One day I’d like to be as well-known for my writings on health and fitness as Edgar Allan Poe is for his short stories and poems. But I’m hoping that day is at least 35 years away.

Poe’s fame, you see, came only after he ceased to be. The acclaim he received for “The Raven” occurred after he was — as that ugly bird so eerily croaked — “nevermore.”

While this intro is tongue-in-cheek, it’s also apropos.

Nearly 35 years ago, I expressed something very contrary to the accepted nutritional beliefs of that time. Since then, I have written about it repeatedly (the last time was just six columns ago), and in the last half dozen years or so the nutritional world has come accept it.

Yet I still toil in obscurity even though that something I call The Snowflake Theory of Dieting has once again been supported by research. This time by a study of gut bacteria.

In the same way that no two snowflakes are alike, I believe that no two bodies turn food into energy or fat in precisely the same way. That’s why it’s foolish to blindly follow any diet book and why you need to continually experiment with your diet, assess the results, and create a personalized one.

That the bacteria in your digestive tract plays a significant role in your health is something no one suspected 35 years ago, but in the last few years bad gut bacteria has been linked to many of today’s most pressing health problems: obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and the chronic inflammation that helps create autoimmune diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis.

Nutritionists now see your digestive tract as a huge housing development that’s residence for trillions of people of different nationalities. About 85 percent of your residents do good things for the community, but the others do not.

As owner of the housing development, you need to eat in a way that helps the do-good bacteria stay healthy, which is why foods are now being marketed as prebiotics or probiotics.

Prebiotic foods are those that the do-gooders thrive on. Probiotic foods actually contain the do-gooders.

Fermented foods like yogurt, kefir, tempeh, sauerkraut, and kimchi (Korean sauerkraut) are examples of the latter. Research published in Molecular Nutrition Food Research in May 2015, in fact, found that eating kimchi not only changes the types of bacteria in the gut, but also reduces the risk of developing obesity, insulin resistance, and high blood pressure.

Wheat bran, barley, cocoa, apples, garlic, and shirataki noodles (the pasta replacement I’ve previously lauded), are some of the best prebiotic foods. Foods that bad gut bacteria thrive on could eventually be called anti-prebiotics. If so, fried and processed foods — especially those with added sugars — will wear that label.

While it’s far from standard research, it’s interesting to note that Hyperbiotics.com shares a story of a professor of genetic epidemiology who took a sample of the gut bacteria from his adult son, had him eat strictly fried foods and junk foods for a week, and then took a second sample. The second sample not only was significantly different (by nearly a third), but it also was devoid of many of the most beneficial bacteria found in the first sample.

Meat and dairy products that contain antibiotics (about 80 percent of all the antibiotics used in the U.S. are not used on people but livestock) and genetically modified foods have been found to increase bad gut bacteria. Moreover, a study first published by the journal Gut online last February using young adults as subjects found that increasing their fat intake by 40 percent decreased their good gut bacteria and increased their odds of developing a number of chronic diseases later in life.

But work published in Cell Host & Microbe this June — work that clearly supports The Snowflake Theory of Dieting — questions if we really can make broad declarations about the effect foods have on your gut health. Researchers at the University of Minnesota led by computational microbiologist Dan Knights had 34 healthy volunteers record all food and drink consumed for a period of 17 days straight.

This information combined with stool samples and something called metagenomics clearly showed that the foods you consume definitely change the composition of your gut bacteria. Unfortunately, the changes lacked an across-the-board pattern.

For instance, out of the 109 clear indications that a certain food altered gut bacteria, only eight alterations were shared by more than two of the 34 participants. Moreover, the two volunteers who were primarily consuming meal replacement shakes registered as much daily change in their gut bacteria as the volunteers whose diets were based on whimsy.

In short, while the UM researchers — and I — still believe that you’ll improve the quality of your gut bacteria and your overall health by eating certain foods and avoiding others, their study shows that this area of investigation is still in its infancy.

And that maybe, just maybe, I should secure the trademark rights for the term The Snowflake Theory of Dieting.