Calling his book a self help title is a stretch - the author is one of the top researchers in his field. He simply wrote a book making the research out there a

Calling his book a self help title is a stretch - the author is one of the top researchers in his field. He simply wrote a book making the research out there a lot more accessible to the layman. He isn't selling you anything past that. As for the field of "sleep science", you're drastically oversimplifying it. Your sleeping habits have tons of second order affects that aren't remotely intuitive. For example, you know alcohol wrecks your sleep quality? Over time that lack of quality sleep is associated to weight gain. Doesn't it make sense to have a solid understanding of something you spend a third of your life doing? Finally the author of the blog post has no background in this past reading articles on PubMed. I've read some genuine criticisms of the book, most of which Walker addressed, but these are incredibly weak. If you're attempting to synthesize entire fields of research, you should probably have a background in them.