It Takes Guts makes reading about the body fueling process fun

It Takes Guts, How Your Body Turns Food Into Fuel (And Poop) is seemingly custom-made for the reading level, humor, patience, and temperament for sixth-grade students. It’s also intelligent enough to be appreciated by those older readers, even those who have no idea what chyme it is. That’s another reason that middle school ages will enjoy It Takes Guts, it’s funny and laden with puns or other learning pneumonic devices. The puns in the book are so sublime that some readers won’t even get them, but they’ll know that they’re there to make the book more palatable.

Enzymes and Acid and Mucus, Oh My! is an example of that. While many kids have seen The Wizard of Oz, it’s not likely that they’ll know that saying from the movie. However, as the title to a chapter that’s all about the inside of the stomach, it helps illustrate what’s happening to that pizza you just ate. Now, let’s factor in a comic book style illustration that opposite that clever title. We see an esophagus that’s in the vein of a living room, with a chomped-out cookie walking down the stairs. It’s greeting some snack foods that are on the sofa that are adrift a river of green liquid that most people would initially call bile.

It turns out that this green liquid has something more akin to Alien that a four-letter word that rhymes with a long unit of measurement in the United States. It’s HCI, or the liquid that could burn through steel in that classic movie with the creature designed by H.R. Geiger. However, in your stomach, hydrochloric acid is a major key to making the magic happen.

It Takes Guts is not a book that will immediately warm over those reluctant STEM students. However, it’s one of those books that will stick to you, and make those who are slightly curious want to learn more. The book accomplishes that by using the same indefinable metric that makes cat videos impossible to watch just one. On a whim, if you thumb through It Takes Guts you’ll be sucked into the book and carelessly reading (see: learning) about how your body gets the energy it needs in order to make you do the things you do.

Granted, it might get some kids reading about STEM that otherwise wouldn’t have picked up anything science-related. Now that I’ve written that down, it’s a tall order, isn’t it? Let’s get some upper elementary students, with the main focus being middle school readers, interested, curious, and passionate about the inner workings of the human body. Yeah, that’s crazy talk. However, It Takes Guts has a couple of things in its favor, as well as a couple of items that kids love to read, or in this case, don’t.

Each chapter is approximately 12 pages long, however, each chapter is broken up into one to three-page vignettes. These subchapters break down the larger subject into smaller portions that add up to the main topic. For example, the chapter on poop is broken up into gut microbiomes, a roll call, bacterial friends, nourishment, bad bugs, poop transplants, probiotics, and more.

The fact that these bits are small, makes them easier to digest. A book on the digestive system sounds wonky and difficult to read, but It Takes Guts is anything but that. It’s smart enough to be a deeper-than-usual introduction for some, but also intelligent enough to be respected by older readers who need, and can handle more. The book will plant seeds of curiosity about the things that enter our system and the manner in which it exits. There’s a degree of potty humor, but it’s just a dash of it and handled with a deft, soft approach. It knows that it could be sophomoric, doing so would alienate the older readers who need to read a smarter book, but also want to have fun while doing so.

It Takes Guts How Your Body Turns Food Into Fuel is by Dr. Jennifer Gardy with illustrations by Belle Wuthrich and available on Greystone Books.

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