The Crap Science behind Bryan Johnson's $2M Diet

The surprisingly weak science behind Bryan Johnson's diet - the one where "every calorie has to fight for its life"

I recently put out this video on my second channel Joseph Everett where I usually post podcasts. Let me give you a bit of the backstory.

In case you haven’t heard, Bryan Johnson is a tech entrepreneur who claims to be spending $2,000,000 a year to ‘not die.’ He’s been making several grandiose claims like “this is the first moment where we can say death is a maybe.” He calls himself ‘the most measured man in history’ and frankly, I thought his experiment was quite interesting and was curious to see where it went.

It always struck me as odd that he emphasized on several occasions that “every calorie has had to fight for its life” to be in his diet, yet when it came to the question of why he made the huge decision to completely exclude all animal products from his diet (except collagen powder), he said it was a “personal decision.”

Though, lately I’ve been much more critical of Bryan since he made the vague and grandiose claim last week that he is “the healthiest person on the planet” based on some biomarkers of his choosing.

He also claims he has better skin than a 20 year old woman… 🤔

Frankly, I suspect this ‘healthiest person’ on the planet claim is another marketing tool designed to embellish the Bryan Johnson™️ story. After all, the “marketing genius behind Bryan Johnson,” Kate Tolo said in an interview that “storytelling is the only thing that matters. That's definitely what I've learned from over the years of working in viral marketing.”

The story goes like this: tech millionaire is rich, but things aren’t going so well for him. He doesn’t like the way he looks, but more importantly he doesn’t like the way he feels. He decides that he is going to devotes millions of dollars to hiring a research team to go through all the science to build the perfect anti-aging protocol. He is so thorough, that he becomes the most measured man in history. After over 3 years of trial and error he developed “the perfect anti-aging diet” and rigorously implemented this along with very specific health-boosting supplements. Thanks to his efforts, he is now the ‘healthiest person on the planet.’ Pretty exciting, right?

I don’t see anything wrong with selling products, but along with the fact that his product line has his own name on it, you can’t help but think the message is:

‘if you wanna be like me, the healthiest person on the planet, then you need to take my products and eat my diet.’

In any case, this brings us to the meat of the discussion where Bryan dropped a Twitter (X.com) thread laying out all kinds of studies that explain why “red meat did not make the cut to be in [his] diet.”

(1)Red Meat Consumption and Mortality: Results from Two Prospective Cohort Studies

(2) Meat consumption and mortality - results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition

(3) Association Between Plant and Animal Protein Intake and Overall and Cause-Specific Mortality

(4) Red meat consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes: 3 cohorts of US adults and an updated meta-analysis

(5) Red meat intake and risk of type 2 diabetes in a prospective cohort study of United States females and males

(6) Red meat consumption, cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes: a systematic review and meta-analysis

(7) Red Meat Intake and the Risk of Cardiovascular Diseases: A Prospective Cohort Study in the Million Veteran Program

(8) Consumption of red and processed meat and breast cancer incidence: A systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies

(9) Red meat intake and cancer risk: A study in Italy

(10) Long-Term Intake of Red Meat in Relation to Dementia Risk and Cognitive Function in US Adults

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He then included screenshots of the above 10 studies looking at meat consumption and its effect on longevity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and even dementia. I tweeted out the earlier linked video criticizing these studies and it kind of blew up. Bryan even replied.

Here’s what I said in the video:

10 whole studies sounds very impressive, but what kind of studies do you think these are? Maybe they took two groups of people who were the same age, the same weight, the same height and so on and gave them the same meals … but one group got meat and the other got beans. You do this for say a year and then see what happens to their health … the studies were something like that, right?

Not at all. Every single one of these 10 studies relies on questionnaires for its data. Here’s an example of one of these questionnaires from Cambridge University.

Do you really think you can accurately remember what your average use of Bacon was for all of last year? Also, for this particular questionnaire they don’t even ask how much bacon you ate at a time.

Further, did you eat your bacon in a cheeseburger with fries or as part of a salad? They don’t know that.

Back in 1994 a study claimed that hot dogs increase brain cancer risk in children. "The asked the people: Did you eat a hot dog? They didn't ask them: Did you put in a bun? Did you put ketchup on it? That's important because it may be that it's not the hot dog at all that's causing this increased risk of cancer, maybe it's the bun, maybe it's the ketchup, maybe it's the mustard."

Think about the type of people who eat the most hot dogs. Do you think they’re the type to eat a hot dog with wheat grass juice and a salad after their morning yoga or do they eat it with fries and a coke after a cigarette?

This issue is a well-known fatal flaw of questionnaires: It’s called the healthy user bias.

Who's the type of person to eat less meat? The average person who listens to conventional 'healthy' advice exercises, doesn't smoke, they make sure to get good sleep, don't drink too much and don't do drugs... and of course they listen to their doctor try and lean towards a more 'healthy' plant-based diet. After all, we've been told meat is terrible for health for decades. So the type of person to do ‘healthy’ stuff is much more likely to eat less meat. The type of person in these studies who answering 'I ate read meat every single day for all of last year' is more likely to be the type of person who doesn’t listen to health advice and is eating that meat in the form of burgers with fries, microwaved lasagna, Denny's Grand Slams and they probably wash it down with a Coke.

Just in 2023 Harvard claimed that red meat is linked to diabetes. This study was heavily criticized for its use of questionnaires. The participants were asked to guesstimate how many times they ate certain categories of foods for the entire orevious year. In the "red meat" category, they included lasagna and casseroles.

Remember all 10 of those papers Bryan brought up on his Twitter thread were very weak questionnaire-based studies.

The fact that you can’t make any reliable conclusions based on these types of studies is old news and it’s well known. The glaring flaws with these studies were even laid out in a vegan versus omnivore debate on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2018.

Bryan’s reply was … underwhelming to say the least.

“This message was brought to you by the American Hot Dog Association.”

I was hoping for a more thorough reply, though he did say himself on the MPMD podcast "I think that I'm not the best person to make these arguments because I'm not the team and it's typically I trust them, not myself, because I'm not the expert” when Derek was asking him about the results of his Follistatin gene therapy. Bryan often iterated that his team is the one that makes the decisions in that podcast. Nothing wrong with relying on your team … but he’s the one personally making specific claims about why red meat isn’t in his “perfect anti-aging diet.”

Let me reiterate that this isn’t about just dunking on Bryan because he’s vegan. Bryan has a specific longevity protocol that he is now advertising as the method by which he achieved the self-given title ‘healthiest person in the world.’ He initially claimed the diet being was just a personal choice, but he’s now claiming various studies support the idea that meat reduces longevity. He also emphasizes how important diet is and just how meticulous he is about it. So, I can’t see how the message isn’t ‘if you want to be super healthy like me, you gotta do a vegan diet like me.’

By the way, I broke down the issues with questionnaire based studies a while back in this 2019 video of mine Is Bacon actually Bad for You?