Inside the $2M-a-year project to measure and slow aging — the diet, the 100+ supplement stack, and what's actually evidence-based versus still speculative.
This page describes Bryan Johnson's publicly documented project in detail. It is not a personal endorsement of THE FAD, not medical advice, and not a recommendation to replicate any part of his protocol without your own doctor's involvement.
Bryan Johnson is a tech entrepreneur (best known for founding the payments company Braintree) who has, since 2021, run an extremely public, extensively documented personal project called Blueprint — an attempt to measure and slow his own biological aging using daily data rather than guesswork. Reports put the annual cost of the project at around $2 million, funding a team of physicians and researchers who help design, monitor and adjust his regimen.
What sets Blueprint apart from ordinary "healthy lifestyle" content is the sheer volume of tracking involved. Johnson's team has assessed the estimated biological age of more than 70 of his organs individually, alongside recurring blood panels that include inflammatory markers, hormone levels, metabolic indicators and cardiovascular measures — the same general category of biomarker covered on our hs-CRP and inflammatory markers pages, just measured far more frequently and exhaustively than almost anyone else attempts.
Johnson's eating pattern follows a fixed daily structure rather than a single named "diet": a consistent meal schedule, no snacking between meals (intended to support insulin sensitivity and give the digestive system a genuine rest — see our glycemic index and autophagy and fasting pages for the underlying mechanisms), and a deliberate inclusion of fermented vegetables specifically for gut microbial diversity and inflammation reduction — precisely the territory covered in our fermentation deep dive and gut health page.
Public versions of the Blueprint stack have included over 100 daily pills, powders and fortified foods. Several of the most consistently reported components are explicitly framed around inflammation:
The active compound in turmeric, taken at doses well above typical culinary amounts — see our polyphenols page for the food-level version of this same compound.
Taken twice daily, explicitly for brain, heart, joint support and lowering chronic inflammation — the same rationale behind THE FAD's own omega-3 signal in our foods list.
Studied in mouse models for extending lifespan and reducing chronic inflammation — an early-stage compound with far less human evidence than the food-based approaches covered elsewhere on this site.
Supports autophagy, the cellular cleanup process covered on our autophagy page — again, promising in animal models, less established in humans at supplement doses.
It's worth being direct here: no randomized controlled human trial has demonstrated that Johnson's full 100+ compound stack extends lifespan or meaningfully reduces disease risk beyond what its individual, better-studied components (like omega-3s) already show on their own. Much of the mechanistic case for compounds like Ca-AKG and spermidine currently rests on animal studies, not confirmed human outcomes. Some clinicians who review these protocols have specifically cautioned against "stacking" large numbers of supplements before establishing, through actual lab testing, which individual deficiencies or markers a person is actually trying to address.
THE FAD's founding idea — measuring lifestyle inputs instead of guessing, and letting a daily number reflect the result — is the same underlying instinct behind Blueprint, just at a completely different scale and budget. Where Blueprint tracks 70+ organs and 100+ supplements with a full medical team, THE FAD tracks five pillars (Food, Sleep, Alcohol, Exercise, Stress) using self-reported and wearable data, aiming for something any individual can actually sustain. See our FAD Score methodology for our own, far more modest version of the same underlying logic, and our supplements and inflammation overview for a general, non-prescriptive take on the supplement categories Blueprint leans on most heavily.
Blueprint is an extreme, resource-intensive individual experiment — not a program most people could, or necessarily should, replicate exactly, given both the cost and the amount that still rests on preliminary animal research rather than confirmed human trials. It's most useful as a demonstration that frequent, structured measurement is possible and can be informative, and as a reminder that even a heavily-funded, medically-supervised project is still working with real scientific uncertainty in several of its more aggressive components.