A new study from Japan has shown that eating plain, probiotic yogurt every morning, along with moderate exercise and a healthy diet, can slow aging by 2.2%.
Doctors have long known that a healthy gut microbiome — which refers to the variety of bacteria we have in our gut — can help people live longer. People with more variety in their gut bacteria are more likely to have lower cholesterol levels, faster walking speeds, and higher levels of beneficial blood chemicals. All of which contribute to a longer lifespan.
Probiotic yogurt can introduce healthy new bacteria to the gut, helping to keep this healthy balance, and it’s a cheap breakfast option.
This latest study to extoll the health benefits of yogurt was published in the journal Aging. It took place over a 12-week period and followed 48 overweight Japanese men aged between 50 and 74.
Half of the group were instructed to take part in “moderate exercise” in the form of a brisk walk or using a stair climber three times a week, told to cut out sugary drinks, snacking and overeating, and were given a yogurt to eat for breakfast every day.
This yogurt contained the specific BB536 strain of probiotic, proven to improve gut health.
The other half were allowed to continue with their everyday habits and acted as the control group.
The researchers then measured how fast the participants were aging using a tool that can offer a single timepoint measurement.
After just 12 weeks, the “yogurt group” were aging more slowly than the control group — with a 2.2% reduction in the pace of aging, which is considered statistically significant, especially over such a short time period.
What’s more, this result was independent of weight loss and the number of exercise sessions logged, indicating that the probiotic could be having more of an impact than expected.
Because the study group had three lifestyle changes (diet, exercise and a probiotic), the researchers were quick to point out that they weren’t able to correlate the reduction in aging directly with eating yogurt alone.
It is also a small study cohort, so further research would need to be undertaken to prove the findings.
However, they wrote that “neither weight loss alone nor exercise habits alone fully account for the observed slowing of biological aging,”
For this reason, the researchers concluded that adding “microbiota-derived anti-inflammatories” like probiotic yogurt to your diet, while maintaining a healthy lifestyle, can slow aging.
