Eat vegetables. Drink plenty of water. Don’t smoke.

Such messages regularly flow into youngsters’ heads, but rarely do kids get a chance to sit on a giant molar, squeeze through a larger-than-life small intestine and then jump up and down inside a heart before absorbing a few clean-air lessons while gazing at real-life lung tissue sealed inside plastic jars.

Eeeeewwwww…

“What’s the worst thing you can do for your lungs?” asks Charlie Lauts, holding up two jars for fifth-graders huddled in her giant fabric lung cavity.

“Smoking,” calls out Brevin Flory, without missing a breath. “Because it gives you bad oxygen.”

Exactly, Lauts says, pointing out the healthy lungs are pink and unhealthy ones — well, those end up just like this one here: gray and black.

Again: Eeeeewwwww…

“That’s what a bad lung looks like,” Lauts reminds them, as if the kids need any convincing. “So don’t smoke.”

Welcome inside Body Venture, a walk-through educational display that literally swallowed up dozens of kindergartners through fifth-graders Wednesday at Wakarusa Valley School, 1104 E. 1000 Road.

The 2,000-square-foot exhibit — provided by the Kansas State Department of Education and staffed by volunteers — filled the school gym with educational information designed to resonate with children regarding the benefits of good nutrition, physical activity and other healthy habits.

“With the national problems with obesity, we’re trying to teach the children to make healthy choices in eating, and also the importance of physical activity and just going out and playing,” said Jennifer Nelson, a member of the school’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Committee.

Body Venture starts with a Brain Dome exhibit that gives way to a walk-in mouth, with a tongue serving as something of a bud-filled red carpet. By the time it’s over, students have been absorbed into the bloodstream, inhaled into the lungs and ultimately deposited back outside the body through a thin fabric that represents epidermis.

The display’s real-life lessons, after all, can only go so far.

“We’re exiting from a cut in the skin,” laughs Kelli Mondi, after enlightening another batch of students about the body’s largest organ. “We’re not exiting the other way.”