Alright, I'm going to pick a lesser known nutritional deficiency (well, disease caused by a nutritional deficiency, whatever), pellagra. You might not have heard of pellagra. It's a deficiency of vitamin B3, or niacin. Also tryptophan.
When Native people started cultivating maize (mostly people from Central America/Mexico), they prepared it using nixtamalization, which makes the niacin available to the person eating it. If it isn't prepared like that, but corn has become a staple crop, people get pellagra.
Now what does pellagra do? A lot. But the basic four are diarrhea, dermatitis (skin irritation, eczema is a form of dermatitis. Basically rashes, blisters, itching), dementia, and death. The less common/definitional symptoms basically fall into either skin stuff or neurological symptoms.
So, after corn was introduced to Europe, people noticed that people got this disease, usually in spring, getting worse in summer, then going away until the next spring. They thought it was related to the corn, but in the "bacteria on the crop" sense. In the winter, people were eating more meat, which has B3.
Skipping forward to the 1910s American South. Pellagra had become endemic there. In South Carolina, at the Spartanburg Pellagra Hospital, a doctor named Joseph Goldberger was sent to figure out why this was happening. Then he noticed that the doctors and nurses didn't seem to get pellagra. And they were actually eating things like meat and milk. And when Goldberger added those things to the hospital diet? The patients got better! You can even just add some brewers yeast!
There were more tests, including tests on volunteers (who were also prisoners, so ethically not great). He didn't figure out what nutrient caused pellagra, other scientists did, but it was figured out!
So what are the numbers? From Wikipedia: "Between 1906 and 1940 more than 3 million Americans were affected by pellagra with more than 100,000 deaths, yet the epidemic resolved itself right after dietary niacin fortification." And yet, the disease was basically eliminated from the US through food fortification.
We figured it out once! And then Europeans didn't listen and we forgot, and a bunch of people died. So that's what happens when "We don't need things added during food preparation"
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