The upcoming debate in the European Parliament about tackling obesity and promoting healthy living is well-timed. As many as 200 million Europeans are believed to be overweight or obese. A town in my constituency was named in recent weeks as one of the 'most obese' in the country. In the UK, children have just returned to school after the summer break to a new regime of healthy eating. Already 20% of children in the UK are believed to be overweight.

Similar issues are facing citizens all around Europe. The question for us in the Nutrition Green Paper is, essentially, how can the EU best compliment the actions of member states in promoting healthy lifestyles? The Green Paper raises two particularly promising areas: food labelling and advertising.

A breakthrough on labelling was made earlier in the year with the adoption of the new EU Regulation on nutrition and health claims. For the first time, all nutrition and health claims will have to stand up to scrutiny, giving busy shoppers a better chance of making an informed choice. Labelling is especially worth our focussing on if it can help to promote a reformulation of existing food products by forcing producers to own up to recipes with high fat, sugar or salt contents. To give one example, Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury's have already promised to cut out all trans fats - which we know to be seriously detrimental to health - from their own-brand products.

Advertising will be controversial area for discussion, but an anecdote from my own office is a reminder of why we must not shy away from the subject. My Parliamentary Researcher in Brussels recently returned home to discover that her 7-year-old daughter had pestered her father into buying chocolate straws, advertised as being a good way of helping children to drink more milk. The problem is that, according to the British consumer watchdog, WHICH?, the amount of sugar a child would consume every morning if they ate Kellogg's Coco Pop Straws as a breakfast cereal is equivalent to a two-finger Kit Kat bar - 10.4 grams. A chocolate bar every morning certainly was not what my Researcher had in mind as being "healthy". We should try to help parents in this kind of situation wherever we can.

We know the problem that confronts us. As the Green Paper states clearly; "unhealthy diets and lack of physical activity are the leading causes of avoidable illness and premature death in Europe". Already, we are spending an estimated 7% of our EU health budget on obesity-related problems. The debate over how we respond is imperative. If we get it right not only will we save money, but we will save lives too.

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