Preface
Christel Teyssèdre – President of Aprifel
As the president of Aprifel, I am very pleased to announce the 9th Edition of EGEA Conference, in September 2023 from the 20th to the 22nd.
Created in 2003, the EGEA Conferences are unique international scientific events and a platform for the scientific community to share and discuss their ideas and work on healthy and sustainable diet rich in fruit and vegetables. Multidisciplinarity, scientific excellence and requirement have always cadenced the editions and conclusions of the EGEA conferences. Through these conferences, Aprifel aims to provide concrete, evidence-based recommendations for changes in practices.
Co-chaired by Pr. Elio Riboli and Dr Joel Doré, the 9th Edition will be a unique opportunity to celebrate the 20th anniversary of these conferences, and still an important place to highlight the role of fruit and vegetables in a healthy and sustainable food system. The theme proposed by the EGEA scientific committee is: “One Health with Fruit and Veg” – an approach based on the concept that human’s health, animals’ health, and our shared environment are interconnected.
This theme is very important for Aprifel: sharing with the scientific community the determinants of a healthy and sustainable diet with fruits and vegetables and prioritizing the actions to be implemented for individuals, society and the planet are at the core of Aprifel’s daily work: 4 sessions, more than 20 speakers, oral presentations, and posters will contribute to achieve the objectives of the 9th Edition: to build a sustainable food system with Fruit and Veg.
We look forward to seeing you all again at this 9th edition.
Fruit and vegetables and One Health: what contributions?
The One health approach revolutionizes the traditional disciplinary method and challenges all health actors – working on human, animal or environmental health – to adopt a transversal and holistic perspective on their practices and knowledge. Thus, for its 20th anniversary, the EGEA conference invites the scientific communities, as well as all stakeholders interested in food and health issues, to jointly examine and address the contribution of diet and specifically of fruit and vegetables to individual health and the sustainability of food systems and to explore the role of the consumers in the vegetalization of their diet.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), fruit and vegetables production and consumption help in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in a “One health” approach. Indeed, alongside the already well-established and widely proven benefits regarding the risks of all-cause mortality and chronic diseases, fruit and vegetables would also have effects and impacts in terms of sustainability of food systems and the reduction of inequalities (FA0, 2021).
Therefore, the objective of the EGEA 2023 conference is to illustrate, through concrete examples from science, how fruit and vegetables would contribute to One Health– an approach that has been widely validated by the support of the World Health Organisation (WHO), the FAO and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) (OMS, 2021) – with four plenary sessions, a round table and oral and poster presentations.