Divided by Design: How Sex Shapes the Way We Eat, Absorb, and Burn by Jerry Brainum 7/26

 

 

Is nutrition different for men and women? Do the two sexes respond differently to specific nutrients, supplements, and diets? At first glance, the physical differences seem obvious enough: men tend to be larger than women, carry more muscle mass, and are built around a distinct hormonal profile. But surface differences in size and strength are just the beginning. The more intriguing question — and the one that nutritional science is only now catching up to — is whether those biological distinctions extend to something as fundamental as how the body processes food.

Dietary preferences appear to diverge early in life. Research suggests that women tend to favor what might be called "lighter" foods — fruits, vegetables, and plant-based options — while men skew toward meat and animal proteins. But food choices are only part of the picture. Women are also significantly more likely to develop eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia, conditions rooted in a profoundly distorted body image. Those affected don't simply dislike how they look — they perceive a body that bears little resemblance to physical reality, and they respond to that perception in dangerous ways, through self-starvation, purging, or relentless restriction.

Yet disordered body image is by no means exclusive to women. A striking parallel exists among competitive bodybuilders, where the condition has been informally dubbed "bigorexia." Rather than seeing too much body fat, these athletes — some tipping the scales at well over 250 pounds, most of it muscle — look in the mirror and see someone too small, too underdeveloped, never enough. Different obsession, same fractured mirror.

Women have long faced intense cultural pressure to conform to a particular body ideal — though that ideal has shifted considerably over time. During the Renaissance, fuller, more voluptuous figures were celebrated as the height of feminine beauty, associated with abundance, health, and fertility, as seen in the canvases of Rubens and Titian. The drive toward thinness as a female virtue is largely a 20th-century development, gaining force in the 1920s when the lean, boyish silhouette of the flapper became fashionable, and accelerating through the mid-century reign of reed-thin runway models.

That standard, however, is shifting again, and this time in a more interesting direction. The ascent of visibly athletic women as cultural role models has helped reframe the conversation from thin to strong. Nowhere is this more evident than in the embrace of resistance training by women who once avoided the weight room for fear of looking "too bulky." Research has consistently shown that while aerobic exercise excels at reducing body fat, strength training is uniquely effective at sculpting muscle definition and improving body composition — changes that go well beyond what the . . .