The Super Bowl can be hazardous to your health, say researchers

With the Super Bowl now less than a week away, the media hype machine is shifting into high gear. The two teams competing in the game, the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers, are slated to arrive in Dallas, the site of the game, today. Celebrities renowned for their partying ways are flocking there as well to host glitzy, high-end liquor-sponsored soirees, and scores of Americans are beginning to make weekend plans for taking in the biggest spectacle in all of sports. But should they be worried about going into cardiac arrest?

That's what a new study published in the journal Clinical Cardiology warns: that the enhanced consumption of booze, fatty food and fandom-related stress on Super Bowl Sunday is a toxic recipe for the average human heart. But let's not hold off on the guacamole just yet -- the gist of the report stems from a study of Los Angeles-area residents following a single Super Bowl featuring the then-Los Angeles Rams more than 30 years ago.

"In 1980, when the Pittsburgh Steelers staged a fourth-quarter comeback to beat the underdog L.A. Rams, heart-related deaths shot up 15% among men and 27% among women in the subsequent two weeks, compared with the same period in 1981 through 1983," CNN reports about the study. "There was also a significant increase in deaths among people ages 65 and older, the study found."

However, the same researchers found no spike in heart-related deaths in the Los Angeles area in the weeks following the 1984 Super Bowl, which the then-L.A. Raiders won. And since fact-checking operations have debunked a slew of myths associated with the Super Bowl -- such as dramatic spikes in wife-beating and overwhelmed sewage systems -- we can't help but think that this latest round of attention-grabbing claims are weakened by the study's own conflicting. We're not the only ones who think so; sports blog Deadspin notes that the study's data "tracks cause-of-death records, not individuals, so there's no proof that the dead were even football fans."

But even if they were, at least some hardcore football fans would likely say that to die while cheering for their team in the Super Bowl and gorging on high-cholesterol snacks would be a fantastic way to go out -- so who gives a fried chicken wing?

(Photo: Getty/Sharon Dominick)