The paleo diet may make your biological age older than your real age

By Michael Le Page

The paleo diet claims to replicate what our ancestors ate

Richard B. Levine/SIPA USA/PA Images

A new way of calculating our biological age based on the bacteria in our gut has thrown up some surprising results. Among other things, it suggests that people following the paleo diet are nearly two years “older” on average compared with people not on the diet.

“It is striking,” says Guruduth Banavar at Viome, a California-based company that sells tests that measure gut bacteria. “In our population, people on a paleo diet were younger, but their biological age is actually older.”

In the past decade, …