Part VI takes up questions of food and nutrition that have historical as well as contemporary relevance. It begins with two chapters that continue a now decades-long debate over the extent to which improved nutrition may be responsible for reduced mortality within populations – a debate that has centered on, but certainly has not been limited to, the circumstances surrounding the population increases of the countries of Europe since the eighteenth century.

These are followed by a group of chapters that, although not specifically addressing matters of mortality decline, do help to illuminate some of its many aspects. An elaboration of the concept of synergy, for example, emphasizes the important role that pathogens (or their absence) play in the nutritional status of an individual, whereas the chapter on famine reveals the circumstances within which synergy does some of its deadliest work.

Stature, discussed next, is increasingly employed by historians as a proxy for nutritional status, and final adult height can frequently be a function of the nutrition of the mother before she gives birth and of the infant and child following that event – a subject treated in the following chapter. A chapter on adolescent nutrition and fertility, harking back to matters of population increase, is succeeded by another concerned with the linkage between the nutrition of a child and its mental development.

By way of a transition to a second group of chapters in Part VI focusing on culture and foods is a chapter on the biological and cultural aspects of human nutritional adaptation.