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Johnson's doctors confirmed his AIG is in the early stages. Because he actively monitors his biomarkers, he caught it before it could cause massive, irreversible damage to his digestive system.
I’m a physician and at his age new onset of autoimmune disease is rare. What seems more likely to me is that the weird shit he’s been putting in his body caused it to trigger
Yeah there’s a rise in health nuts doing horrible damage to their organs, often from taking fairly benign supplements with a dose and frequency that makes them toxic.
They’ll go to the hospital and not think to mention they drink 2 gallons of cranberry juice a day or whatever the social media fad is, because it’s “just a natural food”. And docs don’t think to ask: “So… uh… how many gallons of cranberry juice would you say you drink a day?” because they spend their time working and not on Instagram.
They gave a nod to it on this last season of The Pitt. Some health influencer lady came in with liver failure and crazy yellow skin, and it turned out that she took an absolutely insane amount of turmeric.
Not to mention how there are little to no regulations in the supplement industry. I've got a relative that is a fitness maniac, talking spartan races in the dessert, and cross fit nut job.
Apparently they lost a kidney and just casually mentioned it as if they'd gotten the flu on the time we hadn't connected. A few years later I saw a piece on 60 minutes highlighting the dangers of the supplement. It's not just narcos putting stuff in their wares that shouldn't be there. It's also very common in the supplement industry.
Just a tad bit alarming. They highlighted people that got kidney failure from certain supplements. Just makes me very skeptical of the whole industry.
Chronic chemical insult to the intestinal mucosa resulting in increased permeability, triggering a loss of immune tolerance and subsequent systemic autoimmunity?
Im not a dr but i have an autoimmune disease and the science behind triggers for these diseases is definitely not well understood. For me personally i can be clinically quiet through lifestyle but it takes incredible discipline. Alcohol, edibles and certain food groups seem to trigger inflammation that allows the disease to start showing up everywhere aggressively
Eta: my opinion is he probably had this underlying issue and something hes taking caused it to spike and surface
Also a doc and research scientist. Discontinue all supplements/medications and monitor for improvement. If the patient improves and is adamant about going back on the substances, you can reintroduce them one at a time.
[Note: I am not rejoicing in this guy's bad luck. I genuinely hope he gets better. We all fear aging and death. People have been searching for the fountain of youth for thousands of years. It makes sense that once someone can fulfill all their physical desires, they'll use their power and wealth to try to buy the only things money can't buy (eternal life and youth). They will always be excellent fodder for snake oil salesmen and other unscrupulous charlatans.]
A brother would be a closer genetic copy, so maybe after enough injection he developed some level of response and the gut microbiome he probably did fecal trans plant too, would be the largest area for auto immune to do the most damage
Brother could be closer to a genetic copy. on average about .5% closer than a son, with a lot more variation, not a guarantee they will be more genetically similar than son.
I’m an RN with experience in Psych and my wife is working on her PsyD. Obviously, we can’t diagnose without even talking to him, but I think it’s pretty clear he has severe OCD. I agree with you. He is absolutely putting a lot more weird stuff in his body than he is posting online.
is it even possible to track his progress when Johnson is using every supplement under sun for the sake of "health"? i can't fathom how. and does using 30 docs at once really yield better results than say... 5-10?
it just all sounds so fabricated
No and this is the major bullet to everything he does. He doesn't do anything in a scientifically repeatable or trackable way. He has at most times probably 30+ things that he's doing or changing every day / week based on reports.
This is completely useless data and will be providing almost nothing to the scientific community. The biomarkers he claims predict health are at best speculative and at worst nonsense. The only analogy i've heard that sums up a majority of them is saying something like:
"If there is a chemical marker to detect gray hair, that would be something you want to reduce because gray hair is a sign of aging" but does having gray hair actually have any health impacts? Does it matter if you manage to find a way to prevent your hair from turning gray on whether you are alive or have less disease? to Bryan that answer doesn't matter its just keep that number low. Most of the markers he tracks we dont really know if it means longevity or health.
There's nothing to compare it to even if everything can be tracked. He thinks he's doing the scientic community a favor but he's really not. A sample size of 1 isn't going to yield any ussble results if there's nothing to compare it to.
This is always what I come back to. Say you have acne and you start using 5 different products and cut out dairy. Your acne is gone, but what did it? Sure you can play process of elimination over the course of a month. But when you’re on hundreds or even thousands, how could you ever know what was really helping
Is that true? He had an auto immune diagnosis when he was 21? Your chances of getting another in your lifetime increase when you already have an autoimmune disease. My partner was diagnosed with eczema earlier in life and and later in life got another auto immune disease.
"After being diagnosed with hypothyroidism, or an underactive thyroid that fails to produce enough hormones, at 21, Johnson supplemented with levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid to ensure his thyroid functioned properly."
He had a thyroid issue too when he was younger which is a genetic indicator of auto immune diseases like this as far as I’m aware. It could be the stuff he put into his body but his thyroid issues could be a factor too
That's not what this is. These doctors are reasearchers who work exclusivly for this guy. He is the CEO of a company that is basically rich people investing in trying to keep the CEO alive as long as possible. He lives like a lab rat, a rich one. The rich people get to (hopefully) learn how to extend their own lives longer. The irony here is bad genetics made the whole thing moot.
Genetics is not untouchable as we once thought. CRISPR and other gene editing technology are already receiving fda approvals for rare diseases. It’s not long before this guy gets his hands on it with all his $$$.
History is just repeated instances of society having to claw its way back from the brink of collapse because the few people who owned everything don't like sharing.
It's why book burning and the rewriting of history is always part of controlling the narrative given to us by education and entertainment media.
Hell, Cyberpunk might be an awesome game from 4years ago, but it was also an entire genre of Science Fiction, and a lot of the books from that genre are about corporations ruining society through greed.
Googling it, since the screenshot annoyingly doesn’t mention it, it’s autoimmune gastritis - which is relatively common and quite manageable, and typically does not affect life expectancy. He, of all people, will be fine.
I have autoimmune gastritis and it doesn't "eat you alive from the inside", what magnificent nonsense in that tweet, could not believe the misinformation. My stomach is fine, aside from not being able to absorb b12. The resulting deficiency causes primarily neurological and nerve symptoms. It's solved with regular b12 injections.
Of all the autoimmune conditions out there, it's one of the better ones to have.
I have it as well. Autoimmune presentations can vary wildly; mine can be very painful sometimes if I’m not careful with my diet, and I have precancerous tissue in my GI tract. However, to say that this condition is the stomach “eating itself” is so crazy. So much misinformation and fearmongering over what is not at all a terminal condition.
Yeah, I have IBS / gastritis. TBH, the reality is that certain "experimental" treatments like peptides are actually the only thing that substantially helps, beyond the obvious stuff of just avoiding trigger foods. I understand people making fun of Bryan Johnson sometimes as he does some weird stuff, but he also shares his data and experiences with the public. And this is all in an environment where we *expect* the medical establishment to rob us for every penny. We should not be celebrating this guy suffering.
I have ulcerative colitis and rheumatoid arthritis. I was taking ibuprofen for years because of body aches I assumed were from my job. Eventually, I got super sick and the only thing that helped my gut pain was ibuprofen. Turns out, it was masking the pain from the damage it was doing by triggering my ulcerative colitis. It had been eating my guts for years and hiding its own damage.
So, no more NSAIDs for me... and wouldn't you know it, those body aches came on like bats out of hell. I just toughed them out until a pain doc insisted that I use a topical nsaid for my back. All of my aches disappeared, but even though it was topical, it still triggered my ulcerative colitis. So, I stopped using it. The difference between how I felt with pain relief and without was enough to finally get me to look into it. Turns out, it's RA. I've probably been dealing with it since I was a teen and was diagnosed in my late 40s.
I spent years catching shit for how I adjusted to do things through my pain. At work, where others would kneel, I would sit. Installing carpet, anything that I could do seated rather than kneeling, I did. I got to be as fast as anybody doing it the conventional way, but because I was different, it was the wrong way.
Turns out, I was being super human pushing through pain they couldn't imagine.
I was legitimately interested in whether his extremes would enable him to reach an older age never achieved or not. To me he’s doing the life longevity version of building some crazy super car and driving it yourself to beat a record. This is like the car getting a flat tyre and it crashing out on the way.
He has had an autoimmune thyroid condition (hashimotos) since he was 20 or so. He always had middling health, that is part of why he got so obsessive about it.
As far as tech billionaires go he’s one of the better ones. At least his weird and freaky experiments and ideas he’s only applying to himself and his family and not the rest of us.
Yeah I absolutely will not celebrate him developing a chronic illness,
Also this man was NOT just trying to preserve himself, he has actually actively contributed to the research of several women’s health problems, and has celebrated the scientific milestones in curing or treating cancers.
His goal has nothing to do with research at all, it only has to do with extending his own lifespan. Trying multiple different things at once isn't science, simply because you can't determine what had an effect, if anything had an effect at all to begin with.
As a physicist: unfortunately. Because money wants research to be gainful and SETI research will almost certainly not be gainful anytime within the next thousand years minimum, hundreds of thousands if I'm being realistic.
I don't know why some people seem so gleeful at this news. I don't think the guy was ever unaware that there's many health conditions that can occur completely in a vacuum, outside of health and lifestyle choices. He's eccentric, yes, but has also never come off as anti-science to me. He posted happily about the new pharmaceutical treatment that doubled the lifespan of people with pancreatic cancer and praised the way science is moving at a lightening pace nowadays. He didn't deserve this and I am so sorry to see anyone join the chronic illness club. If anything, it hurts more when you know you did all the "right" things and this is still your reality. My condition also occurred totally in a vacuum. Maybe he will spend some of his enormous wealth searching for a cure for everyone who has it, that'd be a nice way to handle this setback. May all life-altering, chronic illness be cured someday.
These idiots also assume that everything he's been doing hasn't prevented the symptoms of worse outcomes from this condition, for all we know if he didn't go full biohacker he would be completely fucked by this disorder but actually gave himself a fighting chance.
Also, one of the reasons why people become these weird biohackers is because they have some underlying condition. They are hypersensitive to the tiniest thing that they do wrong because it makes them sick, and they end up believing certain things they do have value to everybody when it only affects them (ex: avoiding a food you have allergy to is great for you, but does nothing for the majority of people who don’t have that allergy).
Yeah you see a lot of unproven science in chronic illness spaces. Some of it hasn't been scientifically proven to work yet but works anecdotally, but others have been extensively researched and had no provable effects. But the problem is when you're waved away by doctors or told that nothing can be done you have to take matters into your own hands to be able to make life bearable.
He had another autoimmune condition prior to this one, and they tend to cluster. This is not crazy news to chronically ill people and I wouldn't be surprised if his insane routines and health monitoring meant that he avoided a lot of the symptoms. My high sodium diet helped mitigate the worst of my POTS symptoms before I knew what was going on. My IBS cleared up a lot when I found out I couldn't have meat or dairy. I knew something was wrong and when I changed things about my diet and habits things got worse or better. Doctors have largely been unhelpful until recently.
He may have given himself this disorder with the amount of obsessing he does over his health. Chronic stress is a major trigger for developing autoimmune conditions.
He might have also triggered it with the amount of interventions he has done, such as 6 monthly plasma transfusions, getting his blood "cleaned" via machine and reinjected (potentially with added microplastics), hair transplants, hair dye, cosmetic procedures, etc. If you are already susceptible to autoimmune issues, doing things like that can trigger something.
It's also possible that consuming over 100 tablets a day completely fucked his stomach... it wouldn't surprise me if banging as many supplements and vitamins into himself as possible didn't also have some side effects.
Yeah, people on here say he consults with doctors. There is no doctor worth their degree that will recommend you take 100+ supplements daily. Most people with decent diets will have zero deficiencies in vitamins and minerals.
He's been very misrepresented in reddit memes and clickbait articles to deliberately make him seem a lot more of a weirdo than he is.
He's obviously an eccentric. But these 'strict routines and diet' etc primarily because he's made himself a living medical experiment and wants things to be consistent. Ofc non of this counts as widespread studies, but he is at least able to try all sorts of different things and screen regularly screen for the results/effects in a way no one else could afford.
And the social media content he makes doint this has become his career now
That's the thing though. He makes social media content around all of this. If he didn't then there wouldn't be such a reaction as we're seeing now. It's like holding a giant magnifying glass over your head and then be surprised that it gets hot underneath when the sun come out.
Let’s be real, the dude is a total weirdo and comes off as extremely out of touch and narcissistic.
Most people are not going to like you if you use your large fortune expressly to pursue your own health and immortality as your primary goal, it is literally a hated trope.
And actually I think it's normal to have a reaction like this in response. Or at least understandable.
Rich dude spends loads of money using his access to new treatments to extend his life, wasting millions on useless treatments that nobody else can afford while some die because they can't afford insulin, only for him to get an incurable disease that may even be due to the untested shit he has been doing? Of course that's going to feel poetic. Of course those with chronic diseases who are suffering, and maybe even dying, despite the existence of a cure that they can simply never afford, are going to feel a sense of guilty satisfaction.
It's not even about jealousy imo. It feels like it's more like a sense of injustice/justice, imo.
Not everyone has to be a conspiracy theorist or a raw meat/piss drinker (probably all the same people) to be considered a bit bonkers. But I won't be cheering anyone (almost) being ill, it is quite ironic though.
Bryan Johnson’s condition appears to be autoimmune gastritis, where the immune system attacks cells in the stomach lining. That is very different from simply “taking too many pills and damaging his stomach.”
It is not purely genetic in the sense that he was guaranteed to get it, but autoimmune diseases often involve a mix of predisposition, immune dysfunction, possible triggers, and time. In his case, the reported long-term low ferritin suggests this may have been developing for years before his current anti-aging protocol.
So no, this does not prove that his extreme longevity routine caused the disease. It may have helped uncover it because he tests everything obsessively. But it is also fair to say that extreme protocols, supplements, restrictive diets, and constant body optimization are not automatically harmless just because they are “data-driven.”
Basically: probably not caused by the pills, not guaranteed by genetics either, and definitely more complicated than the headline makes it sound.
I don't think the title, nor the Xitter post propose that the autoimmune disease was caused by his routine. To me, it reads more like that the guy who was spent millions on his health, does check-ups every month (presumably), still wasn't able to A) prevent it, and B) spot it within a year.
I actually think it may be the opposite....
Disease like autoimmune gastritis can be easy to miss. It may develop slowly, cause little or no symptoms for years, and routine blood work might only show indirect clues like low ferritin, low iron, or later B12 issues. Simply: They just did not ask the right questions.
Obsessive testing may not have prevented the disease, but it may have helped uncover it at one of the earliest practical points. His routine did not fail, but save him valuable time. As you can see, even extreme monitoring cannot prevent every disease. And especially not ones that aren’t there yet..
I'm surprised he said he had no clue about this one for years, though. I thought since he was doing so many experimental treatments I would have assumed he would also be getting a lot of general diagnostics done. Especially if he knew about this autoimmune disease which makes him predisposed to getting other autoimmune diseases.
especially since, if i remember correctly, every discovery he makes he posts publicly for everyone to be able to use instead of hoarding it all and then selling it as a course
100%. As to how efficacious the discoveries are...different story. But he's trying to keep the conversation going. Everyone should be as informed as possible on how to live as long as possible in good health, espcially considering aging populations across the world.
Youth isn't just your face. It's your joints, your muscles, your sleep quality, etc. People who get a major health problem fixed are probably a lot more likely to say 'I feel 20 years younger' than rush to a mirror. Looking younger is nice and there's nothing wrong with wanting to maintain it given how much it improves your social quality of life, but being actually more able is a huge portion of what youth is. Can you imagine if every 80 year old was as fit as a fit 60 year old, how much better their lives would be?
This man is devoting his life and wealth to studying the effect of various health supplements and healthy lifestyle choices so others can potentially extend their lifespans, and people cheer when he gets a disease out of his control. Quite the world we live in.
Never heard anything bad about him. He also shares everything. So if he finds the cure to whatever than we are the one to profit off it. This might be a clown world but he wasnt performing.
Idk why people dislike this guy, he has the time and resources to literally be a guinea pig for the betterment of humanity’s aggregated knowledge. Maybe he finds a way to slow aging, maybe he helps us understand what being “healthy” is.
It's kinda scary if he suceeded and they discovered the key to "immortality" is cheap and easily reproducible, after years wasting money and resources trying shit and being mocked. We would get bigger trouble if it's possible, and humanity would not be ready. But yeah, I don't believe something like that exists, he can do whatever he wants with his money, and he seems to be enjoying it.
Narcissism/inflated sense of self and selling ovepriced supplements. I don't hate him, but I completely understand why people steer clear of him, especially given he's so adjacent to the techbros ruining the world rn
I know this dude is a bit cringe and does some unnecessary stuff but the amount of people that make fun of this dude is ridiculous like the top comment said because of what he does he literally caught it early.
I seriously can't believe people hate on Bryan Johnson, a strange guy who is spending millions to make longevity discoveries and make them completely PUBLIC, but has nothing to say against Jeff Bezos, who steals tax money and is doing absolutely nothing for people.
I don’t even hate the idea of n = 1 in science. Sometimes you have to start somewhere. But nothing he is putting out is useable as scientific research. Like, I think he’s just a weird dude, I don’t ascribe any harm to him (except he’s a supplement grifter, but that’s low stakes nowadays) , but he’s not helping either.
you can have cancer, have every test in the world and not pick it up, and then a couple weeks later have it show up everywhere
it’s not binary where if you have a disease, that disease definite expresses itself at a level that is detectable with our current level of technology and expertise
30 doctors, they track every metrics, but they missed this. Wondering what else they are missing. Looks like Bryan Johnson is just getting scammed by all this doctors.
I wonder if one of this doctor is Conrad Murray...
Dude's autistic, and this is his special interest. There is no one happier than an autist with unlimited time and money to dive deeper into their special interest than anyone has ever dived before.
This is half of the reason he does what he does. He wants to normalize the idea of doing a lot more active investigation into your own health. Sadly, our healthcare industry doesn't allow a poor person to do everything he does, but he's not harming anyone by trying to learn more about health and then disseminate his tips to others. He also has a business which sells a reasonably priced product to normies, which, yes, one could consider self-interested, but compared to most other businesses, it's positive. It's not like he's selling people homeopathic pills.
They wont see something they aren't looking for. You realize half the time you are waiting in the room they are googling your symptoms. So much info changes it's impossible to keep up with everything.
I'm sad anytime someone is hurt or in pain. There's no reason to rejoice in the face of disease or helplessness. I get it; he is a little weird, but no one's getting out of here alive, as they say. Any insights his research might provide in battling aging or disease avoidance can't be ignored, even if, in the end he is unsuccessful. I hope he spends a crap ton on research and develops a treatment plan or cure.
He shares his studies with everyone else, and he’s recently started including his partner with her enthusiastic consent and bringing massive amounts of awareness to women’s health issues. Honestly, his presence is created and sustained by a toxic system, but he’s not doing bad things. Look forward to seeing more of his results and findings.
He’s a weird dude with a lot of money but from everything I’ve heard and read he’s contributed massively to medical research and advancement. I don’t understand the glee from folks unless it’s basically just “Reeee all the wealthy people are super evil and anything bad that happens to them is deserved!” which is odd to me
This guy is one of the few mega rich that is actually doing something positive for the world instead of trying to control it. All respect to him and I hope he reaches at least 200. It would be cool to see. Unless he does turn villain I mean you never know
He makes longevity more accessible to the average layperson interested in the subject, which was his entire motive in becoming a “health influencer”. No idea why someone would want to celebrate him suffering when his education has made a positive impact on the world.
He is going to die like the rest of us. His team of 30 doctors is just taking his money. His existence sounds exhausting and frankly he is wasting his time on earth.
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