Thank you. I&#x27;ve been saying this forever, based largely on personal experience living in countries where average portions aren&#x27;t grotesquely oversize, and where the chemistry of a typical meal is healthier and more natural.<p>I spent the first six years of my life in the USSR, where my formative attitudes about food were formed: received cultural wisdom was that you should be grateful for food and clean up your plate, both as a social grace and out of larger moral considerations. This stayed with me, but unfortunately is a disaster when applied in the US, where everything is enormous. Accordingly, I&#x27;m prone to overeat, since almost all eating out in the US is overeating by global standards. I&#x27;m not obese per se, but weight control has always been a struggle.<p>On the other hand, I lived in Yerevan, Armenia for nearly two years 2012-2014. Within about half a year of arriving, I lost nearly 30 lbs, eating an average diet and having no exercise regime whatsoever. There was no gym membership and no morning jog. I did nothing special to lose weight, it just happened. The amount of walking involved in everyday life surely helped, but it wasn&#x27;t extraordinary; the inner centre of Yerevan is small, not on the scale of a European capital. I just ate a lot less, it turns out. It was a fairly rich diet, too, with lots of dough, bread, meat and carbs--just less.<p>Of course, I promptly gained the weight back a few months after returning to the US.