Tom Lehman Cares About Your Heart Health Even If You Don't

Notes from on site at the Shell Houston Open:

Where are you likely to find a lot of people with heart disease? A PGA Tour event is likely a good place. Or maybe you peoples out there, just sitting there like a blob, reading about sports and licking your Cheese Doodled-stained fingers.

So Merck partnered up with PGA great Tom Lehman and asked him to be their spokesman for a heart disease educational program. He wants people to learn more about their cholesterol numbers, what they mean, and things they can do to prevent heart disease. On Thursday, he was signing autographs at the Shell Houston Open and giving away educational information. I asked him to say a few words in a video to you about why he cares about heart disease education.

You can find more detailed information at triplethreatchallenge.com. (autoplay audio in link). Some people may not like drug companies using sports figures to educate people about diseases, but if folks are more likely to listen to their favorite athlete over their doctor, I'm okay with whatever works.

You don't need eat mass quantities of Cheese Doodles to have heart disease. The problem with heart disease is that you can have really high cholesterol and not look or feel bad at all, until uh, your heart says screw it . So get your cholesterol checked regularly, and you can use that website to learn more about what your test results mean.

Though it isn't in the video, we talked about what blogs are all about and the different ways they can be used. I told him about FanHouse. I told him how much I liked the writers here, and that it was especially good for sports fans who travel a lot and want to keep up with what is happening with sports in general and their favorite players and teams. He said he'd check it out.

So if you are reading this, I'll say "Hi Tom!" See, that's one of the differences between a blog and traditional media.

In a newspaper article about this subject, the writer likely won't say "hi" to you. Who cares if that isn't terribly professional, whatever that means in modern journalism?

Hello Tom Lehman. Thanks for the nice conversation, and educating people about stuff that most people want to stay willfully ignorant about so they don't have to think about how poorly they are eating and how little physical exertion they get. And maybe helping those people who do eat well and exercise, but have genetic risk factors for heart disease.

If you want to have a nice chat with him too, not just about heart disease or the blogosphere, please check out his schedule of upcoming appearances. If you would like to know how his golf game is going, check out this link.