In this episode of the Fully Alive podcast, host Zach Gurick sits down with the incredible Dr. Malissa Wood—Vice President and Chief Physician at the Lee Health Heart Institute, former Director of Cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a professor at Harvard Medical School. They dive deep into cardiac health—exploring cutting-edge tests, prevention strategies, and the empowering truth that 80% of heart disease can be prevented through simple lifestyle changes. From working with Olympians to leading groundbreaking research in women’s heart health, Dr. Wood shares practical tips on how to take control of your heart health—no matter your age or medical history. Ready to future-proof your heart? Let’s jump in!
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The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Future-Proof Your Heart: Cutting-Edge Cardiac Health With Dr. Malissa Wood Of Lee Health
I’m excited about this episode because we have an amazing physician with us, Dr. Malissa Wood, who is the Vice President and Chief Physician at the Lee Health Heart Institute. She’s our guest and has so much wisdom, experience, and expertise. Before serving at the Lee Health Heart Institute, she was the director of Cardiology at Mass General Hospital in Massachusetts, and also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Beyond that, she also worked with the Olympic team and did some amazing work with Olympians, which we are going to learn about in this episode as well. She’s dedicated to women’s heart health and was a leader in the Happy Heart Trial as well, which is an amazing thing that she was a part of.
Beyond her professional achievements, she also enjoys many outdoor activities. She is somebody who practices what she preaches and exercises significantly, enjoys running, swimming, and cycling, as well as weight training and racing and events, like 5K and 10Ks. You’re in for a treat to hear from Dr. Malissa Wood. Let’s dive into the episode.
Dr. Wood, it’s such a privilege to have you on the show. I’m excited for our audience to hear from you, your wisdom, your experience, and your expertise. Thank you so much for being with us.
I’m excited to be here on this beautiful sunny day.
It’s a great place to be. You have this amazing experience at Mass General and a professor at Harvard. How did that experience shape your vision for what you’re doing now at the Lee Health Heart Institute and how you’re forming, molding, and shaping that?
I feel like every step of my journey prepared me for the experience I’m having now, which is thinking about how to bring cutting-edge cardiovascular care and preventive medicine to the community of Fort Myers, which is a large and growing community. The work that I did in Boston examining heart adaptations and healthy athletes’ issues that can come up as athletes age, as well as looking at sex differences in cardiovascular disease and prevention have all been fundamental parts of my training and my experience there, but are allowing me to implement strategies in this community to help improve the health of the whole community.
As I said, we’re grateful you’re here. As far as cardiovascular health, what are the most important factors that contribute to a longer and healthier life?
Cardiovascular Health Factors
The first thing is our health behavior. We know that heart disease, unfortunately, remains the leading cause of death globally, and certainly in the United States. Yet we also recognize that 80% of those deaths and cardiac events could be prevented with behavior. It’s a lot.
We know that, first of all, understanding one’s risk for heart disease means knowing about your family, but also knowing about your own factors, things like smoking, exercise patterns, nutrition, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol numbers, what type of sleep patterns you have, how much stress and anxiety is in your life. All of these things can in some way contribute to one’s risk. Understanding your own individual risk and then managing each of these areas, many of which can be managed with behaviors, is empowering news for people to recognize they have some control over this type of condition.
All of those lifestyle factors are extremely important. Is it too late to improve heart health? What about people who are already down that road? Maybe they don’t have the best lifestyle choices. Now there is some cardiovascular disease. What are the most effective interventions for people? Is it ever too late, and then what are the most effective interventions?
Prevention Strategies
It’s never too late to recognize your risk and it’s never too late to implement strategies or changes in your life. We used to think about something called primary prevention, which is all of the things we do before we have a cardiac event or have evidence of cardiovascular disease. Secondary prevention is thinking about preventing additional events or preventing ongoing new heart disease in the presence of heart disease. We then began to learn that there’s even something called primordial prevention, which is preventing future heart disease when a mom is pregnant with her infant. We know that moms’ behaviors will affect their child’s cardiovascular risk.
It's never too late to recognize your risk or to implement strategies and make positive changes in your life. Share on X
To answer your specific question about secondary prevention, when someone has had a cardiovascular event like a heart attack or a stroke or has evidence of heart or blood vessel disease like plaque, we know that we can slow the progression of that disease and reduce the risk of recurrent events through a combination of behaviors, such as increased physical activity, improved nutrition, improved sleep if sleep is a problem, managing behavioral things like anxiety and stress, but then certainly, understanding and managing medical conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol with medications when needed.
After an event has occurred, it’s that combination of behavior and some medications. Before an event has occurred, in many cases, it’s largely behavior with a small part of medication, depending on one’s risks, but certainly, in secondary prevention, we do have to incorporate some medical therapies as well.
There are ways to slow down the progression of cardiovascular disease.
100%. The Holy Grail in cardiology has always been, “Can we reverse heart disease?” There has been a lot of work done. Dr. Dean Ornish who trained at Mass General has spent his career focusing on this. To varying degrees, depending on people’s definition of reversal, there has been some evidence that we can change the characteristics of plaque or the build-up. In an artery. There has not yet been anything that takes it away completely. What we care about as opposed to what it looks like in a vessel is what that means for a person. Can we prevent that disease from causing more events? We know that we do have control over that.
It’s very exciting because we have sophisticated tests to identify heart disease before someone has had an event. Now we have a toolbox full of things we can do to empower people to prevent events. I’ve been a heart disease warrior and heart disease educator and researcher for most of my life. Finally being able to engage our patients and their families in this healthy journey is so exciting and empowering for me.
Cutting-Edge Tests And Medical Advances
I’d love to dive into a little bit of those cutting-edge tests and advances that are happening that are helping us with the preventive healthcare side of our cardiovascular treatments. What are some of those and what are you most excited about as you think about the medical breakthroughs that are happening?
From a blood test perspective, we’ve known for a long time that cholesterol numbers can predict an individual’s risk of having a heart attack or a stroke. That data has been pretty well shared around the world that in certain individuals with very high cholesterol, you want to try diet and exercise. If we can’t get to the individualized goals, then a medication like Statin is recommended because they are safe and effective in most people and certainly can prevent events and individuals with very high cholesterol.
Excitingly, we now know that other blood markers also suggest that an individual may be at risk that were not examined as closely in the past. Those include something called Lipoprotein(a) or Lp(a). That’s another form of a lipid that circulates in the bloodstream. In the past, it was only measured when people had an early event at a very young age, like a heart attack or stroke or a family member had early heart disease. By early or premature, we define that as a male having an event before age 55 or a female before 65.
Lipoprotein(a) has now been incorporated into our guidelines and it is recommended that everyone have it measured at least once in their lifetime. The sneaky thing about Lipoprotein(a) is that it can be very elevated in individuals with completely normal cholesterol patterns. We may not see it and you know that it’s elevated until we’ve gone to look for it after an event. Now, we know we can look for it and identify that risk early or before an event has happened.
From an Imaging perspective, the cool stuff that we now have access to is very high-resolution coronary artery CT scan modalities. When I started my career in 1991 as a cardiologist, we could only identify what the inside of the vessel looked like by doing a coronary angiogram and going in through a blood vessel in the leg, usually.
It’s an invasive test. It has risks and it’s uncomfortable. Now, we can look at the heart arteries with a CAT scan. For a calcium scan, we don’t have to inject a die. We just take a quick picture. For the detailed coronary artery CT scan, we inject some contrast into a vein which is super easy and not very uncomfortable. It’s a little warm. You feel a little warm very quickly and it passes. What’s cool about the technology now is that AI exists to look at the walls of the blood vessels and tell us whether there is plaque with or without calcium.
The Role Of AI in Cardiology
The calcium indicates that it’s been there for a while and that there may be factors that are pulling that calcium into the plaque, but it also tells us if there are characteristics of the plaque that make it more likely to break open or rupture and cause a heart attack. We identified about fifteen years ago that many people who have heart attacks may have been given a somewhat clean bill of health by being told they didn’t have severe blockages in their arteries.
We now know that some of the trickier and more dangerous plaques are not severely blocking an artery, but they’re full of fat and they’re very unstable. This type of technology can give us information about the total plaque amount or volume in the artery, and the type of plaque that exists in addition to telling us whether there’s a severe narrowing or not. The AI algorithms have been a moonshot for us to be able to use that data and help our patients understand.
Some of the most dangerous plaques don’t severely block arteries — they’re fat-filled and highly unstable. Share on X
I can share my own personal story of being a physician. I work in an environment where we offer CT scanning to employees as part of a population health research program. It is currently not covered by Insurance to have a CT scan of the arteries unless someone has symptoms. However, self-pay options exist. As part of this research, I had a CAT scan. I’m a lifelong athlete. My numbers are perfect. I have normal blood pressure and no risk factors for heart disease. I had this scan and they identified 1 point of calcium and a very small amount of plaque.
I’m a perfectionist. I wanted no calcium, no plaque. Many people had events in my family but later on in their 70s and 80s. There are some jeans there, but nothing that’s super aggressive. I took that information. I looked at my numbers and I made the decision with my physician to go on a very low dose of Statin medication. The goal is to prevent progression, but I also continue and I’m even more vigorous and careful about my nutrition, my sleep, and my exercise, and manage my stress through meditation and exercise.
That one spot made a difference for me. We have algorithms that tell us where someone’s numbers should be and when we need to be concerned. We’re now studying it to see if this data should be available or if these tests should be available to more of a general population, but we need data to support that it’s worth subjecting people to attest that does have a small risk of an allergy to the contrast or tiny dose of radiation. It’s not much at all, but we want to know that that test is worth doing in people, and I think it will be but we need the science to back that up.
Advanced Heart Screening
Is the test we’re talking about Cleerly?
It’s the Coronary CTA, both Cleerly and HeartFlow. Since we’re talking about companies, they both offer the technology to look at plaque and to determine whether a narrowing in an artery is severe or not. They complementary developed technology and now they offer both. They have been game-changers in the world of atherosclerosis, and that’s exciting to be part of that journey to see how that can have an impact.
As we discussed at the beginning, some strategies can be implemented once someone has an event. If we can find people at the right age, identify those who have the beginning of plaque, and get them on a straight path of checking in regularly and making sure we’re doing all the right things, hopefully, we can make a difference. We know that in studies done in Vietnam, a young man who passed in Vietnam did a series of studies looking for early atherosclerosis in these young men. We saw a plaque. There was plaque noted in the aortas of men in their early 20s. We know that this does begin at a young age There is evidence that if we can alter that course, then we don’t have to worry about taking plaque away later. Let’s not ever let it exist in the first place.
I have the Cleerly, so I have pictures of the inside of my arteries. It has a tiny little speck of yellow, which I know is the bad kind. It’s very minor, but I can take it.
It’s not zero, right?
It’s not zero and I do have some in my family. I was talking to a good friend of mine about it. His father had his first heart attack when he was his age. He’s concerned. I show him the pictures of the inside of my coronary arteries. I was like, “You can have this done.” How do people find out? I know it’s not covered by insurance but there is a self-pay option, so if someone wants a test, the HeartFlow or Cleerly, how do they go about that?
We’re fortunate, and I’m not advertising my system, but Lee Health does offer a self-pay option.
How much does that cost?
$1,500.
For $1,500, we can get pictures of the inside of our hearts. We can have peace of mind or we can take action.
In my case, my significant other does not work for Lee Health, so he was not a candidate for the scan. However, as a retired policeman and vigorous athlete, he was a semi-professional athlete in his younger years, I knew that he was extremely fit. Athletes don’t always have the typical symptoms because they are so fit and so used to the discomfort that we blur it out. I wanted him to get the scan. When we moved here, we got it. Lo and behold, he had a very high calcium score and had severe narrowings, including the main artery of the heart.
Two weeks later, he had bypass surgery. Had we not gotten that scan, things could have ended very differently because he had no typical symptoms being a very vigorous athlete with a very high VO2 max or fitness level. Once he had the surgery, all of a sudden, his discomfort that he would get in his scapula went away. We never thought about it because it would come on randomly. It completely went away. That story of what I experienced in my own situation with my CT and then out of my significant other did make a big difference,
I think that this information is very important. When we think about all of the different types of diseases that affect us, we don’t have the ability for some things like cancer, other than perhaps genetic screening and individuals who have a very strong family history of certain types of cancer, like pancreatic cancer, etc. to identify. At least. For heart disease, we can prevent it. With cancer, you may know, but we don’t yet know largely how to prevent certain types. I think we have a distinct advantage in the cardiovascular space to have access to this data, and to be given tools to make changes in our lives to prevent having heart attacks down the road.
At your Institute, anyone can come in and say, “I would love to have a CT scan,” and pay $1,500 and get it done.
I didn’t completely answer that question. At Lee Health, you absolutely can. Most large medical centers now offer this option. It is more available. In some places, however, you do need to be a registered patient in that system so that your primary care is in that system. Otherwise, if there is a direct-to-patient or patient availability, it should be known in the community if that is offered. We encourage people to look in their communities to find things like that. If it’s not, feel free to fly to Fort Myers. There are many flights a day and we’ll get that done for you.
Are most primary care physicians aware of these types of tests now? Is it still something that’s cutting-edge and not in the mainstream yet?
Awareness Of Advanced Cardiac Testing
I don’t think most are aware of the data and the availability of this kind of testing. When I referred my significant other to an Ivy League medical Institution for his primary care, his primary care said that guidelines don’t support it, and he doesn’t have symptoms. That’s that, so we didn’t get it. When we had availability, we did take advantage. I think primary care physicians do understand the importance of cardiovascular risk factor assessment. I think that their understanding of the depth to which we need to educate patients, to make sure they’re doing these things may be still somewhat limited.
As the research begins to highlight the importance of these types of scans like the CT with the Cleerly or HeartFlow analysis, we will be able to have more of an impact on our patient’s care through primary care. Right now, it’s very important for patients to know that if they have any symptoms of chest discomfort, they see a physician. This is a covered test, and so that is peace of mind and you get that additional information as well.
I’ve heard numbers as high as maybe 70% of people who have heart attacks had no symptoms before. Having something when you’re asymptomatic is the key.
Silent Heart Attacks And Gender Differences
Most patients don’t have symptoms before their first heart attack. That’s for many reasons. One is that people in the United States unfortunately are largely sedentary. More people are sedentary than are active Sedentary people do not push their hearts enough sometimes to feel discomfort. Discomfort can be different things to different people, but heaviness in the chest, arm back, neck jaw. The real key is if it comes on with activity and it goes away and comes on again with activity. That type of pattern should raise a red flag.
Most patients don't experience symptoms before their first heart attack. Unfortunately, women are more likely than men to die from their first heart attack and to have another one within a year. Share on X
Importantly, women are less likely to have had any symptoms before a heart attack as well. Women are more likely to unfortunately pass away with their first heart attack and to have another heart attack within a year than men. I only share these data because women often think they are not as likely to have cardiac events. Younger women do have a slightly reduced risk compared to men, but anyone of any age can have a cardiac event.
We want our patients or our audience to be aware of that. Know what symptoms can be, and if some symptoms come on, get them checked out. I’ve said this a million times. If a new symptom comes on and you’re feeling heaviness, shortness of breath, or a type of discomfort that’s unusual, call 911. It’s better to have someone tell you,” This isn’t your heart,” than to have a heart attack at home and not get the care that you need in that emergency setting.
Do you envision a day maybe in the near future when having a test like the HearFlow or Cleerly CT scan would be a common practice once every five years or however many years? Is that coming? Are we close to that?
The Future Of Preventive Cardiac Screening
I’m a science person. The preliminary data that I see and my knowledge and expertise of many years would suggest we’re very close to that day. We know that pap smears are a part of women’s lives. Mammograms and colonoscopies are health prevention behaviors. Cardiac disease has been so reactively managed and researched, and now we’re finally being proactive and preventive. The explosion of research that has been dedicated to preventing disease in general is so exciting. I love being part of that work.
I think down the road, it will be part of it. It will share a lot of information with a lot of people and will have an effect not only on the person who has the scan but also if they have an early disease identified, it will impact their siblings and their children, and their friends will hear about it. After my significant other’s CAT scan and his experience and we believe it saved his life, I cannot tell you how many other people in our social circle have gone on to have the test. I’m happy about that.
It’s amazing that your work and research significantly impacted your own life and the life of your significant other.
I can’t take the credit. It’s being in the right place at the right time.
You’ve worked with Olympic athletes. You’ve been a professor at Harvard. I would love to hear about what was it like working with Olympians and what you learn from that experience that could be applied to everyday people.
First of all, it was a privilege to get to work with the US Olympic teams and the athletes that I got to meet. In particular, we worked with athletes who have differential types of training so we could look at the impact of those specific training regimens on cardiac function. We worked across the spectrum from the men’s and women’s Olympic rowing teams prior to the 2008 Summer Olympics. Before the 2006 Olympics, we worked with short-track speed skaters. We also worked with the weightlifting teams.
It was very exciting to get to see the energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to the personal and team health that these young individuals exhibited. It’s the best quality you can imagine in human beings, and then to see how their hearts became more fit as they got closer to the games. We looked at some cool technology. The reason that I was able to be involved was that I had access to some very new Echo machines that looked at something called strain. It’s like an engineering mechanical term of how the heart muscle shortens and lengthens, and the speed at which it shortens and lengthens.
We also could see with increased training that the heart not only squeezed in a different way, but it relaxes very efficiently. If you think about squeezing or stretching a rubber band and then releasing it, that releasing is a very strong force. We used to think about the resting phase of the heart, which is called diastole, as a passive thing where the heart squeezes and then relaxes, and the squeezing part was only the work. We now realize that both of those parts of the heart function take work and energy.
With training, the relaxing part can be as important because it serves to pull blood into the heart during that relaxation phase. For a few of our athletes, we were able to look at their hearts squeezing and relaxing throughout the training course right before the Olympics. Nobody bothered them during the game and then months after, we were able to go back and look at how their hearts had gotten back to normal. Not completely normal because these are very fit individuals.
Their training regimen before that year ramps up and then they take a break. We had recognized that from studying marathon runners as well. Their training up to a marathon did change some of the mechanics and then afterward, things went back to normal. Depending on the level of baseline training, that normal is different for different people, but. Being able to identify and see these positive changes that we think help the heart work more effectively gives us hope that anyone at any level of athletic performance can bring their heart function to a better level.
Even if you’re just walking on a daily basis, if you’re going from sedentary to walking, we think you can improve your heart function. It is so important because we know as we age that increasing our muscle tone through strengthening, as well as aerobic exercise, and increasing our cardiac output are all very beneficial things for our overall health.
Walking daily — especially when transitioning from a sedentary lifestyle — can significantly improve your heart function. Share on X
Anyone needs to know that if you are sedentary and you decide that you’re going to start an exercise regimen, you have an evaluation by your primary care physician to make sure that there aren’t any red flags either in your family history, personal history on physical exam, or electrocardiograms. Sometimes a primary physician may even want you to see a cardiologist or have a stress test before vigorous training.
The person who says, “I have never run in my life and I want to run a half marathon,” needs to train over a long period of time, pay careful attention to symptoms, and make sure that they’re not pushing themselves too hard. My favorite quote is “Better is the enemy of good.” Trying hard to do too much in a short period of time can cause stress fractures, muscle injuries, and joint injuries. It’s not good for your heart either.
That sets you back. I’m torn sometimes about whether I should spend more time running and training for Ironman as I’ve done in the past or spend more time lifting heavy weights. You hear different things and muscle mass is one of the leading indicators of longevity. What would you say? Is there some combination?
I think doing one thing only is never a good idea. That blend is very important and I’ve taken care of athletes for a lot of my career. One of the things I noticed was the die-hard dedicated “I only run” people. They had the beer belly. Even if they ran a lot of distance, as they aged, our body repositions where our extra weight goes.
As those of us who’ve trained hard for races know you have to eat a lot to maintain your metabolism and not let your body break down. It’s hard to lose a lot of weight through exercise. You lose weight through nutrition and exercise, and for people who only do one thing, they have to eat. Those calories are going to find a way to your waist and your midline as you age. If you don’t do that appropriate combination of strength training and exercise training, you need to be cognizant of what you eat as well.
What I found is that as we get older, and I believe science suggests this, the importance of weight training is magnified. We know that our balance depends on our limbs and our core. If we don’t have strong limbs and a strong core, we cannot balance our bodies well. Strengthening the core also helps reduce low back pain by doing appropriate core training. I believe in 2/3, 1/3. The American Heart Association says you only need 20 minutes of strength training a week, and we’d like you to do at least 180 minutes a week of aerobic training to raise your heart rate.
I think it’s very, very important that we think about safe ways of lifting and using our body as resistance as we get older and trying to incorporate that on a daily basis. If we look at populations that live well into their 90s and 100s, they are largely the populations that do functional exercise throughout their day. It’s a funny story, but some of those places are places that didn’t have flushing toilets for many years. In many of these places like Tibet and China, you have to squat to go to the bathroom. What are you strengthening when you’re squatting? Your quads and your hamstring, to a degree, but your quads.
Daily Movement For Optimal Health
Using those limb girdle muscles and thinking about functional mobility throughout the day, Americans are notorious for, “I’m going to exercise and check the box between 5:30 and 6:30 in the morning, then I’m going to go sit in my car, sit in my office, sit in front of my TV, and go to bed at night. What we understand now is that we need to move throughout the day. If you’re going to increase your fitness, you have to do dedicated training where you push yourself into a training zone.
If you want to have optimal health and wellness, you need to move throughout the day. Thankfully, I’ve got a few reminders like, “You got up and move,” and it was going to kick me if I didn’t. That is such an important thing when people are busy. When they commute to big cities, they don’t have the time to move throughout the day. I feel so blessed to live here in a place where my commute to work isn’t as long as it used to be. It used to be an hour hour and a half each way.
If you want to have optimal health and wellness, you need to move throughout the day. Share on X
Now it’s about 20 minutes, Seasons 25, but my ability to be able to get up and go for a quick walk. We have Peloton accessible when I work, which is great because of the ability to go to a class after work. Living in a community where the weather can be hot in the summer and rainy, but it doesn’t matter. You can get out and exercise in a comfortable way as long as you time it appropriately every day of the year. My biggest concern is lightning in the summer. I try to run when there isn’t lightning in the sky.
2/3, 1/3 in terms of 1/3 weightlifting.
Strength training. That may be more than a lot of people do. That’s not the American Hearts recommendation. For me, that is important because we recognize that when you train your muscles, your body continues to burn more calories throughout the day. I also find that I feel better throughout the day. I feel stronger. I know that each day, we can’t stop the clock, but if we continue to strengthen our bodies, it gets better as we age. I look at that as my opportunity to strengthen my body and make my body more resilient to the things that come my way. That’s flexibility, strengthening, balance, coordination, and all of those things.
What does your personal regimen look like on a given week?
It’s varied over time, depending on my workload. I have a stationary bike at home. I have weights at home. Usually, if I have a time crunch, I will do a 30-minute pretty intensive high-intensity workout on the bike, and then I’ll do 15 to 20 minutes of core in either legs or arms. That’s on a crunch day, like a low day of time. I get up early to do that. On a day like a weekend day, I’ll go for a nice run, I’ll stretch, and then I’ll go to the gym and focus on a body part.
I find that focused training helps me give it my all for that part of my body. Different people have different philosophies, but that seems to work for me. One of the key things is taking rest days. Today is a rest day. My mind is always like, “You need to exercise,” but I know that I need to rest because I want to be able to be strong and get back into it. I’m training for a 5K and a 10K. I want to be able to beat my numbers from last year. I’m very competitive.
That’s another thing about as we age, we have a little bit more availability of our time. When I had little kids, I was running marathons and doing triathlons. My kids had my time, my work had my time, my exercise had my time, and I didn’t have much time to do anything else. As we age, we can carve out more space because, in many cases, fewer people need us in an immediate way. That gives us some more flexibility without feeling guilty for taking time away from others.
That sounds like a pretty amazing personal regimen that you’re able to stay fit and healthy and feel good.
Leading By Example In Health And Fitness
I’m doing enough that I feel like I’m not signing back. I feel a very strong personal responsibility that as a cardiologist and as a physician of any sort, I have to walk the talk. I cannot ask someone to do something that I am not doing. As a physician leader, I feel like all of the people that I’m responsible for managing and overseeing, I want them also to take the time to take care of their own well-being and wellness so that they can have more energy for their life outside of medicine. We know it brings more joy to the daily work that they do if they’re feeling well. It’s important to lead by example. I tried to lead my kids by example, and now they’re so fast that I can’t keep up with them. That’s a problem when they start beating you.
There’s an inflection point if you’re racing against your kids.
My second daughter is a 248 marathoner. I can’t even go for a jog with her.
You instill some good habits and practices in them too.
I try.
That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing with us. Are there any parting thoughts? Where can people find you? Anything else that you want our audience to know?
I am one of those people who’s still on X. I @DrMalissaWood. Lee Health Heart Institute is my place of employment. I do a lot in the community, I try to get out. You may see me running on a road or attending an event. I want to share with people that it’s never too late to start your health and fitness journey. You don’t have to be perfect. I wish I had the time to put in a regimen to feel that I’m doing everything I can, but I know I’m doing enough to make a difference. I know my own heart health risk. I want everyone to assess their own health risks, talk to their clinicians, and address any symptoms that they may be having. I’m grateful to you for inviting me and for hosting this show because it is a wonderful resource for the community.
Thank you so much. Thank you for what you do for our community and the lives that you’re saving. It’s wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
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What an amazing conversation with Dr. Malissa Wood. Isn’t she an amazing human? I’m so grateful that she was on our show. A couple of things that stood out to me were the Cleerly or HeartFlow tests that we talked about. I’ve had that test done for myself. I was able to receive that through my work at Fountain Life and it is amazing. I have pictures of the inside of my coronary arteries. As she mentioned in our episode, you can get this test done for $1,500. Hopefully, in the future, this will be something that’s covered by insurance.
For now, talk to your physician, talk to your primary care, ask a cardiologist in your town, wherever you are, or come here. As Dr. Malissa would say, fly into RSW and come get this test done at the Lee Health Heart Institute. It’ll be worth your while and it could save your life. For $1,500, wouldn’t it be nice to know whether your heart is healthy or not? There are so many things that can be done to prevent it. As she mentioned, this stuck out to me, 80% of deaths from cardiovascular disease could be prevented. That’s a staggering number.
We should take the opportunity to work on that and do what we can to prevent it with nutrition and movement. We talked a lot about that. I know I love the breakdown of 2/3, 1/3 of cardio, exercise, and strength training. Adding that strength training in as we age is so important. I’m excited to take away some of these things from this episode and I hope you are too. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. We look forward to seeing you again soon on the show. Have a great day.
