While researchers have long suspected that the traditional plant foods consumed by Native American tribes in the Northern Plains were super nutritious, no one had ever really studied it.

That's what inspired a published earlier this year in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis by a group of researchers at Virginia Tech and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They analyzed the nutrients in 10 traditional wild food plants from three Native American reservations in North Dakota.

They found that reintroducing these plants — which include cattail broad leaf shoots, chokecherries, beaked hazelnuts, lamb's-quarters, plains prickly pear, prairie turnips, stinging nettles, wild plums, raspberries and rose hips — into the diet of the tribes of the region could improve nutrition and potentially prevent disease.

The superstar of the study was lamb's-quarters, a wild green that's been consumed by hunter-gatherers from northern California all the way to Africa for food as well as medicine. The study found that one serving of steamed lamb's-quarters contained more than 60 percent of the thiamin, 40 percent of the vitamin B6, 60 percent of the calcium and 70 percent of the magnesium of the daily recommended intake.