Abstract
Over the course of a lifetime, we ingest around 30 tonnes of food and 50 000 liters of beverages. Thousands of epidemiological, experimental and clinical studies published over the last 50 years have lifted the veil - in part - on the impact of these foods and their bioactive compounds on our health. Nutrition, in the broadest sense of the term encompassing diet and physical activity, is now recognized as one of the main modifiable factors involved in determining the most widespread diseases in the industrialized world : obesity, cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes... Worldwide, unbalanced nutrition is one of the main risk factors for mortality, accounting for around 1 in 5 deaths, with highly contrasting nutritional problems depending on the country in question. This knowledge has made it possible to establish high levels of evidence for several protective or deleterious nutritional factors, which have served as the basis for the establishment of nutritional policy in France, embodied by the National Nutrition and Health Program (PNNS). This lesson presents the state of the art in nutrition-health relationships, as well as current recommendations for the nutritional prevention of chronic diseases.
