This month’s Atlantic has a fascinating piece on a longitudinal study of Harvard graduates that began in the late 1930s. It followed 268 ‘well-adjusted’ male students and was meant to discover what made people live long and prosper. The idea behind it was to act as a corrective to the fact that medicine spends its time looking at the sick.
To understand the study do read the whole piece, but here are the key conclusions:
“What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically. Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight.
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