Pilar Galán
- Date of investiture:
- 12th of November 2021
- Sponsor:
- Jordi Salas-Salvadó
- Area of knowledge:
- Nutrition
Pilar Galán is research director of the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAe), of the Nutritional Epidemiology Research Team at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord (France).
Born in Riodeva (Teruel), she graduated in Medicine from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and went to Paris to study a Master's Degree in Nutrition, a virtually non-existent scientific discipline in Spain in the 1980s. There she discovered the population-based approach to studying nutrition, public health and prevention, in all its biological, medical, social, cultural, economic and political dimensions.
Her research career has focused on observational and interventional epidemiological studies of food and its relationship to chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes, among others, and on studies to clarify the mechanisms involved in the relationship between nutrition and these chronic diseases. To this end, she launched the world's first Internet-initiated cohort, NutriNet-Santé, with biological samples from 170,000 volunteers.
As a result of this project, the nutritional determinants of cancer, cardiovascular disease, asthma, cognitive impairment and other pathologies have been established, as have the harmful effects of consuming ultra-processed foods, and the perception of certain public health actions. Based on these results, Pilar Galán and the research team she leads have created the nutritional logo Nutri-Score, which is located on the packaging of food products to help consumers in their purchasing decisions and to assist agri-food companies in showing the composition of the products in a transparent way.
