Michel Lucas

Pr. Michel Lucas, PhD in epidemiology and a certified chef, is Full Professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, Université Laval, and researcher at the CHU de Québec-Université Laval. He has more than 30 years of experience at the intersection of population health research, medical education, and the culinary arts.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in nutrition and dietetics, a Master’s degree in community health, a PhD in epidemiology from Université Laval, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in nutritional epidemiology (2009–2012) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he subsequently served as a visiting scientist in the Department of Nutrition from 2012 to 2022. He also holds a professional chef diploma from the École hôtelière de la Capitale. This dual training—scientific and culinary—forms the originality of his contribution: articulating knowledge with the concrete gestures of care.

His work in planetary health focuses on food’s effect on health and on the power to act through food. He draws on data from large population-based studies involving Canadian adults, First Nations and Inuit populations in Québec, Polynesian populations, cohorts of American nurses, as well as cohorts of children and adolescents. As principal investigator, he led the large-scale VisezEau® intervention project, which brought together more than a dozen researchers from seven universities around the promotion of water as the default beverage in school settings.

He is the founder and director of the Culinary Medicine program at Université Laval, the first accredited university program of its kind in the French-speaking academic world and one of the most comprehensive in the world in terms of total training hours (135 hours of integrated training). The Culinary Medicine he develops is a capability-enhancing pedagogy—that is, learning through action—which combines medical knowledge, nutritional knowledge, and the culinary arts to enable people to act by and with food. It is grounded in a perspective of praxis (reflective action) and draws on the theoretical frameworks of care and capability: to care is to make the other capable of acting, to give them the power to be the artisan of their possibilities and to inhabit the world in interrelation.

His current projects integrate nutritional epidemiology, population health interventions, and Culinary Medicine. He is working to anchor Culinary Medicine as a recognized academic and clinical discipline—Francophone and international—and to train a new generation of health professionals capable of translating knowledge into power to act, for the benefit of individuals, communities, and our shared human and planetary health.