Nutritional anthropology applies the anthropological approach to nutritional disciplines by studying and understanding how the interactions of social and biological factors affect the nutritional status of individuals and populations. Dettwlyer conducted medical anthropological research assessing the nutritional status of individuals living in a population in Mali, Africa. She defined it as a biocultural approach because the research was not just about people's biological systems, but about cultural dogmas, infant feeding practices, socioeconomic status, and political-ecological factors. also contributed. Child mortality and malnutrition rates are very high in Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world. Thus, Dettwlyer, as a nutritional anthropologist, extends his study to children in Mali who suffer from malnutrition due to their birth into poor families; because their mothers have a lower status within their extended, prosperous family; ethnocultural principles, etc. Dettwyler conducted three case studies on seven children from poor families. The first case study involved fraternal twins, a boy named Al-Hassane and a girl named Assanatu. They were underweight. Jeneba breastfed her children, but sometimes she gave them formula because breast milk was not enough for her children. Jeneba's first husband died; so he remarried a widower who was an airport employee and stopped providing money. The children from her husband's first marriage did not support her in household chores and in caring for Al-Hassane and Assanatu. So she started saying that she was sick and as a result her children would lose weight and become prone to fever, diarrhea, etc. She could not... middle of paper ...... concludes that biological factors, poverty, cultural beliefs, socio-economic status, ecological factors, etc., intertwine and evaluate the nutritional status of individuals in a population. Dettwyler does good case studies because she presents good ethnographic fieldwork where she herself observed and experienced life among the Malian population. She provides vivid detail about her data and observations, stimulating her biocultural approach. Dettwyler only observed children who were born undernourished and died from illness or disease. She took the rural side of Mali which encompassed Orthodox society and its beliefs but could have taken the urban and positive side of Mali by extending her study to children born healthy; then studied and analyzed their nutritional status and compared it to that of rural children in Mali.