How’s Your Heart?
During this year’s Super Bowl, a commercial for the American Heart Association’s online risk calculator caught Americans in the act – of stuffing their faces with corn chips. The risk calculator is at www.beatyourrisk.com and determines your risk of a heart attack when you enter some stats. The television commercial involved a man in a red heart costume getting attacked by a gang of risk factors: criminals labeled with “high blood pressure,” “diabetes,” “overweight,” and “high cholesterol” (see the commercial at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgc-8KTMtl8). Due to the commercial, traffic to the website was three times what it is on a normal Sunday night. A preliminary analysis showed that three of four visitors are at higher than normal risk for a cardiovascular event.
