It May Be Loverly to Think Women Should Be More Like Men, But It’s Not Healthy
Whether it’s fat vs. muscle, or vitamins and minerals, women and men are very different when it comes to nutrition.
| 14 Apr 2026 | 04:37
Julie Andrews, as Eliza Doolittle, and Rex Harrison, as Professor Henry Higgins, in the 1957 Broadway production of “My Fair Lady.” (
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Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle on the set of the movie “My Fair Lady” with cinematographer Harry Stradling, Sr. (c. 1964) (
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In the 70 years since “My Fair Lady” premiered on Broadway, millions of theatergoers have heard Professor Henry Higgins ask, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Yet, curiously enough, there has been not one report of a single member of the audience anywhere standing up on his or her seat to shout out the obvious: Women aren’t men.
Men and women may be equal in many areas, but when it comes to nutrition, they are not the same. Consider calories. The average man has proportionally more muscle than the average woman does, while the average woman has proportionately more fat, according to the National Institutes of Health. Muscle is working tissue that uses energy, i.e. calories, every time it moves. Fat isn’t, so it doesn’t.
As a result, a man can wolf down about 10 percent more calories than a woman of the same height and weight without putting on pounds.
The larger body of the average man also requires larger amounts of some vitamins and minerals, with two well-known exceptions. Iron circulates in blood, so women of childbearing age need extra iron because they lose some each month when they menstruate. And older women need more calcium. An older man’s testosterone continues to protect his bones, but women lose bone more quickly when their supplies of bone-preserving estrogen decline at menopause.
Some foods and seasonings also affect a woman’s body in ways men never experience. For example, while a higher sodium diet may drive up anyone’s blood pressure, large amounts of salty foods can worsen a woman’s symptoms of PMS (premenstrual syndrome). And while plant foods are universally beneficial, it looks like women may get a gender-related bounce. An early study in the Italian Journal of Human Reproduction suggested plant food lowers a woman’s risk of endometriosis.
As for carbs, long before modern questions concerning simple vs. complex arose, Mexican researchers found that women who consumed many highly processed foods (think corn chips) had a risk of breast cancer nearly double that of women whose diet emphasized complex carbs from high fiber foods such as whole grains, beans and fruits and veggies. The researchers theorized that sweets and starches, which raise insulin levels, might trigger tumor growth. Still, that remains to be proven.
Moving on to the heart of the matter, researchers acknowledge that, regardless of diet, the average woman has higher levels of good cholesterol HDLs (high density lipoproteins) than the average man. Last April, Rumanian researchers published data showing this may actually lower an overweight older woman’s risk of breast cancer although nobody knows exactly why.
Sigmund Freud once wrote that “anatomy is destiny.” To which Eliza Doolittle, the smart, fair lady in “My Fair Lady” might have added, “Especially when it comes to nutrition.”