Featured Image Credit: Bryan Johnson
Topics: Health, Bryan Johnson
Jess Hardiman
A man who spends $2 million a year in a bid to get the body of a teenager has shared the strict diet he follows to help reverse his biological age.
Bryan Johnson, 46, goes to some fairly extreme lengths to turn back the clock, having embarked on an intensive and expensive experimental medical program.
The tech entrepreneur – who sold his payment processing tech business, Braintree Venmo, to PayPal for $800 million (then £492 million) a decade ago – claims he has the lungs of an 18-year-old and the heart of a 37-year-old.
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But, perhaps unsurprisingly, it doesn’t come easily.
Overseen by a team of 30 doctors, the billionaire puts himself through an extreme daily regime, including the equivalent of 20,000 sit-ups in half an hour as part of his workout routine, as well as a special machine to help him exercise to the max.
And then there’s the diet, which turns out to be equally punishing.
In a new interview with Time, Johnson said he eats a meal of steamed vegetables and lentils that are blended until they’re mush.
He doesn’t call the meals ‘breakfast’, ‘lunch’ or ‘dinner’, but ‘first meal’, ‘second meal’ and so on.
For a first meal, he has something like a ‘nutty pudding’, which is made from macadamia-nut milk, ground macadamia and walnuts, chia seed, flaxseed, Brazil nuts, sunflower lecithin, ceylon cinnamon and pomegranate juice.
“It’s the color of a pencil eraser and tastes a little dusty, but it’s not too different from a vegan yogurt, if you like that sort of thing,” journalist Charlotte Alter – who was lucky enough to have a taste – said.
In a separate interview with Insider, Johnson said he also doesn’t even gorge on junk when it’s a ‘cheat day’.
"I no longer have arousal from eating junk food,” he explained.
“People think that a cheat day for me, like the reward would be eating pizza and donuts. It makes me nauseous to even think about.”
Speaking of his critics against his diet, Johnson added: "If you could actually measure the biochemical reactions between the two of us.
"I would argue I experience more exquisite joy from my food consumption than they do."
However, one expert told Insider that they believed Johnson’s approach had unclear health benefits.
"If you expect to live significantly longer than, say, 115 — which is more or less the maximum lifespan of our species — then there is currently zero evidence this can be accomplished," Jan Vijg, a genetics professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told the outlet earlier this year.