot of those you learn not to take individual papers seriously if the claims seem too good to be true.

mustaphah7• 4 months ago

After you read a lot of those you learn not to take individual papers seriously

Can't disagree, but keep in mind that almost all meds are tested first in mice/animal models before human trials verify the effects.

InkCanon• 4 months ago

I only have marginal knowledge about neuroscience, but one of my neuroscience professors in class would tell us

"You can cure anything in mice."

I don't know the mechanism why, but you can find tons of papers with incredibly strong results for curing of mitigating dementia, cognitive decline, addiction, etc in mice, but these almost never seen to work on people.

nofriend• 4 months ago

They're human specific ailments. We create a fake version of them in mice, then we fix the fake version. The basic problem with these issues is we don't understand the root cause. So we can replicate the symptoms in a mouse model then fix the symptoms, but that doesn't work in humans because the root cause is still there.

mustaphah7• 4 months ago

I guess it's because most major disorders and diseases have so many pathways at play that figuring out which one's actually causing the problem at the individual level is just too tricky.

The other thing concerns how potent the effect is to be therapeutic. In many cases, the effect is just marginal to be meaningful.

riazrizvi• 4 months ago

Great info. This is one of those things that it is much faster for an individual to take into their own hands to prove out, rather than waiting for the system to provide us with an answer. Too many decision makers who are unlikely to all be aligned with our own individual interests.

nothrowaways• 4 months ago

They showed that colonizing the guts of young mice with this bacterial species inhibited their performance on the object recognition and maze escape tasks, and that this deficit correlated with a reduction of activity in the hippocampus.

SapporoChris• 4 months ago

I suspect if my guts were forcibly colonized against my will that I might suffer inhibited performance in quite a number of areas.

dharmatech• 4 months ago

The book

"Why Isn't My Brain Working?"

by Datis Kharrazian

published in 2014 talked about this over a decade ago.

hi_hi• 4 months ago

For those who may be interested in learning more about the gut and how it affects your body and brain, this is a great, accessible, read

https://www.amazon.com/Gut-inside-story-bodys-under-rated/dp...

Also, while we're on the topic, if you ever find your self at the other end of the world in Tasmania, I highly recommend a visit to the MONA museum, which houses the Poo Machine.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-07/mona-poo-machine-join...

kseniamorph• 4 months ago

i like how this research (and others related) kind of supports the idea that free will might be lacking. I still keep a pinch of skepticism about this idea, understanding that it's just a concept. But personally i like it, because it even fells a bit relieving... not to say that it helps you abandon responsibility, but it makes your stance on life easier, and pushes you not to blame yourself too much for your weaknesses.

inanutshellus3• 4 months ago

"It's not my will, it's the will of the bugs in my butt!" yes, very "relieving."

I kid, ;) but I see your point. The idea that you might, say, struggle to resist candy and sweets and it's because some population of your gut biome is fighting for its life if you don't eat sugar... makes sense.

The idea that "I just cut sugar out for six weeks and my willpower to resist sugar went through the roof" ... not because your willpower changed, but because you killed that part of your gut biome.

bitexploder6• 4 months ago

What is free will? In Friston’s predictive processing framework, free will isn’t a force that stands outside the brain and overrides it… it’s what the system calls the experience of higher level predictions outcompeting lower-level ones. The brain is a hierarchical prediction machine constantly minimizing surprise, and what feels like a decision is the resolution of competing models, where your prefrontal self model of who you are and what matters generates a stronger attractor than the opposing signal. The sense of “I chose this” is likely a post hoc narrative the DMN constructs after the resolution has already occurred.. agency as story rather than cause. There’s no ghost in the machine, just a very sophisticated model of a self that includes the prediction that it can choose.

Through the vagus nerve and serotonin availability, a dysbiotic gut amplifies lower level threat and conservation signals, making them harder for higher level prefrontal predictions to outcompete. What feels like weakness of will may partly be the system running on a degraded substrate… the DMN then constructs a story about discipline and character over a causal chain that started in the enteric nervous system.

So, you can’t even really perceive some of this. But you essentially can’t overcome it either. The decisions are made before you thought about it.

Fricken• 4 months ago

I got into bicycle touring a few years ago, and it’s an ultra-endurance activity which means burning 3- 4 times as many calories as I would on a sedentary day. My training rides were all local weekend overnighters in preparation for the big 1000 mile challenge ride, and they were no big deal.

On the big ride, about 3 days in I started experiencing bouts of intestinal distress which would put me into some of the blackest moods I can recall experiencing as an adult. My whole thought process broke down and I became ruthlessly nihilistic about everything. I was ready to tell my partner to go fuck himself, chuck my bike off a bridge and take an uber to the nearest airport.

But then when the intestinal distress subsided I came back to my senses and I was like “WTH was that all about?” It happened several times, to varying degrees of intensity over the 10 day tour. My eating strategy improved and I bought some cannabis which helped my manage the issue and I was able to complete the tour.

That was a few years ago and I’ve never experienced the black mood again. It has prompted me to believe that the mind-gut connection is much stronger than we might have been giving it credit for, and if you suffer from mood or cognition issues, big or small, you may want to investigate whether your guts and gut flora might be playing an influential role.

bitexploder6• 4 months ago

What you experienced was the gut-brain axis failing under extreme metabolic stress in real time. 3-4x caloric demand and your enteric nervous system was under enormous strain dysregulation of serotonin production, inflammatory signaling flooding the vagus nerve upward into brainstem arousal states, directly degrading the prefrontal predictions that normally keep your self model coherent and future oriented. the nihilism wasn’t a psychological response to difficulty it was your predictive hierarchy collapsing from the bottom up, the higher level model of who you are and why this matters losing the competition against overwhelming lower level distress signals. The fact that it resolved when the intestinal distress subsided is actually clear indicator that mood and cognition are downstream of gut state more than we like to admit. our gut makes a like 80% of our serotonin or something

theshrike793• 4 months ago

"You" don't crave stuff, the microbiome in your intestine craves stuff.

There are microbes in there that specialize in eating, say, sugar. You don't give them sugar, they send signals to your brain saying "yo, more sugar"

This is why if you go on a sugar-free diet (just stop eating candy and sweets) the cravings just go away eventually. The microbes who keep shouting for more sugar either die away or go dormant.

Mistletoe• 4 months ago

You’ve heard of The Selfish Gene theory from Richard Dawkins but I’ve started talking about The Sefish Tube. If you think about us another way, we are a tube of GI tract that does everything in its life and with its power to simply be full.

DaedalusII• 4 months ago

Heraclitus — 'For the best men choose one thing above all—immortal glory among mortals; but the masses stuff themselves like cattle.'

Aurornis14• 4 months ago

If this was true, sugar cravings would disappear when taking antibiotics that kill those microbes.

The fact that this doesn’t happen should give you pause about this woo-woo theory of cravings.

The reason you crave sugar and fat and other tasty things is that they taste good. You evolved in a world where feeling rewarded and driven to consume more of these was beneficial to survival when food was scarce.

theshrike793• 4 months ago

Antibiotics don't kill 100% of the gut biome, if it did so, we'd die.

It does some decimation, but not a full genocide.

iammjm2• 4 months ago

Clearly "tasting good" is not the primary driver behind all of this. Good taste is an incentive to satisfy something more primary, similar like sex feels good in order to satisfy procreation

owenpalmer• 4 months ago

"You" don't crave stuff

False. We do crave stuff. The microbiome contributes to and influences cravings, but the way you're phrasing it is misleading.

theshrike793• 4 months ago

True, I was kinda trying to allude that it's not the conscious you or your brain that craves things (usually), it's the gut/intestine flora sending the craving signals.

meindnoch7• 4 months ago

Total crackpot theory.

ArchieScrivener• 4 months ago

So drinking turpentine will cure my homosexuality?

gcanyon• 4 months ago

they treated old mice with a molecule that activates the vagus nerve

Anyone know what molecule and treated how?

renecito• 4 months ago

incoming GPL4

m4632• 4 months ago

unrelated but maybe interesting...

I had a colonoscopy and had to empty my system.

I had 1/2 gallon of this fluid to drink the night before, and the other 1/2 gallon to drink the day of. At that point my digestive system was empty.

I will say with an empty system I felt energized and a lot more clearheaded.

I wonder if doing this from time to time is helpful to your system, and furthermore if eating smaller portions would be helpful to my energy levels.

wao0uuno• 4 months ago

Try intermittent fasting. It's easy. It gives your gut a chance to rest. For me it helped with weight control and slightly improved my overall well being. Later I also eliminated sugar from my diet and reduced caffeine intake to minimum by replacing coffee with reasonable amounts of quality tea. That in turn improved my mood, made me less angry and emotional. I also started exercising a bit. All of that combined increased my energy levels, made me calmer, nicer and a bit more optimistic and happy.

papyrus92443• 4 months ago

Most people who fast report that same "clearheadedness".

robwwilliams• 4 months ago

Very well done study with a cautious interpretation of potential translational relevance in humans.

The paper is open access. The discussion does a fine job of providing a full context for interpreting their findings.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10191-6

lsc4719• 4 months ago

You are what you eat.

sn0n• 4 months ago

Yogurt and pickled things acquired.

SilentM68• 4 months ago

That makes sense. I am of the opinion that the gut-brain connection exists. It is real in my view. A healthy gut promotes better mood and health. A parasite-ridden gut leads to all sorts of issues, including anxiety, irritability, stress, constipation and its counterpart, cancer and mental decline. I am doing a gut cleanse now to rebalance my intestinal flora and hopefully remove any bad actors from my gut resulting from years of ingesting processed foods. Want to make sure no parasites accompany me on my upcoming medical imaging visit.

theletterf• 4 months ago

Now I only need to find out how to use the 387 gut coprocessor in my belly to crunch those floats.

#include <gpu_control.h> // g stands for gut

iammjm2• 4 months ago

I believe there is a lot of shame-induced ignorance around this whole subject. Culturally poopin' is in the similar category like sex or death, outlawed from most "civilized" debates. But consider how central digestion is to our existence: basically almost before everything else we must consume -> digest -> expel first. You are not getting that smart brain of yours without that poopy butthole to go along with it

FrustratedMonky• 4 months ago

Article doesn't mention any particular foods that would help.

Is it the typical, eat more fiber, more non-processed, Mediterranean? And this is just showing yet another thing that diet impacts? A link exists, but no specific types of diet to help with aging?.

youknownothing2• 4 months ago

Unless I misread, I found interesting that exposing young mice to old-mice bacteria makes them behave old, but exposing old mice to young-mice bacteria doesn't make them behave young. I wonder if there is something in old-specimen bacteria that wins over young-specimen bacteria.

mustaphah7• 4 months ago

Maybe this explain it:

https://www.psypost.org/scientists-just-discovered-that-a-hi...

Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

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