Blueprint protocol

The Blueprint protocol is the anti-aging regimen that the American entrepreneur Bryan Johnson began in 2021 and has since published, revised and sold in parts: a fixed daily schedule of diet, exercise and sleep, a stack of supplements and prescription drugs, a rotating set of experimental therapies, and continuous measurement of his own body. Johnson calls himself the most biologically measured person ever. No controlled study of the regimen has been run, and the outcomes he reports come from a single, uncontrolled subject who also owns the company that sells its products.

Three things called Blueprint

The name covers Johnson's personal regimen (originally "Project Blueprint"), the free protocol website describing it, and Blueprint, the company selling foods, supplements and personal-care products derived from it. This article covers all three; Johnson's wider "Don't Die" movement is covered in his biography.

§Origins and team

Johnson began Project Blueprint in 2021 and co-founded a company of the same name that year.¹ It reached a mass audience through a Bloomberg profile in January 2023, after which coverage put the cost of running it at about $2 million a year.²

The clinical side was led, as of 2023, by Oliver Zolman, a 29-year-old Cambridge-based doctor with a degree in regenerative medicine, who heads what Fortune described as "a team of 30-plus doctors and health experts". Zolman's stated method is to measure the age of individual organs and set protocols accordingly.²

Johnson's founding framing was software-like. His original protocol site described Blueprint as "an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself", and set out a principle that his "mind", which he regards as prone to impulse, is "unauthorized" to make food decisions; instead his heart, liver, lungs "and my other 70+ organs" are to "speak for themselves" through measurement.³ He calls the resulting state his "Autonomous Self".

§What the regimen consists of

Described at the level of categories, the 2026 version of the protocol comprises:⁴

• Diet. A fixed daily intake of about 2,250 kcal, described as a 10% restriction relative to recommended intake, built around vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, berries and olive oil, with the last meal around midday; Johnson says he does not identify with plant-based or other diet camps. Johnson frames this with the rule that "every calorie must fight for its life". The overlap with Caloric restriction is modest rather than severe.
• Exercise. About six hours a week of strength, aerobic and high-intensity work, plus brief activity breaks through the day, drawing on the literature summarised in Exercise as a geroprotector.
• Sleep. A fixed early bedtime and a wind-down routine aimed at lowering pre-sleep heart rate, which Johnson calls "the single most effective thing you can do for your health"; see Sleep and longevity.
• Supplements. Blueprint-branded products such as a powdered "Longevity Mix" and capsules, consolidating what were once dozens of separately sourced products (on Dietary supplements).
• Prescription drugs. Thyroid hormone for hypothyroidism diagnosed at 21, alongside drugs used off-label or preventively, including Metformin and the TAME trial on and off in cycles, the glucose-lowering drugs acarbose and empagliflozin, the cholesterol drug evolocumab, tadalafil, and oral minoxidil for hair.
• Therapies and devices. Hyperbaric oxygen, dry sauna (see Heat and cold exposure), red and near-infrared light, shockwave therapy, skin lasers and ultrasound, and a range of Wearable health sensors.
• Experimental procedures. A follistatin gene therapy received in October 2023, 300 million mesenchymal stem cells injected into joints in March 2024, and three months of cerebrolysin injections, for which the site reports "no effect measured".

The site presents itself as describing one man's choices rather than a prescription, and states that many of its therapies are off-label, unlicensed or still under investigation.⁴

§Measurement and Johnson's claims

Measurement is the protocol's distinctive feature. Johnson describes himself as "certainly the most biologically measured person ever", and his sites list blood panels, imaging, fitness tests, sleep data, and organ-by-organ estimates of Biological age.⁴ His archived site reported a pace of aging of 0.69 at chronological age 46 and later 0.53, measured with DunedinPACE, an Epigenetic clocks built to estimate years of biological aging per calendar year, and claimed first place on the Rejuvenation Olympics, a public leaderboard of such scores.³

The 2026 site summarises his results as percentiles against reference populations: Johnson reports bone mineral density in the "99th percentile (all ages)", blood pressure "lower than 90% of 18-year-olds", and a nine-year reversal in measured skin age. It also reports longer telomeres and lower inflammatory markers after twelve weeks of hyperbaric oxygen.⁴

These figures are self-reported. The site itself states that its biological-age claims are "preliminary", that the tests are "experimental and intended solely for research purposes", and that the protocol "represents an experimental clinical research project" whose results "will be periodically published in peer-reviewed journals".⁴ As of October 2026, no peer-reviewed paper or preprint by the Blueprint team reporting the regimen's outcomes is indexed in PubMed or Europe PMC.

§What has been added and dropped

1. 2021
   Project Blueprint begins
   Johnson announces the regimen and co-founds Blueprint as a company.
2. 2023
   Young plasma exchange stopped
   After six monthly one-litre plasma exchanges, one using his teenage son's plasma, Johnson reports no detectable benefit and discontinues them.
3. 2023
   Follistatin gene therapy
   Johnson receives a gene therapy intended to raise follistatin, a muscle-growth regulator, in October.
4. 2024
   Consumer subscription
   A 90-day starter package of Blueprint foods opens to 2,500 applicants at $333 a month.
5. 2024
   Rapamycin dropped
   Johnson announces in November that he stopped rapamycin after about five years, citing side effects.
6. 2025
   Internal study reported
   The New York Times reports leaked documents on an internal Blueprint study in which most participants reported a side effect.
7. 2025
   $60 million raised
   Blueprint announces an angel round and a new chief executive, and plans clinics and a food-purity certification.
8. 2026
   Protocol site relaunched
   A rewritten protocol site replaces the original in January; the old one is kept as an archive.
9. 2026
   Autoimmune diagnosis
   Johnson discloses autoimmune gastritis, found in May after years of unexplained low ferritin.

The regimen has repeatedly shed its most conspicuous elements. The young-plasma experiment, which he ran with his son and his father, was discontinued in July 2023 when Johnson reported that he had "evaluated biomarkers from biofluids, devices and imaging, no benefits detected"; the procedure belongs to a line of work covered in Parabiosis and young blood, and the US FDA had warned in 2019 that such treatments "should not be assumed to be safe or effective".⁵ His archived site justifies the follistatin therapy, a form of Myostatin inhibition delivered as gene therapy, by a lifespan result in mice.³

Rapamycin was the most widely imitated element. In November 2024 Johnson announced that he had stopped it, writing that "the benefits of lifelong dosing of rapamycin do not justify the hefty side-effects", which he listed as soft-tissue infections, lipid abnormalities, raised glucose and raised resting heart rate.⁶ He had earlier promoted the drug, and attendees of his own summit that year had exchanged tips on obtaining prescriptions.

§The company

Blueprint grew out of Johnson's difficulty sourcing ingredients he trusted. By his account he was juggling more than 100 vendors and decided to make his own, and the company became an online seller of branded supplements, protein powders, shampoos and olive oil, the last at $35 a bottle in 2025.¹ In January 2024 it offered a 90-day "Blueprint basics" package, enough for 2,500 people, at $333 a month, which Johnson said contained "67 interventions" chosen "based upon randomized controlled trials and strong epidemiological evidence".⁷

Johnson has repeatedly described the business as a liability to his credibility. In July 2025 he called it "a pain in my a—", and said that "somehow making my protocol available at a low cost lessened the trust that some people had in me". He nonetheless chose to expand: in November 2025 Blueprint announced $60 million in angel funding from technology and entertainment figures, named Gyre Renwick, formerly of Modern Health, as chief executive, and set out plans for longevity clinics and a food "purity" certification.¹ A Netflix documentary on the regimen, Don't Die, was released in January 2025.¹

§Evidence and limitations

One subject, dozens of simultaneous changes, no control

Every efficacy claim for Blueprint rests on measurements of Johnson alone, with no control group, no blinding and no pre-registered endpoint. Because dozens of drugs, foods and therapies change at once, no result can be attributed to any single one of them, and improvements from a starting point Johnson himself describes as overweight and sleep-deprived would be expected from conventional diet, exercise and sleep alone. The headline measures are surrogates: no epigenetic clock or organ-age score has been validated as a stand-in endpoint showing that an intervention extends healthy life.

The individual components range widely in evidential support. Regular exercise, adequate sleep and avoiding obesity rest on large human cohorts and trials; metformin's role in aging is still under trial; rapamycin's lifespan evidence is from laboratory animals; and gene therapy and stem-cell injections have no established outcome data for aging in healthy people. Combining them does not add their evidence together.

The one population-scale signal reported so far is unfavourable. According to internal documents obtained by The New York Times in March 2025, about 60% of roughly 1,700 participants in an internal Blueprint study reported at least one side effect; employees described complaints of nausea, vomiting and bloating linked to the Longevity Mix and its sweetener allulose, and blood tests reportedly showed falls in testosterone and prediabetic readings. Johnson said the results showed "common side effects with any food, beverage or supplement".⁸ The same reporting covered his extensive use of confidentiality agreements, which three former employees challenged before the National Labor Relations Board.

§Reception

Researchers quoted in the press tend to separate the habits from the claims. McGill pharmacologist Moshe Szyf told Fortune in 2023 that lifestyle changes could reverse aging, but that "it is unclear, however, whether we have yet the knowledge on how to do this", describing the approach as "a tour de force of anything suggested to affect longevity".² In a 2026 Nature feature, geneticist Nir Barzilai said Johnson's choices are "based on biology but not on clinical evidence" and that "science is not on n = 1"; a London clinic founder reported patients arriving to ask for "the Blueprint" before any of their own biomarkers had been measured.⁹

Johnson and his science team answered in the same feature that randomized trials remain the gold standard for single interventions but that "we regard n-of-1 measurement as the next frontier", claiming "first-in-human observations" beyond the published literature.⁹ That position places Blueprint at the extreme end of the Quantified self movement and of Biohacking and grinders more broadly, and it is the core of the dispute: dense measurement of one person can generate hypotheses, but without controls it cannot test them.

§Outlook

Johnson's team told Nature that the protocol's new focus is to take chronic conditions that medicine treats as "manageable but not treatable" and make them treatable with advanced diagnostics and personalised therapy.⁹ Weeks after the feature appeared, Johnson disclosed that he has autoimmune gastritis, a condition reported as incurable in which the immune system attacks the stomach lining. He said it was found in May 2026 after eleven years of unexplained low ferritin, that his measurements had been picking up "early signals" without anyone having "connected the dots", and that his team would try to "solve" it.¹⁰

The protocol therefore enters its sixth year as a well-funded consumer brand, a free public document, and a personal experiment whose promised peer-reviewed results have not appeared. Whether its measurements ever yield a claim that can be tested in other people, under controlled conditions, is the question it has not yet answered.

§See also

• Bryan Johnson
• Quantified self
• Biohacking and grinders
• Epigenetic clocks
• Aging biomarkers
• Consumer blood testing
• Healthspan
• Longevity escape velocity

§References