In response to Fifi
You are preaching to the choir about the modern western diet and its harmfulness.I am one of the founders of an Intentional Community which strictly eats by the Weston Price foundation/ Nourishing Traditions model,and feel VASTLY better because of it.Food and medicine can be the same thing,and in most cases certainly ARE.

As far as my degree,my main focus was how indigenous cultures conceptualize and treat mental illnesses, specifically how the Yakut, Tungus,and other Siberian tribes people relate to Schizophreinform conditions,and how that their "Shamans disease" and the resultant shamanic initiations seems to be a form of treatment for people who have these sorts of symptoms.I also focused somewhat on the treatment of PTSD like symptoms by traditional healers amongst the Maya.There wasn't really any place to focus on clinical nutrition at all, and Umass is so compartmentalized that it is difficult enough to take courses outside of ones major that it really wasn't worth it to push the issue.( I almost couldn't take an ethnobotony class without yards of paperwork and having to have 3 different professors fill things out for me,all because technically it was a Plant and Soil Sciences class)
My focus was on inter cultural psychology, so along with Umass's very Native American focused cultural Anthro classes,I took alot of Psych and brain science classes.I also interned for 4 years with an acupuncturist and TCM herbalist during my college days,and learned alot about TCM food cures and dietary traditions.I have also studied a fair bit of Galenical/western herbal medicine , as well as a lot of nutritional medicine as well as I can on my own.Id say that i have a fairly well rounded understanding of the subjects involved.

As far as poo pooing traditional common sense,that is exactly what I was trying NOT to do here.Traditional people can be far smarter than the lot of us,and usually are about alot of things local to them, if their culture is intact,and I was certain that the indigenous Europeans were just as smart as any other traditional peoples.

I figured that the European poor folx had something that I was missing( like the rose hips ,which I wasn't even sure was an Old world food,particularly because they grow wild all over the beaches here in New England)And that their source for vitamin C,particularly in the winter was something that everybody had,and wasn't reported because it was so common(like organ meats and cabbage,)or was something specific, like the Northeast natives use of Cedar tea for scurvy,which could have been lost culturally over time.

I was saying that according my limited understanding of the diet, there HAD to be something,and that I was missing it.(or people would have had to have been alot sicker than we assume,which was another possibility I was broaching).And I was asking this list what it could have been,and for leads to learn more.
I wasn't looking for anything obscure,per se, I was admitting my ignorance, that I was probably missing something obvious,due to my limited understanding of poor peoples food in pre modern times.Most of the primary sources Ive found on the subject of pre modern European peoples' food have all been for rich peoples recipe books(ie i could find nothing on what lower class folx were eating),and all of the secondary sources have been archaeological dig reports where most of the not so obvious stuff doesn't preserve well.I was hoping for leads in looking at other resources about this subject I haven't been exposed to yet.