Bryan Johnson has made headlines around the world in his quest to live forever, but his plan has just hit a major snag as he revealed a devastating health issue.
The 48-year-old tech founder and biohacker shared on social media that he has an incurable auto-immune disease called Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG) where his “stomach is eating itself”.
He is not taking it lying down though, saying he would “try and solve [the condition],” which he says only two to five per cent of people have.
He said that while he now makes headlines from optimising everything you could possibly think of, he hasn’t always had a healthy lifestyle.
“As a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, and gobbled down fast food. I had a few healthy years in my early 20s but then became a young father of three and began building a business,” he said.
“Juggling that stress and grind, I let my health slip and gained 40lbs (18kg). Within a few years I’d fallen into a deep, chronic depression.
“Somewhere in that timeline, my body began developing an auto-immune process affecting my thyroid and then my stomach lining.”
He said his hypothyroidism (when your thyroid gland fails to produce enough thyroid hormones) was diagnosed when he was 21 years old with a routine blood draw.
“That enabled me to begin proactive management, supplementing levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid. They are the hormones my body should be producing on its own but wasn’t,” he said.
“By taking these pills daily, my body was able to operate as though my thyroid was functioning properly. What I didn’t know was that something else was going on inside my body: my stomach had begun attacking itself. But there was no routine test to find out and I didn’t have any symptoms.
“I just discovered it in May. I’m unsure how long I’ve had it. AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anaemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects.”
People with AIG typically don’t show notable symptoms, which can include abdominal pain, iron deficiency, loss of appetite, nausea or unexplained weight loss.
And the outlook is grim, with the tech mogul writing that “standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition.”
Despite taking an iron supplement, Johnson’s ferritin levels remained below normal, prompting a series of medical tests to determine the cause and explain why his “iron kept disappearing.”
A clean colonoscopy ruled out colon cancer, so his medical team moved on to a bi-directional endoscopy to look at the entire intestinal tract, along with blood biomarkers.
Thyroid disorders are highly common in Australia, affecting 1 in 10 Australians. Each year, around 60,000 new cases are diagnosed, and experts estimate that over 1 million Australians are living with undiagnosed thyroid conditions. Women are disproportionately affected, being up to 10 times more likely to develop the condition than men.
The blood results showed elevated levels of anti-parietal-cells-antibodies, which pointed towards AIG, as the condition occurs when antibodies attack healthy stomach cells, often in those with a family history or another auto-immune disease like auto-immune thyroid disease.
But the final piece of the puzzle was stomach biopsies that showed early weakening of the stomach lining — clear early signs of auto-immune gastritis.
Johnson further explained that each of his issues — the iron deficiency, his auto-immune thyroid disease and the AIG driving the low iron — were linked and made each one difficult to fix.
He noted that “iron and thyroid feed each other both ways, low iron impairs the conversion of thyroid hormone into its active form and an underactive thyroid impairs how the body uses iron.”
While auto-immune gastritis cannot be cured, it can be managed via B12 injections or iron infusions, the latter of which Johnson received a “1,000 mg Monoferric iron infusion.”
But that won’t stop him from trying to solve the condition, with a plan to routinely monitor several diagnostics, including ferritin and iron, B12 and chromogranin A. Gastrin.
Additionally, his team will perform repeat biopsies and develop experimental intervention treatments depending on the results.
Harsh call after visiting Australia
Mr Johnson’s health news came shortly after he returned from a trip to Australia.
He said Aussies have “older looking skin”, claiming the country’s intense sun aged his own skin by 5 per cent in just one week.
He made the comments after a week-long visit to his girlfriend Kate Tolo’s family in Queensland.
“The Australian sun increased my skin ageing by 5 per cent (via UV damage and spots),” Mr Johnson told his followers, adding that the ageing happened even though he had used his umbrella while in the sun and “protected my skin during peak UV”.
Mr Johnson triggered a mixture of memes and mockery last month when he appeared in an interview at the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas with an umbrella on a rainless day.
“90 per cent of visible skin ageing is from the sun. So this is a UV umbrella protecting me from the sun,” he explained, before copping criticism from the likes of American commentator Matt Walsh, who wrote that he would “rather be dead than live my life like this”.
To back up his claims about Australia, Mr Johnson cited a 2017 study by Monash University that showed Australian women reported severe ageing 10 to 20 years earlier than US women.
“Australians get more intense UV radiation,” he wrote.
“For example, during summer, the Earth’s orbit puts the Southern Hemisphere closer to the sun, making the sun stronger than in most of the US.”
Even outside of the Southern Hemisphere summer, Australia was almost a “perfect storm” for UV exposure, due to thinner ozone overhead, cleaner air allowing UV to penetrate deeper, and high solar elevation angles due to the country’s relatively low latitude.
“This is particularly true in Queensland, where proximity to the equator further amplifies UV intensity.
“Most people in Queensland live roughly at 17–28 degrees from the equator, compared with 34 degrees for Los Angeles, allowing the sun to reach significantly higher elevations in the sky and resulting in more intense UV radiation at ground level.”
Up to 90 per cent of visible facial ageing is from UV exposure, said the biohacker, who claims he has reversed his “skin age by the equivalent of 9 years” since starting his anti-ageing project.
“The sun is great. You want the right amount. Not too much and not too little.”
The data confirms Australia has the highest per capita rate of skin cancer in the world, with about two in three Australians diagnosed by the age of 70, according to the Melanoma & Skin Cancer Advocacy Network.
Mr Johnson made headlines last month when he made a shocking reveal about the top-tier quality of his 30-year-old girlfriend’s privates.
In an unusual goodnight to his 1.4 million X followers, Mr Johnson wrote: “Just gave Kate oral sex. Goodnight, everyone,” before sharing Ms Tolo’s vaginal microbiome report and praising it as being in the “top 1 per cent of all vaginas”.
“Her sample is dominated by the single most protective bacterial species a vagina can host (Lactobacillus crispatus),” he added.
“Only about 25-30 per cent of reproductive-age women globally are L. crispatus-dominant, and dominant usually means above 50 per cent. Kate is at 98.7 per cent.”
Ms Tolo later weighed in, acknowledging that while Johnson’s post “seems unhinged,” oral sex deserves more discourse because HPV has become the leading cause of oropharyngeal cancers in the US.
The bacteria in saliva could also disrupt the vaginal microbiome, she wrote.
“I’m grateful I have a partner who takes my health, his health and our collective health seriously.”
