ZOE Science & Nutrition - Most replayed moment: What can we learn from the man who’s trying to live forever? | Bryan Johnson & Tim Spector

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Today we’re exploring one of the most ambitious self-experiments in human history. Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has spent over $2 million in an attempt to slow - or even stop - the ageing process. From diet and supplements to sleep and skin care, every part of his life is measured, analysed and optimised. So what does his daily routine actually look like? And what can the rest of us learn from it? I’m joined by Professor Tim Spector to dissect Bryan’s data-driven diet, discuss the future of personalised health, and hear Bryan’s top five tips for a better night’s sleep. 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily30+ *Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks  Better Breakfast Guide Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know hereListen to the full episode here

Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're exploring one of the most ambitious self-experiments in human history. Entrepreneur Brian Johnson spent over $2 million in an attempt to slow or even stop the aging process. From diet and supplements to sleep and skin care, every part of his life is measured, analyzed and optimized. So what does his daily routine actually look like? And what can the rest of us learn from it? I'm joined by Professor Tim Specter to dissect Brian's data-driven diet, discuss the future of personalized health,

and hear Brian's top five tips for a better night's sleep. Could you talk us through your daily food routine and I guess also why? So I ate 2,250 calories a day. I'm vegan, although I chose to be vegan for a lot of, ethical reasons. I think we want to be what we want AI to become. I think we want AI to treat us, like we treat other forms of intelligence. So I'm vegan, and my diet consists of the following foods. So in the morning, I'll have what I call super veggie, which is broccoli, cauliflower, black lentils, hemp seed, garlic, and ginger. And then I'll put some extra virgin olive oil on it, a 15 ml.

And then I'll have the next dish, which is nutty pudding, which is macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, pomegranate juice, and berries, black, blue, and raspberry strawberries. And then I'll have a final bill of the day, which varies every day according to vegetables, legumes, berries, nuts, seeds. And I'll have three tablespoons or 45 ml a day

of extravert and olive oil. That's my primary intake of those general categories of foods. I do also, I do pee and hemp protein. So I do 110 grams a day of protein. 110 grams. So you're adding a lot of protein as a supplement there of that fit. Yeah. So collagen peptides are the only thing I do that are non-degan. So I do 20 grams a day of collagen protein, 40 grams a day of peon hemp, and then the remainder is for legumes and

other sources. And you're taking vitamins on top of that, do you? Yeah. I take about 40 pills a day. They're what we think the evidence says are the best. Like we do calcium alpha-katergulterate, tarine, lysine. We do NR. So, yeah, so basically, we try to scour the evidence to say what things cannot be achieved in dietary intake and how do we supplement those. So you look at what you're eating and you say what might we be missing from those foods? Exactly. And you supplement with these ones. Yeah.

So we try to create as perfect of a diet as possible or we say every calorie has to fight for its life. Nothing makes its way into my body that is nice to have or that is cool or just taste good. it has to have a robust evidence that it is a food type that has robust effects inside the body. We think that there's no diet that can satisfy the body's needs, especially if you want to be in the edge of anti-aging. And so we try to supplement all the things you can't get through diet or improper amounts. And then we measure everything to say, are these levels on point or do we adjust something? And do you have super amounts of them? Because, I mean, that's a lot of people, you know, like these vitamin C infusions and things like it,

thinking that more is always better. No. Do you believe that? Yeah. I mean, most things in the evidence show it's a U-shaped curve, and so you want to nail the exact amount and not anymore. That's why we measure everything so extensively is we want to peg the absolute correct number and not move from it.

And so how many additional, like, vitamins and, you know, different supplements are you putting on top of that, like, food-based diet that you were describing? It's about 40. 40 every day. Yeah. So your pill cupboard is the size of like my room. Yeah, yeah. I was at 100, but we've condensed it quite a bit. And that was just the evidence for those ones was really weaker. And then because I mean, the worry about all taking, say, 100 was they might interact with each other.

Yes. And so they might be negating them. Yes. Yeah, we've, and so we've been very open about this where we're impartial. So something's out working, we just remove it immediately. So I've been taking the, the longevity molecule rapamycin for the past five years. And I think rapamycin probably had the most agreement in the entire field as a good thing. And I was on it for five years. And we had done extensive measurement of rapamycin. So I would take it.

And we'd measure my blood levels two hours post 24, 72, you know, 48, 72. So we'd look at all my levels of CMAX and tail curves. But then back in September, we decided to discontinue rapamycin because it was messing with my lipids, with my blood glucose and my resting heart rate and giving me small tissue infections. And so the idea was we knew there were tradeoffs, but we didn't know with like maybe it's worth it, but we just said we don't think it's worth it,

and we stopped it. And then it was funny, a month later, that paper came out and yell showing that rapidin on two of the 16 clocks, or I think more maybe, had accelerated the speed of aging. And so it's just like a good lesson to always be agile and to be very humble.

So we are very, very humble. we think we probably don't know most things, but the power is able to measure it continually. So we caught this one, but still, like, it's definitely not a case where it's really dangerous to be overconfident. So, Tim, I'm really curious as I'm listening to this, like your view, right?

You know, one of the world's experts on nutrition and you've been looking a lot in your background about sort of how this ties into longevity. Are there any areas as you listen to that that you would either suggest Brian should be exploring or things where you're saying, well, actually a bit like this example you were giving where like that's a super drug, and then five years later you're like, oh my God, it's causing me all of these. Like it's damaging me. I've got to stop. What would you be saying?

As I was exploring, you know, I believe that some of these vitamins, if you take too much of them, they're going to have negative effects on your body. And many people around the world are just going crazy and take you as much as you can. and that's the whole nutrient vitamin business is selling you those. So I'd be concerned that, for example, you might be taking too much calcium because too much calcium causes heart disease. But it sounds like you've already thought of a lot of those angles. And it's good to see that having started Rappamicin,

realized that some of these things are actually harmful to individuals. So there might be some people that benefit, but other people not. It's very personalized. And Tim, you're often pretty skeptical, I think, about sort of vitamins and these other sorts of ultra-processed chemicals, rather than getting this through whole food? What would you? I would be looking to see these supplements that LeBron was taking

couldn't be got from other foods or increasing the diversity of other foods he was taking because that's the natural way that we've evolved to use these substances. So I have a general disquiet about taking some of these nutrients. in the chemical form rather than in the pure form. And why is that? That's because we think the body might react differently to them. A bit like the example with calcium I give you. If you have calcium as a chemical,

it's in a large amount. It goes in a big amount in the body. It may not be absorbed the same way and therefore ends up being deposited in different bits of the body than if you took it in spring water or something where it would be much more evenly distributed and in the way that our bodies evolved to do that. So as a general principle, we're still very unclear

about how these vitamins actually working and maybe just as many negative effects as that are positive ones. So I'd be looking to say, can you diversify even more? Because at Zoe, we really believe in plant diversity being one of the key elements to having the most different species of microbes,

which then gives you the natural chemicals, the natural vitamins. I was just curious, if I'd almost have one sentence from each of you, what do you think the personal health practices are going to look like in 30 years' time? I think personalisation is going to be everything. So we're just seeing the dawn of, you know, home testing, home blood draws, like, you know,

just doing like the Zoe Kid at home now, which is unthinkable 10 years ago. And I think we're going to have smart toilets. I'm a big fan that a lot of your body's health can be told from what's going on inside your gut and your gut microbes and the chemicals they're producing. So I think we'll all be having super smart toilets that will tell us what the chemicals of our microbes are producing and what we should be eating during the next week to balance that out and what our risks of diseases, etc. are. So I think a combination of blood,

urine and stool testing at your home is going to be a regular feature and we'll be sort titrating things accordingly in in in the homes you know like this that have all the gadgets certainly Brian I think it would be like what's happened in the stock market where it used to be the case that an investor would read upon a company read other reports study the industry and decide on that stock and now a substantial amount of trading on in the market is these high high frequency trading systems where these algorithms are ingesting gigantic amounts of data. They're seeing patterns that humans cannot and they're executing transactions at the millisecond scale, faster than any human can make a decision and beyond the knowledge of any human. And I think these patterns will be

very thorough through humans as well, that our health will be managed like a high frequency trading system. That right now we think about these things very like, we're a stock picker for our body. Like we say, this food is good in my body. It's just like picking a stock. Whereas we'll be much more granular about the molecular structure of a given thing. And the data will be acquired from our body. It will go into an algorithm and it will start trading on our behalf at the molecular level. And so I think the majority of our health decisions will be gone. We won't even think about it.

And it will just be part of systems. And I think that's like it. So that's like six years from now. I think it's entirely reasonable that we'll have early prototypes by then. Amazing. And if I could, I'll leave your viewers with a five, a suggestion of five habits for sleep. Go for it. To make this very actionable.

So my authority on this is I achieve the best sleep score in human history, eight months of perfect sleep. So here's five things that everybody can do. One is to reframe your identity that you are a professional sleeper. Right now, our cultural relationship with sleep is we sleep when it's convenient, when we're finished with our show, when we're done with the outing, we sleep at all hours. So you are a professional sleeper and take it as seriously as you do your profession. Number two is have your final meal today at least two hours before bedtime. I have my final middle of the day nine hours before my bedtime. And I tested a few hundred different experiments,

at different times, different foods to experiment with this. And I find that when I do that, my resting heart rate goes down by about 20%. So right now is about 44 when I go to bed. And that gives me a perfect night's sleep. So eat earlier and lighter, an experiment sure to find the right time for you. Three is consistency.

So when I was going to bed, when I was doing this experiment, I was in bed at the same time plus or minus one minute. and it was remarkable how powerful my body was in putting itself to sleep. If you give the body rhythm and consistency, it will be a superpower for you. Four is light. So try to turn down blues in the house, turn off screens, you know, an hour or so before bed. If you can have an amber light or red light's the best.

So light is very important. And then five is a wind down routine. And so this is really important. So at 8.30, I go to bed. 7.30, I begin my nighttime wind down routine. and so this is, I do a self-talk where, you know, 7.30 arrives, and then the moment I start nighttime mode, I'll have a thought like, hey, Brian, I have a new idea for a new thing I can do. Or like, hey, Brian, you said something today that probably offended the person, they probably hate you,

and you were not worried about it. So I can say, thank you, ambitious Brian, for reminding me, that this is a good idea. We appreciate you. You're doing good work in life. Or thank you, anxious Brian, for identifying that we really messed up in that conversation and said that rude thing. I promise I'll take care of this tomorrow. See, I'm going to write this thing down right now, but you're doing this because you're trying to calm your nervous system to say, we are now into sleep mode, we're going to calm ourselves down, and we're going to sleep. Otherwise, if you don't and you take this energy into the bed, when your head hits a pillow, you then ruminate on all these thoughts, good, bad, and ugly, and then you wake up.

Same thing you can't go back there, because now you ruminate on these thoughts. And so the wind-down routine is probably the most powerful because you're really setting yourself up for a great night's sleep. But to do that, you have to take it seriously, which is back to your identity. So do those five things, and I think it will change your life more than anything in the entire world. And when you sleep well, you're going to want to exercise. And when you exercise, you want to eat well. And it's this really positive virtuous loop. Thank you for listening to today's recap episode.

I want to take 30 seconds to talk about something that's not talked about enough. Menopause. Over half the people on the planet experience perimenopause and menopause. yet symptoms are often misunderstood or dismissed. At Zoe, we're moving menopause research forward. We recently conducted the largest study of menopause and nutrition in the world, and our study showed that two-thirds of perimenopause and women reported experiencing over 12 symptoms,

symptoms like weight gain, memory problems and fatigue. The good news is, the results also show that changing our food habits may reduce the chance of having a particular menopause symptom by up to 37% for some women. We know how important it is for you to be able to take control of your own health journey. So we've created the Menoscale calculator to help you score the frequency and impact of your menopause symptoms. Go to zoe.com slash menoscale to get your score. The calculator is free and only takes a couple of minutes. And by the way, we've spoken about perimenopause and menopause many times since starting the Zohy.

Zohy Science and Nutrition podcast. To find these episodes, simply search Zoe Menopause in your favorite podcast player.