The Reason Eastern Europeans have such Low Bodyfat and Lots of Muscle

I am from Russia and I really think food has a lot to do with it. Non GMO and much more wild caught fish. We never ate a lot of meat growing up but a lot of fat. I was always very lean, so is my family. When we immigrated to Canada we all gained weight and my father got diabetes. 15 years later my mother got stomach cancer and died. I think there is something very unhealthy about food supply here in north America.

California born and bred, still live here. My wife is Romanian and we go back 3-4 times a year. I am a bodybuilder and I stand out like crazy whenever we go back. My wife laughs because people are constantly saying (in Romanian), "Oh my God, look how big that guy is!" or "That's a big man!". My ego is stroked big time whenever we go back LOL! In my experience, Eastern Europeans eat MUCH smaller meals than most other parts of Europe and certainly smaller than the US. (My Dad is from the Netherlands and we went back many many times while growing up.) Every single Eastern European seems to eat bread with every meal - BUT, it is fresh bread without preservatives. The meat is very fatty, no lean cuts there unless you are wealthy. And so much walking! People walk everywhere! Headed back to Romania in 13 days and I can't wait! The food is sooooo dang good!

If you’ve ever been to Eastern Europe, you know the title of this video is the biggest fitness joke of the decade

I live in Eastern Europe, and I don't see the jacked eastern europeans. Most of the people live an unhealthy lifestyle here, they don't do any sports or any other physical activity. They drink, they smoke, they die early. Oh, and the food at the stores! We don't have quality foods here, only low quality food, and even that is expensive, and the selection of foods is very limited. You have a really hard time, if you want to have a health lifestyle + you need lots of money. One third of the population can't buy food sometimes because they have to pay the bills first. That's how it is in eastern Europe. You can not even buy the protein to get jacked, because you don't have enough money.

Poland here: maybe becouse we are 30 year behind western countries? I already see most fat kids on the streets, fastfoods every corner etc. Give us time we will catch up with ‚syandards’ :D

First off, you cant just group all of Eastern Europeans into one. There are groups in the balkans such as serbs Croatians, Greek to the north such as Polish, latvian, Estonian to the East such as russians. They look have different languages, diets, lifestyle and genetics. I dont know where you get your info from but having lived in many different Eastern European Countries, they eat high carb meals. Some of them eat bread with every meal such as the people in the balkans. The reason in my opinion, as to why they are slim is because they have more labour jobs, they walk everywhere and tney do not oversume as much junk food. Do you honestly think people in russia are eating avocados? There has been a big shift lately to seed oils. They use seed oils to fry meat. Before that it was butter or grill. Lastly, you can't use a study that looked at diet of 26k people in 3 cities back in 2002 and project it to over a half billion of people in 20 different countries. Makes no sense

No way you put out Czech Republic on the front cover 😂 I live here and most of the locals are unhealthy, either undernourished skinny or overweight due to excessive amount of beer , extremely high levels of rapeseed oil consumption and cured meat like salami and sausages. Balkans would better of an example.

A lot of East European countries, including Russia, have a high rate of alcohol consumption and tobacco smoking. I wonder if those factors were taken into account with the higher rates of cancer and heart disease.

My dear Thomas! I was born in Moscow in 1978 and still live here. Trust me, the reality is a bit different and more complicated. Genetics - yes, but food - no, food was always poor. In USSR we did have high quality food (real bread impossible to find today, butter, icecream, kvas, honey, kefir..), but meat was in deficit. I eat meat a lot today because of that)). Yes we had black caviar, but still very little and only once a year on holyday. Carbs - yes, a lot - cheaper and available. You should pay attention to women in small towns and villages - thay are all overweighted because of that. (My all grandmothers, sisters, ants..). Our history had rough times (wars and revolutions) and our ancestors worked hard and.. starved a lot. Hence the metabolism. I think. And again in Ukraine or Poland the picture could be a lot more different.

Thomas, realistically broadly speaking we have a culture of training and exercise. I don’t even know why, I’ve been exercising since I was like 5. Meal portions were never huge, and we do eat more gut friendly food. Also we eat a wide range of cereal - buckwheat, millet, pearl barley, you name it. Summer drinks are berry and fruit compots rather than juices or coke. I ate a decent amount of honey, especially honeycombs, so for me personally I never really craved cakes too much. When I came over to UK I gained around 10 kg in a year without even eating all that much. Looking back, I think that in general, western food tends to be very energy dense with not a lot of satiety, and also people combine fats and sugar a lot.

A little remark: Czech republic - the country you have on the left - is part of Central Europe (not Eastern Europe).

The best Russian wrestlers are not Russians. They from Caucasus Mountains.

Thomas looks like he's just got back from a secret spy mission 😂

I am romanian! Traveled all over the world and trained all over.. and yes we generally stronger. But thats because we used to walk a lot by the feets and be active from childhood entire lifes + natural food. Chese and all that meats are 💯 naturals. Thats all

Not sure what you're on about but a huge percentage of Easter Europeans eat a lot (and I mean A LOT) of pork and fried stuff (in sunflower oil). There's zero dietery education in most Easter Europe countries and being lean is considered unhealthy and being chubby is seen as healthy. A lot of people smoke and everybody eats bread (the bad kind) with every meal. Also please don't say "Eastern European or Russian" as if it's the same thing. Its not

My husband, now elderly, is 100% Polish American. I had always been impressed with his muscle structure. It is perfect. He could have been a champion body builder. He grew up on a standard Polish diet of the time. It did have plenty of carbs in it. I loved the pierogis and chruscikis. His grandmother made her own noodles. They mostly were not overweight. There were lots of good healthy foods too. Most of his male relatives died fairly young of heart problems. They were drinkers and smokers.

I'm age 21 and was born in Ukraine and put into gymnastics by age 4. I was adopted and raised in USA. My DNA is Eastern European. I've been very lean and muscular since far back as I can remember. I was adopted by an older American couple who were childless. They brought me to rural USA community and put into school system 1 year ahead of my age (they were told my wrong birth year which was a year later than was told). I learned only a few months ago I was born in 2002 and not 2001. So I was feeling smaller than other boys my age. But I was also a lot more muscular. I've had no body fat on my body all my life. I gain muscle very easy which for a gymnast can be bad--I didn't train legs with weights to keep me overall light. But I got large arms, wide lats, and extremely muscular 8 pack abdominals. When I was age 15 I got severely beat up by 3 older athletes who found me alone doing a bar workout one summer night by school sports fields. I had done pull ups and muscles ups and hanging leg raises. They waited for me to finally finish then came over and said the were going to have some fun punching the fuck out of my "gymnast abs." They put me in a full nelson and took turns throwing hard punches to my abs. I lasted off and on with short breaks over 30 minutes. I had done over 10 years of abs training for gymnastics and turns out I have rock hard abs. Then within a week I decided I wanted to build a lot more lean muscle mass. I went to the summer school weight room and found some wrestlers who already heard what happened to the only gymnast they all knew. They got me into heavy weight lifting that my gymnast body was very ready for. But I turned to the internet and found some great bodybuilders for building muscles BUT found a whole bar workout community. These guys were from Eastern Europe and all that Thomas said. I saw me up there. I got into training my abdominals to take hard punches and then saw these Eastern European bar athletes taking punches to their very lean muscular abs too. I felt that their training was in my DNA too. My normal body fat is well below 10%. I grew up not eating sugary foods or added sugars. I also grew up with exercise addiction that focused on abdominals to cope with stress of being adopted and raised in rural USA with kids who bullied me a lot. I now work in construction and have no problem avoiding the junk food others I work with eat. I find this video very interesting and will need to watch it again.

The critical factor mentioned only in passing, in the cancer portion of your video, is that Russia has an EXTREMELY high consumption of alcohol, bordering on alcoholism, which most likely contributes to their high cancer rates, more than the meat. Additionally, under communism the country was extremely polluted, including Russians doing nuclear tests near population centers

I immigrated from Russia about 20 years ago. Some aspects of the Russian diet are healthy and some are not. On the healthy side: they eat a lot of probiotic food such as kefir and cottage cheese, and most Russians have summer houses outside the city where they grow their vegetables without any chemicals. On the other side, they eat junk food like candies while they drink tea. They eat a lot of carbs such as pirogi and a lot of bread. The consumption of alcohol and tobacco is very high. I know a lot of people who died in their mid-50s.

They also drink vodka and smoke