How I Broke Up with My Colon: Fascinating, Bizarre, and True Health Stories

Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ

Giulia Enders · 275 pages

With quirky charm, rising science star Giulia Enders explains the gut's magic, answering questions like: Why does acid reflux happen? What's really up with gluten and lactose intolerance? How does the gut affect obesity and mood? Enders's beguiling manifesto will make you finally listen to those butterflies in your stomach: they're trying to tell you something important.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Mary Roach · 348 pages

The irresistible, ever-curious, and always best-selling Mary Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm we carry around inside. “America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Randall Munroe · 312 pages

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a

Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex? More Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Whiskey Sour

Mark Leyner, Billy Goldberg · 288 pages

The Magic School Bus Inside Ralphie: A Book About Germs

Joanna Cole · 30 pages

Ralphie's sick and can't host the Frizzle News Network TV show on health--until Ms. Frizzle and the gang travel inside his bloodstream to learn how the human body fights germs.

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping

Robert M. Sapolsky, H. Lee Hetherington · 560 pages

Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World

Jessica Snyder Sachs · 304 pages

Public sanitation and antibiotic drugs have brought about historic increases in the human life span; they have also unintentionally produced new health crises by disrupting the intimate, age-old balance between humans and the microorganisms that inhabit our bodies and our environment. As a result, antibiotic resistance now ranks among the gravest medical problems of modern times. [This book] addre

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

Alanna Collen · 331 pages

You are just 10% human. For every one of the cells that make up the vessel that you call your body, there are nine impostor cells hitching a ride. You are not just flesh and blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but also bacteria and fungi. Over your lifetime, you will carry the equivalent weight of five African elephants in microbes. You are not an individual but a colony. Until recently, we

Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimizing the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs

David J. Nutt · 384 pages

If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body

James Hamblin · 385 pages

*"If you want to understand the strange workings of the human body, and the future of medicine, you must read this illuminating, engaging book." --Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene* In 2014, James Hamblin launched a series of videos for The Atlantic called "If Our Bodies Could Talk." With it, the doctor-turned-journalist established himself as a seriously entertaining authority in the f

Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

Gary Taubes · 257 pages

This book is an eye-opening, myth-shattering examination of what makes us fat, from acclaimed science writer Gary Taubes. In his New York Times best seller, Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes argued that our diet's overemphasis on certain kinds of carbohydrates -- not fats and not simply excess calories -- has led directly to the obesity epidemic we face today. The result of thorough research, ke

Don't Swallow Your Gum!: Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health

Aaron E. Carroll, Rachel C. Vreeman · 221 pages

The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus

Richard Preston · 384 pages

This interesting books talks about the author doing an investigation about several viruses in africa, including ebola. He explains the different strains and tells us their stories.

The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You

Sylvia Tara · 235 pages

Blends historical perspectives with cutting-edge research to examine body fat as a critical endocrine organ that can be better understood and managed when recognized as a necessary component of human health. Biochemist Sylvia Tara explores the surprising science behind our most hated body part. Fat is an obsession, a dirty word, a subject of national handwringingand, according to biochemist Sylvi

Follow Your Gut: How the Ecosystem in Your Gut Determines Your Health, Mood, and More

Rob Knight, Brendan Buhler · 120 pages

Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine

Paul A. Offit · 322 pages

Medical expert Paul A. Offit, M.D., offers a scathing exposé of the alternative medicine industry, revealing how even though some popular therapies are remarkably helpful due to the placebo response, many of them are ineffective, expensive, and even deadly.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee · 571 pages

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. Published on 16 November 2010 by Scribner, it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

Robert H. Lustig · 328 pages

"Robert Lustig's 90-minute YouTube video "Sugar: The Bitter Truth", has been viewed more than two million times. Now, in this much anticipated book, he documents the science and the politics that has led to the pandemic of chronic disease over the last 30 years. In the late 1970s when the government mandated we get the fat out of our food, the food industry responded by pouring more sugar in. The

The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

Seth Mnookin · 429 pages

A searing account of how vaccine opponents have used the media to spread their message of panic, despite no scientific evidence to support them. In this searching exposé, the recent hysteria over childhood vaccinations and their alleged link to autism becomes a cautionary tale of bad science amplified by media sensationalism.

Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

Jo Marchant · 336 pages

"A rigorous, skeptical, deeply reported look at the new science behind the mind's extraordinary ability to heal the body ... While we accept that stress or anxiety can damage our health, the idea of "healing thoughts" was long ago hijacked by New Age gurus and spiritual healers. Recently, however, serious scientists from a range of fields have been uncovering evidence that our thoughts, emotions,

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

Kelly Weinersmith · 448 pages

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine

Simon Singh, Edzard Ernst · 352 pages

Provides an examination and judgement of more than thirty of the most treatments in alternative medicine, such as acupuncture, homeopathy, aromatherapy, reflexology, chiropractic and herbal medicine.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks · 243 pages

In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who

The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss

Jason Fung · 325 pages

"In this highly readable and provocative book, Dr. Jason Fung sets out an original, robust theory of obesity that provides startling insights into proper nutrition"--Page [4] of cover.