Three words people: low tech food. All food produced in Russia, Poland, Chech Republic and so forth qualifies as "100% Organic" by US standards, because first those countrie had no technology to produce "enhanced" crap US citizens are fed, and now they strongly resist introduction of nice things like "high fructose corn syrup" and US beef enhanced with artifical growth hormone is banned from the entire Europe for precisely that reason.

Even Pepsi Co. products in Poland have entirely different ingridients than in USA (even brougth a bottle of Lipton Tee with me to show the unbelievers :)). Soft drinks in E. Europe have about 50% of the calorie content of their US counterparts (real sugar, although more expensive than corn syrup, is more sweet per calorie).

The result: nobody, and I mean nobody is overweight. You can eat 3 full meals of Polish food and nothing will happen. You will feel perfect, your methabolism will be perfect and your weight will be perfect. Because of that you see more beutiful girls, because in the US even those that have potential (nice figure and pretty faces) are like 100 lb over the norm.

real sugar, although more expensive than corn syrup, is more sweet per calorie

I'm sorry, but that's simply not the case. When the bottlers of Coca Cola and other U.S. soft drinks switched from sugar to corn syrup in the 70's and 80's, calorie content did not change. Nor did the drinks become less sweet.

Soft drink bottlers use HFCS 55, which is 55% fructose and 45% glucose, and which approximates the sweetness of sugar (sucrose) almost perfectly. Versions with different proportions of fructose can be more or less sweet than sucrose, depending on the fructose content.

What is written on your bottle does not correspond to the reality: pure and simple. Otherwise people in the US would have a 3% obesity rate the same as Poland – not 60%.

Saccharose (sucrose) metabolizes slower than glucose & fructose – which is immediately absorbed into the bloodstream with an accompaniment of an insane insulin spike. Metabolism wise you are always better off with the real sugar.

I could drink Pepsi & Lipton Tea while in Poland all day, every day and nothing happened. As soon as I got to the US I gained 40 pounds. I dropped soft drinks, and what a surprise, no more weight gain. What a surprise.

I think the “calorie content is the same as with sugar” is one of those American corporate truths like “arsenic in your water is not harmful” and “growth-hormone laced beef has no adverse effect on human health”.

This is irrelevant. It's not what you eat or drink, it's knowing when to stop. I have never been over-weight, yet I never know how many calories I've ingested. In the old days it was all common sense, no one worried about how many calories anything had. This is just another way for the health-nazis to control what we eat, and it certainly has nothing to do with beauty. Beauty for the most part is inherited.

My experiences are the exact opposite. If I was able to eat 3 times as much quantity-wise in Poland as here and weight 155 lb (up to 200lb in the USA) - it is quite obvious that food quality is much higher factor than quantity.

Nobody is starving themselves in Poland. Everybody and I mean everybody is slim. Half the population in the US is obese. But that does not say anything, because even the "fat" people over there are less overweight than "normal" here.

It was not like that in the USA even in the 80s. Look at the movies. The whole bone structure of people back then was smaller, today even the slim and fit are more massive than 25 years ago - thanks to the "enhancers" in meat production.

In the old days food was just food: eggs, flour, sugar for cakes and cookies, meat, potatoes, peas and carrots for dinner. No "stabilizers", no "taste enhancers", no "freshness preservatives", no "extra color", no "taste equivalents".

Nobody is starving themselves in Poland. Everybody and I mean everybody is slim. Half the population in the US is obese.

You really do nothing for your argument with such exaggerations. 30% is the top rate by state for obesity in the U.S. (Mississippi) and it is unlikely that every single last person in Poland is slim.

actually, i think the thing that makes eastern european girls so ethereally beautiful to american eyes is the drama of their coloring; they tend to have very pale, almost translucent skin and dark, thick hair. add to that the high cheek bones and defined jawlines, and you have something very different than the usual tan, round cheeked, lighter haired look american girls seem go for. it also doesn't hurt that eastern europeans are, comparatively, skin care FIENDS. i work for a company that does a lot of trends research, and russians spend more money on achieving perfect skin than americans do on fast food (i might be exaggerating, but it was an appropriate analogy).

As you age(I'm 59), your metabolic rate slows down, therefore, you must eat less than when you are in your prime years. This isn't brain surgery.

If you want to drink soda in the US with real sugar... go to a Jewish area around Passover and buy kosher soda... no corn syrup. The label on the bottle will be the same but the cap will be different.

I know that isn't the point of this thread but you can find soda without corn syrup and if you want to drink tea, I just brew my own at home. I like it better and I can control the sweetness...

That's right nobody is straving themselves in Poland or Russia. They also have much lower rates of depression and suicide. Eastern- european culture is completely different from American with all the consequences.

yana, then why are they here?

They are here and there. Everyone makes his/her own choice, but they stick to their heritage anywhere they go as I do. Actually, you can take positive things from both cultures, combine them and develop into a new person. There are no inferior cultures or countries.

At one time, back 20 or 30 years ago, the U.S. was the greatest country in the world, due primarily to its rich European culture. Now, we have a third world culture.

I doubt that Russian diet is a legitimate explanation for beauty, especially concidering that number one cause of death in Russia today is cardiovascular diseases (how does One get it? Probably poor diet choices are to blame: ). The second greatest killer in Russia is alcohol-related illnesses and poisoning. In fact, according to UN (FAO), obesity and micronutrient deficiencies in Russia are linked to the Russian diet, which largely consists of high consumption of meat products and animal fat, low consumption of fruits and vegetables, and alarmingly high alcohol and sugar consumption. Thus, to claim that Russians are healthier than Westerners is just absurd.

You may be right about the lack of obesity contributing to healthier, "more beautiful" bodies. But you say nothing of faces...beautiful faces. That's genetics and a smaller gene pool, pure and simple.