atlantic

There has been a fair amount of hoohah about a Stanford Study that suggests that organic foods are no more nutritious than conventional foods.  This shouldn't be a shock, but many health claims have been waved about over the years that say otherwise.  The Atlantic's Brian Fung rightly points out that only over the last few years has the discussion shifted to imply that nutritional content is why we grow organic - in fact, that's not how the organic movement started.  The reality is that such claims are hard to evaluate - what varieties are you comparing?  Is this industrial or small scale…
In the June Atlantic Monthly, Joshua Wolf Shenk has a long, moving article about what may be the longitudinal study of all longitudinal studies - the Harvard Study of Adult Development (Grant Study), begun in 1937. Its creator Arlie Beck planned to track 268 "healthy, well-adjusted" men from their sophomore year at Harvard through careers, marriage, families, retirement and eventually death - and somehow, from this glut of longitudinal data, to glean the secrets of "successful living." But the portrait Shenk paints is as full of pathos as it is of success. Delving into the case files, now…