Today, more than 100 million people are going to tune in to the Super Bowl as the New York Giants take on the New England Patriots in Indianapolis. They will be watching more than just an American tradition at play -- they will be witnessing one of the deadliest sports in history, whose record of premature deaths demonstrates in sobering reality the silent killer in all of us: inflammation. Consider the following:
• Heavy (overweight) NFL players are twice as likely to die before the age of 50.
• Twenty-eight percent of all pro football players born in the last century who qualified as obese died before their 50th birthday, compared with 13 percent who were less overweight.
• One of every 69 nine players born since 1955 is now dead. Twenty-two percent of those players died of heart diseases; 19 percent died from homicides or suicides.
