Disclaimer: I have never personally met Bryan. Reading this again, I realized that this article is quite harsh at times. Overall, I do like him and I am grateful that someone like Bryan exists as he is propelling the whole field forward. I also like the way he deals with criticism.
In my early twenties, I had a two-year-long period during which my body fat was ultra-low (4.8% on the only DEXA scan I had done during that time). I became very obsessive and tolerated an unbelievable amount of self-torture to reach my goals. I also developed very weird eating habits and was rigid about my meal timing – I could not stand breaking my fasts by even a few minutes.
My need for control was extreme and I meticulously tried to control my environment. In retrospect, I am sure that keeping my body fat that low was actually the single biggest contributor to my 90-degree personality turn (as compared to my adolescence) – in other words, I behaved like I behaved more because of my eating disorder than the other way around.
During this time, my blood pressure (roughly 105mmHg), resting heart rate (low 40s when sleeping), and body temperature (roughly 35.8-36.5) were all very low. I had a fixed caloric intake (2000-2100kcal/day) and whenever I overshot it I made sure to balance it out over the next couple of days. My face looked pale and gaunt. My vitality was non-existent.
Just like Bryan, I was never underweight because I had a fair amount of muscle. I had an eating disorder concealed under the veil of “health and fitness”. However, what was really going on was starvation. Nowadays, I quickly recognize it when someone else has an eating disorder.
When body fat gets to very low levels, for evolutionary reasons, people are set to become obsessive, rigid, and engage in OCD-like behaviors in order to help with “foraging”. We see this in about every mammal we study, and Bryan Johnson is no exception. It is not too far-fetched to assume that as Bryan started to control “Evening-Bryan”, he gradually fell into an eating disorder. The resulting neurobiochemical makeup is causally intertwined with the evolution of many of his current ritualistic behaviors.
Upon starvation, sympathetic nervous system activity falls, leading to low blood pressure (as far as I know, Bryan’s is around 105mmHg systolic – so low that most of us would nearly pass out) and heart rate (Bryan’s is in the low 40s while sleeping).
Furthermore, because sympathetic nervous system activity and noradrenaline levels get so low, during sleep resting heart rate drops and heart rate variability increases quite a bit. While having a low heart rate and high HRV can be suggestive of restorative sleep, the change in these parameters can also be suggestive of an abysmally low sympathetic activity. Hence, one could argue that he cheats his way to a “great” sleep score by having a pathologically low sympathetic tone.
In anorexia nervosa (and the huge spectrum of pre-AN states), body temperature often falls to 36C – 35.5C, so borderline hypothermia. Bryan just released a newsletter this week “bragging” that his body temperature hovers around 34.8C, which means outright hypothermia. Mammalian enzymes have evolved to function well within a very narrow temperature range and when the temperature is considerably above or below, kinetic equilibria are going to be perturbed.
To quote from his newsletter: “My health program has me metabolically cold plunging. Since starting Blueprint, my body temp has cooled 4°F in 3 yrs, now at 94.8°F. This technically qualifies as minor hypothermia. To put this into context, it takes swimming more than a mile in ice to achieve an equivalent temperature reduction as mine.”
Well done, Bryan.
His carotenemia is also a hallmark sign of being in starvation and nearly every anorexia patient has it.
Most people think that he is so pale because he simply avoids the sun. Actually, his body is so cold and his blood circulation is so centralized that there is little cutaneous blood flow, therefore the red color of hemoglobin does not “shine” through the skin causing his vampire-like color.
What are my overall thoughts on Bryan?
The part I disagree with most is his self-starvation, perhaps unfairly biased due to my personal experience. I would like for Bryan to communicate openly how much “like shit” he feels all the time (fatigued; weak; cold; hungry; etc.). This is not due to his program but primarily due to his insufficient caloric intake combined with having ultra-low body-fat levels seemingly year-round. From a longevity & health perspective, he would do well with leptin injections (or simply gaining a little body fat). However, they would change his neurobiochemistry probably in a way that is not conducive to maintaining his rigid lifestyle.
Someone with a blood pressure and body temperature this low is definitely not “healthier than most 18-year-olds”. The metrics he is using to judge that are quite theoretical but more on some of his real data later. While caloric restriction may be helpful for longevity (and this is a big MAY in already long-lived mammals such as great apes, elephants, and dolphins – particularly if they live in the wild full of pathogens and caloric restriction leads to immunosuppression and poor wound healing), it means sacrificing most of his (biological) vitality.
The prolonged starvation and the associated hormonal decline may also be responsible for the white matter hyperintensities in his brain (early onset grey matter atrophy), and not just his internal jugular vein stenosis as he believes. Cortical atrophy has been reported in primate studies looking at the effects of starvation on longevity (I am sure Bryan is aware of this but once you have an eating disorder it is sort of hard to stop…).
I also think he is sometimes dishonest about where his on-paper results are coming from. He takes potent anti-aging drugs (rapamycin, metformin, acarbose, 17-alpha estradiol), uses a bunch of hormones (thyroid hormones way higher than replacement doses; TRT in the past; growth hormone in the past), and even gene therapies. His nutty pudding has little to do with his “results”, yet this is what is being sold (and fed) to the masses.
While the testosterone dosage was still listed on his website, the way he looked while taking “TRT” looked nothing like a “testosterone replacement dose” but rather like a (mild?) steroid cycle, particularly at his low caloric intake. Remember, the man is 45 and not 18. However, he does look much bigger than he is because his body fat is very low, enhancing muscle definition.
Given that veins vasoconstrict in non-hot water, I would guess that he somehow artificially enhanced vasodilation before the photo shoot, either by taking a vasodilator (e.g., Viagra), using a blowdryer or sauna, and/or getting in a pump through volume training.
It seems that he is spending a lot of his time & effort on maintaining his hair. If his body was functioning like an 18-year old he should not need to do that. Also, in the interviews I have seen of him, his blinking frequency is quite high, presumably because he is so low in body fat and his lacrimal ducts cannot manufacture the lipid portion of tear fluid properly.
And through his implementation of the vast amounts of cosmetic interventions he is concealing his true speed of aging. However, I love the fact that he shares these as normally people do these in private and like to credit their “good genes” for their looks.
Overall, I do think that what he does is interesting. I read his protocol and watched a few of his videos. The only thing I adopted myself was taking 1mg of lithium per day. I would be interested in measuring my nighttime erections and seeing how they change as my sex hormones, calories, body fat, stress levels, leptin levels, etc change.
The part about Botox injections into his penis was superb and ever since seeing that my opinion of him was swayed from rather negative to rather positive – particularly because he is being public about this. I do think that this single tweet might have opened up a new industry…
Even though this article is full of criticism, more and more I find myself liking him than not liking him. I particularly like him calling out AG1 and other shitty companies. I also like his “shot-gun” approach: “Let us try everything at once and see what we find.” Though, I am not sure whether he openly communicates everything the way he portrays himself. I guess that he does not.
I am also impressed by how well and courageous Bryan reacts to the vast amounts of hate and criticism he gets. We are social primates and social humiliation and ostracism trigger deep-seated circuits of fight or flight – Bryan does neither and it does take a certain greatness to react the way he does (though I am sure he has PR consultants).
Much of his undertaking is probably for his own ego, which seems to be hungry for attention (I could be wrong!). He says that his main goal is all about “not dying” and surviving until superintelligence hits. To me, this seems questionable. Firstly, he is around 45 years old and most predictions about the advent of AGI are way shorter than 40-50 years. Secondly, it seems that quite a few people hate him, perhaps unjustified but still.
Given that the US society has many lunatics, by being so public-facing he exposes himself as a target of hate crime, meaning that he incurs the additional risk of homicide, which may even be his biggest risk of death. He has roughly half a billion $, if not more. If “Don’t die!” is really his top and only priority, why not just take your money & your interventions and spend the rest of your time within a very sheltered property in New Zealand?
Some more data
Sure, he is in the “top 1%” in some parameters but he is much worse off in a number of other parameters that cannot be improved via “effort” (e.g., physical training, medications). Below is cherry-picked data taken from his Blueprint website revealing that he is not as healthy as he would like us to believe. Disclaimer: I picked the most negative data I could find and there is definitively more positive than negative data.
- He has 1.37 liters of subcutaneous fat. This is incredibly low and approaches body-builder-level territory. He calls this “optimal”. Subcutaneous fat is healthy – it is the visceral fat that is bad.
- Some of his heart parameters are like that of a 70-year-old (“LV septal A’ mitral: age 70+; Aortic root diameter age 70+; LA E’ laterobasal: age 70+; RVSP: age 70; LV sepal E/E’: age 55). Despite being a doctor, I had to look up some of them myself. His left ventricular markers are quite good though.
- Most of his brain markers are exactly around his biological age (“White Matter Hyperintensities: age 48; Ventricular volume: age 48; Cortical grey vol: age 45; AI T1 brain age: age 44; RAVENS PM: age 41, Total Cerebral WMV: age 37; WASO: age 37).
- His joints and tendons do not seem to be in the best shape, particularly the important joints of the knee and shoulder. This impairment of some parts of the musculoskeletal apparatus is probably among his weakest areas. I suspect that some of these are the result of undereating + overexercising + underresting: (“Bilateral shoulder labral degenerative tears with paralabral cysts.; Tendinosis (degenerated tendons): bilateral supraspinatus rotator cuff (shoulder) with subacromial bursitis (chronic inflammation in R>L shoulders); Bilateral knee chondromalacia patella (cartilage wear beneath the kneecap) with left knee mild to moderate effusion/bursitis.; Bilateral hip gluteus medius tendinosis (chronic degeneration). Bilateral Hip Cam impingement syndrome. (Can predispose to osteoarthritis))
- His hearing is also not the best (Right ear normal freq: age 61; Left ear normal freq: age 51; Right ear EHF: age 60; Left ear EHF: age 32)
- His telomere length is that of a 42-year old so exactly what we would expect.
- In 2021 he writes: “Body fat increased from 3.5% to 6% due to transitioning to three meals a day (10-16 hour fast), from one meal a day (~22 hr fast).” Most people cannot even imagine what it feels to be 3.5% body fat, which is in life-threatening territory by the way.
Somewhere buried on his website he writes: “Severe headache symptoms causing to wake in the night, on acetazolamide 250 mg since 25th Jan 2022.” What else is he taking that he is not being public about? I suspect quite a bit. There is one video of him measuring his brain activity using his Kernel device while on ketamine. I would not be surprised if he were actually on psychopharmaceuticals as well, potentially to combat his neurobiological depression stemming from self-starvation (as discussed here, depression is not the same as “suffering”).
Sources & further information
- Article: Blueprint Protocol
Disclaimer
The content available on this website is based on the author’s individual research, opinions, and personal experiences. It is intended solely for informational and entertainment purposes and does not constitute medical advice. The author does not endorse the use of supplements, pharmaceutical drugs, or hormones without the direct oversight of a qualified physician. People should never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something they have read on the internet.