Bryan Johnson & Blueprint, a European view

Bryan Johnson is a US tech entrepreneur who made his fortune with the payment company Braintree. Since 2021 he has run a strict longevity project called Blueprint, which does not come cheap. In 2023 alone he reportedly spent about $2 million on medical treatments.^[11] He built it with a team of doctors and researchers, more than 30 people by Fortune's count in 2023.^[16] His stated goal is to measurably slow his biological aging, a plan he shrinks to two words: "Don't Die".^[11] The slogan now also names a movement, which he describes as a religion.^[11]

What sets him apart from other wealthy self-experimenters is that he publishes almost everything, from his meals and supplement list to his blood results and dashboards.^[9] That openness has earned him millions of social-media followers.^[11] and equally sharp pushback from scientists. Reactions range from an interesting, transparent self-experiment to a PR project with thin evidence. Part of that suspicion comes from the business side, because his company Blueprint sells the matching supplements and powders, down to red-light caps against hair loss^[11] So keep his sales in mind whenever he recommends a product.

Johnson's own health became news in mid-2026, when he made public that he has autoimmune gastritis.^[11] In this disease the immune system destroys the acid-making cells of the stomach, so the body absorbs iron and vitamin B12 poorly.^[11] His first warning sign was his ferritin, the blood value for iron stores, which kept coming back low.^[11] His team is now looking at experimental treatments such as CAR-T therapy, a form of gene therapy that has not been well studied in this disease.^[11] Nothing in the reporting ties the disease to his protocol, although a single case cannot rule that out either.

Bryan Johnson's Blueprint today is much shorter than the 100-plus pills a day that belonged to its 2022 and 2023 versions. His protocol page describes the current routine: a mostly plant-based diet eaten by noon, about 8.5 hours in bed and 60 to 90 minutes of training a day.^[9] On top come about five supplement capsules plus powders, nine prescription drugs, regular testing and a few experiments.^[9] The timetable below shows how those pieces fit into one day.

Source: Blueprint protocol page, accessed October 2026.^[9]

Diet

Johnson eats about 2,250 kcal a day, mostly from plants and with no alcohol and no added sugar.^[9] That works out to about 130 g protein, 206 g carbohydrates and 101 g fat, and he describes the total as 10% below the recommended intake.^[9] Since he also trains 60 to 90 minutes a day, his real deficit is likely larger than that.

The timing is the strict part. Everything he eats fits between the pre-workout drink at 5:25 AM and the last meal at noon, which leaves dinner as a purely theoretical idea.^[9] Earlier versions ended the eating day at 11 AM and were described as vegan except for collagen peptides.^[38] Those earlier menus also produced the two signature meals that made Blueprint famous, Super Veggie and Nutty Pudding.^[38] Super Veggie still comes at 11 AM, while the breakfast slot now goes to the proprietary Longevity Protein with Blueberry Nut Mix.^[9]

Sleep and training

Sleep follows the same fixed clock: Johnson is in bed by 8:30 PM and up around 5 AM, which makes about 8.5 hours in bed.^[9] He keeps the bedroom quiet, dark and at about 18 to 21 °C.^[9] Training takes 60 to 90 minutes every day and mixes strength, cardio, HIIT (short all-out bursts with rest in between), mobility and balance work.^[9] Dry sauna and red light follow the workout.^[9] Of everything in Blueprint, these two habits, sleep and training, have the strongest research behind them.

Supplements

The supplements are fewer than their reputation. With breakfast Johnson takes about five capsules: two Blueprint Essentials, one Advanced Antioxidants, one Ashwagandha & Rhodiola and one EPA/DHA omega-3 capsule.^[9] Several powders come on top, namely Longevity Mix, Longevity Protein, Metabolic Protein and collagen.^[9] Longevity Mix is a daily drink with 2.5 g creatine plus calcium alpha-ketoglutarate (Ca-AKG), taurine, glycine and other ingredients.^[12]

The capsules hide most of the rest. The two Essentials capsules add vitamin D3 (2,000 IU), nicotinamide riboside, B vitamins and minerals.^[28] The Advanced Antioxidants capsule adds carotenoids plus vitamins K1 and K2.^[27] That vitamin K matters for anyone on blood thinners, as the safety notes in the European section explain.

Prescription drugs

His prescription list has nine drugs.^[9]:

• metformin (a diabetes drug, cycled 6 weeks on, 6 weeks off)
• tadalafil (the active ingredient in Cialis)
• Jardiance (empagliflozin, a diabetes drug)
• acarbose (a drug that slows carbohydrate absorption)
• candesartan (a blood pressure drug)
• Repatha (an LDL-cholesterol-lowering injection, every two weeks)
• Armour Thyroid and levothyroxine (thyroid hormones, for hypothyroidism diagnosed at 21)
• minoxidil as a tablet (a hair-loss drug)

The protocol page lists these drugs under the noon meal but gives no dosing times^[9] So the timing of each one follows its label and the prescribing doctor. In the form he takes them, all nine are prescription-only in Germany too.^[39] Minoxidil hair lotion of up to 5% is the exception and is sold without a prescription, but the tablet he takes is not.^[39] Several of the drugs are used off-label, meaning outside their approved use.^[9] Johnson takes the diabetes drugs and tadalafil without having diabetes or erectile dysfunction, as a prevention experiment.^[9] That makes the list a record of one man's experiment, not a template.

Two examples show why. Empagliflozin (Jardiance) can cause ketoacidosis, a dangerous build-up of acid in the blood, even with near-normal blood sugar and in people without diabetes.^[29] The risk rises with restricted food intake or dehydration,^[29] and a long daily fast plus sauna adds up to exactly that. Tadalafil must never be combined with nitrates, and on top of blood-pressure drugs such as candesartan it lowers blood pressure further.^[30] None of these belongs in a routine without a doctor who knows your values.

Rapamycin is no longer on the list. Johnson took it off-label for nearly five years and stopped on 28 September 2024.^[10] As reasons he cited intermittent skin and soft-tissue infections, abnormal blood lipids, raised blood sugar and a higher resting heart rate.^[10]

Testing and experiments

To see what all of this does, Johnson measures constantly: blood draws every three to six months, an annual full-body MRI and a continuous glucose monitor.^[9] He publishes the resulting dashboards online.

The experiments are what made the headlines, from gene therapy and stem cell treatments.^[9] to six young-plasma exchanges in 2023^[16] One of them used plasma from his teenage son.^[16] He measured no benefit from the plasma and stopped.^[16]

Super Veggie and Nutty Pudding are Blueprint's two signature dishes, and they are the easiest part of the protocol to try at home. Bryan Johnson has documented both on his openly published protocol pages.^{[9, 38]} They are simple to reproduce, but their place in Blueprint does not establish any anti-aging benefit, because they are one man's eating routine.

Super Veggie is a warm vegetable dish built on broccoli, cauliflower, black lentils and shiitake or maitake mushrooms.^[9] Garlic, ginger, hemp seeds, extra-virgin olive oil, lime, cumin and apple cider vinegar complete it.^[9] It also takes 1 to 4 Tbsp of fermented food such as sauerkraut or kimchi.^[9] Preparation is unremarkable: steam the vegetables, cook the lentils, then season with oil, acid and spice. In Johnson's day it comes at 11 AM, an hour before his last meal.^[9]

Nutty Pudding is the sweet counterpart, made from macadamia and walnuts, chia, flax, berries, pomegranate juice and cocoa, as his protocol archive documents it.^[38] The current protocol no longer names it: his breakfast is now the proprietary Longevity Protein with Blueberry Nut Mix, 11 g collagen, extra-virgin olive oil and berries.^[9]

What carries over from both dishes is ordinary: plenty of vegetables, legumes, nuts and fermented food, and little sugar. Our longevity diet guide covers how well those patterns hold up in studies, and our longevity recipes come with quantities and steps. For your own kitchen, the archived Nutty Pudding is the version to cook, since it needs none of the branded powders behind the current breakfast.

Blueprint's best-backed parts are its most ordinary ones: regular sleep, strength training, plenty of vegetables and not smoking all have solid research behind them. Time-restricted eating, calorie restriction and rapamycin are plausible but unsettled, while most of the supplement stack and the plasma experiments are speculative. The three tiers below sort the parts by how much evidence they rest on.

Well supported:

• Not smoking: current smokers die at about three times the rate of never-smokers and lose more than ten years of life.^[19]
• Alcohol: the risk of death rises clearly with heavy drinking, while light drinking shows no protective effect in a large meta-analysis.^[18] That makes zero the safe default, though not a proven gain over a rare glass.
• Sleep: a regular sleep schedule is linked to lower mortality, and in one large study regularity predicted it better than sleep duration did.^[20]
• Strength training: in large observational studies it is linked to a 10 to 17% lower risk of early death, heart disease and cancer.^[14]
• Vegetables: eating more fruit and vegetables is linked to a lower risk of heart disease, cancer and early death.^[21]

All five rest on observational studies, which watch large groups of people rather than run experiments, so they show links rather than proof. Still, they come from very large groups and point the same way. The strength-training curve also says something about effort, because the benefit peaked at 30 to 60 minutes a week.^[14] That is a fraction of Johnson's daily 60 to 90 minutes, and the data say little about whether more adds anything.^[14]

Plausible, but not proven:

• Time-restricted eating, which means eating only within a fixed window of hours each day: randomised trials are mixed, and none measured lifespan.^{[2, 32, 33]}
• Calorie restriction in normal-weight adults, meaning eating less than usual over a long time: the animal data are strong, while the human data, mainly from the two-year CALERIE trial, are moderate.^{[1, 4]}
• Rapamycin off-label: strong animal data.^[3] but thin human data, and Johnson himself stopped it over side effects^[10]

The eating-window trials show why this middle tier stays open. In a small trial, an early 6-hour window improved insulin sensitivity (how well the body responds to insulin) and blood pressure, even without weight loss.^[32] Two trials of 8-hour windows found less. In one, the window brought no significant extra weight loss over regular meal times.^[2] In the other, early or late windows added no extra loss of deep belly (visceral) fat to a Mediterranean diet.^[33] So far the window has improved markers in one small trial, but it has not added weight or fat loss in the other two.

Speculative to questionable:

• Almost all supplements, as far as a longer life goes.^{[22, 23, 24]}
• Diabetes drugs as prevention in healthy people: Johnson himself justifies Jardiance with data from animal experiments^[9]
• Young-plasma infusions and plasma exchange for rejuvenation^[16]
• Large stacks combined without a check for interactions

Supplements earn their place when there is a reason: correcting a diagnosed deficiency, creatine alongside strength training, or omega-3 if you eat no fish. As a way to live longer without such a reason, they land in the bottom tier because of what the big randomised trials in healthy people found. The VITAL trial randomly assigned about 26,000 healthy older adults to vitamin D, omega-3, both or placebo^{[22, 23]} After about five years, neither supplement had lowered cancer or major heart events.^{[22, 23]} In line with that, the Endocrine Society now advises healthy adults under 75 against vitamin D above the normal recommended intake.^[24]

Even where Johnson's markers improve, Blueprint remains one case, not a controlled trial. It cannot show which piece caused a change, and it cannot tell us what would happen in someone else.

What the aging clocks can and cannot show

That limit matters most for Johnson's headline numbers, which come from epigenetic clocks. These tests read chemical tags on your DNA to estimate biological age, based on one of the recognised hallmarks of aging.^[5] In 2024 Johnson claimed that he had slowed his pace of aging by the equivalent of 31 years, and Morgan Levine pushed back in public.^[8] She is the lead developer and first author of PhenoAge, one of the best-known of these clocks.^[7] A clock is "a single imperfect estimate of aging, not a direct measure", she wrote, as quoted by NMN.com.^[8] A pace score, she added, "is not meant to be used in reference to an age".^[8]

Clock readings can also jump with short-term stress. In one study they rose after major surgery, pregnancy and severe COVID-19, then fell back after recovery.^[34] So a better reading for Johnson shows that his clock responded, which is not the same as proof that he ages more slowly.

What the plasma experiment showed

Johnson's most-watched experiment came back negative. In 2023 he had six one-litre young-plasma exchanges, one a month.^[16] One of them used plasma from his 17-year-old son, and his own plasma went to his 70-year-old father.^[16] The idea comes from animal experiments in which young blood rejuvenated parts of old mice.^[16] Johnson detected no benefit on top of his other interventions and stopped, though he wrote that it may still help biologically older people or certain conditions.^[16] It is a self-reported, uncontrolled result from one person, not a trial.

He has not dropped the idea altogether. He has since moved on to total plasma exchange.^[17] In January 2025 he described replacing his plasma with albumin, the main blood protein, and with antibodies sold as immunoglobulins (IVIG).^[17] The FDA warned in 2019 that young-plasma infusions have no proven benefit and carry the risks of any plasma product.^[16] Plasma exchange itself can cause shifts in blood salts (electrolytes) and drops in blood pressure.^[17] For anyone tempted to copy it, that leaves no benefit on record and a known list of risks.

A European version of Blueprint that keeps the well-backed basics and skips the drugs and experiments costs roughly €50 to €150 a month. That figure is our own rough estimate, not a sourced price. Perhaps €20 to €40 of it goes on a few targeted supplements, and the rest on a sleep tracker and occasional tests. The list below sorts Blueprint's ideas into what to copy, what to consider and what to leave to a doctor.

Copy these, because they are cheap, well backed and low risk:

• Fixed sleep and wake times, weekends included.^[20] You pick the time: even Johnson writes that you do not need his 8:30 PM bedtime, only the consistency.^[9]
• A quiet, dark and cool bedroom, around 18 to 21 °C^[9]
• Strength training two to three times a week, where even 30 to 60 minutes a week counts^[14]
• 30 to 45 minutes of movement every day
• Plenty of vegetables and fruit^[21]
• No smoking, and little or ideally no alcohol^{[18, 19]}

Consider these as optional extras, each with a caveat:

• Time-restricted eating: if you want to try it, a 10 to 12 hour eating window is the gentle version, though no trial shows it adds years^{[2, 33]}
• Targeted supplements, if you have a reason (see below)
• A DEXA scan (a low-dose X-ray of bone density and body composition) if a doctor sees a reason, for example a risk of osteoporosis, plus blood tests your doctor picks (lipids, glucose, ferritin, vitamin B12)
• A wearable such as Oura, Whoop or Polar for tracking sleep and HRV (heart rate variability, the small changes in time between heartbeats)

Leave these to a doctor, or skip them altogether:

• Off-label prescription drugs, including everything on Johnson's list and rapamycin (see our Rapamycin Germany guide). Empagliflozin, for example, can cause ketoacidosis when you eat little or are short of fluids^[29]
• Very low calorie intake at a healthy weight
• Plasma exchange, gene therapies and other experimental rejuvenation treatments^{[16, 17]}
• Stacks of 50 or more supplements with no check for interactions

As a rule of thumb (the 80/20 or Pareto principle, not a measured figure), the first few habits on the copy list bring most of the benefit.

Supplements and tests: what to check first

A good supplement list is short, with a reason behind each item, such as a deficiency your blood test has shown. Vitamin D3, omega-3, magnesium and creatine are the usual candidates, each with a clear job (closing a measured deficiency, covering omega-3 if you eat no fish, creatine alongside strength training), and they are easy to find in a German pharmacy or drugstore (Apotheke, dm, Rossmann). Keep vitamin D below the EU upper limit of 100 µg (4,000 IU) a day from all sources combined^[37] Two safety checks come before you buy:

• Blood thinners: if you take phenprocoumon (Marcumar) or warfarin, skip vitamin K2 and K1 unless your doctor adjusts your blood-thinner treatment, because as little as 10 µg of K2 a day shifted blood clotting in a trial.^[26] That includes Blueprint's own Advanced Antioxidants capsule, which contains 1,500 µg vitamin K1 plus K2,^[27] and any D3-plus-K2 product.
• Heart rhythm: high-dose omega-3 was linked to more atrial fibrillation (an irregular, often fast heartbeat) in randomised trials, more so above 1 g a day.^[25] If you have heart-rhythm problems, ask your doctor first.

Tests need a reason too. DEXA uses X-rays, so in Germany a doctor must decide that the health benefit justifies the radiation.^[35] That rule makes a yearly scan without a medical reason hard to justify. Blood tests follow the same logic, with your doctor picking the values, such as lipids, glucose, ferritin and vitamin B12.

Blueprint for women

Blueprint is calibrated on one male body, and its mix of a calorie cap with 60 to 90 minutes of daily training carries a specific risk for women. In athletes who eat too little for how much they train, a state called low energy availability, cycle disturbances, hormonal changes and bone loss are well documented.^[15] The same risk is plausible for women who copy the protocol.

So adapt the eating window and calories to your body, and put iron and ferritin tests near the top of your list (ferritin shows your iron stores). In perimenopause, keep hormone replacement therapy on the table and talk it through with your doctor (see the women's guide). After menopause, strength training and bone-loading exercise are a better use of the effort than cutting calories.

Importing Blueprint products into the EU

Ordering longevity supplements from the US can run into customs trouble when an ingredient is not authorised as a Novel Food. That is the EU approval a food needs if people in the EU did not eat it to a significant degree before 15 May 1997. Blueprint's documented capsules contain no NMN, only the related nicotinamide riboside,^{[9, 28]} but NMN is the best-known example among longevity products.

EFSA, the EU food safety agency, gave one NMN ingredient a positive safety opinion in May 2026.^[13] The opinion covers one chemically synthesised NMN at up to 300 mg a day for adults, except pregnant and breastfeeding women.^[13] Until the European Commission adds it to the Union list of authorised novel foods, it cannot legally be sold as a food supplement. As of October 2026 we found no entry on that list (see our NMN Germany guide).

Customs are the smallest obstacle, though, because most of Blueprint is not built for a normal life. The protocol assumes a kitchen routine that runs like a clinic, a team of doctors, blood draws every few months plus scans most people never get.^{[9, 16]} It also assumes a seven-figure budget. Without those, we would start with the first item on the copy list: a bedtime and wake time you keep on weekends too.