If you’re among the more than sixty million American adults who have heartburn at least once a month, odds are you’ll pick an OTC medication rather than see your doctor. With what you hear on TV and what you see in magazines, you know there’s a slew of remedies to pick from. The one you buy, though, is the one with the most valuable coupon from the Sunday inserts, right? Right.

Have you noticed that medicine is called a practice? Maybe that’s because everybody isn’t the same. What works for you possibly won’t work for your neighbor, despite that the same doctor prescribes the same medicines for the same reason in the same doses for both of you. The age of individualized medicine is upon us, a time when what goes into your body, whether food or medication or supplement, will be geared toward your individuality.

Your checkbook might be. Your diet should be. If you walk a fine line, you must be. The national budget isn’t. Mental stability might be. Balanced, that is. Physical equilibrium, called equilibrioception among the experts, is what we mean here. It’s that state required for walking or standing, and is achieved by a complex interplay of opposing sets of muscles.

For a long time we’ve heard that green tea does this and green tea does that and green tea has this and that benefit, while poor old black tea sits in the cupboard waiting for its chance on the stage. There’s little question that green tea and its army of polyphenols have distinct nutritional value.

Is there a difference between, “I have blue paint in my bedroom,” and “My bedroom walls are painted blue?” A gallon of paint in the closet or on the floor in your bedroom verifies the first quote. An empty can and blue walls verify the second. Maybe this isn’t the best analogy, but you can apply it to the calcium in your body, which is either part of your bones or used as an electrolyte, or not. It’s either where it belongs, or not.

The heart is a muscle, the most important one on the list. Legs that hurt from pedaling a bike all over the county or biceps that burn from curls are little more than an annoyance. A heart that hurts can mean something more. If you happen to be a cyclist, the odds are in your favor that your heart won’t hurt.

Grapes have been around for a long time, their attributes being praised by the Egyptians six thousand years ago. The healing powers of grapes had been tapped by the ancient Greeks, usually in the form of wine. Folk healers in Europe used the leaves and sap from the vines to treat skin and eye diseases and to stop the inflammation and pain from hemorrhoids.

Some of us know inflammation too well. When getting out of bed in the morning becomes an auditory event in your joints that rivals a flamenco dancer’s castanets, you know inflammation. What you may not know, or at least not realize, is that your weight has something to do with it.

Insulin response? Huh? It’s just what it says, the way the body responds to insulin and the challenges that excite it in the first place. Insulin, as you recall, is a polypeptide hormone secreted by the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. (A polypeptide, by the way, is made of two or more amino acids and becomes part of a protein.)