American invests US$ 2 million a year to rejuvenate – 02/25/2023 – Equilíbrio

Postponing death and avoiding aging is one of humanity’s great challenges. But what is the price of rejuvenation? For entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, $2 million a year. This is his investment in Blueprint, a project that seeks to reverse his biological age.

The American defines himself as a “professional rejuvenation athlete” and claims to have reduced his biological age by 5.1 years, in addition to a 28% drop in his aging pace since the beginning of the project, about two years ago.

Johnson was the creator of Braintree Venmo, a payments company sold to Paypal in 2013 for $800 million. After receiving a diagnosis of depression, he decided to work on this project whose objective is to create a system that makes the body take care of itself in the best possible way – thus, rejuvenation would only be a consequence.

Biological age can be measured through a set of biomarkers, which are molecules that accumulate within a cell or by the functional capacity of an organ, for example. As the years advance, the markers undergo changes and, thus, it becomes possible to know the age of an individual.

Today, biological age is calculated through epigenetic tests, an area of ​​science that studies reversible alterations in the genetic material of human beings. Johnson claims that, through these tests, it was possible to verify that his epigenetic age was “reversed”.

Although these markers correlate well with chronological age, researchers argue that their reversal does not necessarily mean better body functioning, rejuvenation or a lower likelihood of developing disease.

“Today the best way for you to understand your biological clock is precisely the epigenetic alteration over time”, says the doctor and master in genetic counseling and human genomics and co-founder of Genera, Ricardo di Lazzaro Filho. “Now, whether reversing the epigenetic biological clock amounts to rejuvenation is still not so clear.”

Johnson’s reduction in biological age was calculated by averaging the results of the Horvath, Peno, Hannum and Grim epigenetic clocks. However, the only one that has a relevant clinical correlation with the risk of death and disease is Feno, also known as PCPhenoAge. According to the exam, the difference between the entrepreneur’s chronological age and biological age is about 11 months.

In addition to a routine that includes food, physical activity and supplementation, the Blueprint project also involves skin care and experimental approaches. Every day Johnson measures markers like weight and hours of sleep. Monthly, he does dozens of exams to assess the impact of the protocol on his body.

Experts warn that aging is not a disease and should not be treated as such. They emphasize, however, that research dealing with losses associated with this process, such as cognitive decline, is valid and should be encouraged.

You commented in a recent interview that the Blueprint project was born out of a period of depression, correct? The project was born out of an attempt to solve my own problems. Problems that lead to self-destructive behavior, which includes eating too much of the wrong kind of food, you know? I don’t drink or smoke, but many people have these and other self-destructive habits.

I felt terrible. I slept badly, my mind was clouded. I wanted to build a system that would solve this. I learned to fly a plane, I’m a pilot. One day I was flying and I turned on the autopilot. I was amazed that the autopilot steered better than I did the manual control. At that point I asked myself if I could build a system that controlled my health and well-being better than I could myself.

The idea of ​​the system is to take the emotional aspect out of decision making and just rely on the data, right? Can you comment further on this? Yes. What we do is analyze all my organs. This is a way to investigate each organ, the heart, the lungs, the pancreas, the liver. So we know what each organ needs to reach its ideal state [de funcionamento].

This is different from how we do things nowadays, which is going to the supermarket or the grocery store, looking at things and choosing without knowing whether or not it is the best thing for our body. We have a measurement system, scientific evidence, and then a protocol.

One of the most widespread information about your project is that you managed to reduce your biological age by a few years. How is this measured? You can think of it this way, a 10-year-old’s heart looks different and works differently than an 80-year-old’s heart. The same goes for someone in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. The same thing happens with the skin, that of a 10 year old person is different from that of an older person.

We already have enough information for you to be able to create a profile for each organ and for each age and know, just by looking at the appearance and functionality of that organ, the age of the person. The goal is for my body to look and function younger than my chronological age.

You’ve already had the project in progress for two years, correct? What was the original idea and what has the project become? Well, I think the most interesting thing is that we started the project with a question. Where are we in the quest for the fountain of youth? The idea of ​​the fountain of youth is as old as mankind. We are already used to this story of a group of people in a boat in the middle of the forest going to a temple to find an elixir. We wanted to ask that question.

We have seen in these first years that we have come a long way. We managed to reduce my aging speed by 28%. We reversed my epigenetic age by 5.1 years. And we’re just doing the basics. We got good results on over 50 biomarkers, lowered my body temperature by three degrees.

The next step will be to reverse my age. I would say we are just getting started.

What was your biggest surprise since the beginning of the project? That works!

To be more specific, we managed to build a system capable of taking care of me better than I am capable of.

According to the website, the central part of the project is to take emotions out of decision-making and leave the choices in the hands of the data. What is the role of emotions in your everyday life today? Many people think, when they hear about the Blueprint project, that I’m a miserable person. That I shouldn’t feel any pleasure. They think of all the reasons why I’m terrible. And then they think that all they wanted was for me to understand their pleasure in eating a pizza, a donut or a drink.

But I will say this: I have never been happier. My emotions have never been more positive. I have never felt more pleasure in life. I feel better than at any other time in my life.

The project available on your website looks super ambitious and I imagine it wasn’t so easy to incorporate it into your routine. How hard was it? Once you say yes to the system, it becomes easy. Before, the hardest thing was feeling trapped with myself. I had to navigate between decisions 20 times a day.

Eat this or that thing? If I survived the choice, then I’d have to move on to the next one. Now I don’t have to make so many difficult decisions anymore. So it’s much easier and better.

What do you believe is the biggest enemy of rejuvenation in Western lifestyles today? I spent millions of dollars building the Blueprint, but other people don’t have to do the same thing because I’ve made it freely available to everyone.

Implementing the system is inexpensive and only includes four things. Number one is to prioritize sleep. This should be the number one priority in your life. If sleep is good, life is good. Number two is to stop the self-destructive behaviors. Stop doing those things that accelerate disease, aging, and pain. The third is to eat more vegetables, nuts, berries and seeds. The fourth is to exercise. Just the basic.

If people do these four things, they will achieve the most benefits.

So most people engage in self-destructive pleasure-seeking behaviors. On the other hand, you commented that you take great pleasure in developing the Blueprint project. For you, what is the importance of pleasure in rejuvenation? Again, I feel more pleasure today than I did before. My previous lifestyle left me numb to life’s pleasures.

This project seeks to set an example of what the future of humanity will be. We need to be more serious about our evolution. We used to think that evolution happens every 10,000 or 100,000 years. Today we have arrived at a time when evolution takes place in the span of a lifetime.

Do you think we’ll ever have a rejuvenation pill? Yes. The time is now. We are showing that there are possibilities.

X-RAY

Bryan Johnson, 45

He is the founder of Braintree Venmo, a digital payments company sold to Paypal in 2013 for $800 million. Since then, he has invested in technology and healthcare projects with the OS Fund, a technology company funder, and with Kernel, which creates neuroimaging equipment.