Meat Intake and the Dose of Vitamin B3 - Nicotinamide:Cause of the Causes of Disease Transitions, Health Divides, and Health Futures?

Meat and vitamin B 3 – nicotinamide – intake was high during hunter-gatherer times. Intake then fell and variances increased during and after the Neolithic agricultural revolution. Health, height, and IQ deteriorated. Low dietary doses are buffered by ‘welcoming’ gut symbionts and tuberculosis that can supply nicotinamide, but this co-evolved homeostatic metagenomic strategy risks dysbioses and impaired resistance to pathogens. Vitamin B 3 deficiency may now be common among the poor billions on a low-meat diet. Disease transitions to non-communicable inflammatory disorders (but longer lives) may be driven by positive ‘meat transitions’. High doses of nicotinamide lead to reduced regulatory T cells and immune intolerance. Loss of no longer needed symbiotic ‘old friends’ compounds immunological over-reactivity to cause allergic and auto-immune diseases. Inhibition of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide consumers and loss of methyl groups or production of toxins may cause cancers, metabolic toxicity, or neurodegeneration. An optimal dosage of vitamin B 3 could lead to better health, but such a preventive approach needs more equitable meat distribution. Some people may require personalised doses depending on genetic make-up or, temporarily, when under stress

Psychotherapy with people who smell

This paper stems from psychotherapy work with patients who ‘neglect personal hygiene’ in homelessness and chronic mental health settings, and consultancy to staff groups tasked with patients’ ‘social inclusion’. Psychoanalytic theory has largely eschewed exploring internal psychic states communicated by odour and, equally, the meaning of marked societal hostility towards malodorous individuals. The paper looks at historical and anthropological notions of ‘dirt’ and the construction of the ‘unwashed’ as a social category in the formation of bourgeois society. Psychoanalytic ideas of unconscious bodily and psychic communication are described. Case examples explore how troubled relations between body and mind result from early abuse/neglect, where the internal world is suffocated by trauma and ‘dread’ which cannot be contained and processed. From a psychosocial perspective, taking up a role as ‘unacceptable’ is the paradoxical condition of belonging for many members of the social whole. The paper suggests that invasive smell confronts us with our repressed knowledge of that which is ‘rotten’ in the emotional and sociopolitical environment in which ‘the unwashed’ exist. An example from organisational consultancy traces profound disturbance in institutional dynamics that occurs when the malodorous individual seeks to claim shared social resources. The author questions the prevalent view that ‘being smelly’ is an attempt to withdraw from social and psychic contact, rather than a meaningful communication which is within the scope of psychoanalytic thought to understand