“Go on, get up from your couch!” is the advertising slogan chosen by the General Directorate for the Health and Protection of Consumers of the European Commission and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to represent the television campaign launched this week and “aimed at encouraging European citizens to practice physical exercise on a daily basis”. The television commercial, lasting half a minute, will be transmitted free of charge in over forty countries during the interval of the 125 matches of the Champions League of the 2007/2008 season (watched by a weekly average of 90 million spectators). The campaign forms part of the platform “Diet, physical exercise and health” and other actions sponsored by Brussels to contribute to food education, in the conviction that poorly balanced diets – and the consequent obesity from which half of the European population including over three million children suffer – lie at the origin of six of the seven main factors of illness in the EU and constitute 7% of the overall EU public expenditure in the healthcare sector.
