Researchers claim that a combination of probiotics and a herbal supplement called Triphala extended the lives of fruit flies by 60 percent. The study, published in Scientific Reports, adds to a growing body of evidence of the influence that gut bacteria can have on health.
The researchers incorporated a symbiotic -made of probiotics with a polyphenol-rich supplement- into the diet of fruit flies. The flies fed with the symbiotic lived up to 66 days—26 days more than the ones without the supplement. They also showed reduced traits of ageing, such as mounting insulin resistance, inflammation, and oxidative stress.
“Probiotics dramatically change the architecture of the gut microbiota, not only in its composition but also in respect to how the foods that we eat are metabolized,” says Satya Prakash, professor of biomedical engineering in McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine and senior author of the study. “This allows a single probiotic formulation to simultaneously act on several biochemical signalling pathways to elicit broad beneficial physiological effects, and explains why the single formulation we present in this paper has such a dramatic effect on so many different markers.”
Futurity.org quoted Prakash as saying that fruit flies and mammals share about 70% similarity in biochemical pathways. “The effects in humans would likely not be as dramatic, but our results definitely suggest that a diet specifically incorporating Triphala along with these probiotics will promote a long and healthy life.”
