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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zarrock God of Evil" data-source="post: 302229" data-attributes="member: 2025">He he. The wealth explanation is hardly valid. Sure - the US has a larger average GDP per Capita than most European countries - but if you exclude the richest and poorest 5% of the countries, this picture will change dramatically. The gap between rich and poor in America is HUUUGE compared to in Europe - especially in Scandinavia and the Netherlands where the gap is close to non-existant (by an international scale anyway). So using the GDP per Capita to estimate how rich the average American is compared to the average European wildly skews the result...On a related note a survey on highest living standards in the world turned out this result in 1998:Country   Score (max. 100) Denmark 98.4 Norway 95.6 Austria 93.2 Sweden 93.1 France 91.9 Finland 90.8 Luxembourg 90.7 Ireland 89.1 Poland 88.5 Germany 88.1 This survey was conducted by the University of Pennsylvania...For more relevant information check out this link <a href="http://newsport.org/archive/f98/americans/stats.html" target="_blank">Economist Survey</a>. It's got average Calorie Intake, Average Sugar Intake and much, much more and compares Japan, Argentina, USA, Germany, and Denmark. (...and if anyone's wondering why our country has such a low life expectancy compared to living standard the answer is: Alcohol.)-Zarrock</blockquote>