Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food

Not Hippocrates — no such line in his corpus Unknown No documented author · the sentence is absent from the Corpus Hippocraticum
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

No source exists. The line appears nowhere in the sixty-odd treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus, and the two peer-reviewed studies that went looking for it — Cardenas (2013) and Witkamp & van Norren (2018) — both conclude there is no evidence Hippocrates ever wrote or said it.

Last verified 24 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” popularly credited to Hippocrates, but the line appears nowhere in the Hippocratic Corpus and its author is unknown. See Diana Cardenas, "Let not thy food be confused with thy medicine: The Hippocratic misquotation," e-SPEN Journal 8, no. 6 (2013): e260–e262. Via Quotle.info.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Hippocrates. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the themes of wisdom and simplicity. Theme: "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

What the Hippocratic texts actually say

Attributed work
None — the sentence is absent from the Corpus Hippocraticum
Nearest genuine text
On Aliment (Περὶ τροφῆς), §XIX
Translation
English rendering by Diana Cardenas (2013); the Greek original is long out of copyright
Investigated in
Diana Cardenas, “Let not thy food be confused with thy medicine: The Hippocratic misquotation,” e-SPEN Journal 8, no. 6 (2013): e260–e262

Ἐν τροφῇ φαρμακείη ἄριστον, ἐν τροφῇ φαρμακείη φλαῦρον, φλαῦρον καὶ ἄριστον πρός τι. — rendered by Cardenas as “In food excellent medication, in food bad medication, bad and good relatively.” Not the quotation

This is not the famous line — no text containing that line has ever been found. This is the passage from On Aliment §XIX that Cardenas proposes as the possible root of the confusion, and it says something close to the opposite: food can be excellent medication or bad medication, good and bad only relative to circumstance. Cardenas also notes the treatise is now dated to the Hellenistic period rather than to Hippocrates.

Περί τροφής (On Aliment) — Greek text at Wikisource

How we checked

  • Wikiquote files the sentence under its Disputed section ↗, noting it “is often attributed to Hippocrates but does not appear in the Hippocratic corpus,” and pointing to Diana Cardenas’ study as the source of that finding.
  • The peer-reviewed position is the same. A 2018 review in the European Journal of Pharmacology begins: “There is no evidence that Hippocrates, although being credited for it, ever literally stated” the phrase — PubMed record, PMID 29936236 ↗.
  • Cardenas’ own reasoning is reproduced at length by Science-Based Medicine ↗, which adds that the line is “nowhere to be found in the more than 60 texts known as The Hippocratic Corpus.”
  • The one passage that comes close, On Aliment §XIX, survives in Greek at Greek Wikisource ↗ — and says food may be either excellent or bad medication, which is not the slogan.

No copyright status can honestly be asserted for the popular English sentence, because it has no identified author, work, or first-publication date. The ancient Greek of On Aliment is long in the public domain; the short English rendering shown above is Diana Cardenas’, from her 2013 e-SPEN Journal article, and is reproduced here as a brief attributed quotation.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Where the credit goes wrong

This may be the single most-shared line ever pinned on Hippocrates, and nobody has produced a text for it. Three separate things get confused here — the wording, the sentiment, and one genuine passage that sounds a little like both.

Hippocrates Not in the corpus

Wikiquote places the sentence under Disputed and states that it “is often attributed to Hippocrates but does not appear in the Hippocratic corpus” — see Wikiquote ↗. A 2018 review in the European Journal of Pharmacology is blunter still: “There is no evidence that Hippocrates, although being credited for it, ever literally stated” it — abstract on PubMed ↗.

Hippocratic medicine generally Overstated

Diet mattered enormously in Hippocratic practice, but Cardenas argues the slogan reverses the actual doctrine: “Hippocratic doctors clearly saw a difference between food and medicines” — food was assimilated into the body’s substance, a medicine changed the body’s nature without becoming part of it. Quoted in full at Science-Based Medicine ↗.

the treatise On Aliment (Περὶ τροφῆς) Wrong era

Cardenas names one cryptic line in On Aliment as a possible root of the confusion — and notes that this text is nowadays attributed to the Hellenistic period, though Galen in antiquity treated it as Hippocratic. The Greek survives at Greek Wikisource ↗.

No Greek text, no translation, no pre-modern printing: the honest answer is that the author of this sentence is unknown, and that it is not Hippocrates — the position taken by Wikiquote ↗ and by every scholar who has looked.

Context

Why this one matters

This is not a meme that stayed in the meme layer. The sentence has been printed in the medical literature itself: a 2004 BMJ editorial by Richard Smith, archived at PubMed Central ↗, opens by noting a reviewer of folic acid science closing his piece “by quoting Hippocrates” with exactly this line. Once a claim clears peer review it stops being checked, and the phrase has since travelled through nutrition papers, supplement marketing, and wellness copy with an ancient physician’s name welded to it.

That is Cardenas’ actual complaint. Her argument, quoted at length by Science-Based Medicine ↗, is that Hippocratic doctors drew a sharp line the slogan erases: food was material the body assimilated and turned into itself, while a medicine was something that altered the body’s nature without becoming part of it. The misquotation does not merely misattribute a nice thought — it puts a conflation into Hippocrates’ mouth that Hippocratic writers specifically refused.

Hippocratic doctors clearly saw a difference between food and medicines.

Read the full story

The “Hippocrates said” framing is shakier than it looks even for lines that are in the corpus. Wikipedia’s article on Hippocrates ↗ notes that because of the variety of subjects, styles and apparent dates, the Corpus could not have been written by one person, and that the volumes were probably produced by his students and followers.

The closest genuine text, On Aliment, is a case in point: Cardenas notes it is now attributed to the Hellenistic period, though Galen in antiquity took it for Hippocrates. So even the near-miss passage that may have seeded the confusion is not securely his.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Wisdom Simplicity

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Hippocrates — Disputed quotationsen.wikiquote.org

Lists the line under Disputed: often attributed to Hippocrates but not in the Hippocratic corpus, citing Cardenas and the On Aliment passage.
The obsessive worship of "medicinal foods"sciencebasedmedicine.org

David Gorski, 2015 — quotes Cardenas at length on why Hippocratic doctors distinguished food from medicine.
Περί τροφής (On Aliment), Greek textel.wikisource.org

The Greek of section XIX, the passage proposed as the root of the confusion.
Witkamp & van Norren (2018)pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

European Journal of Pharmacology review whose abstract states outright that there is no evidence Hippocrates said it.
"Let food be thy medicine…" (BMJ, 2004)pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Richard Smith's editorial — an example of the misattribution passing through a major medical journal.
Hippocratesen.wikipedia.org

Life dates c. 460 – c. 370 BC, and the multi-author history of the Hippocratic Corpus.

About the man who gets the credit

Hippocrates

Hippocrates

c. 460 – c. 370 BC · Greek physician, traditionally the “Father of Medicine”

Hippocrates of Kos is remembered as the physician who insisted diseases had natural rather than divine causes, and who built medicine around careful observation of the patient. The body of writing that carries his name — the Corpus Hippocraticum — was almost certainly assembled from many hands over several generations; Wikipedia notes the question of whether Hippocrates wrote any of it “has not been conclusively answered.” Diet and regimen genuinely mattered enormously to Hippocratic medicine, which is exactly why a food slogan sticks to his name so easily — but the famous sentence is not his.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this page

No primary source located. The attribution is examined and rejected in Diana Cardenas, “Let not thy food be confused with thy medicine: The Hippocratic misquotation,” e-SPEN Journal 8, no. 6 (2013): e260–e262; see also Renger F. Witkamp and Klaske van Norren, “Let thy food be thy medicine….when possible,” European Journal of Pharmacology 836 (2018): 102–114.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/let-food-be-thy-medicine-and-medicine-be-thy-food/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied