APAD: You are what you eat
The proverbial saying 'You are what you eat' is the notion that to be fit and healthy you need to eat good food.
What's the origin of the phrase 'You are what you eat'?
The originator of 'You are what you eat'was Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.
His version was 'Tell me what you eat
and I will tell you what you are'
'You are what you eat' has come to into the English language by quite a meandering route.
In 1826, the French lawyer Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante:
"Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es."
[Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are].
In an essay titled Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism, 1863/4, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach wrote:
"Der Mensch ist, was er ißt."
[Man is what he eats]
Neither Brillat-Savarin or Feuerbach meant their quotations to be taken literally (that would be rather messy). They were stating that that the food one eats has a bearing on one's state of mind and health. Although they coined French and German variants of 'you are what you eat', the phrase didn't migrate into other languages and wasn't used in English until decades later.