A brilliant book which deserves both a space in every middle-school Biology (or Health) classroom and every adult's bookshelf. Enders seamlessly weaves together a fun story, complete with cute illustrations, about the journey of food through our entire system. Along the way, she touches on contemporary scientific revelations about our microbiome and reveals the structures and behaviours of our innards in colourful detail reminiscent of no other book I've read. While she's making our inner biology a fun topic for dinner parties, she periodically drops in some reminders backed by unconventional reasoning.

Every page evoked a response from me. Sometimes she left me craving broccoli or fresh, homemade yogurt. Sometimes she'd leave me dumbfounded by collecting adjacent scientific research into a neat pile that defends what many of us know intuitively about our overall health based on the foods we eat. And sometimes she'd refresh the most basic behaviours of civilized society with new (or forgotten) information: brush your teeth, eat your veggies, talk to your doctor, get enough exercise and sleep every day.

Based on the reviews, I had expected Gut to be a fun read. I hadn't expected it to make me so excited about improving my own health. It doesn't hurt that Enders write with so much excitement and enthusiasm for her field.

The writing does lag a little in places and it would be hard for this book to break into 5-star territory for me. My one HUGE gripe, however, is that her references aren't cited! Uggghhh. Just because a book is intended for a casual audience does not make it okay to drop a comment like "five recent studies have shown" into the book without explicitly referencing all five of those studies. I sincerely hope she adds endnotes in a future edition.