Word.ws English Dictionary

you are what you eat

you are what you eat proverb: personal health and wellbeing is determined by one's eating habits, in both positive and negative ways.

Proverb

you are what you eat

  1. Personal health and wellbeing is determined by one's eating habits, in both positive and negative ways.

Origin of you are what you eat

Semi-Calque of German Der Mensch ist, was er ißt (literally “The human/man is what he eats”), coined in 1850 by Ludwig Feuerbach in a review of Jacob Moleschott’s Lehre der Nahrungsmittel. Für das Volk (Erlangen, 1850). Compare German man ist, was man isst.

Questions about you are what you eat

What does you are what you eat mean?
You are what you eat means personal health and wellbeing is determined by one's eating habits, in both positive and negative ways.
What part of speech is you are what you eat?
You are what you eat is a proverb.

Words near you are what you eat in the dictionary

  1. you and whose army
  2. you and yours
  3. you are never too old to learn
  4. you are the doctor
  5. you are welcome
  6. you are what you eat
  7. you ask me, I ask who
  8. you attract more flies with honey than vinegar
  9. you beauty
  10. you bet
  11. you betcha

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: you are what you eat (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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