Created in partnership with the national agency Santé publique France, the annual Public Health Chair is designed to encourage excellence in research and intellectual debate at the highest level on public health issues.

Nutritional prevention of chronic diseases : from research to public health action

Over thecourse 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 fifty years have lifted theveil- in part - on the impact of these foods and their bioactive compounds on our health. Nutrition, which in the broadest sense encompasses 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, and nutritional issues vary greatly from one country to another. Nutrition brings together a range of modifiable risk and protective factors, all of which can be leveraged at individual and collective level to improve the health of populations and help reduce social inequalities. This series of conferences addresses current concepts and issues in public health nutrition : how are levels of evidence established ? What scientific contributions have been made by the major French epidemiological studies of recent decades ? Over and above established knowledge (on alcohol, salt, fiber, etc.), many questions remain as to how we can make the most of the latest research.), many questions remain as to the impact of emerging risk factors (industrial or domestic transformation processes, food additive mixtures, pesticide residues, fasting, food supplements, etc.) on the long-term health of mankind and the planet. How can we sort out the real from the fake between real scientific knowledge and " fake news ", in a field that is the subject of much ink and is the focus of major economic interests. Oncethe nutritional factors and behaviors to be promoted or avoided have been identified, how can they be monitored at population level, and what public health measures (labeling, pricing policies, regulation of advertising, etc.) can be put in place to effectively improve chronic disease prevention ?