ZOE’s best health tips of 2025 - Part 2

**Jonathan** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science & Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
Welcome back to part two of our 2025 highlights, the moments that changed how we think about our health and gave us practical tools to feel better every day. Today, you'll hear what happened when I put my own breakfast under the microscope, how arthritis symptoms were reversed in a groundbreaking trial, and we finally get a scientific answer to the question, does cheese really cause nightmares? But first, the person who has arguably pushed the boundaries more than anyone, Brian Johnson. Brian has dedicated his life and his body to testing cutting-edge health interventions to slow down aging. His meticulous approach to sleep, diet and exercise has sparked global debate and raises a question that matters for all of us. How much should we experiment with our own health? I began by asking him how he developed his unique way of living.

**Brian Johnson** (1:08)
We wanted to approach this question scientifically, and so I hired 30 medical professionals. We went through this process where we evaluated all the scientific literature on healthspan, lifespan. We tried to grade the evidence that we could identify it that, do we think, for example, a given therapy, let's say it slows down the speed of aging or reverses aging damage to a certain degree, do we believe the evidence? Then we stack ranked all the evidence and said, okay, we have our list, and let's just start with number one, and let's do that therapy or that measurement. And so we had a firm principle that we would do everything based upon measurement and scientific evidence. And so I became the most measured person in human history. There's more data on my body than anyone before me. That's amazing. And we've just gone through this process of measurement, application of the science, and again and again. And I think it's possible that I have the, they have the best comprehensive health markers of anybody in the world. You have to take 50 different markers from my sleep quality to my inflammation levels, to uric acid, to muscle, to fat, to take any marker. We're going to share this actually in the next coming days. But it's really a contemplation of like, what does health look like and comprehensively from how you sleep, to what your microbiome looks like, to your biological age, your methylation patterns. So we really have tried to just do this by the data and numbers and with as little storytelling as possible.

**Jonathan** (2:37)
Brian, when you say the best possible markers, do you mean the best possible markers for someone of your age? Or are you saying that they're better than my 16-year-old son?

**Brian Johnson** (2:48)
So in every biological age marker, there's typically an ideal age. So for example, like in grip strength, as you grow older, you increase in grip strength capacity. Then you hit a certain age, you decline in grip capacity. And that is true for a lot of things. That's your cardiovascular fitness. It peaks at age 18 and then declines from there. And so we've tried to identify the peak health level of every category of every marker. And we try to peg that. So we say, what is peak cardiovascular fitness for an 18-year-old? And then how do I achieve that? So for example, my cardiovascular fitness is equal to top 1.5% of 18-year-olds as measured by VO2 max. We completed a test today looking at oxygenation of muscles. And so that's also a marker of age. So my oxygenation of my muscle is the top 5% of 18-year-olds, elite swimmers. And so we try to find peak levels and then peg my markers to that as best we can.

**Jonathan** (3:48)
If I understand rightly, you are saying that yes, you are better than my 16-year-old son basically on all of these markers.

**Brian Johnson** (3:55)
Yes. I mean, if you basically said, conventional wisdom would say a 47-year-old could never be as healthy as a 16-year-old. Now, in certain regards, that's probably true, right? They have the anatomy of a 16-year-old, I have the anatomy of a 47-year-old, and there's just some things our technologies can't do today. However, if you compare the 16-year-old and me on these markers, inflammation, sleep quality, cardiovascular ability, bone marrow density down the line, it's possible my health markers are in fact better than these 16-year-olds.

**Jonathan** (4:26)
That's amazing. Listening to Brian, I was struck by the contrast between his extreme routine and the much smaller health experiments most of us might want to try. My ZOE co-founder, Professor Tim Spector, Brian and I shared a really honest, useful exchange about what's safe, what isn't, and where to start. One question I think a lot of listeners will have listening to this is, is it safe to experiment on my health? So how should people, if you were going to advise anyone listening to this, thinking about experimenting with the health but wanting to do it safely, what would you be saying, Tim?