Some people are good. Others are lucky. Dr. Denton Cooley, apparently, is both.

The pioneering heart surgeon who founded the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital and performed both the first successful heart transplantation in the U.S. and the first implantation of an artificial heart in man in the world, simply has maintained his own good health with great ease, he says.

When asked about his own medical history, the 89-year-old smiles and talked about his weight.

“I don't recall having to do anything other than keep myself physically fit,” he said. “I was an athlete and played varsity basketball at UT. I still weigh what I did back in my senior year — 178 pounds.”

When he was a freshman at the University of Texas, Cooley was rail thin. He weighed just 135 pounds and was 6 feet, 4 inches tall. His coach told him that if he didn't gain weight, he couldn't play. So Cooley started eating cheeseburgers and drinking malts — remember, no one knew anything about cholesterol back then — and promptly put on about 45 pounds.

He couldn't tell you how many calories it took to gain the 45 pounds, but he laughs at the idea that as a teenager he might have even cared. Today he holds his intake to around 1,800 calories a day and weighs himself regularly.

“I'm not fussy about what I eat, but I try to watch how much I eat,” Cooley says. “As you grow older, you don't need as much food.”

He says he eats a lot of fruits and vegetables but isn't a big fan of salad. For protein he likes everything from nuts to barbecue and hamburgers. And after lunch and dinner he eats a small dish of vanilla ice cream — every day.

“I have friends who say they won't eat beef. I think it's unnecessary to be on such a strict diet and pass up the pleasures of life,” said Cooley, a fan of portion control and everything-in-moderation. “Eating should be an enjoyable experience.”

Cooley still goes to work at THI five days a week, though he stopped performing surgery a few years ago, and tries to play a round of golf weekly. But back in the day he was a super-busy doc who got his exercise doing rounds and climbing stairs at the hospital. He never did formal exercise that you'd find in a gym, but he played a lot of tennis and some golf. (Tennis didn't require as much time as golf did.)

That's one bit of advice he offers to people who don't like to exercise. You don't have to take up jogging or cycling, but you ought to find something you enjoy that's active.

As for diet advice, he urges everyone to find a healthy weight and to work hard at staying there.

He takes a multivitamin each day and a 1,000mg vitamin C supplement but otherwise believes he's getting all the nutrition he needs from his well-rounded diet. Prescriptions? Not this super-healthy super-doc. He takes Coumadin for problems he had after colon surgery he had last summer but otherwise has no health worries. He doesn't wear hearing aids and only uses glasses for reading.

“My wife tells me I need hearing aids, but my response is that I'm not hard of hearing, I'm hard of listening,” he laughs.

Cooley, who's been married to his wife, Louise, for 61 years and has four daughters, all of whom work in the medical field in some capacity, says he can hardly believe the success he's had as a heart surgeon.

“I was a good student, but I could never have predicted what my career would be about. I was fortunate to participate in the early development of heart and vascular surgery.”