Why We Get Sick

In this collection, Why We Get Sick references 2 other books and is cited by 6 other books.

It draws on The Selfish Gene and The Origin of Species.

It’s picked up by The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat, The Circadian Code: Lose Weight, Supercharge Your Energy, and Transform Your Health from Morning to Midnight and The Longevity Diet: Discover the New Science Behind Stem Cell Activation and Regeneration to Slow Aging, Fight Disease, and Optimize Weight and 3 others.

Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.

Why We Get Sick is recognised as a founding text of evolutionary medicine, and its central insight -- that symptoms like fever and anxiety are evolved defenses, not malfunctions -- has become a lens that health authors across disciplines now routinely apply. Stephan Guyenet builds on Nesse's framework in The Hungry Brain to explain obesity as an evolutionary mismatch, Satchin Panda invokes it to explain why round-the-clock eating breaks ancient digestive rhythms, and Valter Longo argues our genes expect periodic food scarcity.

Matt Richtel extends the mismatch idea to autoimmune disease in An Elegant Defense, framing it as an immune system evolved for parasites now idling in sterile environments. Readers praise the book for fundamentally reframing how they think about illness, though the Darwinian lens can feel overly speculative when applied to specific conditions.