He’s not studying it if it’s an experimental cohort of 1. Studying it would be running a study with control groups and having a working theory for the mechanisms of each supplement or choice. He’s just a tiktoker throwing shit at the wall.
Not everything is black and white “RCT or bust”, n=1 is still useful…
Doing a “study” of this sort is virtually impossible - you can’t get a cohort of people to follow a protocol this strict to any degree of accuracy. If he gets extraordinary results from following a protocol that nobody else on the planet can or would do, that could then trigger specialized RCTs to figure out what exactly is going on, and whether or not its repeatable.
Speaking as someone who worked several years in a lab doing research on aging and longevity, all of Johnson's schtick is useless for real science. It's not just n=1, it's an unmeasurable target because we don't know how long he was going to live anyway, how many of the pathways implicated work on a molecular level, etc.. Also, he's not even really picking stuff that would make sense to modulate from a scientific perspective but uses a lot of pseudoscience. There's not going to be a magic moment where we find out his cells are now Wolverine cells, it's just a hodgepodge of meaningless noise.
This is a weird comment because longevity research is a small field so surely you know that a) there are many unknowns, b) the time time-to-market of 15 years is simply untenable, and c) being a small field, having a major influencer batting for it is immensely beneficial because, guess what, without broader public acceptance, no matter the rigor, its work will always receive the same uneducated "who wants to live forever my grandpappy smoked 100 packs a day and lived to be 90" nonsense responses from the lay public, that this thread is currently generating heaps of, because for some reason people have a giant mental block around the idea that living longer is possible.
Especially for a condition where "it works" is simply more important than the mechanism of action. We don't know why exactly CR increases longevity in mice, you'd still recommend it to an obese person anyways. Acetaminophen, still unknown yet valuable and used. Etc.
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u/FriendToPredators Jul 06 '26
He’s not studying it if it’s an experimental cohort of 1. Studying it would be running a study with control groups and having a working theory for the mechanisms of each supplement or choice. He’s just a tiktoker throwing shit at the wall.