There are lots of good reasons to try and follow a healthier diet.

You lose weight, you feel good, but the main reason, to live a longer, happier, more productive life.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Today we answer what may sound like a very unusual question,

can revitalizing blood with blood transfusions slow aging?

In our first story, we consider gruesome experiments that surgically attached old animals to young ones

to show that there is something in the blood that causes aging.

One of the major hallmarks of aging is the decline of regentive capacity of our tissues.

There are stem cells residing in their muscles, for example, that can leap into service at the first sign of injury to repair any damage,

is the waning of tissue renewing ability

due to some intrinsic property of aging stem cells

or a consequence of being trapped in an aging body.

To find out, researchers grafted the muscles of old rats into young rats and vice versa.

Inside the young rat, even the weak atrophied muscles of extremely old rats at the end of their lives

regained their strength, volume, and ability to regenerate.

They became young again, so the capacity was still there all along.

And young muscles and old rats lost renewal capacity.

So it appeared to be something about the surrounding milieu rather than inherent defects with age.

To see if the critical elements were circulating in the bloodstream, old muscle stem cells were

cultured in the blood of young animals. This alone had a rejuvenating effect to suggesting that there may be some sort of vitalizing factors in youth that we lose as we age or inversely some repair repressing component that builds up.

Either way, this may be good news because if we can find out what those factors are, we may be able to flow aging or even reverse it.

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