In the UK, some historians have argued that average diets before 1750 were much more diverse and nutritious than we might otherwise imagine. Pulses, berries, foraged greens and herbs, and wild game added variety and vitamins to the starchy staples and dairy on which peasants depended, and it wasn’t until industrialization and urbanization really accelerated, in the nineteenth century, that the British diet was reduced to meat, wheat, sugar, and dairy.
