Inequality: The Dangers of Meat Haves and Have-Nots in a Nicotinamide-Adenine-Dinucleotide World

Abstract

Our evolution and recent history can be seen as a “World Hunt” for meat as part of an omnivorous diet. Meat contains key micronutrients namely Nicotinamide (vitamin B3) and methyl-donors with deficits causing pellagra, an archetypal disease of poverty. Inequality is a leading ultimate risk factor invoked in the aetiology of common diseases let alone threats from climate change and pandemic triggered catastrophes. We hypothesize that the origin of inequality was our evolutionary and nutritional move from equal to unequal sharing of the meat supply some 10–20 thousand years ago. High meat intake may have bioengineered powerful ruling classes and lower intake the proletariat with higher fertility, but inferior (brain) health. A fairer quantity of a safer meat intake in future should moderate global variances of fertility, height, health, and prosperity. Death rates of acute infections including emergent zoonoses (such as COVID-19) and chronic infections (such as TB) should fall as might the incidence of some diseases of affluence. Meat justice by improving human capital could make redundant superficial markers, such as skin colour, used to discriminate against peoples and heal a divided world.

Pellagra: Down Not Out If Down and Out – Part 1

“…Along with effects on NAD-Consumer enzymic activity this could give mechanisms for a hypervitaminosis B3 as is suggested by excessive induction of NNMT in many diseases of "modernity". In other words, creating the worst of all possible "NAD Worlds" with missing treating cases of subclinical endemic pellagra at the same time as increasing the potential for nicotinamide overload and toxicity [17].…”

“…Oxygen is freely available, water less so and NAD supplies needed for energy and as metabolic master molecules are much harder to obtain. This difficulty has worsened while we "niche constructed" agriculture as sources became expensive creating self-reinforcing transgenerational "poverty traps" that are hard to escape from and contrast with rich others as "meat elites" that "hit the jackpot": more recently we moved away from mixed farming and agroecology to industrial farming with damaging effects on carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles and made inequalities of meat consumption worse in places (Figures 1-3) [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22].…”