I bet you’ve heard a version of the Healthy Outlier Story before.

You know, how somebody’s grandpa lived to be 99, yet smoked three packs of Pall Mall’s every day and drank a six-pack of Schlitz every night. The last time I did, I was a teacher and the teen telling it insolently added, “So what do you think of that?”

I knew the boy well enough to know he wouldn’t understand the analogy that came to mind, so I held my tongue. But you will, so now I won’t.

I think that even though somebody has to win the lottery, when grandpa finally does pass away, you don’t use the inheritance money to play. Instead, you lower the principal on your mortgage payment.

Similarly, I think it’s best to take a proactive approach to your health.

It’s an approach best understood in comparison to its opposite, a reactive approach, to act in response to an unwanted or unfavorable health and fitness situation. A proactive approach is not - repeat, not - a response.

It’s a series of distinct actions prior to the unwanted or unfavorable situation to keep it from happening and increase the odds of favorable long-term health and fitness. And I’m not the only one who advocates this.

In a paper published in the February 22 issue of Frontiers in Public Health, “Rethinking COVID-19 and Beyond: Prevention, Remedies, and Recovery,” Philip B. Maffetone and Paul B. Laursen explain how the failure of so many people to be proactive has exacerbated COVID-19. That this failure has produced a syndemic - what Maffetone calls in another article, a pandemic “synergistically fueled” by prior health problems.

Health problems that are far less likely to exist if you’re proactive.

And that one of these health problems in particular - the one found in 80 percent of the adult world population and 91 percent of the adults in U.S. - is “primed society for high rates of COVID-19 infection.”

The health problem is overfat.

A far broader term than obesity, overfat includes the obese, the overweight, and up to 40 percent of the “normal weight individuals who also have excess body fat.” What the media have come to call skinny fat people.

But overfat is not a communicable disease like COVID-19. You don’t catch it but develop it over time by not being proactive and taking “modifiable health risks,” such as being sedentary and eating poorly.

Now it may seem odd for me to argue for proactivity when 91 percent of adult Americans are already overfat, but whether you’re in that group right now or not, Maffetone and Laursen have a single “simple” bit of dietary advice to improve your health and lower healthcare costs.

It’s in the way you view the added sugar and refined carbohydrates ubiquitously added to processed foods. See them as the “new tobacco” and eat accordingly.

Part of the pair’s rationale goes something like this.

The last half century has clearly demonstrated diets low in calories and fat don’t work. The last quarter century has revealed that while increasing the time exercising helps, it isn’t the panacea we thought it would be, either.

What research does shows, though, is a “rapid effectiveness and healthfulness once the consumption of refined carbohydrates, including added sugars, is lowered.” That eschewing refined carbs and added sugars not only reduces excess body fat but also lowers the risks of cardiovascular disease, metabolic conditions, some cancers, and a number of other health problems - including COVID-19.

And that the “starting point” to reverse overfat is to eat a “natural balanced whole-food diet in any ratio of complex carbohydrate, fat, and protein.”

If you read this column regularly, my support of their “starting point” may catch you a bit off guard. After all, the phrase “any ratio” is found in it.

And regular readers know I favor a diet that’s virtually all complex carbs and protein with only a tad - let’s say 10 percent - of mostly monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat.

But my support of a diet where you consume a higher percentage of fat doesn’t mean my views on dieting have changed - only that I recognize that guys like that 99-year-old grandpa actually do exist.

They are the most extreme cases of what I’ve written about all along.

That our physiology - especially our digestive systems - are as unique as our fingerprints, and there’s never a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to eating food or engendering fitness.

But all individuals can still count on this. Health is best handled ahead of time, not once some disease or injury afflicts you.

So it’s important to be proactive, and being proactive means living life with forethought. Eating and exercising not based on a whim but a plan.

A plan implemented from the results of the experiments you conduct on yourself from reading articles like the ones you find here in that never-ending quest for optimal health.