Jeffrey Friedman was eligible for the Danone Institute Prize for Nutrition because he developed a truly new concept in nutrition, supported by strong scientific data. He is the first to discover the regulation of satiety and hunger by adipose tissue cells which produce a new hormone identified as leptin acting on the brain to suppress hunger. As the father of this new concept, he led the way to thousands of research teams around the world into new scientific avenues in the fields of obesity, nutrition and food intake. The implementation of his concept is going well beyond technical developments namely by the positive treatment of leptine-defi-cient patients by leptin, but also it lead to new developments in nutrition, clinical practices and public health by enabling the identification of a new system regulating the balance of food intake and energy expenditure. Thanks to all these new discoveries, disorders of food intake will soon be understood and treated in the future. Being undoubtedly a research leader, who stimulates the research of other groups at international scale, and promoting research on nutrition at a level never reached before, made Prof. J. Friedman fully eligible for this prize. His excellent career led him to develop truly surprising, new and fascinating concept in nutrition. His continuing work on the front of research in this field, especially studying the interaction and regulation of appetite and adipogenesis by leptin and other relevant new compounds, justify his winning of the prestigious Danone International Prize for Nutrition.

He was unanimously elected by the Jury members as the laureate of the 2007 Prize.