Nutrition science is notoriously unreliable. The reason is because a substantial proportion of research in the field is conducted using surveys, and people just aren’t very good at remembering what and how much they ate.
The field is further damaged by a sensationalist press…The latest example of this is a study that linked increased coffee consumption to reduced mortality. In general, media outlets wrote headlines like, “Drinking coffee may reduce the risk of death.”
…
Sleep studies suffer from a similar problem.
…
Most likely, too much or too little sleep is not causing health problems, but is rather an indicator of them. It is easy to imagine that the same molecular changes that occur in the brain that lead to dementia are also responsible for disturbances in sleep behavior. In some people, that might manifest as too much sleep; in others, too little sleep.
So, how many hours should you sleep? It depends on you. If you feel fine on 6 hours of sleep, do that. If you need 9 hours to function properly, do that…
The bottom line is that if you feel tired, your body is telling you something. Listen to it, rather than the media.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Sleep Science Plagued by Hype, Contradiction
