What once induced a general manager of an NBA team to trade an emerging star, a second-year player already named Rookie of the Year, the team’s leading scorer and best playmaker who was ranked among the league leaders in both assists and steals?

The offer of a perennial All-NBA player? The opportunity to acquire two established veterans to help fix the team’s greatest flaw? The chance to load up on draft picks while unloading a number of bad contracts?

Nope. How about an idea, the pursuit of which caused the team to ultimately — and ironically — say sayonara to said GM?

Optionality.

That’s the word former Philadelphia 76ers’ GM Sam Hinkie used to justify a complicated three-way trade in February 2015 that sent Michael Carter-Williams to the Milwaukee Bucks. “I believe a lot in optionality — a lot,” he said. “I believe a lot in [being] flexible.”

While Hinkie’s over-the-top adherence to optionality (he procured second-round draft choices the way Imelda Marcos acquired shoes) torpedoed his career, it also transformed a travesty into a top-tier team. That head-scratching trade for nothing more than an idea in 2105, for instance, was used in a deal to obtain nothing less than the number-one overall draft pick in 2017, Markelle Fultz.

Moreover, others like it created the optionality that allowed Hinkie to draft Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, the team’s present stars who could very well the league’s future superstars.

Adapt Hinkie’s attitude towards optionality to your health, and you could become top-tier too.

For an idea of how to do so, consider what else Hinkie said about the aforementioned trade: “[Michael Carter-Williams] did nothing wrong. He only left here because there was a way to move our program forward.” While you may argue that selecting a player who only appeared in 14 games did not move the franchise forward, don’t forget that Embiid and Simmons did not play at all in their first seasons.

Hinkie also said something else that has application to your health: “It is possible for two things to be really valuable.”

In other words, you could be doing healthful or “really valuable” things for your health right now, but you should always be looking for ways to get healthier to “move [your] program forward.”

With that firmly in mind, read the rest of this column.

******

One of those presently healthful things you could very well be doing is discriminating between good and bad dietary fat. For years, studies have shown that diets high in the “good” monounsaturated fats, such as olive oil, can actually aid cardiovascular health and that diets high in the “bad” saturated fats, the type associated with red and processed meats, can certainly hurt it.

Recent testimony to this fact is found in a 28-year observational study based on the feedback of 115,000 health professionals published in BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal) in 2017. From this information, researchers learned that those participants who consumed the highest amounts of saturated fats were 18 percent more likely to develop heart disease than those who consumed the lowest amounts of saturated fats.

But what if you keep your consumption of saturated fat very low by following the Mediterranean diet, a diet that allows for the ample use of olive oil, yet you are still a few pounds overweight?

Employ optionality.

For in your case, a better option than the Mediterranean diet may be the low-fat one espoused by Dr. Dean Ornish. You may have to recognize that “it is possible for two things to be really valuable,” but that one of them at the present time is less valuable to you.

In fact, you may need to temporarily see all dietary fat other than the trace amounts in vegetables and grains as “bad” since ingesting even the “good” kind — all kinds have more than double the calories as protein and carbs — is leading to the excess of calories that’s producing unwanted body fat.

And excess body fat hurts what the eating of “good” dietary fat is supposed to help: cardiovascular health.

Regardless of where it is situated on your body. Regardless of those studies that suggest you can be both fit and fat.

A comprehensive study published this spring in the Journal of the American Heart Association establishes that. By reviewing seven studies that attempted weight loss through dieting, professor Peter Clinton and colleagues at the University of South Australia in Adelaide found what’s often called the “obesity paradox” to be false.

That having excess fat other than excess belly fat, primarily in the buttocks, thighs, and hips, does not reduce the incidence the risk of developing heart disease.

To reach this conclusion, Clinton’s team specifically compared the participants’ blood sugar, insulin, cholesterol, and blood pressure levels not only to fat loss but also overall weight loss. From this, Clinton found and shared with Medical News Today that “all fat loss is good, at least for the heart.”