continues. first, you don't want to miss this. one rookie is getting ready for the super bowl after making a comeback from cancer. dr. sanjay gupta begins right now. this morning a doctor getting a lot of attention saying he knows the key to preventing illness. we all want to know this. it could add years to your life. exciting stuff, but also controversial. explain. we'll sit down and talk to professor henry lewis gates about a test that can help you find your roots. absolutely fascinating stuff. they found my roots back six generations. it can also shed a light on your risk of certain medical conditions as well. first, hey, it's super bowl weekend. new york giants taking on the new england patriots. got your favorite, i'm sure. those of us who care about head injuries can look for a few extra things during the game. i want you to pay attention. for one, we know super bowl ads are the most high profile, most expensive spots to run. the nfl will use one of those

spots to run an ad that talks about what the league is doing to promote safety. this past week on "60 minutes" roger goodel said players need to share responsibility and also to be honest about their injuries. >> some of it's a warrior mentality. some of it's wanting to be out there to contribute, but that's part of our education is to make sure that the players understand the seriousness of the issue and that they have to report these injuries. >> so the question a lot of people ask, just how hard are those big hits? i recently spoke to a concussion expert kevin gust owi tz who said you can measure the force. >> we'll see what happens. >> it's recorded up here at 23.6 g's of acceleration. >> reporter: he recently won a macarthur genius grant for his work on concussions in football. >> he is going to with stand an impact of 157 g's.

>> wow. that's similar to a car accident. >> right. >> 157 g's. it's just amazing. now, at the super bowl if you are watching, the nfl will have independent athletic trainers in the media box above the field to help spot big dangerous hits. we called an nfl team trainer to ask what specifically will that person be looking for? take a look at this. he told us, number one, special teams. the punts, the kickoffs. pay attention there. big collisions happen when players, like number 15, richard goodman, of the san diego chargers, he is the one in the right. they build up a head of steam running down the field. number two, don't jest just follow the ball. the main camera may not catch it. if you look closely, you'll find players are colliding all over the field, and, three, after the play, players who don't get up quickly may have a strange walk and may warrant a closer look on the field. one of the doctors who thinks big who wants to change the way we think about medicine. he made his name on the frontlines on his war on cancer,

but he came to think that, you know what, we're taking the wrong poach approach, and not just to cancer. in his new book "the end of illness" he explains how taking an individual look at health can prevent disease and add years to your life. >> we talk about prevention a lot, and i think intuitively, people understand you prevent disease brz they happen. that's a good thing. what is new in this book? what is different about what we should be doing or as a society we should be doing? >> i mean, it's aggressive. it talks about modelling health as a complex system, which sounds a little crazy, but it's different than what we're doing now, which is trying to replete each part that's missing. if x is low, give y. i want to change the whole system. the root of the system seems to be inflammation. it's the root of heart disease, cancer, brain diseases. you know, your special last week on brain injury, the key is inflammation there. we want to prevent it. we have met this now, whether it

be by behavior changes, changing our die elt, what we do during the day, or even medicines that can block inflammation. it can have a profound impact on disease. >> can you give me a couple of examples, because i think the inflammation is the buzz word, but if someone is watching saying, okay, look, i'm actually pretty -- i'm healthy. i'm not experiencing an illness. i don't want inflammation. what do i do? what do you tell them? >> you know, we think of inflammation, and you think of a cut, and it turns red. that's inflammation. inside your body is inflammation that's happening that we can't feel or see. we have some blood tests for it. one called a protein, and probably others that are going to come through science. drugs like statens, like lipitor, that you can get a 90 day supply for $10 from wal-mart without health insurance, what that does is it blocks inflammation. if you take lipitor or the statens every day, you decrease your incidence of cancer by 40%, delay of heart disease. aspirin, another remarkable pill that can decrease death of cancer and heart diseases. as now in our country with health care costs are going

crazy, we have to focus on inflammation. >> a lot of people will say -- i'm sure you have been asked this. is this pill pushing? is this ordering too many medications, too many tests? doesn't that increase cost as opposed bring them down? >> there's no question. i mean, people aggress he havely question am i part of the pharmaceutical industry? am i pushing drugs? there's no question. i'm pushing progress and prevention. again, i look at death every day. the other side of it is if you start to look at things, evolution cares for who has good kids. it doesn't select out for who lives until they're 90s. in order to optimize to them, we have to focus. focus on our daily schedule. it turns out if you have your lunch today at noon and tomorrow at 2:00, for two hours your stress hormones go up, and i don't want that. i want you to be regular in your schedule. have your lunch the same time every day. have all your meals the same time. the person who grabs an apple whenever they want is bad. the person who grabs an apple

every day at 2:00, greatest thing in the world. >> it's fascinating to think about it, and it's a real sort of control that one has over their body. let me ask you, can i ask you personally, whatsoever things do you take? you mentioned staten drugs. you mentioned baby aspirin. what -- are there other things that you yourself take? >> yeah. i mean, i'm a big believer that we want to be as natural as we can in our foods and what we eat. i eat healthy. i go to the supermarket -- what came in fresh today, and that's what i get. there's nothing there that i want, and i get flash frozen. something that's been sitting on the shelf for a day or two has little nutritional value. the key is i don't take vitamins or supplements. if you start to look at the data on vitamins and supplements, there has been no benefit in over 50 studies with over 1,000 people for heart disease and cancer. if a man takes vitamin e every day for three years, his risk of prostate cancer is 17% elevated, is and that risk will last three years after stopping the vitamin

e. the most common non skin cancel vatd. that's an enormous impact on society. >> there's a lot more in the book as well. things that we don't have time to talk about today, but the idea of individualized medicine and how people aren't the same if they have cancer, their cancers aren't the same. that's another area that you talk about quite a bit. you have to come back and talk to us about that sometime. >> sanjay, i would love to. you have been an inspiration to me and part of the reason i wrote the book is watching you and what you do to people in this country. thank you. >> it's nice of you to say. congratulations, again. good luck. see you back here again soon. zimp coming up, the man who traced my family roots. very emotional. they traced it back to my great, great, great, great, great grandfather. let's stick around and see this. [ man 2 ] yummy. i got that wrong didn't i? [ male announcer ] want great taste and whole grain oats that can help lower cholesterol? honey nut cheerios. that can help lower cholesterol? imagine if you could always see life [music]

in the best light. every time of day. outdoors, or in. transitions® lenses automatically filter just the right amount of light. so you see everything the way it is meant to be seen. maybe even a little better. experience life well lit, ask for transitions adaptive lenses. i took some steep risks in my teens. i'd never ride without one now. and since my doctor prescribed lipitor, i won't go without it for my high cholesterol and my risk of heart attack. why kid myself? diet and exercise weren't lowering my cholesterol enough. now i'm eating healthier, exercising more, taking lipitor. numbers don't lie. my cholesterol's stayed down. lipitor is fda approved to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke in patients who have heart disease or risk factors for heart disease. it's backed by over 19 years of research. [ female announcer ] lipitor is not for everyone, including people with liver problems and women who are nursing,

pregnant or may become pregnant. you need simple blood tests to check for liver problems. tell your doctor if you are taking other medications, or if you have any muscle pain or weakness. this may be a sign of a rare but serious side effect. [ man ] still love that wind in my face! talk to your doctor. don't kid yourself about the risk of heart attack and stroke. if lipitor's been working for you, stay with it. lipitor may be available for as little as $4 a month with the lipitor co-pay card. terms and conditions apply. learn more at lipitorforyou.com.

i recently had the experience of seeing my family tree traced back eight generations. and my deepest ancestry traced back at least 50,000 years. i did it with the help of professor henry louis gates. i'm going to lay it out in his documentary series called "finding your roots" on pbs. he is director of the institute for african-american research which is at harvard. he is also the author of many books including the new one "life upon these shores." everyone knows you now around the country for a lot of the work that you've done, but most recently the work in genealogy, tracing people's roots, something your name is synonymous with. have you traced your own roots? >> my father looked like a white man and my grandfather was so white we called him casper behind his back. we wanted to know where this

white man came from. one of my motivations for doing the pbs series was to use genealogy and genetics to find out more about myself and we found out two very interesting things. first off, we found out that my mixture which is a percentage of ancestry from europe, africa, asia and native america over the last 500 years. and mine, to my astonishment revealed in the middle of the shoot for the first series was that i am 50% white and 50% black. the director of the dubois institute for african-american research is half a white man. this is an identity crisis for me. >> did you think about the medical significance at all of the dna testing? >> not initially. imagine when i called to ask you if you'd be in my series if you knew i would have access to your medical information you might

have second thoughts. so we told people in advance we won't look at the medical results. and when we started, there were no medical results. we started -- we do tests now that didn't exist when "african-american lives," the name of the first series, aired. but we've been working several years with a dna company called 23 and me. they test all of our guests. they tested you. and they announced last july that they wanted to give away 10,000 tests to self-identify african-americans to establish a database to explore the link between genes and risk for disease. these databases exist, of course, with many americans and people of european descent but not so much african descent and what it does, unlike any other company i know -- and i have to say i have no financial interest in 23 and me -- but they'll do your ancestry testing but also reveal your propensity

genetically for certain diseases, what your risk is. so what is your risk for diabetes? what is your risk for high blood pressure? for high cholesterol? for clotting disorders? stroke? osteoporosis? if you only have less than 1,000 people in your database, it's not enough. >> people think about certain diseases like alzheimer's, for example, you find out you're at risk for it but you can't do anything about it right now. is there value in knowing even if there isn't a plan to do something about it or, in the case of too many americans, they don't have the ability to pay for health care or have access to health care insurance to do anything about it? >> i think that the important side is to supply data to those who are curing the diseases. on the one hand, you might be delivering the terrible news that you have disease for which there is no known cure but on the other side in the medical schools, in the research laboratories, people are looking at the same data trying to make correlations between a genetic

structure, let's say, and the causes of the disease. and that's where we're putting our money. >> you did it. you had this done. >> my father and i had our full geno sequence. that test retail was $100,000. now it's about $20,000. we didn't have to pay because it was part of my pbs series. and it revealed whether we had certain genes for alzheimer's, for example. and, fortunately -- well, my father was 95 years old when he took it and he didn't have alzheimer's so i figured i was 50% okay. fortunately i didn't have any of those genes. but i was worried about it. i was concerned. i had to decide whether i wanted to know. i said i didn't want to know. when i sat down they said thank god you don't have any diseases. i said thank you, thank you. >> 23 and me, the company that offered this promotion, told us they're hoping to renew this offer for african-americans again in march.

you can check them out anytime on line. you can see my full family history. amazing. you can see professor gates late they are spring on pbs called "finding your roots." up next, just in time for super bowl xlvi giants linebacker mark herzlich on his comeback for bone cancer. >> keep focusing and your brain mentally focused. it's 90% mental. >> he will absolutely inspire you. in 2009 herzlich was diagnosed with ewing's sarcoma. this weekend he'll be on the field at the super bowl. well somewhere along the way, emily went right on living. but you see, with the help of her raymond james financial advisor, she had planned for every eventuality. ...which meant she continued to have the means to live on... ...even at the ripe old age of 187. life well planned.

see what a raymond james advisor can do for you. [oinking] [hissing] [ding] announcer: cook foods to the right temperature using a food thermometer. 3,000 americans will die from food poisoning this year. check your steps at foodsafety.gov.

oh, there's a prize, all right. [ male announcer ] inside every box of cheerios are those great-tasting little o's made from carefully selected oats that can help lower cholesterol. is it a superhero? kinda. ♪

two years ago i was told i might never walk again. just walked off the plane in indy to play the super bowl. take that, bleep, cancer. that was a tweet last monday from new york giants rookie linebacker mark herzlich. for mark taking on the new england patriots this weekend is nothing compared to the battle that he, himself, fought back in 2009. >> how's it going? >> mark herzlich has come a long way in a very short time. >> we need to win, and that's what we're excited about. we're excited to be here as a team and playing in the super bowl is unbelievable. >> the rookie linebacker for the new york giants is focused on beating the new england patriots.

but his story has been a focus of the media leading up to the nfl championship. that's because some say his being here is somewhat of a miracle. herzlich was expected to go far. as a junior in boston college he was named his conference's 2008 defensive player of the year. he was projected to be a first-round draft pick. but all that came to a crashing halt in may of 2009 when he was told he had a rare form of bone cancer called ewing's sarcoma. >> when the cancer came, it wasn't just my super bowl dreams are dead. it was all my football dreams were dead. >> herzlich was determined to fight the cancer. after two months of chemotherapy doctors wanted to remove part of his thigh bone. then he found a doctor willing to try a rare treatment for this type of cancer. radiation therapy. >> my dream was to play football again. i knew that radiation and keeping my leg was going to be the only chance i would have to play again. >> the treatment worked. in a little more than four months after diagnosis, herzlich

was declared cancer free. >> football drove me every second of every day. >> herzlich returned to boston college the next year, and even though he wasn't drafted he was still picked up by the new york giants and now he'll be playing in the biggest game of all. the biggest game of all. >> i think the biggest thing coming back from cancer, coming back to play football, all of that kind of sits in the rear view mirror now as we're getting ready for the super bowl. there are such things as dreams coming true and miracles, and i believe this is one of them. >> congratulations, mark. live strong, buddy. while you watch mark at the super bowl party, keep your eyes peeled for something else, the dreaded double dipper. you know what i'm talking about here. they've done studies on this and i'm going to show you what they found. that's next.

did you just double dip that chip?

>> excuse me? >> you double dipped the chip. >> double dipped? what are you talking about? >> you dip the chip, you took a bite and you dipped again. >> yeah, no doubt, a lot of us will be at super bowl parties this weekend and we're going to be eating chips and dip. so i wanted to leave us with a study that measured exactly what happened when someone does double dip. the results might surprise you a little bit. after double dipping a few times, researchers found 50 to 100 times more bacteria in the dip. that was just from one mouth. imagine your party. lots of people double dipping and one of them possibly being sick. you can see how this could away problem. so eat up, for sure. have fun with the super bowl parties and watch out for the george costanzas, as well. you might end up looking for something like this. pepto bismol.

studies have shown that sales of antacids spike every year after the super bowl. that has more to do with what we eat and how we eat it. but soom some good advice, nonetheless. whatever you're eating, it's time to tri with me. up next, i'm going to introduce you to the lucky seven training for their first triathlon. >> i want to overcome the effects of being a diabetic. >> i need some help dealing with some emotion aal health issues. >> i don't want to die young from controllable circumstances. i want to live.

we are back with "sgmd." it is a big weekend for the cnn fit nation triathlon challenge. the lucky seven, as we're calling them, we got them together for the first time giving them some important training and giving them a look at what's ahead. each one of them is going to get

a road bike, a wet suit, a personal trainer, gym membership and a trip to hawaii to help them get ready to compete in the malibu triathlon. we just got back from a hike out there. stone mountain, just outside of atlanta, and it's been a busy day. how are you guys doing? >> great. >> carlos, you're a school teacher in southern california. >> yes. >> you're a type ii diabetic. >> yes. >> you ran your first mile in 30 years. how was that for you? >> it was amazing. my trainer dave ruby said, how much time do you think you'll do it in? i said, oh, 20 minutes. he goes well, we'll do it a little bit better than that. it was really nice because he helped me through it and i ended up doing 13:24. >> 13:24, all right! >> it was great. >> your blood sugars, are they under control? >> they are pretty much. i check two or three times a day, sometimes more. even now since i'm working out a little bit before, i'm checking my sugar before and after exercise. >> and exercise can help with that, help regulate your blood sugar even more so you keep an eye on that as we go along. welcome to afton, minnesota.

your video was amazing. 26 years, you talked about a marriage that lasted 26 years and a separation occurred and it was something that, i think, in part inspired you to move on and to do this. what was your thinking when you sent in that video? >> my thinking was that i needed to be strong and i needed to get on with my life in a positive way. and it's been nothing but positive since the day i sent it in. >> how do you feel about the training so far? >> the training so far has been great. and the people have been amazing. and the camaraderie has been -- >> it is a pretty welcoming community, isn't it? >> it is, it is. >> rick from asheville, knock new york carolina, one of my favorite cities, by the way. i love asheville. it's a great town. you know, your blog, you're a fireman, you're a smoker. your video that you sent in was quite amazing, with talking about how you really wanted to quit. we could see the desire in your eyes.

what was the biggest challenge before all this for you? >> i think just quitting smoking has -- you know, i realize how detrimental it is to my health. and i want to live to be 100 years old. i want to be around for my great-grandchildren. i want to live healthy. i want to live healthy and have that quality of life. i want to be able to contribute with my volunteer fire department, as well. so i know smoking is bad and i think this program is going to help me. i thought, what the heck? i'll quit today. this was going to be my last cigarette. >> there you go, all right. love it. saw it here first. >> if i did it, you can do it, too. >> do you have any doubts you're going to cross that finish line? >> i have no doubt at all. >> any doubts nancy? >> no doubt. >> carlos, you? >> no doubt. >> we're going to keep on top of them. next week, we'll introduce you to the other four participants. they're absolutely amazing, including a truckdriver who pulled into a