US millionaire Bryan Johnson is trying it with a vegan diet, lots of exercise, vaguely scientific approaches and lots of money
Bryan Johnson will spend about $2 million on his own health this year. He doesn’t have a disease that requires expensive treatments or unknown pathologies: he simply wants to do everything to avoid aging and even aims to rejuvenate. It is a fixation that Johnson has had for some years and which has been discussed a lot in recent weeks among fitness enthusiasts, “superfoods” and supplements after Businessweek he had told it in a long article.
Johnson is 45 years old and can afford the millionaire youth treatment thanks to the money raised from the sale of his electronic payments company Braintree to PayPal, which took place a decade ago for 800 million dollars. He is not the only Silicon Valley millionaire to have developed a penchant for researching systems that reverse aging processes. Just around the time Johnson was about to make hundreds of millions of dollars, Larry Page, one of the cofounders of Google, had invested a lot of money in Calico, a company that was supposed to develop solutions for health and wellness, including those for aging slower. The company still exists and is part of Alphabet, the large holding that controls Google, but has not led to particular results in the sector.
Unlike Page and his other millionaire colleagues, Johnson took the issue very personally to the point of experimenting with anti-aging techniques and solutions on himself. He is assisted by about thirty doctors, follows their indications and in a few years has changed most of his habits, from eating to those related to physical activity. He doesn’t seem to lack dedication, but for his detractors, the great commitment demonstrates more than anything else that Johnson is above all interested in stopping his own aging and not that of others.
The medical team is led by Oliver Zolman, a 29-year-old British doctor who specializes in regenerative medicine. To decide which strategies to put into practice, Johnson and Zolman have become avid readers of scientific research dealing with aging: they consult a large amount of it and then decide together which ones to experiment with. The starting point is scientific, but the approach in general seems to be less systematic and structured than how clinical trials and research are organized. Moreover, the various practices concern only one guinea pig: Johnson himself.
(Bryan Johnson)
The ultimate goal is extremely ambitious and foresees that his middle-aged man’s body is almost thirty years younger, reaching the physical shape of an eighteen year old. For more than a year, the initiatives and efforts to try to achieve this result have been collected in “Blueprint”, a project halfway between a diary on Johnson’s progress and a site to advise other people on the best strategies to achieve the same goals, possibly without spending millions of dollars. All in all, scientific information is scarce, while much space is dedicated to the lifestyles to be adopted, along the lines of those strictly followed by the millionaire who wants to be young again.
Johnson eats just under 2,000 calories every day following a vegan diet, dedicates an hour a day to physical exercise and always goes to sleep at the same time, after wearing special glasses that filter the “blue light” for a couple of hours such as that of screens, which can interfere with sleep-wake cycles. Using various types of devices, he constantly monitors his physical activity and undergoes a long series of medical tests once a month: from magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate the state of internal organs to colonoscopy, through blood tests and various visits type.
One of the past that consumes daily Bryan Johnson (Bryan Johnson)
The Blueprint shows some data collected by the doctors who follow Johnson and which should demonstrate the progress achieved so far. According to their analyses, the 45-year-old would have a 37-year-old heart, the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old. The estimates are made by comparing various parameters for each organ with statistics collected among populations of various ages, but it is not very clear how they are calculated. Zolman told anyway a Businessweek not to rely too much on those data: «We have not yet obtained particular results. With Bryan we have achieved small and reasonable results as we expected».
Johnson is certainly among Zolman’s most important clients, who in 2021 founded 20one Consulting, a company that offers consultancy related to the reversal of aging processes. Zolman says he uses particular “biostatistics” to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments and has set himself the goal of achieving “a 25 percent reduction in aging in 78 organs by 2030”. He acknowledges that at the moment there are no 45-year-old people who look 35 in all organs, but believes Johnson could be the first to achieve the result, becoming a sort of example and model to study.
Also in this case the approach doesn’t seem to be very scientific, considering that the results – if ever achievable – would concern only one individual with specific characteristics. Scientific research is largely based on the possibility of reproducing the experiments carried out by others obtaining comparable results, which is unlikely to happen in the case of a possible rejuvenation of Johnson.
On closer inspection, the “experiments” conducted by the millionaire are not very different from what some athletes undergo to give their best in their sporting activity, for example by following particular diets and workouts. In a sense, Johnson is an athlete who is trying to excel in a discipline in which a large part of mankind engages: living as long as possible. Hence the constant measurements of weight, fat mass, body temperature, glucose levels, heart rate and many other parameters that even a professional athlete keeps an eye on during their training.
A phototherapy session (Bryan Johnson)
As a drug-free discipline, Johnson also takes a large amount of supplements and medications. He takes pills containing lycopene for circulation; turmeric, black pepper and ginger for the liver and to reduce inflammation; zinc to complement the vegan diet; resorts to microdosing lithium, i.e. taking small amounts of this substance which he says helps his mental health. Taking supplements has been very fashionable for a few years, but as doctors and nutritionists point out, if you have a balanced diet and don’t have any particular ailments, supplements are often useless, because our body already has the substances it needs, producing them themselves or obtaining them from food.
Other treatments Johnson undergoes appear to be more aesthetic-oriented than actual rejuvenation. He has long since decided to expose himself to the sun as little as possible, to reduce the aging caused by ultraviolet rays, and uses seven different creams to apply to his skin every day. He also undergoes treatments such as peelings, to remove the most superficial layers of skin, and facial fat transplants to renew the layer of cells that keep the skin in tension, reducing the formation of wrinkles.
On multiple occasions, Johnson has told that he decided to change his life after a period of depression that lasted about ten years, which partially coincided with the phase in which he followed his own startup. He got married, had three children, and finally divorced. He was overweight and didn’t do much to keep fit, until he began to take an interest in the initiatives (often more commercial than scientific) in Silicon Valley to keep fit, to have devices that easily analyze one’s activity and with which to plan diet, exercise physique and more generally lifestyle habits.
The digital-related fitness sector in the last decade has become one of the most fruitful and richest for the main technology companies, which devote large resources to the research and development of new products such as trackers, watches and other devices to keep fit. These solutions are the basis of successful products such as Apple’s Apple Watch or companies born expressly for this purpose such as FitBit, acquired by Alphabet in 2021. There have been great successes, some failures and stories that ended very badly as in the case of Theranos, which promised comprehensive health checks by testing a drop of your own blood with a device that never worked.
Of course, even in Silicon Valley there are companies that study aging and ways to slow it down or reverse it with a more scientific approach, involving research groups and funding the activities in the laboratories of some of the most important universities in the United States and beyond. And precisely at Harvard, one of the most prestigious US universities, works the Australian biologist David Sinclair who became famous thanks to some high-sounding declarations on the results achieved by his studies in the laboratory, thanks to a good ability to disseminate and promote himself.
Bryan Johnson (Dustin Giallanza)
Earlier this year, Sinclair published in the scientific journal Cell a study on the “information theory of aging,” which holds that our bodies age from the mess that builds up in the genetic material over time. According to Sinclair, every time DNA is damaged and our cells try to repair it, they accumulate new changes and inevitable errors, similar to those found in computer programs and which can then cause malfunctions. In the study, the research team illustrated how they managed to create a kind of biological switch to intervene in those processes and bring order, reversing some of the changes caused by aging.
– Listen also: “It takes a science” on Sinclair’s work
The work of Sinclair, a researcher who enjoys great visibility, has been welcomed with interest by those involved in aging, but by the same admission of those who have created it, it still contains many aspects to be clarified and only works in the laboratory on some guinea pigs. However, it is the demonstration of how the sector is widely explored and with more elaborate approaches, and with great implications, compared to interventions of different scope such as radically changing one’s diet and doing a lot of physical exercise.
Johnson does not rule out resorting to genetically-related experimental treatments in the future, even if his plans in this regard are not yet very clear. And precisely the difficulty in seeing a certain coherence in the experiments on himself has contributed to attracting criticism over the years. Some have accused him of having an eating disorder and psychological problems, manifested by his obsession with ageing, a process which, moreover, affects any living being and which according to current knowledge cannot be avoided. However, Johnson considers himself a pioneer in an area that will receive more and more attention and does not seem to be very interested in criticism. Even if he wants to be eighteen again, he’s lived long enough to learn to ignore them.
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