Yours is a great take on the fallacies of one-size-fits-all medicine, Michael. Those boundary conditions are far too complex, and we know too little of and about them to make any predictions of an individual’s response to any intervention, be that nitrates or others. An individual’s genetic predisposition and its interactions with the environment and health behaviors is an important and integral part of those boundary conditions.

Unfortunately, our medical sciences (and nutrition is part of medicine) is so focused on (a) the reductionist research paradigm (trying to explain a complex organism from the understanding of its isolated parts), and (b) on the belief that the results of group-based clinical research apply to every individual, that we will make very little and very slow progress towards individualized lifestyle medicine. I have written about this in an earlier post (https://medium.com/right-to-rejuvenation/cvd-risk-factors-may-actually-not-kill-you-or-make-you-sick-the-stunning-statistics-e1c835d30f6a).

The solution that my team and I pursue is to make individualized lifestyle medicine accessible to every layperson. Medical research has the tools (N-of-1 experiments), but our healthcare matrix shies away from using them.