It was poor diet too. In winter, you survived on what you managed to store away and preserve in one way or another. All our preservation arts from fermenting and pickling (where basically, it rotted, and you ate it anyway) to drying, salting, and smoking, come from those days. There were only certain times of the year where you could eat fresh nutritious food, and the rest of the time was spent eating less balanced diets of easily stored food that sometimes went bad and killed you itself. The rye mold in Salem Massachusetts, that led to the Salem Witch Trials, was a good example of how your own food stores could kill you or get you burned at the stake or hanged.
