I've stopped taking seriously any news about a healthy lifestyle, because it's ridiculous - one day you read that something is good for you, just to read the next day that it's actually bad for you. I'll trust my common sense and do what makes me feel good.
Good heuristic. I've started to only trust research results that have very high confidence in their results and which is peer-reviewed, e.g. nut consumption cause towards life span [1].
[The researcher's] theory is that people who sleep for more than eight hours sometimes have an underlying health problem that is not yet showing in other symptoms.
So, it's not the long sleep that is causing the increased mortality risk, it's the hidden illness.
TLDR there is a correlation between sleeping longer and decreased health. Not worth three minutes of your time.
Length of life or quality of life, I don't think these are parallel to each other all the time. I would prefer to quality, so as long as I am convinced to quality of my life, dying early should not be a problem because of my sleep too much or less.
Obviously that would be ideal, but it's easier to determine what is improving the quality of your life (since you have direct, immediate feedback) vs. what is improving the length of your life (where you won't find out for years and by then it will be too late).
> As we've reported before, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that until the late 17th Century people did not sleep in one long uninterrupted stretch, but in two segments, separated by a period of one or two hours in which they prayed, read, chatted, had sex, smoked, went to the toilet or even visited neighbours.
> That may be more natural than the current tendency to sleep - or try to - in one stretch.
Just because people did it up until very recently doesn't necessarily say anything about whether it is healthy or not. Up until very recently we didn't have electricity, which meant that we were more limited when it comes to what we could do at certain hours of the day-night cycle.
The fact that people did it up until very recently says that people were able to survive reasonably well with that lifestyle, as a species. But "healthy" is more than that: you can live an unhealthy lifestyle, reproduce, maybe even help raise your grandchildren, and die at 60 of cancer or some heart-related disease.
The other side of the coin is that: just because we can, doesn't mean that we should! Just because we can stay up until 3 am and read books or stuff on the Web, doesn't mean that it is good for us. Maybe some restraint might be in order.
