The key to living longer could be in … poop

Gut health is one of the hottest new trends in health and wellness. A healthy habitat of bacteria in your intestines can support everything from easing digestion to reducing inflammation.

As you and your stomach age, consuming decades of pizzas and cheeseburgers along the way, those microbes lose a step as your dependency on them becomes ever more critical.

Many have turned to a steady stream of supplements or probiotic-enriched kombucha to stay healthy, but a new — albeit significantly less appetizing — source of healthy gut bacteria has recently arrived on the world stage.

This new miracle drug, studies suggest, is poop — young poop, to be exact. Don’t laugh (or recoil). It turns out kids could be holding the fountain of youth in their stool.

The findings were recently published in Nature Communications by a team of researchers at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, U.K.

They found by studying mice that there are many benefits to “fecal transplants.” The key, researchers found, is for older mice (22 months old) to consume the droppings of the younger mice (3 months old).

They believe this fecal transplant brings a healthier mix of protozoa, fungi and viruses into an otherwise aged digestive tract, which in turn reduces frailty and inflammation for the entire body.

It’s not known exactly why our bacteria turns against us as we get older, but it’s reassuring to know that the process can be reversed with the proper organic stimuli.

While fecal transplantation mostly has been relegated to those suffering from gastrointestinal issues, breakthroughs like this could catapult the practice into the mainstream.  

After all, we are what we eat — and we soon may be what they eat, too.