Why We Keep Looking for a "Bad Guy" to Blame for Aging

Here's a question worth posing: when was the last time you heard a health condition explained without someone identifying the "bad actor" responsible for it?

It's how we've been trained to think about illness for well over a century, and for good reason.

When infectious disease was the dominant threat to human life, that framework worked brilliantly. A virus, a bacterium, a parasite — find it, target it, eliminate it. We developed vaccines, antibiotics, and sanitation built on this exact logic and transformed life expectancy. It's one of medicine's genuine triumphs. Let’s save the vaccine discussion for another newsletter.

The trouble is, we never really updated the model when the diseases changed.

Today, the conditions doing the most damage to people as they age aren't infections — they're chronic, slow-developing diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And notice how we still talk about them: Alzheimer's research spent decades hunting for the "bad actor" in beta-amyloid plaques and tau tangles.

Parkinson's research zeroed in on clumped alpha-synuclein protein. Find the villain, design a drug to target and clear it out. Billions of dollars, some of the best scientific minds alive, and that exact strategy.

And yet, if you look honestly at the results, this approach hasn't produced the breakthroughs we hoped for. Some anti-amyloid drugs have reached the market, but their real-world impact on slowing disease has been modest at best, with real costs and risks attached. Meanwhile, rates of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's keep climbing.

So here's the reframe worth considering: what if Alzheimer's and Parkinson's aren't really "invading enemy" diseases at all? What if they're better understood as neurons that have become damaged and are slowly failing — not because a villain moved in, but because the underlying systems that keep neurons healthy have broken down over time?

That's a fundamentally different starting point. Instead of asking "what do we eliminate?" it asks "what do we restore or preserve?"

And what neurons depend on more than almost any other cell in the body is energy — specifically, healthy mitochondria, the tiny structures inside our cells that produce it. There's a growing body of research suggesting that many of the conditions damaging brain health today are, at their root, connected to how well our cells are managing energy and stress.

Strategies supporting whole-body metabolic health may do more for prevention and quality of life than chasing down a single molecule ever could.

This doesn't mean the protein research is worthless — understanding what's happening at that level matters. But it might not be the whole story, or even the most useful place to focus our personal health decisions.

The practical takeaway for us, as we think about brain health while aging: instead of waiting for the next drug that promises to eliminate a specific molecule, it may be far more powerful to ask a simpler question — what does my whole body need to function well, so it can do what it's built to do?

More and more people are wondering what they can do in their own lives to build up a resistance to these chronic diseases. One thing is for sure. The more we work on our own health, the lower our chances of contracting them.

Don’t wait for the ‘bad actors’ to show up. Make your body an inhospitable place for them.