Indeed. By and large most people’s diet back then sucked compared to ours. Most people were still eating what was available by the season and health regulation was virtually non-existent compared to 2018 (or even 1958). Nice clothes and better manners aside, life was hard and often short back then.
I think it depended where you were. Most of the country was agricultural, and people generally ate pretty healthily, if they ate less varied or “fancy” diets.
My grandmother would have been 21 years old when this film was made, left largely orphaned and ill-cared for from the age of 12, married at 16, and having borne three children. She lived to be 94 despite childhood malaria and one pregnancy/childbirth that almost killed her and affected her for life.
But the work to live back then for everyone involved a lot of physical exercise that people don’t get now. Just running a household was enormously different for women, in terms of sheer physical labor. While that could be detrimental depending on economic status, in many cases it was probably healthy and strengthening.
(And I would suggest that mental/emotional health was generally superior.)
I wonder how many of those men wound up fighting and dying in WWI?