Remember Bryan Johnson? Here’s a reminder of his silly obsession.
Johnson famously claims to spend millions on his health each year, which goes towards keeping a personal army of doctors on hand who constantly monitor his biomarkers, and help carry out more unorthodox health interventions like swapping his blood out with his younger son’s and monitoring his nighttime boners (though he’s seemed to pare things back as of late).
Unfortunately, poor little Bryan is sick.
Bryan Johnson, in his quest for eternal youth, has been dealt a mortal blow.
Last week, the longevity-obsessed tech investor revealed that he had been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease in which his “stomach is eating itself.”
He’s got autoimmune gastritis. It’s not a mortal illness, but it is a serious and uncomfortable chronic disease, nothing to be made light of. Pity him, but don’t plan the funeral just yet.
Besides, he’s going to turn this into a profit-making drama.
But, true to his mission, Johnson believes he can biohack his way out of this gut-punch, too.
“I’m going to try and solve it,” he wrote on X. “Will share all.”
The man is rich, he already spends millions of dollars on his health every year, and gastritis is a manageable illness. I’m pretty sure he’s going to live through this, it’s just become a significantly more uncomfortable process.
But someday, he will die.
He’s swallowed dozens and dozens of pills for years and now his stomach is acting up. Hmmmm???
Any chance frequent blood transfusions (or something else idiotic that he’s doing) confused his immune system? (Don’t know of that’s actually a thing) Because that would be karma.
To praphrae Bob Dylan from Matsers of War :
“All the money you made can never
buy back your soulextend your life.”@ ^Of curse the extra millions do buy access to far better healthcare than most USoAites could ever dream of getting and more medicines, treatments, etc.. which is obscene as viewed by most of the rest of the world and unjust as fuck. Still. Cannot buy immortality.
Long life is luck of the draw even for the rich. Jim Pattison is one of the richest men in Canada. His personal fortune is probably close to 10 billion dollars at this point. He’ll turn 98 October 1. I’m sure being rich has allowed him to have the best health care possible, but I’ve heard no stories he’s eating goat testicles or sleeps in a glass tube. He’s also donated large amounts of money to charity, including 50 million bucks in 2017 to the then under construction children’s hospital at the University of Saskatchewan here in Saskatoon. (He was born here.) It’s pretty hard to live forever if you don’t get a chance to leave childhood.
And Pattison can genuinely claim to have come from nothing, as his father lost everything during the Great Depression, and Pattison had jobs as a teenager like fruit picking, selling donuts, and working as a hotel page boy. He also was pretty ruthless once he started running the car dealership that began to make him rich, firing the poorest performing salesman each month.
Eat healthy, live longer?
Didn’t work out for Euell Gibbons, a name that should ring some bells for those who are sufficiently old.
@1. larpar : Side effects?
Yeah, would be karma if karma were actually real. Poetic justice for sure.
Only a few weeks ago, I some fool on a tech forum mentioned this guy as a reason why Musx’s plan of moving to Mars is absolutely realistic, as he has shown that the tech bro’s billions will buy them immortality – we’ll see.
Wonder how his bio hacking will work out.
Do you think he will donate some of his millions to actual useful research of autoimmune diseases? /s
@6. Snarki, child of Loki : Before my time so I wiki-ed him :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euell_Gibbons
Huh. I mean he died relatively young but not sure quite what the poetic justice element or whatever was there?
Of course I know Euell Gibbons.
mordred@8 that guy doesn’t understand just how harsh conditions on Mars would be, and that stopping aging doesn’t mean you’ll stop all disease and injury, including fatal ones. Or that the people who will probably be able to afford antiaging treatments of that sort are the rich who will never go to Mars. Too much actual work involved living on Mars.
StevoR
Did Snarki, child of Loki imply anything about poetic justice? The point, I believe, is that this individual ate healthily but still died at a relatively young age.
There was another health advocate, whose name I can’t recall at the moment, who died while being interviewed on Dick Cavette’s show. The episode never aired.
@9 StevoR — Urban legend at the time was that he died of stomach cancer presumably from all the forest-floor detritus he was supposedly eating. I remember as a wee tyke people laughing about it, which I never understood. They were obviously wrong.
These billionaries have the resources to – if they wanted to – sequence the whole genomes of long-lived organisms and hire huge teams identifying the genes and gene products that allow many species – including mammals like bowhead whales – to live much longer than humans.
Instead they choose snake oil.
.
I am reminded of Steve Jobs who ignored modern medicine when he got a perfectly curable form of cancer.
Johnson attributes bad life choices earlier in his life. Detractors might attribute his over the top regimen. Instead this autoimmune disorder may have been genetically predisposed if not inevitable.
Could be the obsessive testing was what brought the condition to light. Otherwise he would have lived on obliviously.
He’s got his quirks, but is far from the worst nutrition oriented guru out there. I doubt he’d promote the carnivore BS. Anyway this guy explores some of his dietary views without dissing him too hard on the wacky stuff, like logging boners:
I just knew PZ was gonna bring this up when I read about it yesterday.
Walter Solomon @ # 12: … another health advocate, whose name I can’t recall at the moment, who died while being interviewed on Dick Cavette’s show.
That would be J. I. Rodale (1898-1971), publisher of (among other titles) Prevention and Organic Gardening magazines. A colorful character who promoted both genuinely healthful living and blatant quackery, his relevance to the present thread includes the quotation –
Live right, eat right, exercise right, die anyway.
@dennyk – Yes, lots of cruel urban legends/jokes about Euell Gibbons, when his diet was fine (and fun). Similar swath of cruel nonsense about runner Jim Fixx, who had a congenital heart defect and whose exercising actually prolonged his life.
Pierce R. Butler,
Yes, that’s who I was thinking about. Thank you.
Last month I did a very rough napkin (iPhone notes and calculator) tabulation of my daily calories and pinpointed a few key places to cut calories (eg- no more chips and smaller portions of stuff like brown rice for lunch). Not near as obsessive as Bryan Johnson. I was maybe 200 calories over before the changes and around 200-300 calories under (deficit) with changes, but that’s a rough estimate. I’m not getting blood transfusions or taking creepy overnight measurements. I take some supplements.
I eat ham for dinner so I’m definitely not living forever. And I eat a McDonalds double quarterpounder protein/heart bomb occasionally. So much for calorie deficits. I think one of the Bryan Johnson videos I watched was him deconstructing a fast food meal and I thought he got just a little carried away with the breakdown. Pretty sure it was this one:
I mean I’m not eating fries or drinking soda. The burgers aren’t great from a nutritional or quality standpoint, but I will eat one once in a while.
I absolutely went apoplectic when I surveyed the menu of a popular donut chain and looked at the added sugar in their coffee drinks. OMG. Give me a McDonald’s protein bomb mega burger any day over that! Still not great.
Being too focused on good nutrition verges into orthorexia.
The video Hemidactylus posted is pretty good and I recommend watching more from the same guy. Basically, Bryan Johnson does a lot of things right and in fact as it is with most nutrition related stuff, you can get 99% of the benefits from following generic, boring, and the conventionally known facts such as eating a balanced diet high in fruits and vegetables, avoiding most ulta processed food, maintaining low body fat, and so on and so forth. You don’t need to take a million dollars worth of supplements.
He’s the guy being dissed in the OP!
(Also, Maccas is different in different parts of the world, franchise or not)
John Morales @22
Pretty sure lotharloo is talking about the Nutrition Made Simple video and that guy is Gil Carvalho, who I nickname Karate kid for obvious reasons. He’s got pretty good science based nutrition related videos in general.
The other video I posted was Bryan Johnson tediously going through a bunch of items from the McDonald’s menu and scrutinizing their nutritional content.
As an aside I had recently watched a video talking about how there were things about Supersize Me that were very misleading. The guy later fessed to drinking at the time, which could play hell with your liver enzymes.
Other “documentaries” showed how one could lose weight on a McDonalds diet, which may be true with calorie restriction, but may not be a great idea. I imagine such an approach would make Bryan Johnson apoplectic.
Today I started watching the Fat: a Documentary propaganda (holy fuck WTF even is that?). Google is your friend. Some of these “experts” are MAHA at least and maybe pandemic deniers. I do agree fat was demonized and there are healthy ways to consume it. Olive oil. A “documentary” was set up to lead me toward keto if not carnivore carb and fiber plant hating. Not fucking having that shit motherfuckers!
One influencer I kinda side eye because he fucking has his own products behind him says he was afraid of fruit early in his career arc and goes on to address this rampant carb hate.
Bring it!
Dude has arms hence expertise (sarcasm!).