Photo Credit: Health Renegade

'You’ve heard it before. To be healthy, we need to drink eight glasses of water a day. And get eight hours of sleep per night. Oh, and eight is the lucky number in Chinese. Coincidence?

In the natural health world, sleep is praised for its restorative values. Followers of the 30 BananasaDay raw food website are told that they can’t sleep too much. In fact: the more sleep, the better. (Just like they are told that they can’t eat too much fruit, and the more they eat, the better.)

Eight hours is the minimum. People seeking peak performance are told to get 8, 9, 10, or even 12 hours of sleep a night.

People will do anything to catch up on this precious sleep: sleep in on weekends, use the “snooze” button profusely, and sleep 10-12 hours a day while on vacation (while falling asleep in a stupor of rum and coke and margaritas).'

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