Biohacker Aiming to Live Forever Gets an Autoimmune Disease
A cautionary tale for anyone who dreams of immortality
Bryan Johnson, an entrepreneur and social media influencer, spends some $2 million dollars annually trying to biohack his way to immortality. He takes dozens of daily supplements and employs multiple questionable technologies, making himself a giant biochemical experiment of one. He thinks it’s possible to live forever.
Interestingly, last week Johnson announced he has autoimmune gastritis (AIG), an incurable though manageable disease.
In a post on X, Johnson blamed his AIG onset on childhood eating habits and unhealthy lifestyle prior to the biohacking experiments:
“As a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, and gobbled down fast food. I had a few healthy years in my early 20s but then … I let my health slip and gained 40 lbs. Within a few years I’d fallen into a deep, chronic depression. Somewhere in that timeline, my body began developing an autoimmune process affecting my thyroid and then my stomach lining.”
His assessment surely offers a cautionary tale on how to set yourself up for a short and unhealthy life. (I’m not judging, btw. I too consumed copious amounts of sugary cereals and sodas when I was young, and only came around to healthier eating later in life.)
To be fair, logic might suggest Johnson’s AIG could be a direct result of his previous bad habits, as he suggests. But we can’t know that for sure.
At least one expert figures the biohacking is to blame.
It’s just as likely the AIG resulted from Johnson’s experimental health interventions based on quasi-science, according to Rupert Leong, a gastroenterologist specializing in inflammatory bowel diseases, via an article in Financial Review.
We will never know which set of factors led to Johnson’s AIG. You can’t glean conclusions from an experiment with a sample size of one.
What we can know for certain is that Johnson, like all of us, will die. I don’t wish that on him, of course, nor do I wish him any ill will whatsoever.
But here’s a cold, hard fact:
There is no such thing as anti-aging medicine, and no longevity influencers or optimistic anti-aging scientists are on any sort of cusp of developing one.
Mountains of scientific evidence show that healthy aging does not come from injections or pill-popping beyond what a skilled doctor might prescribe for a specific medical condition.
“While pharmacological interventions will no doubt become more prominent in the anti-aging landscape in the coming years, I think it would be a mistake to forget about things like exercise, proper nutrition, clean air and water, and healthy social relationships,” Calen Ryan, PhD, a research scientist at Columbia Mailman School’s Butler Aging Center, once told me. “These more fundamental behavioral and environmental factors no doubt form the bedrock for living long, fulfilling, and healthy lives.”
We all age, chronologically and at the cellular level. At the cell level — within the brain, heart and other organs, muscles and joints and so on — it’s just a question of how swiftly or slowly.
Genetics plays a role in biological aging, but environment and lifestyle choices are at least as much a factor, likely more, much research has shown. Even cancer, which many think of as a disease we have no control over, is now thought to be blamed nearly 50% — and likely more — on things we do to ourselves and broader effects of technology and society on the air, water and food we take in.
The consensus of reputable science:
Life expectancy (population-level averages) can increase through improved lifestyles and better healthcare.
But individual lifespans (how long any one person can live) have not risen in decades and almost surely won’t rise more than a handful of years in the next few decades.
As I wrote a couple years back, even after billions of dollars has been spent on so-called anti-aging research in recent decades:
Despite all the hullabaloo around anti-aging technologies and age-reversing medicines, nobody has set a new record for longevity since Jeanne Calment of France died at age 122 in 1997.
“It has become progressively more difficult to increase life expectancy,” scientists concluded in an analysis in the journal Nature Aging. “Humanity’s battle for a long life has largely been accomplished.”
There is, of course, much you can do to up your individual odds of a longer and healthier life: good diet, physical activity, quality sleep and other lifestyle medicine approaches summarized in my 7 Pillars of Healthy and Happy Aging.
Smart choices can help you live longer and healthier, but listen to your doctor and the well-vetted science, not the anti-aging influencers.