During the American Revolution, was the American standard of living considered the highest in the world? Explain.

Determining who has the highest standard of living even
today is difficult given how hard it is to define "quality of life."  This problem is
made much worse when we try to look at standards of living over 200 years ago.  In those
days, there were very few records kept, which makes it very difficult to make any
objective comparisons.

Those who say that the American
standard of living was highest generally point to things like the physical size of
American people.  Americans were (it is believed from things like military records)
quite a bit larger on average than Europeans were.  This implies that Americans had more
and better food and were generally healthier than their European counterparts.  If we
define "standard of living" in this way, then Americans had the highest standard in the
"European" (Europe and other places peopled by Europeans) world, at
least.