Meat and Vitamin B3: Getting a Grip on Engel's Curve

*Adrian C. Williams and Lisa J. Hill*

### **Abstract**

We evolved from herbivores to a meat eating "commons" in hunter-gatherer days and then to a non-egalitarian meat power struggle between classes and countries. Egalitarian-ism, trans-egalitarianism and extremes of inequality and hierarchy revolve around the fair-unfair distribution of meat surpluses and ownership of the means of meat production. Poor people on poor diets with too few micronutrients may explain many inequalities of human capital, height and health and divergent development of individuals and nations. Learning from past successes and collapses from switching trophic levels the lesson is that meat moderation toward the top of Engel's curves, not calorie-centrism, is the best recipe for countries and classes. Improved health with longer lives and higher crystallised intelligence comes with an ample supply of micronutrients from animal products namely iron, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin B12 and other methyl-donors (such as choline), and nicotinamide (vitamin B3). We concentrate on nicotinamide whose deficits cause the degenerative condition pellagra that manifests as poor emotional and degenerative cognitive states with stunted lives and complex antisocial and dysbiotic effects caused by and causing poverty.

**Keywords:** Nicotinamide, Vitamin B3, Engel's curve, Poverty, Ageing, Neurodegeneration, Dementia, Cancer, ACE2, Covid-19, Free Energy, Energy gradients

### **1. Introduction**

Seeing world history from a meat perspective was initiated by Hinman and Harris (1939) [1] who believed (as did Homer's heroes and many Gods) meat eating was key to the success and power relationships of nations and to class ascension (as if on the "Great Gatsby Curve"). Later Cokburn (1996) largely concurred as had McCay earlier (1912) [2]. De Castro in his "Geopolitics of Hunger" (1952) [3] was concerned over country and postcode food injustice and argued that Malthus (and Ehrlich 1971), was wrong and cereal dependence with increased fertility was the cause, not the effect, of population booms quoting Doubleday's "True Law of Population" (1842) [4] and significant epidemiological evidence that meat eating reduced fertility. Godwin and Boserup also disagreed with Malthus as they felt population pressure was "the mother of invention" and new agricultural technology as has been true, so far, but has not led to a good diet for the poor ("Golden rice" with extra vitamin A being an exception) and the returns may be diminishing or counter-productive (such as by encouraging population booms) and busts from the neolithic on.

McCarrison (1921) [5] and Boyd-Orr (1936) [6] after observations on differential tribal characteristics (such as the pastoralist Maasai being taller and healthier than

cultivators), on different diets in colonial India and Africa, complemented by the discovery of Beri-Beri and Pellagra in the 1940's [7, 8], campaigned for square meals for all. Despite these early initiatives following the science and an analysis of natural experiments, poor nutrition is still the leading cause of death under the age of five as well as causing physical and cognitive stunting and both wasting and obesity. Acute hunger affects 150 million and given little monitoring or screening figures for micronutrient deficiency are likely to be higher than currently recognised, at 2 billion. Geography is critical: if born un-lucky in the lowest 10% of income countries your typical income per head is \$3 a day, making meat unaffordable, compared with \$3000 plus in the richest countries. Country is now as important as class and that was not as true a century ago [9]. Meat may be the real "stuff" of comparative inequality that could be sorted as a practical non-transcendental move dealing with blighted lives, even if it just a start on fairer initial conditions [10–16]. This is not before time (today even in wealthy Europe 10 cm differences in height exist between the Netherlands and the UK), as even back in 1904 it was realised that poverty and poor diet meant the "tenement" child was stunted and had everlastingly poor odds that meant running the race of life with handicaps [17, 18]. Thomas [17] and Hunter [18] suggested poverty should be seen in clinical, not moral terms, relating to loss of income (including from industrial accidents or illness). Here we use pellagra, an archetypal disease of dietary poverty from a (cotton) market failure, as our generalisable example of such a negative externality easily corrected by social insurance or cash given that Engel's curve predicts that more would get spent on meat [19–22].

Pro-meat views are not exactly the "zeitgeist" of our times as meat is considered to be a major threat to both health and climate but calls to tax it, for instance, could be a serious misstep so an unbiased unpolarised debate is needed [23]. The human right to basic food "entitlements" that enable capabilities, capacities and optimal human capital may need adequate meat and explain the striking benefits of basic income trials [24–28].

#### **2. The demand for meat: predictive pro-active brains**

That the demand for meat is high, but elastic, is not surprising as we evolved as an (A (meat) + 2B (vegetable and fruit)), omnivore as have our cuisines and fusion foods. Our closest living relative's (chimpanzees), eat and fish for insects but hunt meat rarely and not fairly. Fairs fare was our social leap in a software with a "Killer App" where needs based and conspicuous sharing of meat obtained as an "affordance" was the social norm (**Figure 1**). More meat in diet, as with the convergent evolution of the Neanderthals, led to bigger brains with nicotinamide as a key ingredient. Meat intake varied by latitude but once obtained there was a sharing culture with shunning of transgressors by the reproductive in-group - even if seeking meat was the usual cause of inter-band warfare and of global diasporas following animal trails [29–31]. Huntergatherers had less "stuff" and what they had was often redistributed in feasts and "potlatches": they have been considered an affluent society with leisure and family time for cooperative breeding and teaching [32, 33].

#### **3. Engel's curves: Families, Countries and Classes**

The need and umami taste for meat is reflected in Engel's law that he based on family budgets in Belgium (confirmed repeatedly) (**Figure 2**) [34–36]. Modified by Bennett [37], this law states that as families become richer they spend less on starchy food but more on meat. Later attempts to define a poverty food line, where a *Meat and Vitamin B3: Getting a Grip on Engel's Curve DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100056*

#### **Figure 1.**

*A synopsis of our journey from herbivores to omnivores on a high meat diet and socially compulsory meat sharing to extreme meat inequality. Moderate meat inequality may allow for phenotypic variation in the population with cognitive elites and workers with higher fertility at a cost. Severe meat inequality being the basis of much inequality of opportunity and the diseases of poverty (and affluence) as well as much discrimination and dehumanisation of the poor. Fighting for a fair meat ration has caused much friction and migration in the past and could continue or worsen if corrective action is not taken.*

safety net could lie, started with Seebohm Rowntree (1937) [38] and moved on with minimal wages and subsistence rates now \$1.9 per day, although this is widely criticised and is not enough to afford any animal products [39, 40]. The nutritional and biochemical advantages of affording meat, other than being a source of calories, revolve around micronutrients not easily obtained from plants such as iron, zinc, Vitamin A and several B vitamins [41–44]. B12 and Choline are important as methyl donors and B3 to the mitochondrial energy supply and as precursor to metabolic nicotinamide-adenine dinucleotide (NAD) - consumer master molecules. NAD is key to brain growth and "human capital" so meat cannot be trivialised as conspicuous consumption as a "Veblen good" (with exceptions), or part of sexual politics (also with exceptions), and our "demonic" past [45] as it is a vital victual.

We may be more like eugenic eusocial insects with diet-induced castes than we like to think [46–48]. In some societies (such as the Taureg), this is explicit with pastoralist

#### **Figure 2.**

*Engel's law. As incomes rise the proportion spent on food (and rent) falls giving a disposable income for "luxury goods" and education and then services and is the consumer base for modern economies. As incomes rise the absolute spend on meat rises and on starches falls improving human capital and "grey matter" as micronutrient needs are met. There may be increased temptation, compared to the past, to deviate from this law when cheap calories and processed foods, costing 1/5th of vegetable equivalents, are available let alone other commercially available distractions and fashions.*

nobles eating the crops of their cultivating slaves [49]. Poor maternal and infant diet may mean that those in poverty are born unequal, making and unmaking minorities, particularly if that is then exacerbated by NAD consuming chemical pollution or excess infections. This is a preferable view point that sets limits that are easily corrected, than the idea of genetically determined human sub-species as first suggested by Linnaeus (1758) [50] and modified by Blumenbach (1795) [51]. Eugenicists and social Darwinists agreed but these views were refuted early by Buffon, Darwin himself and Boas. Boas noted that exposure to new diets changed immigrant people's "fleeting and superficial" differences just as the "Melting Pot" suggested and that hybrids (despite anti-miscegenation laws) were fertile and healthy arguing against separate species - first investigated on Pitcairn Island after the mutiny of the Bounty [52, 53]. Satisfying this need for better diet and meat in new power battles, whose old motives and underhand mechanisms we discuss [54], is important before society can progress and modernise linking meat, disease and demographic transitions, that remain patchy [52–56]. As Darwin noted on his Voyage of the Beagle "*if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin*".

### **4. Supply of meat**

Let us first review the supply-side by rough ages of globalisation from pre-history hunting parties to "factory farm" industrialisation in the context of our NAD supply whilst harnessing external sources of energy (originating in NAD dependent photosynthesis) in metabolic network involving the major carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus and nitrogen cycles of life, that we have exploited and disrupted [26, 55–59].

#### **5. Planet of the apes to** *Homo sapiens: Meat cornucopia*

The "cradle of mankind" was in the African Rift valley after climate change led to deforestation expanding the savannah grasslands and supporting a population

#### *Meat and Vitamin B3: Getting a Grip on Engel's Curve DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100056*

explosion of herbivores. Hominids evolved into this ecological niche and formed prosocial hunting parties aided by new technology from spears to the bow and (poison) arrow and dog domestication. *H. sapiens* emerged with egalitarian "reverse dominance" structures with "reciprocal altruism" to kin and selected non-kin with meat sharing and an extensive cattle vocabulary and spiritual connection with animals and plants [29, 60, 61]. Human phylogeny and ontogeny ("EcoDevo") revolved around cooperative feeding and a shared intentionality over resourcing meat, and over breeding with alloparenting, in three-generation families. Long dependent childhoods allow for gene expression intersecting with diet and epigenetic learning (such as hunting and gathering from tribal encyclopedias), allowing easier adaptation to changing environments [62, 63].

Pit roasting or boiling were the cooking (extra-somatic digestion), methods for meat and drying then salting for storage in newly invented pottery in "delayed return" societies [64]. Hunting and trapping and fishing (some forming the "Salmon nations"), parties crossed the globe, including via Beringia, extirpating animal (such as the woolly mammoth) and fish, sea-mammal and bird species that alongside climate change led to the demise of megafauna and meat shortages temporarily alleviated by concentrating on smaller game. The interest and obsession about meat and cattle is well preserved early in Cave paintings of Aurochs and Mammoths and sculptures (such as the "Lion man" representing hunting prowess) and other clay artefacts suggesting an early religious element with a veneration of cattle before they were even domesticated – when later some became gods and pastoralism was depicted in rock art, wall paintings and figurines [65].

This was the longest successful subsistence economy in our history and was the environment to which we largely adapted. Extra amylases (to digest starches), and lactase persistence and milk, bread and beer fermentation produce are subsequent genetic and cultural co-evolutions. This period was culturally, with the origins of science and music [66] and metabolically affluent with the sort of joined-up thinking that later influenced the physiocrats [67–69]. The advent of cooking and life of yeasts added to this metabolic thread – now lost and needing a new social contract [70–73]. Populations on the ancestral diet remained low, affecting division of labour, so it may be a "Paleofantasy" that these high meat diets were best, as they must have changed for a reason [74].

### **6. The (Neolithic) agricultural revolution and cerealization: grass roots**

Homo evolved as a food producer and processor first with horticulture and play farming then cultivation of grasses (that we cannot digest easily unlike ruminants), and the co-domestication of cereals [75, 76]. Animal domestication and pastoralism came later in trading or conquest driven relationships that usually involved a degree of specialisation with nomads providing the meat [77–79]. Herdsmen and pastoralists come in various forms, starting around 1000 BC with the humpbacked sanga cattle in Ethiopia and reindeer further north, depending on the seasonal transhumance distances between summer and winter pastures that need to be travelled. Despite managing a distributive and exchange system, specialist pastoralists, such as those with horses and wheels, drove meat inequality hard with property ownership (cattle, rather than land), and controlled meat surpluses [80–83]. Seafood was exploited more variably and often as a "famine food" perhaps as the "protein punch" was low and the effort high or over-fishing is too easy. Some in the "fertile crescent" were better off in "lucky latitudes" across temperate zones with mixed farming roping in animal predomesticates than others in the Americas and Africa (who also had carnivores and parasitic microbes to contend with in the tick and "Tsetse belt".

We can now see various seeds of hierarchy (worse in the hunting season), inequality and how a trans-egalitarianism centred on the meat supply and its ownership

might have developed [84, 85]. Sedentism, materialism and social stratification and pathology emerged with a well fed ruling "cognitive" non-food producing class and a less well-fed worker and slave class as a proletariat with, by definition, high fertility [86–88]. Meat became commodified and Engel's curve kicked in and got distorted later with the need for money competing over just about everything that used to be a common good or was a new luxury [89]. Where and when meat was scarce captured proles were used as (as was consecrated sacrificials) meat in the Americas as stateregistered cannibalism; less-coercive mechanisms of soft-power elsewhere made sure the rich were easily able to afford meat [90]. A (2nd) cerealization and calorieization event around 1000 AD in Europe specifically separated meat-eaters from grain-eaters with social penalties for transgressors in "Bourdieuian" social enclosures. Another transition phase involved tributary-redistribution by the feudal upper classes putting on regular feast days or by monasteries but then our niche construction comestibles were trusted, perhaps unwisely, to the market place [91–93].

#### **7. Enclosure movements, clearances and conservation**

Physical enclosures restricted the commons and hunting and pasture rights for serfs [94–97]. The argument used was that productivity is increased by landowners, by crop rotation improving nitrogen fixation and winter feed (turnips) for animals, compared with the overgrazing or overfishing of the "tragedy of the commons" or "prisoner's dilemma". Such arguments can be true of socialist strategies or privatisation [98] or cooperation as in "Stag Hunt" games and farmer cooperatives. Serfs were denied access to free meat and poachers fined or paid with capital punishment as in the Black act of 1723. "Rule of Capture", or gleaning rarely applied. Thomas' Paine (1796) in his "Agrarian Justice" [99] and the more radical Spence (1829) [100] started a chain of thinking about landowner's debt to others in society and that "homesteading" (as in "go west young man"), or at least compensation for the removal of pastureland should be available to all [101–103]. By forcing workers to work for an income, now usually allotments in cities, the poor were at the mercy of market forces and the price of meat (factory workers often paying three-fifths of their wages in food).

Expropriation of land resources, as in the Scottish Clearances, also damaged local peasant farmers to the benefit of the meat supply to richer cities, becoming yet another basic mechanism of inequality and discrimination with loss of social and human capital for many – who often emigrated [104–106]. Despite higher incomes and more meat per person for a while after the population decline caused by the Black Death, by the 1700s the poor became virtually vegetarian [107–109].

Conservation efforts later had similar effects, even in the American land of abundance, born amongst worries about non-white population increases destroying habitats to the further disadvantage of the poor with less pasture and hunting rights, driving poaching [110, 111]. The Cape is also a good example, as was India, as white hunters emulating aristocrats largely exterminated big game (after ivory and trophies) with improving rifles up to the High Veld and Limpopo river and set up safari reservations whilst denying locals any right to hunting despite their cattle being devastated by Rinderpest creating pellagra outbreaks - eventually the camera replaced the gun [112].

#### **8. The Columbian exchange and aftermath**

This early globalisation event is relevant as the Americas were poorly off for animal domesticates (early hunters had killed off both megafauna and horses).

*Meat and Vitamin B3: Getting a Grip on Engel's Curve DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100056*

Low meat diets may have contributed to their easy conquest by the Conquistadors' superior technology and cognitive know-how and by infection, as somewhat immunosuppressed [113]. Here is an example of a low meat culture being "laggards" with their late use of the alphabet, wheels and metallurgy. The Spanish brought horses, sheep, and goats and built ranches on an industrial scale with even feral "plagues of sheep" and a glut of cheap meat: whilst the imports of cereals and tubers contributed to "plague of corn" population explosions in the east [114–116]. Appropriation of Indian lands and the extinguishing of Bison and the rise of cattle/cowboy and "red meat republics" led to a high meat diet for white Americans and a poor meat diet for indigenous peoples [117]. The slave trade also led to a poor low (fatty/flap) meat diet for those forcibly imported from Africa and other indentured peoples.

#### **9. Intermission for some early reflections**

It cannot be a coincidence that these nutritionally deprived folk were felt to be an "inferior" race although racist, sexist and genetic explanations were invoked even if "Black Spartacus" revolts and humanist ideas gave abolitionists support for the idea we are, indeed, one race. Poor meat, milk and high corn diets were so rife they caused pellagra whose members with poor cognitive and social skills were known as the "Butterfly caste" and considered a degenerate race facing discrimination and the attention of eugenic movements. The eugenicist answer was sterilisation not diet, as discovered by Joseph Goldberger [118]. At times agriculture and maize has been rejected perhaps for this very reason as an "ecology of freedoms" with the ambivalence of "play farming".

This ability to create a man-made economic and dietary environment and then blame the victims or consider them sub-human even in their (spiritual) responses is a fundamental attribution error made easier by physical segregation; even Lombroso, a famous pellagraologist, is best known for proposing (1887) the atavistic "*l'uomo delinquent*" [119–122]. The second amendment did not allow slaves or freedmen to carry arms (except when they ran out of white soldiers), impairing their ability to hunt as did the use of their lands for plantations [123]. Denying such people access to education, health care (believing they have higher pain thresholds or prone to "Cachexia Africana"), or immigration or property rights (losing out on capital gains and heritable wealth increasing their debt) further reinforces stereotyping and ghettos, whilst obscuring the basic dietary cause that is lifelong and transgenerational [124–127].

Perhaps our original social sin is of not sharing, rather than the eating of meat and is the real reason for guilt and blanking over (unfair) access to meat. Displacement to the "narcissism of small differences" with discrimination over surface matters, particularly to people close to us physically or ethnically, is stronger than "clashes of civilisations" or even religions. Such trivia (with no biological basis), may be microagressive "smoke screens" over competition over neighbouring means of meat production (as in the "curse of Cain" the farmer and founder of nations), and is something we need to overcome with a "species think" more empathetic to strangers on lower rungs (with the added benefit of less loneliness and more diverse friends that also drives ill health [128–133]. Hope comes from the relatively recent history of divide and rule racism (after Bacon's rebellion of 1676 that united poor whites and blacks but then "Jim Crow" laws took over for decades until the success of Civil Rights Movements), suggesting these attitudes are not "hard-wired" in our amygdala and pre-frontal/anterior temporal/posterior cingulate cortical areas (that degenerate in pellagra), and that implicit bias can improve once others are seen as part of a coalition for a common cause, such as survival of the species [134–137].
