Put On Your Dancing Shoes

On Thursday 16 November at 11:15 a.m. more than 200,000 Dutch people will be dancing simultaneously for five minutes as part of the 'Get the Netherlands Dancing' campaign, an initiative by the Dutch Institute for Sport and Exercise (NISB). The aim of the campaign is to call attention to exercise as a resource in the fight against obesity. An important part of the campaign is to break the current Guinness world record for simultaneous dancing. At the moment it is held by Canada, where 196,569 people danced the hokey cokey simultaneously on 9 April 2002.

More than a thousand organizations all over the country are taking part, from kindergartens to schools, from rehabilitation centers to health centers, to wheelchair dancers, students, government employees, police and firefighters. In many city halls there will be dancing with the mayor. These tens of thousands of Dutch people will be dancing the same dance, to the track 'What a Feeling' by the Hughes Corporation.

'Get the Netherlands Dancing' will kick off on 16 November in the city hall of the government city, The Hague. Various members of the lower house of Parliament, CEOs of companies and members of leading social organizations will be joining in the dancing. Afterwards they will be debating how exercise can put a stop to the growing problem of obesity.

One in four children in the European Union is overweight. This number is growing year on year by around 400,000. Although not all European countries record the number of their overweight or obese citizens, the European Commission estimates that over 200 million adults in the EU may be overweight (source: International Obesity Task Force, 2006).

In the Netherlands 13% of children and young people (aged 0-21) are overweight. For adults the figure is 40%, 10% of whom are battling a serious weight problem. If the current trend continues, in 2015 an estimated 15 to 20% of Dutch adults will be obese (source: Dutch Obesity Forum).

'Get the Netherlands Dancing' is part of the "30 Minutes' Exercise" campaign, run by the Dutch Institute for Sport and Movement (NISB) on behalf of the Ministry for Health, Well-Being and Sport. The NISB wants to encourage Dutch people to exercise for half an hour at least five days a week. For children and young people the Dutch Exercise Health Standard is an hour a day.