Bryan Johnson on Sperm Health, Biomarkers, and Measuring One Body as Much as Possible
Bryan Johnson
In this episode, Bryan Johnson, Blueprint co-founder Kate Tolo, and Dr. Mike Mallin, Johnson's lead physician, review two sets of results. The first is a new series of sperm health measurements. The second is a public release of more than 60 of Johnson's biomarkers. Johnson's central argument is that measuring the whole body intensively, and then changing behavior based on the data, can produce "optimal" results across hundreds of markers at once. He says this has made him, as far as he can tell, the most measured human in history and possibly the person with the best comprehensive biomarkers in the world. The conversation also covers where the numbers fell short and what the team thinks caused those misses.
Why talking about sperm feels taboo
The episode starts with the awkwardness of the subject. Tolo says she blushed simply raising it. She sees this as odd, because men and women are constantly assessing each other's genetic fitness, often unconsciously, and sperm health is a direct indicator of overall health. She attributes her reaction to a deep-seated social taboo against discussing sexual health in public, even though she and the others have talked frankly about almost everything for years.
Johnson says he feels no such hesitation. He would gladly ask other men about their nighttime erections and help them fix any problems. Asked whether he had to unlearn restraint from his Mormon upbringing, he describes a culture where everything was tightly controlled and crossing a line cost social status. Having no filter now feels liberating to him. He frames his openness as being in other people's interest, because taboos keep people from improving their health.
The starting point: a population-wide decline
Tolo summarizes a tweet from Johnson. According to that tweet, sperm health as a species has fallen by about half over roughly the last 50 years, and global averages have dropped by more than 50% since 1973. She presents Johnson's results as evidence that ideal sperm health is still achievable despite that trend. She also speaks directly to male listeners, saying it is highly likely they have experienced some of this decline, and promises that female reproductive health will be covered in a later episode. She mentions that some of her own markers have already been measured.
Measuring sperm more systematically
Johnson explains that the team realized a few months earlier that it had not measured sperm as rigorously as other systems. He had only two or three sperm measurements over the previous three years. In his view, Blueprint's main value is seeing how biomarkers respond to specific interventions: whether sauna lowers or improves sperm quality, or what increased exercise capacity does to a given marker. That requires a higher sampling frequency. So over a 90-day period the team collected what he describes as six samples to establish a baseline. Mallin later describes it as five consecutive measurements from January to April. Mallin says the data were quite consistent across that run.
Tolo reads the figures, comparing them with typical values for a man of Johnson's age. She describes him as 45 during this exchange, while Johnson elsewhere gives his age as 47.
| Measure | What it means | Typical | Johnson | |---|---|---|---| | Sperm count | Number of sperm in a sample | 80 million | 165 million | | Motility | How much the sperm move | 35% | 43% | | Normal morphology | Share of sperm with normal shape | under 5% | 8% |
Tolo describes morphology, half-jokingly, as how "messed up" the sperm are, and Mallin confirms her plain-language readings. Johnson sums it up: more sperm, more of them moving properly, fewer abnormal. Tolo puts his results at roughly double the average and at least around four times the WHO minimums. Johnson says that if the results are converted to a biological age, his sperm health resembles that of a man in his early twenties.
When asked about historical data, Johnson says his first sample was taken in 2022, so there is nothing from 10 to 20 years ago. Mallin adds that there is not enough data yet to connect sperm quality to specific past therapies, which is what the team is now trying to do. Johnson regrets not measuring earlier, because he would have liked to see how caloric restriction and nutrition changes affected sperm.
Later in the episode, Johnson reads calculations from a team member comparing 2023 with 2025:
- concentration up 147%
- motile sperm count up 32.5%
- sperm with normal morphology up 233%
He admits there is little comparison data. Still, he takes these numbers as a sign that whatever the team did during those two years made a significant difference.
The sauna experiment and testicular cooling
Now that measurement is systematic, the team plans to use it to test sauna. Tolo notes that she has heard car seat warmers can affect sperm quality. Because Johnson has started a sauna protocol that will naturally heat his testicles, the team wants to see whether sauna has a measurable effect. They plan to use ice protection as much as possible.
Johnson describes the design. He will cool his testicles during the first two weeks, stop for two weeks, and take measurements in both phases to compare the results. For now he is improvising with various cooling pads he has at home, and he says he needs a proper, systematic solution. Tolo asks him to share the cooling protocol publicly. This part of the episode describes an experiment that is planned or has just begun. No results are reported.
Sperm as a composite marker of whole-body health
Johnson argues that sperm health is not an isolated metric. It reflects how the whole body is doing, and hormones cannot be off while sperm health stays excellent. He therefore treats his "twenty-something" sperm results as evidence that his overall protocol is working.
Mallin compares this to bone mineral density, which the team discussed in the previous episode as a proxy for overall health, and breaks the sperm measures down by what each one reflects:
- Sperm count has been linked to cardiovascular disease risk and reflects overall hormone status, including FSH, LH, and testosterone.
- Motility relates directly to mitochondrial function. Better mitochondrial function means more mobile sperm.
- DNA fragmentation, which the team also tests, relates to inflammation and reactive oxygen species.
Mallin also points out a difference in time horizon. Serum markers such as CRP for inflammation or glutathione for oxidative stress are snapshots that can change within hours. Sperm and bone mineral density reflect health over months or even years, so they give a longer view of how someone actually lives day to day. Johnson connects this to the idea that health habits compound. People notice quick gains, such as from cutting sugar or sleeping better for a few days, but he says he had no intuition for how much systematic habits accumulate over years. He mentions that the skeleton rebuilds itself roughly every 10 years.
Johnson uses these two markers together to support his whole-body argument. If his bone mineral density is in the 99.8th percentile and his sperm health matches a man in his twenties, then in his view everything from inflammation to hormones must be working well, or those results would not be possible.
What caused the decline, and what individuals can do
Tolo notes that testing is available from several companies for about $200–$300, and some will freeze sperm for later IVF use. Johnson asks Mallin what people can do, pointing out that he is 47, lives in the modern world, and still exceeds 1973 levels.
Mallin approaches the question by asking what has changed since the 1970s. He lists several candidate causes:
- Toxins such as phthalates, BPA, and PFAS, which he says have anti-androgenic effects that lower hormone levels and also cause inflammation and oxidative stress.
- Diet, with higher rates of obesity and insulin resistance driving inflammation, which he says leads the testicles to produce less sperm.
- Heat from laptops. He offers this as his own speculation, noting that it is literally in the word "laptop."
- Less sleep, as people watch TV later and sleep less than they used to.
- Smoking and alcohol, which remain relatively common and add to reactive oxygen species.
Mallin summarizes the situation as society being set up to kill your sperm, so people have to actively resist it. His recommendations overlap heavily with the podcast's usual themes:
- metabolic health, regular exercise, and an appropriate diet
- consistent sleep and less stress
- keeping laptops off the lap
- a sauna protocol that keeps the testicles cooler
Asked about tight underwear, Mallin says it warms the testicles by holding them closer to the body. The testicles sit outside the body for a reason, he says, so they need to breathe. Johnson says he wears loose cotton boxers.
Johnson adds encouragement. If a test result is disappointing, the body can recover, and he offers himself as an example of someone who wrecked his health through about 20 years as an entrepreneur and then bounced back.
How "outmeasuring everything" began
Johnson then explains the thinking behind the full biomarker release. When he entered longevity, he says the most obvious thing was that everyone disagreed about everything. Each expert had a narrow focus and personal opinions, so asking someone what to do was not a real option for a non-expert. At the time he was building the brain interface company Kernel, and he says the solution seemed obvious: outmeasure everything and follow the data.
The team did every measurement it could find that gave insight into the biological age of a body part or system. Beyond blood draws and MRIs, the tests he lists include:
- nerve sensitivity testing
- a professional-grade hearing test
- eye measurements of the optic nerve and nerve fibers
- many physical fitness tests
- counts of follicles under the skin and microscopic examination of hair
- 3D imaging of his face to track changes over time
Oral health: gum attachment loss and pocket depth
Johnson spends a long digression on his gums as an example of this approach. He explains that two of the variables used to assess oral health are attachment loss and pocket depth, which together describe how tightly the gums hold the teeth. He believes two things hurt his gum health. The first was a very high-sugar diet as a child. The second was years of nighttime teeth grinding (bruxism) during a period of chronic depression while raising young children. He did not correct the grinding because he never got proper advice. He now uses a SomnoDent device, but he says those years wore down his teeth and worsened attachment loss and pocket depth.
He found a dentist, and together they set out to "biologically age" his gums. Scores ranged from 1 to 4, where you want to be at 2 or below, and he thinks a few sites may even have been 5s. To correct this, they combined two treatments:
- PRP with Emdogain. They drew his blood, centrifuged it, concentrated the growth factors in the plasma, and reinjected it together with Emdogain, a product he describes as containing growth factors derived from pigs and used in dentistry for post-surgical healing.
- A mouth-specific surgical adhesive. Johnson describes this as a superglue made for the mouth, used to "glue" the gums back to the teeth.
The transcript is garbled on the exact numbers, and Johnson says he does not remember the precise data. By his account, the four-millimeter pockets improved and his attachment loss and pocket depth ended up around 2. He did the procedure about three times and describes it as unpleasant and a lot of work. He says it turned his oral health back 15 to 20 years, to roughly a teenager's level. According to Johnson, his dentist told him his gums were healthier than those of the teenagers the dentist sees, and that the dentist could not make them bleed no matter how hard he tried. They also measured plaque index as another biological-age marker.
Claiming to be the most measured, and possibly the healthiest, person
Returning to the main topic, Johnson says this process made him, in his view, the most measured person in human history, with more biological-age measurements than anyone who has ever lived. He says the data provided a wealth of insight into what to do, and the team then used scientific evidence to optimize those markers.
He answers early confusion about his project with an analogy. Put a 90-year-old next to a 2-year-old and anyone can tell which is which. Put a 35-year-old next to a 34-year-old and they cannot. In the same way, he argues, organs have structural and functional biological ages. A heart's function and cellular structure can reveal its biological age, and the team tried to assess this across the entire body.
The previous month, the team published more than 60 biomarkers. Johnson says they were chosen because they rank among the most predictive of all-cause mortality, although he has many more. The team argued that his biomarkers are the best of anyone in the world, not just among 47-year-olds. Johnson admits he is unsure how to think about that claim, since sampling everyone might turn up people with better numbers. However, he says he honestly believes that out of 8 billion people, he could have the best comprehensive biomarkers at 47.
He adds that the point is not to be number one. Society ranks the fastest person and the richest person but has never had a quantifiable ranking of the healthiest person, which has always been a subjective judgment. He calls this a new game and a new way to gain status and power through quantified benchmarks. Tolo later says that if someone else published as much data and proved they had better markers, that would be a win for the community, and a formal competition would be the best possible outcome.
Why being "optimal across the board" is hard
Tolo restates the approach in her own words. Measurements from across the body can be plotted against age. For example, pocket depth increases with age, so a person's gums can be compared with their chronological age. These comparisons then serve as benchmarks for judging whether a therapy works. She estimates the team has collected probably hundreds of thousands of measurements on Johnson. First the team built a comprehensive picture of his predicted age. Then it applied existing therapies until his markers reached optimal ranges. She clarifies that this does not mean he is perfect in every way. Her point is that keeping hundreds of markers in good ranges at the same time is extremely difficult. A person might have an excellent VO2 max but high cholesterol, poor oral health, or hair loss.
Johnson adds that most people lack intuition about this because few have been measured extensively. If you pulled someone off the street and ran a blood test, he says, they would probably have some good markers and some very bad ones, likely more bad than good, with high highs and low lows. Tolo argues that no single philosophy, such as a carnivore diet, can address everything. That is why they come back to measurement, which she says is almost "the intervention" itself.
N-of-1 and "M": combining study size with measurement count
Mallin expands on Tolo's point. Measurement first turns subjective impressions into objective data: "I feel better eating a stick of butter" should be checked against the data. That remark set off a joking exchange about butter lovers who will flood the comments.
Mallin's second point is that published clinical research also has to be tested at the individual level. For example, rapamycin may extend lifespan, but that does not mean it works for everyone or for Johnson in particular. He also stresses measuring multiple markers for the same domain. For inflammation, that means tracking TNF-alpha, S100, and others alongside CRP, so that disease and poor health have nowhere to hide. Mallin, who says he has also cared for professional athletes, says Johnson is tested more than athletes who earn millions from their bodies, and that the level of detail is unprecedented.
Tolo gives an example of how broad measurement can reveal hidden downsides. Johnson tried what the transcript suggests was a form of Ozempic for its potential longevity benefits. His resting heart rate rose and his HRV fell. Tolo points out that someone could take the same drug, feel more energetic, run more, and improve their VO2 max without ever seeing those signals. Because every intervention is checked across hundreds of markers, red flags surface. On that basis she suggests that following Johnson's protocol is a relatively safe route.
Johnson responds to the criticism that his results only apply to him. Most of what the team has found, he argues, are population-level truths. Going to bed at the same time every night benefits everyone. Lowering your resting heart rate before sleep also helps, which means eating earlier and lighter, reducing stress, and avoiding fights before bed. These are things most people already know from experience.
Tolo proposes a framework based on this. Science usually looks at N, the number of study participants. She suggests also looking at M, the number of measurements taken on each person. A study with N = 1,000 that measures only one thing cannot show an intervention's effect on everything else. The team's approach, she says, applies findings from large-N studies to a single person, with an M in the thousands. She calls this pairing possibly the best form of science that can be done on an individual. She adds that since the major population-level interventions have now been tested and Johnson has a rich baseline, the team is exploring more esoteric interventions that lack population-level evidence.
RCTs and their limits for individuals
Johnson also answers the criticism that what they do is not science. People have practical problems, he says, such as fertility, autoimmune disease, or unexplained headaches. Scientific evidence is the best starting point, and it comes in tiers, with RCTs at the top. He then asks Mallin to explain RCTs.
Mallin calls the randomized controlled trial the most important type of data for population-level health and essential for medicine. He gives a hypothetical: in an RCT with 100 participants, an intervention helps 55 people and does nothing or harms 45. If the statistics work out, the headline conclusion is that the intervention has a positive effect. But at the individual level, the chance of benefit is only 55%. Without measurement, he says, interventions can be applied to people for whom they do not work, and 45% is not zero. He emphasizes that he is not dismissing RCTs, which society needs. His point is that personal decisions are more complex.
Johnson says he is grateful that the interventions with the biggest impact are mostly accessible and within people's control: sleep, diet, and exercise. He acknowledges they are hard to maintain. Mallin says sleep is clearly necessary and exercise is too, though the best type is debatable. Diet, he says, is where the religious fervor comes out, and it is a wild west. Tolo notes that food is hard because many people have food addictions or disordered eating and cannot simply quit food. She points to the Don't Die food guide as a starting point, generally advising people to avoid sugar and fried foods. With food, she says, the work is mostly limiting harmful things. With exercise and sleep, it is mostly actively getting enough.
Highlights from the published biomarkers
Johnson describes the release as a large data drop. It includes more than 60 biomarkers, 12-month data with averages, and the raw lab reports. He goes through some highlights himself:
- Speed of aging. He uses PACE, an epigenetic test. Johnson says the team invested heavily in epigenetic measurement years ago, clinical evidence has accumulated in the past couple of years, and PACE is now among the most clinically validated pan-tissue epigenetic tests. His best three-test average is 0.54, which he calls number one in the world, and his most recent best is 0.48. He interprets this as aging at roughly half the normal rate and the lowest known score among people competing on this test.
- Telomere length. He describes telomeres as the end caps of chromosomes and says his length is equivalent to a 10- to 15-year-old's, based on a dataset of 15,000 samples from SpectraCell.
- Telomerase activity, meaning how much the telomeres rejuvenate, is comparable to a 12-year-old's.
Mallin highlights this as an example of measuring one concept, overall age, with several metrics. He applies the same logic to inflammation. Johnson's high-sensitivity CRP has been undetectable across several tests. Mallin says chronically elevated hs-CRP is associated with about a 150% higher risk of death, which makes it one of the markers he values most when assessing overall health. He adds that TNF-alpha and IL-6 should also be checked. Johnson notes that his CRP had been low for years but had never before been undetectable. Mallin explains that undetectable means the level is below what the machine can measure, reported as something like under 0.3, and the true value could be 0.1 or even zero. They mention a detection limit of around 0.15 and note that it varies by lab.
Tolo recaps other results:
- bone mineral density in the top 99.8%
- cardiovascular fitness in the top 85th percentile of 18-year-olds
- high testosterone despite caloric restriction and without TRT
She says the team had to rebut claims that he was on TRT, because his numbers seemed hard to believe, especially for a vegan.
Rebutting a carnivore advocate and a heavy-metals influencer
Johnson recounts how one of the most outspoken carnivore advocates publicly accused him of lying. That person's position was that high testosterone is impossible on a plant-based, calorie-restricted diet, and they suggested Johnson must be on testosterone replacement. They also said that if it were true, Johnson would be the first person they had ever seen achieve it. Johnson clarifies that he is plant-based plus collagen peptides.
He says he called the person and showed his lab reports in real time. Normal LH and FSH levels, he explained, are evidence that his testosterone is natural. By Johnson's account, the person was stunned and had never seen such results. Johnson's takeaway is that people hold preconceived ideas about what the body can do without good reasons for them.
Tolo describes a similar exchange. An influencer who works hard to avoid heavy metals insisted Johnson could not have lower levels than they did. When the results were shown on screen, Johnson's levels were lower. Tolo lists the areas covered so far: speed of aging (DNA methylation), fertility, telomeres, bone health, cardiovascular fitness, inflammation, hormones, and sleep. Her key point is that getting all of these not just into optimal ranges but into top-percentile ranges at the same time is the hard part. She notes these are only a handful of the markers and that the lab PDFs are on Twitter for anyone who wants to analyze them.
Where the results fell short
Johnson then asks Mallin to cover the mediocre or weak results.
Glutathione came in low at 105 micrograms per milliliter. Mallin says Johnson had just stopped taking NAC. He describes this as experimenting with cycling off the supplement to trigger a hormetic response, which he personally supports, and the test happened right at the start of that break. Johnson recalls a different reason for stopping: the team worried NAC might blunt some of the effects of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). His 12-month average is 210, and this was the first low result. Mallin adds that HBOT consumes glutathione and likely increases its production, so stopping NAC during HBOT may have been a "double whammy," which he says fits the mechanism.
LDL and ApoB may have been pushed too low. Mallin says Johnson had just started Repatha while also taking Zetia, and the combination drove the numbers quite low. He cites studies suggesting that below about 50, ApoB offers no further benefit for preventing cardiovascular disease progression, so they may ease off. Johnson's latest ApoB was 52, which Mallin calls solid for cardiovascular disease. Mallin notes that unlike a typical blood test, finding problems in Johnson's results requires real searching.
Vitamin D came in high. Johnson says his levels had hovered stubbornly around 40–50 for years no matter how much he took, then jumped to 134 over the past 90 days. Above 100 is excessive, so they plan to bring it down, and he has stopped his 5,000 IU daily dose. The team's working hypothesis is that HBOT may have greatly improved his microbiome, which in turn improved absorption of vitamin D and other nutrients. Johnson presents this as a hypothesis, not a confirmed explanation. He notes the rise coincided with his HBOT sessions and increased across successive blood draws, and he says the team will check whether microbiome improvements actually increased absorption. Because vitamin D is fat-soluble, he expects it to take a few months to return to normal.
Tolo adds that the team's internal analysis and comments on each marker, including hypotheses about what is happening, are also posted online.
Next steps: analyzing viewers' data
At the end, Johnson suggests a future episode on how the team thinks about and adjusts specific markers, such as a particular cholesterol marker. He believes many people get blood results back and do not know what to do next. Tolo proposes analyzing health data submitted by a viewer the team knows nothing about, with the person's consent and in a HIPAA-compliant way, and asks interested viewers to comment. Johnson also suggests a "roast my protocol" segment, in which viewers send in their health routines for the team to assess. Neither idea is committed to in the episode, and both are left as open invitations to the audience.
So today we're talking about biomarkers. We're going to go through Bryan's general full biomarker overview, which is going to be awesome cuz the amount of detail and layers that we put out there is insane. And then we're also going to cover your sperm health, Bryan, which, you know, that's an exciting topic that, you know, we talk about. We'll see how that goes. So that's exciting.
I was thinking about my role in that conversation and being like, huh, how am I going to contribute to this conversation, but we'll poke around. I mean, basically, but right, like these are all... these are what people do. Like men are assessing women for genetic fitness. Women are assessing men for genetic fitness. Like we have these algorithms running all the time, and whether or not we can pinpoint the exact data, we're running these algorithms all the time, like who we are with, who we work with. So yeah, I would say like that's absolutely just part of the natural state. We're just actually giving numbers to what we're doing. And you mean unconsciously too, right? Like unconsciously evaluating for fitness.
Yeah, right. And we don't talk about it, ironically, even though it's probably one of the things we run more frequently. So it's funny, like I started, I brought it up and then I immediately started blushing, like that's how little we talk about these topics, which is so silly because it is a direct indicator of overall health.
I mean, that's interesting you would blush, Kate, because we've been in the trenches talking about literally everything for years. So was it just that we'd be on a podcast talking about it, so it's like a public conversation about it?
Yeah. Yeah. There's some, I guess, deep-seated taboo around sperm, sexual health. Like even if I can act one way and be like, "Oh, it's like no big deal or whatever," there's still just this entrenched societal thing around like we don't talk about these topics in public. Mike, what's your take? Do you feel something similar or do you feel different?
I plan on blushing as well. It will look really nice with your clothes. It's going to match my shirt. My face is going to match my shirt by the time we're done with this conversation, for sure. Yeah, it's awkward, right? I mean, like, men rarely talk about other men's sperm. When was the last time you talked about someone else's sperm, right?
You know, honestly, I would love to. Like, it's like a missed opportunity. I've been like, you guys, where's everyone at? Like, why can't... why can you measure your biomarkers so I can ask you some questions? Like, why? I feel zero social hindrance to talk about these things. Like if someone wants to talk about nighttime boners, I'm like, how are you doing? Like how are you doing? And if you're not doing well, let's talk about how you're going to do better. Oh my god. I mean, I want people... I want them to thrive and to have phenomenal nighttime tumescence, and if they're not, help them solve the problems.
Did you have to unlearn this coming from Mormon culture? It definitely... where everything has to be so tightly controlled, and if you walk over the line you trigger all these social repercussions of status loss. So yeah, I mean it just feels so liberating that I don't have any filter now. It's all there, and honestly I think I feel that way because it's genuinely in people's best interest to learn about this. It's entirely about trying to help the person out. And these taboos keep people from achieving a better self.
Definitely. I wonder if people are gonna feel awkward listening to this. I don't think so. That's the weird thing. It's like when you're on your own and you're listening to other people, it's not vulnerable for them. Yeah. Yeah. Right. We shall see. Yeah. That's right. Let us know in the comments how you feel right now. Uncomfortable or comfortable.
So, the TL;DR here is that Bryan, you put out a tweet and essentially sperm health as a species has declined by half in the last 50 years, which is crazy. This is like a generational change that's happening, right? And then amongst that, you've still been able to maintain insane sperm quality metrics. And so that says even though our society is changing, you can still achieve ideal sperm health during that time. So, can you, Mike or Bryan, I don't know what would be more comfortable, talk us through what metrics you guys were looking at and what results you got?
Yeah. Mike, do you want to do the overview on this? I think you should do it. It's your sperm. Okay. He doesn't want to blush.
Okay. We have been trying to measure everything about my body, and we've tried to be extremely rigorous and meticulous, and we realized a few months ago that we have not been measuring sperm as robustly as we would have liked. So I have I think two, maybe three measurements over the past three years that I did with sperm. But what we really wanted was a much higher frequency, because we wanted to see what impact various therapies and protocols would have on sperm, because I think the big value of Blueprint is, when you do a given thing, how do biomarkers change, right? So if you do sauna, for example, does it lower sperm quality or does it improve it? If you increase exercise capacity, does it have a certain effect on whatever biomarker? So, we had this question about sperm. So, we said, "All right, we're going to get a robust data set." So, over a 90-day period of time, we did, let's see, six measurements, and we got my sperm baseline with six different samples.
And can I just jump in here? If you're listening at home, so you're a male and you're listening at home, it's highly likely that you've fallen into this category where you've experienced some sort of sperm decline in this cohort, because it is such a wide-reaching situation that across the last 50 years it's declined so much. So we'll go through what Bryan has done to increase his sperm count as well across time. And same thing for women as... Right. Right. As well, like we'll be looking into female reproductive health. I've had some markers measured which we can share as well in another podcast.
Okay. So Bryan, let's look at your actual data, because we love to go off of measurement. So population level has declined by half. The average current typical amount of swimmers, so the amount of sperm in a sperm sample for a 45-year-old male, which you are, is 80 million, and yours is 165 million. So substantially more. Motility, which is movement. Is that right, Mike? Yeah, that's right. It's how much the sperm's moving. Okay, great. The typical for that age group is 35%. Yours is 43%. So again, above average. And the morphology, which is like the amount of [ __ ] upness of the sperm. Is that right? Yeah, that's the medical term. Yeah. Okay, great. I got it. So typical is... is it less than 5%? Is that right, Mike? I never know how to read those lines so bad. Less than 5%, and yours is 8%. Does that mean you're above average in morphology, Bryan?
That's right. Yeah. So, overall you have more swimmers that are not [ __ ] up, but because you've got so much, the percentage is higher. Am I on? Yeah. Basically, I have more swimmers, more are moving properly, and less are [ __ ] up. Yeah. I think that's a good summary.
Is that a good... So, I love this actually, because this is probably how people read these tweets. Like most people, obviously, we've got a lot of people who are really deep in the science community and they're like, "Kate, this is like basic sperm health stuff." But as a newbie here, that's how I'd read that. Cool. So you're anywhere between double average-ish and then around four times minimum for WHO standards.
Yeah. If we biologically age this, I think I have the sperm health of an early 20-year-old or early 20-something. Cool. Did you have historical information on this? Sadly no. My first sample was in 2022, but I don't have it from 10, 15, 20 years ago.
Have you seen any changes across time in your sperm quality? You know, we don't really have good enough measurements. So, looking back through the measurements, we did five consecutive measurements starting in January and then finishing up in April. So, we have a good run now, and the data was actually pretty consistent. But no, sadly, we don't have enough data to make relationships with other therapies, which is what we're trying to do now. Now that we're doing this systematically, like, you know, we mentioned we just started sauna, and so now we get to see the real-time impact of sauna on sperm, whether you cool the testicles during sauna or whether you let them heat up. So now we're finally in the groove. So I guess I wish we could go back in time and have measured this much more robustly, because it would be cool to see the effects of caloric restriction and nutrition changes, all the therapies we've done. We just haven't had it. So yeah, we're correcting for that now and getting the data.
Yeah, it's so funny how typically, to really be able to see the effect, you want to know what your baseline is. So, it's sad we didn't get that. I've definitely heard before that car seat warmers will affect sperm quality. And so, what Bryan's referring to here is we are going on a sauna protocol. His balls are naturally going to get heated up in the sauna. And so, it'll be really interesting to see if there's an effect from that. We're going to do ice protection as much as possible to avoid it. But it'll be almost like retroactively seeing how much your sperm is impacted by things external to your rigorous lifestyle now.
Yeah. And on the sperm health protocol, we're doing icing for the first two weeks. I'm wearing an ice diaper. Not really, but kind of a testicular... Blushing? No, that was just laughing. Aggressive laughing. I'm doing testicular cooling. Yeah. Testicular chilling. Blue balls. Yeah, we'll do that blue balls protocol for two weeks, and then we'll go off two weeks and we'll make measurements and see what happens. Make sure you share your testicular cooling protocol with everyone. Exactly. You know, currently I've pieced this thing together with various cooling pads or cooling things I have at the house, but I need to really legit solve it through some kind of systematic process.
But Mike, okay, so all right, so my sperm health is really good. So this is really relevant, because sperm health does not sit in isolation. It is a product of the whole body. So if your body is not doing well in other areas, your sperm health is not going to be doing well. It's like your hormones can't be off and sperm's doing great. It really is like a composite marker of how you're doing across your entire body. So, the fact that I'm basically like 20-year-old-ish on sperm health does represent that holistically with my other markers. It makes sense if you go through my biomarkers. This is evidence that things are working really well. Is that fair?
It reminds me of bone marrow, bone mineral density, that we talked about on the last podcast. Basically as a metric of, or a proxy to, overall health. And when you think about it, it sort of makes sense. We can even break it down. So number of sperm, right, has been directly related with cardiovascular disease risk, right, and has to do with, you know, total hormone burden: what's your follicle-stimulating hormone and your luteinizing hormone, your testosterone, how your hormones are, you know, increasing sperm production. And then motility is directly related to how well your mitochondria function. So the better the mitochondria function, the more mobile the sperm are. And then one of the other metrics we're looking at with your sperm testing is actually DNA fragmentation. And that's directly related to inflammation and to reactive oxygen species. So we're actually getting these little windows into different aspects of your health just by looking at sperm function and total count. It's pretty cool.
This will bridge really well to our next topic, which we're not going to go there yet, but we've been trying to help everyone understand that your body's organs and biological systems work in tandem, and that when you think about health and wellness, it's not going to be sufficient to focus on one thing. You need to think about a whole-body health protocol, and then your markers will represent that. So, if my total bone mineral density is in the top 99.8 percentile of all people, and also sperm health is, you know, 20-something years of age, then those are really great markers that my whole body, from inflammation to hormones to everything, is working really, really well. Otherwise those markers are not going to be the case.
Yeah, I think it's really cool to see on sperm health, Mike. So people can get tested, and I think several companies offer this test, and it's like $200 or $300, and these companies will even freeze your sperm for you if you want to save it for IVF. You can get it tested for a fairly low cost. And then Mike, what can people do for their sperm health? If global population averages have dropped by over 50% since 1973, what can people be doing proactively? Because I guess I'm showing that you can be 47 years old and live in the modern world and have better levels than 1973, and, you know, 20-plus years younger than my chronological age. So, we're doing it. What can others do to think about and care for their sperm health?
Well, I think one way to think about it is, historically, what has changed since the 1970s that could account for the reduction in sperm health? And I think there's a few things that are worth talking about. So, toxins would be one of them. Phthalates, BPA, PFAS, things like that are causing toxicity, which have these anti-androgenic, so anti-hormonal, effects, where they actually decrease your hormones, and they also cause inflammation and oxidative stress, which is going to reduce the production and the quality of the sperm. Also diet has changed quite a bit. There's much greater obesity and insulin resistance causing inflammation. That inflammation then leads to basically a reduction in sperm production. So the testicles just produce less sperm because of the increased inflammation.
Interesting, like I kind of wonder if laptops have something to do with it. You know, you see people sitting with laptops in their laps all the time; it's literally in the word laptop. And they get hot, right, and that increases heat, which could very well be reducing sperm production. And then other basic things, like, you know, I think our society now sleeps less. People watch TV later, they get less total sleep than they used to. Smoking, alcohol, still at relatively high levels, causing more toxic production, extra reactive oxygen species. So society is set up to kill your sperm, and you have to subvert that. You have to somehow stop that and prevent the destruction of them. And the ways to do that are, you know, ironically, the things that we talk about on most of these podcasts, right? It's metabolic health, regular exercise and appropriate diet, and sleeping consistently, and reducing your stress. Not keeping your laptop in your lap, maybe having a protocol for using the sauna, keeping your testicles cooler. All those things are going to have massive impacts on sperm health, sperm production.
I've heard not wearing tight underwear; is that actually a thing or is that...? Yeah, that will actually warm up your testicles a little bit. Yeah. So it keeps them closer to the body. They are not inside the body for a reason, right? They've got to breathe. So you've got to let them breathe if you want them to work. It does actually matter. I mean
Blushworthy question, Bryan, but what kind of underwear do you wear? I wear boxers. I wear cotton boxers. Those are loose. Is that right? Yeah, that's right.
So I don't have a lot of comparison data of the data. I do have Alli just sent me these calculations. So from 2023 to 2025 concentration increased by 147%. Motile sperm count increased by 32.5%. And then sperm with normal morphology increased by 233%. So whatever we were doing in that 2-year time frame, significant improvement.
So, I guess this is like with bone mineral density and sperm that you can meaningfully change your biomarkers. If you get a test result back and you feel a bit discouraged, don't feel too discouraged. Like, you can definitely bounce back. I mean, I'm a great example, like I absolutely destroyed my health. I mean, I was in a really bad spot after, you know, a couple 20 years of being an entrepreneur. So do not be discouraged by bad results. You can bounce back. The body can bounce back. Do the things that Mike was talking about.
One interesting thing about looking at sperm too, just like bone mineral density or any of these other outcome metrics, is that we're getting a longer look at your health, right? So the temporal relationship is much broader as opposed to, like, you know, we can measure a lot of these things by just checking serum levels, which we do, like CRP looking at inflammation or glutathione levels to try to get a sense of reactive oxygen species, but that is like a single time point that can change over a matter of hours, whereas when we look at sperm or bone mineral density we're looking at a much longer time point of months to really, like, sometimes even years of your overall health. So it gives us such a longer tail to look at to understand how you're living your life on a regular basis.
That's cool. So compounded gains, that like the things you have to do, they accumulate, and this is true with bone mineral density, like your skeleton rebuilds itself every 10 years. So it really is like, people obviously feel immediate gains if they stop eating sugar or they start sleeping well over the course of a few days. But that's one of the things I didn't have intuitions on, is like when you start actually really getting into health and systematizing these habits, how much they actually compound, which is actually maybe a good bridge to the biomarkers, which is like, I'm so proud of what we've accomplished, and I guess they really do represent years of devotion to this, even coming from a really bad spot.
When I first got into the game, I guess the world of longevity, the first thing that was abundantly obvious was that everybody disagreed with everyone about everything. There was no such thing as listening to a podcast or reading a book or asking some expert, "What do you do?" Because each person had both a narrow focus and then they also had their own unique opinions about what to do. And so I was confronted with this problem of, not being a longevity expert myself, what do you do? Like how could you possibly get in and play this game?
And so it just seemed, that was when I was building Kernel, the brain interface, and I thought, how obvious is this, you just measure. Like you basically just outmeasure everything and you follow the data. That's just such a clean solution. And so we just got to work. We did every single measurement we could find that would give us any kind of insight in terms of the biological age of various things. Like we did the obvious things like blood draws and we did MRIs, but we did things like nerve sensitivity. I did a full-on professional hearing grades test. Of course, eyes. We did eye measurements, looking at my optical nerves and fibers. I mean, we did a whole bunch of physical fitness tests, like so many follicles under the skin, what's happening to the hair under the microscope. We did like 3D imaging of your face to see changes across time.
So the gum thing, what we did though is, the way to measure oral health is, two of the variables you're looking at are attachment loss and, what's the other one? Attachment loss and pocket depth. And so you're basically looking at the gums' tightness around the tooth. And so two things. One is as a child I think I had so much sugar in my diet that that must not have been good for my oral health. You can say it. Definitely not. It was not a good situation for my mom. Definitely not. Yeah.
And then two is in my years of chronic depression and babies and all that kind of stuff, I started grinding at night, having bruxism, and I didn't take any corrective measures because I didn't know how to do it. Like I didn't actually get proper advice. I now have that SomnoDent device, but those years of me grinding at night really wore down my teeth, which then exasperates attachment loss and pocket depth. So the gums start to peel away from the teeth.
So I found this dentist and we're like, "Okay, let's biologically age my mouth, my gums." So we measured all the pocket depths and all the attachment loss. We got scores across the board from either one to a four. You want to basically be two or less. And so then we started, I think I even had maybe one or two that were fives maybe, like there were a few really bad spots.
And then we said, how could you basically correct for attachment loss and pocket depth? And so we did two things. So we used this product called Emdogain, which is with these growth factors taken from pigs. And so we did PRP, so we drew my blood, we spun it up, we got the plasma, we concentrated the growth factors, we reinjected the plasma with the Emdogain, those two products, because the Emdogain is used in dentistry for the healing post surgeries. So we paired those two and then we used a superglue that is specifically built for the mouth. So we superglued my gums to my teeth and that worked. It took all of my four millimeter pockets and moved them all to four.
Now, I did something like three of these therapies and it was like, they're not fun. It's definitely a lot of work, but basically, I forget what the exact data was, but it moved my oral health back like 15 to 20 years, back to like a teenage health level, with attachment loss and pocket depth around two. And so yeah, that was a really effective therapy. But yeah, that was a big tangent. But this is to say, like, we have been in many directions for many years. And I took my oral health from highly questionable to where my dentist said, like, you legit have better gum health than the teenagers I see. Like I cannot get your gums to bleed no matter how hard I try. And so that was really cool. And then we also did a bunch of measurements like plaque index, because that also was a biological age marker. But yeah. Anyway,
so like back to the biomarkers, this is what we were trying to do, is like we are trying to follow data everywhere. And over the course of doing this, I became, I think, the most measured person in human history. There's no human ever to exist that has more biological age measurements done than me. And that data gave this treasure trove of insight of what to do and how to do it. And then we started working with the science to say, how do we now optimize these markers?
And so a lot of people in the beginning were so confused by what we were up to. They're like, "What is this guy even doing? This is so weird. Like I don't understand it." And we're like, "Actually, we're measuring biological age," because intuitively if you take a 90-year-old and a 2-year-old and you put them adjacent to each other, you know which one's 90 and which one's two. There's no confusion. If you put a 35 and a 34-year-old next to each other, it's not clear who's who. That's based on eyesight. Yeah. Based on eyesight. Exactly. So what I'm saying is that intuitively you understand that organs have a structural and a functional element of biological age. You can actually look at a heart and say, based upon its function and based upon its cellular structure, you know, cellular anatomical reading, what is the biological age. And so yeah, we did this over the entire body. And so yeah,
last month we posted 60 plus of my biomarkers. Now we have many, many more, but we chose these 60 because they rank among the highest as being predictive for all-cause mortality, and we made the case that I have the best biomarkers of anybody in the world. Not just a 47-year-old, but literally better than anybody in the world. And, you know, I haven't known exactly how to think about that. Like how accurate is that? Is it the case that if you actually were to sample everybody, that by default you'd find people with better markers? I'm honestly not convinced. Like I legitimately think it could be the case that out of 8 billion people I have the best comprehensive biomarkers in the world at age 47. I think it really is possible.
But the point here is not to be number one. The point here is to say we have created rankings in society to say there's the fastest person in the world, there's the richest person in the world. We've never had a ranking of who is the healthiest person in the world or who has the best biomarkers in the world. It's never been something that's been quantifiable. It's always been this esoteric subjective assessment. And so this is a new game. And so what's cool about this is there's a new way to acquire status and power in society, which is to have quantified benchmarks. And we started a new game. I think it's a lot of fun. So, yeah. That's the premise behind this. So, yeah, Kate.
Well, I just want to try and digest that all out loud. I'm gonna think and, yeah, correct me if I'm wrong. So, you can take measurements across the entire human body and plot it on an age graph. So, pocket depth increases as you get older. And so you can look at gums and you can say, is this person, you know, younger or older generally than their chronological age, which is when they were born. You can do that across all the markers and you can use that as a goalpost for whether a therapy works or not. Mhm. And so we took all the measurements we could possibly get of you, probably in the hundreds of thousands at this point, and we said, based on all that, here is a comprehensive view on this biological human's predicted age.
And we said, let's start going to work on therapies that exist. And so that was like the first chapter. Then we got you to a place where we were able to, across all of those biomarkers, achieve optimal health. That doesn't mean that you're perfect in every kind of way, but the nuance here is that it is incredibly difficult to hit, across hundreds of markers, such good ranges at the same time that you can operate in harmony with your body. So, someone can have high cholesterol but then have an amazing VO2 max score, or have poor oral health, or XYZ, be, you know, losing their hair or whatever the marker is. And so the difference here, and I think where a lot of people get caught up, is that if you look at your overall health, it is incredible, and that is incredibly hard to pull off.
Yeah. People don't have those intuitions yet because there aren't that many people that have measured themselves extensively. But if you pull someone off the street and get a blood draw done on them, it's highly likely they're going to have some good markers and some really bad markers. Probably more bad markers than good markers, but the point is that they're probably going to have really high highs and low lows. And what we've not been able to do is to create optimal across the board.
It's such a hard concept to deliver in today's standard and norm, where most people aren't getting measured. Most people don't understand that you can't just apply one philosophy of health like carnivorism and expect that it's going to be able to treat all things. And so that's why we come back to measurement as actually, almost like, measurement is the intervention.
Let me take that one step further, Kate. So what you said is totally correct. Like one major point is taking subjectivity and creating objective data around what would otherwise just be a subjective assessment, right? So like, I feel better eating a stick of butter. Okay, show me the data. Like are you actually better eating that stick of butter? Not to attack butter, but it's also, yeah, we're sure
lots of butter. I take that back. I don't know how I feel about butter. Whatever. Everyone's like, it's like people are going to attack because they love their [ __ ] butter. Like everyone thought, we all process the comments, like, but I love my butter, [ __ ], like leave it alone. Your butt on the, but like, I shouldn't butter, damn it. Yeah, I know. I was like,
so like, but it's not just taking the subjective and creating objective data around it. It's also understanding the objective data that we consume from, like, you know, clinical medicine and these papers that are published online about, like, you know, this one intervention works for 60% of people, and it's actually understanding, does it actually work for Bryan? So it's objectivity to the point of an N equals one study, where it's like, okay, so there is this data that, whatever, rapamycin can potentially, you know, increase your lifespan. Great. Does that work on everybody? Probably not. Does it work on Bryan? So it's taking the question down to a deeper level of understanding on an N equals 1 level.
And also not just following a single marker for each one of these areas of disease and longevity, but hitting them from multiple different directions. So, not just following CRP, but following CRP and TNF alpha and, you know, S100, like all of these additional markers, so that you attack a problem from multiple different areas so that disease and a lack of health has nowhere to hide. Like you're going to find it with one of these markers. That's, in essence, and in doing that, Bryan has, I mean, I think done something that really hasn't been done by just about anyone. I mean, so I've also cared for professional athletes, and Bryan is more tested than them, right? Like these people that literally make millions of dollars a year because of their physical fitness, because of their health, and the level of detail Bryan has is, I think, unprecedented.
Yeah. It's so funny. You almost can go to Bryan as, like, if you want to go a safe interventional route, do what Bryan does, because if you think about someone touting some sort of therapy and they show one marker, you don't get to see the trove of what happens. So, for example, you tried a form of Ozempic, Bryan, because it has potential longevity benefits, and when you did that, was it your blood glucose that rose? What was it? My resting heart rate. Yeah. And resting heart rate increased and HRV decreased. And so it's like, you could have easily done that, felt great, been more energetic, been able to run more and get a better VO2 max. Even that is like subjective measurement. I don't even want to go into that territory. A lot of people just do it and they say I feel great, etc. But then if you're constantly measuring one intervention across hundreds of markers, you catch anywhere where it lets you down. So everything you do is almost like, if you want to just have safe health interventions, do what Bryan does, because it's measured across so many things. Red flags will come up. Yeah.
And a lot of the critique I get in the world, people will say, "Oh, that's just Bryan, but Bryan's markers are unique to him." That's not true. Like, you know, going to bed at the same time every night is useful for every human. It's not like you've got a special genotype and it's like, nope, you are better off doing four hours different every night for alternating nights. The body is very consistent across many humans. And so the majority of the things that we have discovered are population-level discoveries, right? Going to bed at the
same time every night. Working to lower your resting heart rate before sleep, right? That includes, like, when you do those things: you eat earlier and lighter, you lower your stress, you calm your body and mind, you don't get into fights before bed. These are things we all know, like when we have heavy meals, it's hard to sleep. When we fight just before bed, it's hard to sleep. When you're really stressed, it's very hard to sleep. And then the same thing with, you know, certain foods, like dietary things. So just that, like, it's becoming obvious in this conversation.
So people think about science from, like, what's the N number? And for anyone listening at home who doesn't know that term, it's essentially the amount of participants in a study. And so the more participants, generally the more the scientific community views it as positive, because you've got more data points to reference. That is a great way. Also, it's almost like we need another number, which is, on a person, how many measurements were you doing? M. So even in a study, if you have an n of, you know, a thousand, but you've only measured one thing, we don't really know the impact of what that thing did on all these other things. So the beauty of what we've done is that we've taken n-of-large-number scientific studies and applied it to an n of one, but done it with a measurement, m, of thousands. And so you're not just going in blind. I think that's the critique you get, like, how do you know what's working? You have thousands of measurements on you, and actually the pairing of those two things is probably the most optimal form of science you could ideally do on an individual person.
We also have been exploring, now that we've really tested all of the major population-level studies and interventions, can we now, since we've got you at this optimal baseline, you've got a fantastic M baseline, measurement baseline, can we now try to do more esoteric interventions that aren't at the scientific rigor for population level, and actually now really be able to test it, because we've got this trove of baseline data.
The second vector of attack we get is scientists level this criticism that what we're doing is not science. And what we're trying to convey here is that, you know, people have practical problems in life that they're trying to solve. Either they're trying to improve their fertility because they're trying to get pregnant, or they have some autoimmune disorder, or they don't feel great, or they have headaches and they can't quite understand where it's coming from. Now, in those situations, the best vector of course is to look at scientific evidence, and there's different tiers of scientific evidence, an RCT being the best. Mike, actually, can you chime in? What is an RCT, and what are the benefits of an RCT, and what are the limitations of how people think about various degrees of scientific evidence?
A randomized controlled trial is the most important data we can collect for population-based health, right? So it's very important for medicine. It's important for understanding how to take a therapy and understand whether it's going to work for the majority of people that you apply that therapy to, right?
But let's take an example of a randomized controlled trial in 100 people. There's some intervention, right? And in 55 of those people, that intervention has a positive outcome. And in 45 of those people, it has a nil or a negative outcome. If the data works out appropriately, the highlight at the end of that study would be: there is a positive outcome from this intervention. But you have to drill into that randomized controlled trial to understand that only 55% of the people actually had a positive outcome. So when I take that and I apply that to a population, great. This intervention is more likely to have a positive outcome than a negative outcome. However, when I look at an individual basis, you're only 55% likely to have a positive outcome from that intervention.
So there's this misstep when we take population-based care and apply it to a single person. If we're not measuring, if we're not objectively collecting data, we can inappropriately apply interventions that otherwise may not be having a good outcome in someone 45% of the time, which is not zero, right? So I think that's just a thing that people often miss. And I'm not trying to completely nay randomized controlled trials. They're extremely important. We have to have them for society. We have to have them to understand how to apply interventions. But on a personal level, it's more complex than that.
Thank God that actually the interventions that we can all do that have the biggest impact are things that are accessible to everyone, mostly, and are within people's control, which is sleep, diet and exercise. I know it's hard to do, like incredibly hard, but I'm grateful for that, that at least it's there and anyone can grab it.
Yeah. I wish there was just a more clear direction. I mean, sleep is obvious, right? It's like, you need sleep. Okay. And exercise is also obvious. I guess you need exercise, although maybe we can argue a little bit about which kind's best. Diet is where, oh man, the religions come out, right? With their axes and their pitchforks, and it's just such a wild, wild west out there.
The hard part about food is that we all have food addictions and disorders, and so it's really hard because we can't just go cold turkey from it. We have to engage with this food. And so we point people to the Don't Die food guide. Generally you want to avoid sugars, fried foods, that kind of stuff. Have a look at that guide and you'll have a good place to start. Oftentimes it's about limiting the bad things, whereas exercise and sleep, it's very much more proactive, like go get these things, do this amount of exercise, get this amount of sleep. So it's hard. Yeah.
Again, last month we posted online these 60-plus biomarkers, plus my actual data from the past 12 months, including averages, and then my actual blood draw results from the lab. So this was a big data drop. So yeah, I'll just go through a few. I'll grab some. Mike, Kate, you guys can grab a few.
I'll start with speed of aging. This is an epigenetic marker. I like this because we actually went big on epigenetic measurement years ago. We saw the potential of this, and over the past couple years the clinical evidence has accumulated. This is now one of the most clinically validated markers of aging, and this particular one we use, this PACE, is the most clinically validated pan-tissue epigenetic test. And so we trust this marker. It has clinical validation, and I've lowered my speed of aging. My best three test average is 0.54. This is number one in the world, and my most recent best test was 0.48. So this means roughly I'm aging at half the speed of normal. So this is the lowest one in the world that is known of those who are competing with the speed of aging test. So that was cool.
My telomere length: these are the end caps on the chromosomes. This is age equivalent to a 10 to 15 year old. This is based upon a data set of 15,000 samples from SpectraCell. And then the relative telomerase activity, this is how much the telomeres rejuvenate, is comparable to a 12-year-old. So interesting. I'll do those top three as starters. All right, Mike.
Yeah, I mean, that's a good example of how you're using more than one metric to measure the same thing. So in this case we're measuring sort of an overall age, and you're using multiple different metrics to do that. We do similar things, for example, with inflammation. So, you know, one of the metrics you monitor for inflammation is high-sensitivity CRP, and you've been undetectable with that for quite some time, like multiple different tests now. And that's important because high-sensitivity CRP is directly associated with mortality, to the extent that chronic elevated high-sensitivity CRP is associated with like 150% increased risk of death. So this is one of those most important biomarkers that I always think about when I'm evaluating somebody's overall health. But you also want to look at other markers that measure a similar thing, like for example TNF-alpha or IL-6. There's all these other markers that can also measure inflammation. And so it's important to make sure that we're measuring from multiple different areas and not just putting all of our faith in one particular marker.
Yeah. Mike, can we pause on that, the hs-CRP? I mean, I've been low over the years on that marker of inflammation, but I've never achieved a non-detect. That's pretty insane. Can you comment on that?
Yeah, so basically it just means that your level is so low the machine can't pick it up. So it comes back as a less than 0.3, which means, who knows, maybe it's actually zero, maybe it's 0.1, but the machine itself is incapable of measuring that low. I think the detection limit is 0.15. Oh, is it 1.5? Yeah, it's a little bit different between each lab. But yeah, it's pretty low.
And then we covered last week that your bone mineral density is in the top 99.8%. Your cardiovascular fitness is in the top 85th percentile of 18-year-olds. A fun one that people love to comment on is that your testosterone is incredibly high given that you're in a caloric restriction. You're not on TRT, which is something we had to debunk, because the markers are so good that it's almost hard to believe. We haven't seen it, especially in veganism. That's a hot topic in society right now. Yeah.
On that one. So I had one of the most outspoken carnivore advocates basically calling me out online, trying to make me look a fool, like I was a liar, and I finally called him, like, hey, what's up. And so I showed him my lab reports, because his hypothesis was: it is impossible for you to have high testosterone if you are plant-based and calorie-restricted. I've never seen it in my entire life. It is impossible. And if this is actually true and you're not lying, because he was suggesting I was on testosterone replacement therapy to boost my testosterone levels, he said, you would be the first person I've ever seen achieve this. Now, to be clear, I'm plant-based plus collagen peptides. So, yeah. And so I showed him my markers in real time from my lab report. I'm like, "Here's my LH levels and my FSH levels. If those two are normal, it's evidence that my testosterone levels are in fact natural." And he was stunned, like he had never seen it before. And so people come at this with these preconceived notions of what can or cannot be achieved in the body, but there's no good reasons why. So yeah, that was a good one.
Same thing on the heavy metals thing. There's a heavy metals influencer who was essentially like, there's no way. This person tries really hard to avoid heavy metals, and Bryan called them up. They were like, there's no way you have lower heavy metals than I do. Showed the results on screen to them, and Bryan has lower heavy metal results than they did, someone who actively works on that specific thing. So it's honestly incredible that we're able to just show that it is possible.
So even in covering these results, what have we covered? We've covered speed of aging, so DNA methylation. We've covered fertility. We've covered telomeres, which is a really hot topic in longevity. We've covered bone health, cardiovascular fitness, inflammation, what else? Testosterone, so hormone health, sleep, and across the board. That's the thing to take away from this conversation: getting all of them not only optimal, but actually top-percentile performance, is the hard thing. And that's just a handful of the markers too. We'll have to put on screen where you can get it from; this is all on Twitter, everyone. If you want to go into the details, if you want to see the PDF export from the lab itself and go in depth and analyze Bryan's biomarkers, please, we encourage it. Also, we say that Bryan is the healthiest human out there. If someone else came out and posted as much data and proved that they had better biomarkers, that would be such a win for the community. Please do it. Please go and get these things done. That's the best thing that could happen. If there's a formal competition, that would be the biggest win.
All right. So now that we talked about the good ones, Mike, let's talk about the not-so-good ones. Where do we think we are mediocre, and where do we think we are struggling, based upon the ones we posted?
Yeah, room for improvement. Yeah, glutathione was low, 105 micrograms per milliliter. And that was because you had recently stopped taking NAC. You were basically messing around with cycling off to get the hormetic response of not taking that consistently, which I think is personally a great thing. We happened to test in the middle of that cycle off, actually the very beginning of it, which is why the glutathione level was lower. So that's one of them.
Do I remember that we stopped doing the NAC because we were worried it may blunt some of the effects of HBOT? So we pieced those two together. We realized we were doing HBOT and NAC, and then we realized the NAC may be blunting something. So we discontinued it, and then we got this result back, because my 12-month average for glutathione is 210. So wherever we want to be in the range, it's just this last test was our first lower level.
Correct. Yeah, and you use up glutathione with HBOT, and actually the HBOT likely upregulates the production of glutathione. So not only did we stop taking it, but you were also getting HBOT at the same time. So you're getting a double whammy, but it makes sense given the mechanism.
We may have overshot LDL a little bit. It's too low.
Yeah, we may have overshot a little bit, and that's because we had basically just started a new therapy. So you just started Repatha right before we did this most recent trial. You were on Zetia and Repatha at the same time, which got you pretty low. I mean, really, you don't necessarily want to be below about 50 for ApoB. That's what the studies have shown is the floor for no cardiovascular disease progression. So maybe a little bit too much on that. Back off a little bit.
So my ApoB is 52 on the latest draw. Are you happy with that?
52 is solid for sure when it comes to cardiovascular disease. Certainly solid. But yeah, the cool thing here is we really have to search. It's not like a typical blood draw where you can just clearly be like, "Oh yeah, we need to work on these things."
Yeah. The other thing that came back high was my vitamin D levels. So I've been hovering around the 40 to 50 range for the past couple years. It's been stubbornly there, and no matter how much vitamin D I take, I just cannot move it. And over the past 90 days, it shot up to 134. So over 100 is getting to be excessively high. We don't want to maintain 134, so we're bringing it down now. But in trying to piece this together, we have a working hypothesis that HBOT so dramatically improved my microbiome that it could have dramatically improved my ability to absorb vitamin D and other nutrients. So that was cool. We'll see. I was doing 5,000 units per day, and we stopped taking that. But the rise in my vitamin D is exactly in the same time frame as HBOT therapy, incrementally going up over the blood draws we did. So that'll be cool to see if the microbiome improvements did in fact increase absorption. And then it takes a beat for vitamin D to come back down because it's fat-soluble. So it'll take a few months to get back down to normal ranges.
That's a good summary, I think. Yeah. So you guys can go out and check these out. Yeah. You've
Also posted online all of the analysis and the areas for commentary, essentially internally for the team, where we've looked at a marker, hypothesized what's going on there, and added comments. So if you want to get into the details, everything's online.
Yep. Wrap, you guys. That was a great podcast. Let us know again in the comments improvements for us to do.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think also we could pursue another time, maybe get into more of the details of how we're thinking about certain markers, how we're playing with them. We went over the biomarkers today generally, you know, how do you approach it if you're looking at a certain cholesterol marker? How do you think about it? How would you work on it? Because I think a lot of people would probably do a blood draw, get a result back and say, "What do I do now?" And they could of course, you know, do their own research, but it might be helpful to talk about it.
You know, it'd be really cool to have someone submit their health markers. Like, we don't know anything about them. Yeah. And we just look it over. Obviously, they would have to be okay disclosing their health markers. Obviously, HIPAA compliant and all that kind of stuff, but it'd be really, really interesting to do an analysis.
Yeah. So, if you're interested in that, put a comment so we know if this is something you'd like us to do. It'd be a really fun experiment.
Yeah. Also, I think we should do roast my protocol. You could do that along with the palm reading and the horoscopes. No, it'd be cool, like, you know, people send in what you do for your health and then we'll assess it.
Cool. All right. Thanks, you guys. Yeah. See you next week. All right. Bye, guys.
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