Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics

2014 Edition
| Editors: Paul B. Thompson, David M. Kaplan

You Are What You Eat

Reference work entry
First Online:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0929-4_55
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Synonyms

Being; Brillat-Savarin; Feuerbach; Food; Healthy eating; Identity

Introduction

While it is possible to trace the roots of the phrase “you are what you eat” to early Christianity where the body and the blood of Jesus Christ were represented by bread and wine (Gilman 2008), the phrase has become a token statement indicating a strong association between physical well-being and eating, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. In contemporary parlance, “you are what you eat” refers to the idea that one’s eating habits determine and also are a manifestation of the health of the person in question. The phrase became a slogan of healthy eating in the English-speaking world during the 1940s through the efforts of nutritionist Victor Lindlahr with his radio broadcast and then his book entitled You Are What You Eat: How to Win and Keep Health with Diet, which sold around half a million copies (Levenstein 1993). During the 1960s, influenced by the hippie culture, healthy...

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References

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.SociologyMiddle East Technical UniversityAnkaraTurkey