Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint: Ambitious Experiment or Overcomplicated Health Gamble?

What is Blueprint and Bryan Johnson all about?

Bryan Johnson, a multimillionaire entrepreneur, aims to defy aging and live as long as possible in optimal health. Therefore, he created (along with a team of doctors and experts) a protocol he calls Blueprint, which he openly shares with everyone on the internet. This includes everything, from his diet, workouts to various measurements he does on an almost daily basis.

It may seem that his success in maintaining healthy biomarkers validates the program. While it is safe to assume his protocol hasn´t harmed him yet and most likely was responsible for achieving his perfect test results it is also impossible to say which part of his protocol had an impact on his health and which ones didn´t.

Key issues with the program

While the general guidelines of the program stand on solid scientific ground (daily sport, healthy recipes, enough sleep, no alcohol etc.), Blueprint also has some fundamental issues. For example, the protocol consists of countless supplements, many of which have little to no evidence to have an effect on the human body and others are not needed within that diet. Furthermore, there are general concerns on how the protocol works on a basic level:

1. Some change in biomarkers happen over time. If I identify a deficiency in a given nutrient and decide to supplement it, my lack of nutrients is potentially already recovering from a small dietary change I applied some weeks ago but since the body can only absorb so much of nutrient X, further supplementation is useless. But since I am now supplementing X my next blood test shows no more lack of nutrient X. I decide to keep supplement X on my daily Todo list yet despite there is no need to do so. Same probably also applies to the Blueprint when one considers that it consists of handful of pills everyday.
   

2. Many processes in our body are interconnected with each other. For example, Iron and Vitamin C. Combining these two together means, that more Iron will be absorbed by the body while the overall amount of Iron that has been digested stayed the same (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_iron_metabolism). So, eating something rich in Vitamin C with your meal of choice might drastically increase the amount of Iron in your body (with potentially even harmful consequences in form of an Iron overload). Furthermore, there are also nutrients which decrease the body´s ability to absorb certain nutrients. Just thinking about the effects, we know of would be way too complicated for many people and that leaves out the stuff we don´t know. On top of that things like stress can also increase demand for specific nutrients.

3. Our body is a self-regulating system in many ways and adding a supplement is often just without effect. A good example is water soluble vitamins which your body just gets rid of by peeing. Adding Vitamin C in a somewhat normal diet will have no effect on most people other than costing money.

4. Bryan Johnson has a sample size of exactly one: Himself. Since we know there are genetic differences in humans in terms of nutritional requirements and not only that. Sex, age, body composition, activity level and many more factors are influencing what your body needs and even how it reacts to any given substance. Creatine being one example where there are clear responders and such that don´t respond at all.

5. The absorption of nutrients and various supplements is poorly understood in the human body and therefore just adding them into one´s diet doesn´t mean it´s a good idea. In case of Rapamycin (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirolimus) this means the substance maybe have a positive effect on your body but there are some underlying mechanisms we yet don´t fully understand. In the best-case scenario one would waste money, worst case an isolated supplement like that could also pose a harm for the body.

6. Mice aren´t people: Bryan Johnson supplements almost all available vitamins there are and additionally experimental drugs that show promise in mice studies. Mice studies are usually just the beginning of the research. The human body is different in a myriad of ways to that of the mice.  Just because mice which had been fed nuts and seeds tend to live longer than the ones receiving 5% of their daily calories in form of Tofu doesn´t mean one shouldn´t eat Tofu and instead resort to a nut and seed-based diet. The same applies to medication of all sorts. Unless the supplement of choice isn´t tested in humans it is generally not advised to just add given supplement.

7. The hype isn´t your friend: Bryan Johnson seems to be very interested in experimental treatments (like stem cell treatments and gene editing) yet serious research takes years and often decades to reach conclusions. Just trying them out and see if they damage your body isn´t a healthy choice exactly and one that doesn´t benefit anyone or anything. What is needed to determine any use are careful and expensive studies not a single person just experimenting with a dosage.

8. Too many variables in general: Bryan takes a lot of supplements (Almost all vitamins, two garlic supplements, Lithium, Glucosamine Sulphate just to name a few of his very long list). It is impossible to determine which supplement had which influence on his body, because the complexity of his program is too great. For example, supplementing Lecithin is said to have a positive impact on the MTOR-pathway. Below is a schematic of said mechanism. This is not to say, that MTOR won´t be fully understood at some point but it illustrates how complex the mechanisms in our body are and they are all interconnected and have complex feedback mechanisms. Tinkering with substances which aren´t fully understood might not be the best idea.  

Credit: Charles Betz (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Unnecessary Risks                  

Bryan´s personal benchmark in terms of his fitness is somewhat risky too. He prefers to measure his strength for example by doing one repetition maximum with rather bad form like bench pressing with his butt leaving the bench, putting himself under a lot of unnecessary risk of injury. Note that torn muscles never come back to their old form and function, once the damage is done. A better alternative is to use things like a 5-repititon maximum and calculate one´s maximum strength.

In general Bryan Johnson also seems to enjoy a high-risk high-reward strategy by incorporating questionable treatments as well, which might have positive or negative outcomes for his body over long periods of time. One of these examples is an experimental stem cell treatment, which we simply do not know enough of at this point (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem-cell_therapy)

There is not only an underlying risk that things could go south very fast because of this kind of treatment it is also undermining the efforts of blueprint in two ways:

1. Almost no person will be able to undergo such expensive procedures and therefore it´s hardly of any use to anyone. At least for now.
2. There is almost no way to find out if any of these things had any meaningful impact. In its worst form this means he might get cancer at some point and decades later we find out that his experimental treatment most likely caused it.

In medicine a common term is called conservative therapy, which implies to use less risky, less invasive therapies to be preferred over an invasive and more risky therapy. If a bone is able to heal without applying screws and titanium, then this is the preferred option of course.

A maximalist effort

The maximalist approach might be interesting to him, since he doesn´t need to be concerned about money but for the regular, every day, normal guy it is a valid concern. Since he also sells his own products associated with that lifestyle, it could very well be a marketing strategy by combining an excessive number of supplements in order to generate a need for an unnecessarily complex product so people can´t rebuild it reasonably cheap themselves anymore.

Risk aversion is something he already happily practices by not participating in highly dangerous activities so why not leave the potentially dangerous therapies up to the scientists to study with care, money and time?

Perfectionism of a subject can consume one’s life. Bryan already has perfect biomarkers, for now it would be great to downsize again and find out what is truly necessary and what is not. Personally, I am of the opinion, he could greatly reduce the number of supplements he is taking as of now but again, this is not something I can scientifically back-up by studies but by a rough estimate, since he is often exceeding his recommended micronutrients by a lot.

This article is not to say, that Blueprint doesn´t work, quite to the contrary: Many things are in fact very healthy habits. Many first world countries would benefit greatly if everyone would incorporate the basics more rigorously into his/her lifestyle.

At the same time, it might be appropriate not to go overboard with this lifestyle as it could be rather time consuming and what good does a regiment do if the invested time potentially outweighs the years, one gets out by adhering to the blueprint protocol?

Clickbait and marketing

While Johnson shares his protocol openly, his social media promotion often uses exaggerated claims like ‘Live to 120+,’ which lack credible scientific backing and may mislead followers. Given that only one person was verified with an age over 120 years (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment), there is little to suggest the Blueprint lifestyle will lead to such an extreme lifespan. Especially when one considers that Jeanne Calment had a vastly different lifestyle and was even a smoker for most of her life.

Nobody should expect to reach an age of 120.

Additionally, some of Bryan Johnson´s endeavors like this one are questionable at the very least:

Experimental gene therapy, carries significant unknown risks.

Healthy skepticism

The premise of the Blueprint protocol is: "Don´t die!". But so far nobody even has exceeded the age of 120 since Madame Calment despite major advantages in medicine. What has improved drastically however was the average life expectancy due to covering the basics, like sanitary installation, less famine, less war (thanks to Putin and the Xi Jinping this might change), vaccination programs etc. While the amount of people who live to see their 100th birthday might be increasing, there is no observation of people becoming much older than that. Currently the oldest people are between 112 and 116 years old. But we have yet to see a person celebrating his/her 123th birthday.

While there is no law of physics limiting a person´s age there is also no guarantee humanity will be able to drastically change the ultimate age limit without resorting to cybernetics if that is even possible. Not only that, there are no mammals that live forever and animals that could in theory live forever are vastly different to us humans in every aspect (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(genus)). While there is progress on the anti-aging front, it is slow and expensive. Ironically almost every time anyone finds an interesting drug or procedure that might dramatically increase lifespan in a given species, the result is usually that the tested organism develops cancer. This indicates there is still a long way to go before we see the first 200 year old person.

Many practitioners of longevity diets hope for scientists to come up with life extending medicine and technology that will hopefully preserve them forever but for now this is a distant hope and nothing more.

From an ethical perspective it is probably more desirable to help people not to die of easily preventable diseases than letting the richest people on this planet live forever. Especially since these are low hanging fruits and the measurements to do so are known to work, like investing in education, sewers and vaccines.

Conclusion

Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint undoubtedly promotes some valuable habits, but its complexity, reliance on experimental treatments, and marketing hype raise valid concerns. Sticking to simpler, proven health practices may ultimately be more beneficial—and less risky. While achieving immortality seems unlikely, adopting healthy habits is always a great step toward improving quality of life.

 

Further reading: https://protocol.bryanjohnson.com/