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From a recent St. Louis Post Dispatch (my local fish wrapper) the Health Facts of the Week caption on page H2 contained startling information. Checking further with the newspaper, the avatar that answered the phone automatically apologized for the oversight and in a disembodied recorded voice, explained they just get their info off the newswire, and offered to give me a free copy of yesterday’s paper for the inconvenience (scored some swag, yeah!).

Nevertheless, the caption I’m referring to made the observations that a) Americans spend a lot of money going to the hospital, and 2) the five leading causes for spending money at the hospital amount to about of fifth of all money we spend there.

That kind of Yogi Berra journalism isn’t what one expects from a Pulitzer prize winning paper. It’s closer to reading my undergrad statistics book, except the textbook didn’t leave ink on your hands.

Anyway, back to the promised epiphany.

The table showed that we Americans spent $873 billion dollars visiting hospitals in 2005. Of that almost one trillion dollars, twenty one percent or $180 billion dollars came from only five conditions, as explained in executive summary a couple paragraphs earlier.

Ho hum, I know. But stay with me here. There’s something for you in all this.

If anyone actually worked at the newspaper, like one of those old fashioned “reporters,” god forbid, they might have noticed that those aforementioned (oh I just love that big word) five conditions could be grouped into two important categories, from which emerges some potentially interesting information.

Let’s start with the second and third conditions on their list: pregnancy and childbirth, and newborn infant care. Not a big stretch to see how they’re related, so we’ll put them in a category we’ll call, for simplicity, Being Born.

Okay, then we can take the first, fourth and fifth conditions we spent the most money on at the hospital, including: coronary artery disease, heart attack, and congestive heart failure. We’ll call that category, hmmm, got it: Dying Unnecessarily.

So it seems that we spent $79 billion on what we called Being Born. Now let’s forget about that, it’s not like any of us had a say in whether we were going to be involved in this, so no sprint bonus points available on this one.

We’ll focus instead for as long as we continue to have your attention on the darker and more sinister category.

Adding up the costs of Dying Unnecessarily, we spent $110 billion for the chance to accelerate our own demise. That’s the equivalent of almost $400 dollars for every person in the U.S..

Oh, and as to it being “unnecessary,” well listen to this.

Shocking new information from two independent studies found that - are you sitting down? - eating right and exercising reduces the risk of death.

I know, groundbreaking stuff here.

Quick stats for those of you who want to dominate conversation on the next club ride: Eating right reduced the chances of death over 5 years, and moderate exercise had about the same amount of benefit.

Now, since they were independent studies, researchers weren’t able to calculate the benefit of doing both. However, our own independent research, involving careful use a calculator and our most trustworthy finger (it goes everywhere with us), came up with — let’s see, press five, press plus, press five, press equal sign, and viola! — ten years.

That’s ten more chances to watch the Tour de France. That’s ten more opportunities to justify buying just one more bike. That’s ten more, well, you get it, years.

Anyway, here are even more scintillating facts to carry your next dinner party conversation:

- Moderate exercise lasting only 30 minutes on “most” (sorry, that’s a technical term and wasn’t explained in the study) days, reduced the chances of Dying Unnecessarily by 27 percent.

- Vigrorous exercise, yeah, that’s you and me, made one 32 percent more bulletproof, and able to leap taller buildings and all that.

- Exercising less than moderately, but getting off your duff occasionally, generated a still significant 19 percent improvement versus sitting on the couch and waiting to dial 911.

So we’ve proven a few important points:

- We all know it’s possible to add years to our lives and cut the chances of dying without much effort — admit it.

- Assuming that reading cycling blogs means you actually ride a bike occasionally, and possibly even vigorously, you’re very likely to live longer and save some righteous bucks.

- And finally, my local newspaper actually does say something worthwhile once in a while.

Quiz questions (hope you were paying attention)

1. How many zeros are there in a hundred and ten billion? Ans: 10

2. Why are there more zeros in a hundred and ten billion than in a hundred and eleven billion? Ans: still working on that, will get back to you.

3. If you assume that by living la vida bicicleta you can avoid the hospital costs of dying necessarily, and that’s say forty grand, give or take, how many bikes are you entitled to buy for yourself with the money you saved? Ans: About eight at $5k each — so go nuts.

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