Interesting. I briefly checked into one of his retorts and it appears just as poorly sourced. Take this one:
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has stated that, “Insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic.”
If you follow the link (which doesn't even go to the CDC site!), it's dead. If you go get the 473 page report from the CDC for 2014 (implied by the dead link) from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus14.pdf, you find the word sleep used only 3 times (once in the index) and no such quote.
Reading the CDC blog post, it seems like an exaggerated use of "epidemic". An epidemic is something that has arisen, or is spreading, in some growing of transient fashion.
The blog article describes a problem that exists, and may have always existed. A behavior that contributes to bad health outcomes - well that's tremendously common. There are probably many thousands of human behaviors that have negative consequences. Would you say there's an "epidemic" of poor posture in the world? No, it just is a constant reality - something we need to work on continuously.
Overall, while it might have been an accurate source - it's not a very meaningful notion or weighty reference.
None of this was called into question as far as I understand.
The problem in the initial critique was that the author of the book misattributed the epidemic claim to WHO. He subsequently admitted that he misremembered and really it was the CDC. He provided a source to back this up on the blog.
The poster above then seemingly called the veracity of that into question, based on a brief investigation.
This prompted me to do my own investigation, because I wanted to know what was true after all. Up to that point I was unconvinced of any malicious intent on the author's part.
And it turned out that the author was not lying. That's all.
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As for the use of the word "epidemic" I agree -- it might have been an exaggeration/hyperbole or colloquial use (a bit out of place then) on CDC's part. This is probably why they eventually changed it to "problem".
The article was online however for close to 6 years under the original headline and even though it was updated long before the book was published, I would not hold it against the author, because the book was most likely written over a long period of time.
That there are mistakes and errors, shows to me that it might have been a bit rushed towards the end.
None of these significantly alter the validity of the message and the author admitted and corrected them -- a revised edition of the book is apparently in print. To me this means that he cares.
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On a personal level, I feel the message of the book comes from a good place. It does point to real problems that are systematically overlooked/ignored/marginalized/ridiculed and it is completely plausible to me that taking steps to fixing them might significantly improve society. Some exaggeration might be in order.
I read the book and the information did contribute to substantially improving my life. I verified some data in it by self-experimentation. It is harmless and scientifically-sound enough to offer people looking for solutions to their sleeping problems.
For the unfortunate these are absolutely not trivial and incomparable to bad posture. Bad sleep can make one's life absolutely miserable. A lot of miserable people makes for a miserable society.
As it happens, I've been going through an extremely stressful time since last September. I've learned to sleep by listening to Star Trek while I sleep. I think the sound of familiar voices, and the distraction to prevent me from dreaming naturally (which currently turns into stress nightmares) has really saved me. Two of my colleagues have turned to medication, and I can see they're having a harder time of all this.
I have been struggling with bad sleep for most of my life -- seems to run in the family (now I suspect it might be a common chronotype). What finally improved my life and has now been working better and longer than anything before (and I implemented this after reading the book) is properly establishing my circadian rhythm/chronotype and adjusting to it. Now I sleep on a regular schedule and my total sleep time has actually decreased.
Unfortunately this is rather difficult and requires radical lifestyle changes if you are a night type trying to exist on a typical work schedule. I was desperate and in a position to introduce the changes, and fortunately it's worked for me. Hard to recommend to everybody though at this point -- that's why a societal change is needed and that's where this book does good.
From indirect experience, echoing the book, I would strongly advise against medication, in particular zolpidem. It is very highly addictive, may have terrible side-effects, especially mixed with other substances, and ultimately doesn't really work. Honestly it is so much worse than so many illegal substances that from my point of view the only explanation for its continued proliferation is profit.
Definitely respect the author for standing against that in the book.
Guzey's appendix addresses it directly: Between late 2010/early 2011 and August/September 2015 [1 (a), 2 (a), 3 (a), 4 (a)], CDC had a page on its site titled “Insufficient Sleep Is a Public Health Epidemic”. More than 2 years before Why We Sleep was published, the page changed the word “epidemic” to “problem”, so that its title became “Insufficient Sleep Is a Public Health Problem”.https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#possible-origin-of-the...
