Concluding that humans need less than 7 hours of sleep is a tabloid myth

A short section from a book that changed my priorities and my life. Nothing is more important than high quality sleep!
De-mythifying sleep: Concluding that humans, modern-living or pre-industrial, need less than 7 hours of sleep is a tabloid myth.
“sleep study on modern day hunter-gatherers dispels notion that we’re wired to need 8 hours a day”
First, when you read the research paper, you learn that the tribes people actually give themselves a 7 to 8.5 hour sleep opportunity each day with an estimated range of 6 to 7.5 hours of sleep. The sleep opportunity that these tribes people provide themselves is therefore almost identical to what the National Sleep Foundation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend for all adult humans: 7 to 9 hours of time in bed.
The problem is that people confuse time slept with sleep opportunity. Many people conclude they only need 6 hours so they give themselves 6 hours sleep opportunity which means they will only obtain 4.5 to 6 hours of actual sleep.
Need is not defined by what is obtained (as the disorder of insomnia teaches us), but rather or not the amount of sleep is sufficient to accomplish what sleep does. The most obvious need then, would before life – and healthy life. The average lifespan of these hunter-gatherers is jut 58. Epidemiological data says any adult sleeping an average of 6.75 hours a night would be predicted to live only into their early 60s, close to the median life span of the .
More prescient, however, is what kills people in these tribes. The most common immune system failures that kill hunter-gather members are intestinal infections. This is the same fatal consequence of keeping rats alive for 15 continuous days in a lab. No sleep for 15 days kills rats by striping their immune system and killing them by infection.
Finally, one of the few universal ways of forcing animals of all kinds to sleep less than normal is to limit food. When food becomes scarce, sleep becomes scarce as animals try to stay away longer to forage. The Hadza will face days when they obtain 1,400 calories or less and routinely eat 300 to 600 fewer calories than those of us in Western cultures. A large portion of their year is therefore spent in a state of lower-level starvation, on that can trigged well-characterized biological pathways that reduce sleep even though the sleep need remains high. Concluding that humans, modern-living or pre-industrial, need less than 7 hours of sleep is a tabloid myth.