“You are what you eat” is a widely quoted aphorism, expressing the general truth that nutrition and health are intimately linked. It is generally said to derive from the phrase “tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are” found in French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1823 book “Physiology Du Gout.” However, Brillat-Savarin was not referring to nutrition, he was commenting on the differences between the foods available to different social classes. The rich could count on a large variety of foods, while the poor subsisted on a meager food supply. Interestingly, he did make a scientific observation noting that sugar and white flour are associated with obesity.
Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine” has also been credited with germinating the expression with his advice to “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” The problem here is that there is no record of such a statement in the “Hippocratic Corpus,” the medical writings produced by himself and his followers. The closest is “one must not administer food to the sick in greater quantity than they can bear,” with the idea being that the wrong diet worsens disease. Another excerpt from the writings highlights a shift towards evidence-based nutrition: "For it is not sufficient to learn simply that cheese is a bad food, as it gives a pain to one who eats a surfeit of it; we must know what the pain is, the reasons for it, and which constituent of man is harmfully affected." There is no question that Hippocrates linked health to diet, but he never said, “you are what you eat.”
Presbyterian Minister and self-proclaimed dietary reformer Sylvester Graham used a number of phrases that do smack of “you are what you eat” without using those exact words: “The food we eat exerts a direct and powerful influence upon our physical and moral nature” and “the character of man depends very much on the character of his food.” These transmit the same sort of message. Graham was quite specific about his nutritional advice. He was a dedicated vegetarian, emphasized abstention from alcohol and spices, and urged the consumption of coarse whole grain flour. These measures, he claimed, would prevent self-pleasuring which he considered to be a great evil. Graham flour, Graham bread and Graham crackers were inspired by his teachings.
Another candidate for the origin of “You Are What You Eat” is an ad that appeared in 1922 in the Atlantic Monthly with the catchy headline “medicine cannot do this for you; your strength and vigour depend on what you eat.” The ad was for Fleischmann’s Yeast with the claim that it is a rich source of vitamins and helps the intestines eliminate poisonous waste matter. Although it does not specifically say “you are what you eat,” the implication is there.
The first person who uttered the exact phrase was naturopath Dr. Henry Lindlahr, who in 1914 founded the Lindlahr Sanitarium in Elmhurst, Illinois. The Sanitarium’s slogan was “no drugs, no serum’s no surgery.” All diseases, according to Lindlahr, were caused by accumulated metabolic waste which he referred to as “toxins” without specifying what these toxins were. The solution to reducing them was a diet of raw fruits and vegetables, whole grains, minimal animal products, no stimulants and frequent fasting. Lindlahr was also an advocate of iridology, a nonsensical method that claims to diagnose illness by examining the iris of the eye He also believed that the smallpox vaccine was useless and was the cause of cancer.
While Henry Lindlahr first used the phrase “You Are What You Eat,” it is his son Victor who is more closely associated with the expression given that he published a book in 1940 with that exact title! Dr. Victor Lindlahr graduated from the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine and went on to become a health food writer and host of “Talks and Diet,” a popular radio show. Since it was Lindlahr’s book that popularized “You Are What You Eat,” I thought I better read the book for some background since I have used the expression many times myself. Truthfully, I thought I would be in for a plentiful dose of quackery seeing that after his father’s death, Victor had taken over the running of the Lindlahr Sanitarium with its questionable practices. I was in for a surprise.
Lindlahr actually approaches nutrition scientifically, at least as much as that was possible in 1940. He describes how the body is built from components in the food supply and comes up with a useful analogy: “If you planned to bake a cake, you would assemble in proper proportions the necessary flour, eggs, milk and baking powder; similarly to have good health, you must supply your body with foods that contain all the different elements your body needs in their proper amounts.” He emphasizes the importance of a balanced diet and even makes a stab at what that should be since by 1940, carbohydrates, proteins and fats had been identified as the major components of food and the importance of minerals and vitamins had been recognized.
Fruits and vegetables were the key to health, Lindlahr maintained, and railed against people who claimed that salads are “bunny food.” “Man does not live by bread alone,” he argued, proposing that too many carbohydrate foods throw the body out of balance. Fruits and vegetables are highly nourishing Lindlahr said and supported that with the observation that bulls are vegetarian, yet they become “as strong as a bull,” and that the fierce gorilla lives largely on vegetables and has a passion for fruit.
In some cases, Lindlahr went overboard with claims that vitamin C in lemon juice treats arthritis, that vitamin A dissolves kidney stones and that constipation is the great evil that causes food remnants in the colon to produce toxins. To his credit, he recognized the value of fiber in preventing constipation and promoted the use of Serutan (“Nature’s” spelled backwards), a predecessor of Metamucil, today’s often-recommended fiber supplement.
After dealing with some fundamental concepts about the composition of foods, most of the book is devoted to entries of specific fruits and vegetables with their macro and micronutrient content along with their therapeutic potential. Some of this is the same kind of hype we see in books by today’s “wellness influencers.” Avocados can build blood because of their iron content; artichokes have vitamin A to ward of respiratory infections and blueberries have neomyrtillin that can lower blood glucose. The latter is in the polyphenol family, a class of molecules recognized by current science as being valuable antioxidants, but nobody should rely on blueberries to control blood glucose.
Victor Lindlahr also gets credit for recommending a daily diet with a specific composition: twelve ounces of protein foods, twelve ounces of fat, starchy and sugary foods, and thirty-six ounces of “protective foods,” basically raw and cooked fruits and vegetables that can be selected from a list in the book. While there is no problem nitpicking many of the arguments in the book, it deserves credit for promoting a diet based mostly on plant foods as is promoted by today’s researchers, and for explaining in a rational fashion why “You Are What You Eat.”
