Unless you are the last lighthouse keeper in the U.S. - the guy working the Boston Light in the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area - the way you work has been altered in some way by COVID-19.

In mid-April, PRNewswire.com reported a survey from Clutch found 67 percent of currently working employees were doing so from home either full time or part time. When Gallup posed a similar question 25 years ago, only 9 percent had ever worked even a single day from home.

Moreover, two more recent Gallup polls show the average U.S. workers’ number of remote work days has increased by about 240 percent since COVID-19 hit.

While many types of work can be done just as well from home, some can’t.

Like medical research.

In an article for ScienceMag.org last March, Jonathan Epstein, executive vice dean and chief scientific officer at the University of Pennsylvania, explained that Penn is “trying to avoid having any patient come to the hospital purely for research purposes.” Many other hospitals have done the same, with some even suspending work done with lab animals.

As a result, the release of new health-and-fitness research has been scarce, which has made this column a bit more anecdotal than I like it to be. COVID-19-related research abounds, however, and one paper in particular supports a belief of mine that I have expressed repeatedly to you: That the foods you eat play a far more influential roll in your overall health than you imagine.

Analyses of past studies at the Zoonosis Science Center in Uppsala University in Sweden and published in October in Redox Biology has led researchers to propose inhaling nitric oxide as a way to treat COVID-19.

In one of the cited studies, nitric oxide kept monkey cells infected with a strain of virus related to COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, from replicating. It does so by inhibiting an enzyme needed by viruses to duplicate themselves, but that’s not important here.

Nitric oxide, which your body makes from the nitrate found in certain foods, dilates blood vessels, increasing blood flow and oxygenation of the blood. That’s just one reason why what you eat is far more important than most people realize.

Increased blood flow and more oxygen in your blood not only improve serious athletic performance, but they also make everyday moderate exercise seem easier.

The improvement in serious athletic performance can be significant.

In a study published in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, for instance, subjects ran 5 kilometers on a treadmill 41 seconds faster 75 minutes after ingesting 200 grams of baked red beets (which contain about 500 milligrams of nitrate) than after eating 200 grams of cranberry relish. The faster speed occurred without increasing heart rate indicating these subjects didn’t run harder, just more efficiently.

But there’s actually a greater benefit to consuming foods high in nitrate and increasing the nitric oxide level in your body. It promotes heart health.

In fact, four separate studies cited by Healthline.com in an article about exactly that found that if you have high blood pressure, eating a steady diet of foods high in nitrates “can lower blood pressure as much as some blood pressure medications.”

So which foods have high enough concentrations of nitrate to improve or insure heart health?

Not sausage, bacon, or hot dogs.

These do not contain nitrate, but rather sodium nitrate - what’s used by meat processors as a preservative - and your body can’t convert that into nitric oxide. Sodium nitrate becomes sodium nitrite, which can harm your health. In fact, it does so often enough that the United States Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the World Health Organization have all placed limits on its use.

So stay away from processed meats and start eating meals that contain a few of these vegetables: celery, lettuce, spinach, arugula, kale, cabbage, and beetroot (aka red beets). All are high in nitrates and easy to include in the salad I would suggest you eat daily.

While beetroot juice is sold as an athletic performance enhancer, a cheap alternative is to purchase cans of red beets. Eat the beets with meals and drink the juice prior to workouts or competitions.

Two final thoughts: Because vitamin C increases the efficacy of nitric oxide, adding citrus fruit to your salad or eating it for dessert with the meal is a shrewd move. So is treating yourself to a bit of dark chocolate every now and then.

The flavonols in the cocoa also increase the efficacy of nitric oxide.

Just don’t use that as the excuse to eat the typical grocery-store chocolate bar every day of the week. Opt for higher-quality dark chocolate bars because they contain far more flavonols.

According to studies, 1 ounce a day is sufficient.