Serge Michels
Thirty years assessing food and health risks, and explaining the science behind them.
LinkedIn profileAn agricultural engineer, graduate of the École nationale supérieure agronomique in Toulouse, Serge Michels has built his career on the boundary between science and decision-making: how a scientific finding turns into an alert, a regulation, or a public controversy.
That question led to ScienceProtect: making it legible, for food manufacturers, what research actually establishes about an ingredient, a substance or a supply chain, before the subject becomes a crisis.
Career
- 1991-1996UFC-Que Choisir
Food policy officer at the French consumer association, working on product assessment and public information.
- 1996-2000Entropy
Founder of a consultancy specialising in corporate communication and health crisis management.
- 2000-2019Protéines group
Entropy joined Protéines, a leading agency on food and health, where he became general manager and then president.
- Since 2019ScienceProtect
Founder of the platform that continuously analyses peer-reviewed scientific literature for the food industry.
Expertise and appointments
- Boards and committees: INRA, Codex Alimentarius, the French National Food Council, the High Council for Public Hygiene, CEDAP.
- Research assessment work for the French National Research Agency.
- Food safety, nutrition, chemical risk assessment, crisis communication.
Publications
- Place de l’arachide et des fruits à coque dans les recommandations nutritionnellesPratiques en nutrition 19(76), 33-38 · 2023
Tree nut consumption in France remains far below guidelines, and peanuts are often left out of dietary advice altogether. The article revisits their nutritional profile and the benefits, cardiovascular in particular, established by recent epidemiological studies.
- The Impact of Crunchy Wednesdays on Happy Meal Fruit Orders: Analysis of Sales Data in France, 2009–2013Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 49(3), 236-240 · 2017 · with Adam Drewnowski, Diane Leroy
From September 2010, McDonald’s restaurants in France offered free fruit with every Happy Meal on the first Wednesday of the month. Sales data show fruit desserts rising from 14.5% in 2010 to 19.4% in 2013, and consistently higher on those Wednesdays.
- Innovation : une France paralysée par la peurLe Cercle Les Échos · 2014
An opinion piece on the risk aversion that has taken hold of the country, and what it costs scientific progress.
- Le marketing de la peurEyrolles · 2014 · with Marie-Hélène Westphalen
Pesticides, aspartame, phone masts, parabens: the book unpacks the strategies of those who trade on fear, and what that emotion, turned into a way of thinking, costs companies and democratic debate alike.
- Dictionnaire des cultures alimentairesPresses universitaires de France · 2012 · edited by Jean-Pierre Poulain
A collective dictionary edited by Jean-Pierre Poulain, in which more than 160 specialists bring sociology, anthropology, law, economics, agronomy and nutrition to bear on food as a social fact.
- Le goût du sucre, plaisir et consommationÉditions Autrement · 2010 · edited by Marie-Sylvie Billaux
A collective work edited by Marie-Sylvie Billaux of the Institut Benjamin Delessert, on how sugar has been represented in history and in the media, on the pleasure of sweetness and on its nutritional stakes.
- Le désir de santéÉditions d’Organisation · 2007 · with Christophe Thomassin, Jean-Michel Gilibert
How the aspiration to complete well-being, physical, psychological and societal, upends what consumers, employees and public opinion expect, and what it demands of companies.
- Perception des messages nutritionnels par le consommateur françaisOléagineux, Corps gras, Lipides 12(5-6), 395-396 · 2005
What French consumers actually take away from the nutritional messages addressed to them.