When I wrote in last week’s article that we have an odd type of mentor/trainee relationship because my guidance consisted solely of written words, I could’ve cited a second oddity.

That you rarely complain.

While I do occasionally receive complimentary emails (as well as requests for more specific information about the past week’s article), what I don’t often get are critical ones. So, as honestly as I can, I assess the articles myself.

Consequently, I am well aware that a good number of them ultimately advise you to intelligently experiment with dietary practices or workouts to make them best suit you. I’m also well aware that you might see such advice as a cop-out.

You might, that is, unless you are really, really overweight.

In 2015, The Action, Care and Treatment in Obesity Management report surveyed 3,008 clinically obese adults and found 82 percent believed weight loss was “completely their own responsibility.” Additionally, almost 30 percent of those surveyed hadn’t discussed their weight with a doctor in the past five years.

But maybe they should have.

A CDC report cited by Dr. Philip J. Gosienski in his nationally syndicated column, “Stone Age Doc,” indicates that obesity in America has increased about 800 percent in about the last 100 years. Gosienski calls the obesity epidemic “unstoppable.”

While that declaration may be true for America — as well as the modern world — it doesn’t have to be true for you.

All you need to do is — yes, you guessed it! — intelligently experiment with your diet.

Research performed at Texas A&M University in College City and published in the journal Genetics last December certainly suggests that. It also supports something I’ve been calling the snowflake theory of dieting since teaching my first health and fitness class more than 30 years ago.

Simply stated, my theory asserts that no single diet works for everyone because, just like snowflakes, no two humans are exactly alike under a microscope.

The Texas A&M research tested this theory in a sense, according to a Medical News Today account, by first creating four types of genetically different mice. For our purposes, see this as the difference between growing up in San Diego or Singapore; Samoa or Switzerland.

The mice were then fed five different diets. Four simulated different ways in which humans eat.

One was high in fats and refined carbs and considered akin to the typical less-than-healthy American diet. One was high in fats and proteins and low on carbs and comparable to the weight-loss diet used by many Americans after that first diet makes them fat.

One was designed to imitate the Mediterranean diet reputed to be heart healthy and conducive to weight control; a similar diet also incorporated green tea and rice to give it a Far East flavor. The fifth consisted of the foods typically consumed by mice.

Since mice are genetically similar to humans, especially when it comes to gaining weight and developing heart disease and type 2 diabetes, you would expect the less-than-healthy, typical American diet to produce less-than-healthy results for all four different types of mice. It certainly did — overall. But not all of the mice gained weight and developed the precursors that lead to the aforementioned diseases on the typical American diet.

Equally as significant, the known-to-be-healthier diets didn’t always improve health.

While three of the four different genetic strains of mice did well on the green-tea-and-rice diet, the fourth didn’t. In fact, in the fourth group that diet actually increased the amount of fat found in the liver and the amount of damage done by it.

But that oddity only starts the support the Texas A&M study gives to my snowflake theory of dieting.

Two strains of mice responded to the low-carb diet rather well; two others didn’t. “One [group] became very obese, with fatty livers and high cholesterol,” explained William T. Barrington, the main author of the paper. The second group didn’t increase body weight but did significantly increase body fat, what’s called becoming “skinny-fat” when it occurs in humans.

Additionally, the diet designed to imitate the Mediterranean diet produced erratic results. While many mice many gained weight eating this way, many remained healthy.

Combine this study with another fairly recent one that found glycemic index scores are also determined by genetics to some degree, and you can see why William T. Barrington’s summary of his group’s research is fine advice for improving your diet: “A personalized ... approach to dietary recommendations may yield better health outcomes than the traditional one-size-fits all approach.”

You can create such an approach by recognizing that you are metabolically different from everyone else, but that those differences may be as hard to discern as the differences between snowflakes — until placed under a microscope. As a result, you need to continually experiment intelligently with your food choices to create a diet that provides ample energy and optimal health.