Blueprint Protocol

Blueprint is Bryan Johnson's published aging protocol, run on himself since 2021 and later sold as a line of supplements, food, and biomarker-testing subscriptions through his company of the same name [1]. It is not a single intervention. It is a bundle of dozens of individually testable components, some with strong independent trial evidence and some with almost none, tracked together on one person.

The protocol's published architecture, current as of the 2026 protocol.bryanjohnson.com page, rests on five habit categories: sleep, nutrition, exercise, family/community, and avoidance of addictive behaviors [1]. Layered on top are five current prescription drugs. Acarbose, an alpha-glucosidase inhibitor, extended median lifespan in mice by roughly 22% in males and 5% in females when started young, and by 6% median/12% maximum when started in middle age, in National Institute on Aging Interventions Testing Program (ITP) studies [1]. Empagliflozin (an SGLT2 inhibitor, brand Jardiance) and candesartan are repurposed cardiometabolic drugs with large human outcome trials in diabetic and hypertensive populations, though not in healthy people using them for primary aging prevention. Tadalafil is used off-label for endothelial function. Evolocumab (Repatha) is an FDA-approved PCSK9 inhibitor with strong trial evidence for LDL lowering and cardiovascular event reduction in high-risk patients, again not specifically tested as an aging intervention in healthy adults.

The diet leans on extra-virgin olive oil (three tablespoons/day per Johnson's own account) and a largely plant-forward pattern resembling the Mediterranean diet [2]. The best human evidence for this piece of the stack is PREDIMED, a Spanish randomized trial of 7,447 adults at high cardiovascular risk: a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil cut major cardiovascular events with a hazard ratio of 0.69 (95% CI 0.53-0.91) against a low-fat control diet over a median 4.8 years [3]. That trial supports the olive-oil-and-produce component of Blueprint; it says nothing about the supplement stack, the drugs, or the protocol as a combined unit.

What the evidence does not show is any test of Blueprint as a whole. No randomized trial has been run on the combined 100+ item protocol, and given the number of interacting components, no such trial is realistically fundable or interpretable in the near term. Peter Attia and other clinicians in the longevity field have made this point publicly: any biomarker change Johnson reports could come from sleep, from diet, from exercise, from any one drug, from the interaction of several, or from regression toward a healthier mean after starting from a “broken down 42-year-old” baseline, in Johnson's own description [1]. There is no control condition and no way to isolate causes in an n=1 self-experiment, however well instrumented.

Johnson tracks his results with unusual granularity and publishes both the biomarkers and the methodology. His central metric is DunedinPACE, an epigenetic pace-of-aging clock built from the Dunedin, New Zealand 1972-73 birth cohort and validated by Belsky, Moffitt, Caspi and colleagues against morbidity, disability, and mortality outcomes across five additional datasets [4]. Johnson reports a DunedinPACE around 0.66-0.69, meaning roughly two-thirds of a chronological year of epigenetic aging per calendar year [5]. He has also reported hsCRP dropping below the detectable threshold and a 2.6% telomere length increase (10.3 to 11.4 kb) after 60 sessions of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and biological-age-linked improvements in central blood pressure and pulse pressure after roughly 23 sauna sessions [1]. Blueprint's consumer product, Biomarkers, now sells the same panel structure (100+ biomarkers, 160+ measurements per year) to the public for $365/year [6]. These are self-reported values from one instrumented subject rather than population data, and the underlying lab methods have not been published in a peer-reviewed venue.

What critics say, specifically: Morgan Levine, PhD, whose lab developed advanced epigenetic clocks, publicly stated that a pace-of-aging score is a rate, not a number of years, and that multiplying it by chronological age (as in Johnson's widely repeated “31 years reversed” claim) misapplies the statistic; she noted his lower pace of aging likely still reflects genuine health benefit, just not that specific figure [5]. Charles Brenner, the biochemist who discovered the vitamin activity of nicotinamide riboside, has argued that NMN, long featured in the Blueprint stack, must be broken down to NR before cellular uptake, making it a costlier route to the same endpoint [7][8]. A 2025 review from a science-literacy organization characterized Blueprint's public materials as combining well-supported basics (exercise, sleep, avoiding smoking) with commercial promotion of a large paid supplement line whose components are individually and collectively under-tested, noting the same review documented Johnson's own discontinuation of growth hormone after roughly 100 days due to side effects [9]. Vadim Gladyshev, a Harvard Medical School aging researcher featured in the Netflix documentary about Johnson, said on camera that a properly designed experiment, not one person's routine, is what would let scientists draw conclusions about rapamycin and aging [10].

The protocol is also a moving target, and its discontinuations carry information. Johnson dropped rapamycin entirely in September 2024, after nearly five years of testing multiple dosing schedules, citing recurring infections, elevated blood lipids, higher fasting glucose, and a higher resting heart rate with no other identified cause [10][11]. He discontinued growth hormone after about 100 days in May 2023, citing signs of elevated intracranial pressure, headaches, and higher blood glucose [9][12]. He stopped testosterone patches in December 2023 after reducing his caloric deficit from 25% to 10%, judging he no longer needed exogenous support [12]. He ended a roughly six-month multigenerational plasma exchange experiment with his son and father in 2023, reporting no detectable benefit and no way to separate any effect of “his” plasma from the effect of simply removing his father's older plasma [13]. Each of these drops is a useful negative data point independent of anything Johnson currently takes.

Blueprint carries a direct commercial interest: Johnson owns the company, which sells the supplements, food, and skincare he uses on himself, and he has said running it costs roughly $2 million a year with a mix of profitable and loss-making months [13]. Readers should treat product claims on the Blueprint site as marketing for a business Johnson owns, distinct from the biomarker self-reports and published mouse/human trial data cited above.

The plain takeaway: several individual pieces of Blueprint (olive oil and a Mediterranean-style diet, sleep discipline, resistance and Zone 2 exercise, acarbose in mice) have real trial or cohort support; the protocol as an integrated 100+ item stack has never been tested as a unit, and Johnson's own biomarker improvements cannot be attributed to any specific component without a controlled comparison that does not exist.