Eating For Beauty? Not As Fun As It Sounds

Last night's episode of the National Geographic Channel's series Taboo focused on how obesity is viewed in different cultures. One segment was devoted to Mauritania, where a woman's size "indicates the amount of space she occupies in her husband's heart." Because famine is a regular occurrence in the West African country, bigger women symbolize not only fertility, but wealth and health. In fact, one in five women there practice gavage, which is a kind of force-feeding akin to torture.