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.