Force Feeding Makes Women Beautiful in Islamic Country of Mauitania

In Mauritania, a small country in N.W. Africa, young girls and women are sometimes force-fed in order to make them fat. Obesity is considered by many people in this mainly Islamic country to be beautiful. Girls as young as four years of age are sometimes force-fed huge quantities of high calorie liquids and foods in order to increase weight and girth. Women who insist on loosing weight are sometimes threatened to be divorced and are sometimes refereed to as ugly.

The country of Mauritania lies with Senegal to the southwest and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. It is dry and barren and surrounded by sand dunes. In a place where many people have struggled to live, obesity has been looked upon for centuries as a sign of prosperity and health. The tradition is not dying an easy death. Centuries of looking upon a woman with rolls of fat as being gorgeous, has made life quite miserable for anyone who is naturally thin.

In the town of Nouakchott, a woman struggles up several flights of stairs, sweat dripping from her forehead. She pauses and tries to catch her breath but the ordeal of hefting two hundred and fifty pounds covered in layers of clothing and veils up three flights of steps have taken their toll. Her joints are aching and her heart pounds. The woman in her early 50s is not obese from choice, it is a cultural tradition.

When the little girl was only four years old her family, led by her mother, began the ordeal of force-feeding the young child. She was forced to drink up to fourteen gallons of camel milk every day. When the girl vomited she was beaten and when she refused to consume the high calorie concoction her fingers were bent backwards so that her fingers would touch her hand, forcing her to drink. Her stomach ached severely and she would often pray for all of the animals that produced milk to die, so that she might escape her plight. By the time the girl was ten she could no longer run. A few years later she struggled to walk. Her mother was content. She had done her job. She rejoiced in measuring her young daughter's rolls of fat. Her daughter was grossly obese and she was considered beautiful. The woman carried her weight for all of her life and now suffers from heart disease and Diabetes.

The mother was not torturing her daughter knowingly. She loved her and was proud of her. She was just following the old tradition of 'gavage', from the French word, which means (force-fed). The same technique has been used for years to force feed geese, while cramming tubes down their throats and pouring in large quantities of high caloric feed, in order to produce the delicacy called, Foie' Gras. This procedure in recent years, has been made illegal in the United States. The force feeding of females in the country of Mauritania has recently also been made illegal. Centuries of tradition die hard and in rural areas the tradition is sometimes still carried on.

In Mauritania, out of more than 1.5 million women, more than one-fourth are morbidly obese. In a country twice the size of Texas with no fast food restaurants, the percentage is quite high. The World Health Organization claims that the total is still quite low, considering that obesity in the United States runs upwards of 40%. To halt the practice of force-feeding and viewing obesity as lovely, Mauritania's government has campaigned on TV and radio to educate the people about this unhealthy life-style.Many love songs in this country sing the praises of 'larger is more lovely', and the government is using this method to come up with ode's dedicated to 'thin is in'. The country is also banking on Soap Opera's beamed into the country that shows stick thin actresses as being the norm. Soap Opera's are fashionable and watched faithfully in areas of the urban elite.

One in ten young girls under the age of 19 are still force fed in this country, compared with more than 1/3 of the population over forty years of age. Obesity is still considered popular in many parts of the Arabic world. 52% of women over 15 in Kuwait are obese, along with 46% in Egypt. More than 1/3 of women in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are fat.

One man, a 48 year old library curator, who takes care of ancient Islamic manuscripts full of poetry and love dedicated to plump women, states, "A man's goal is to marry a woman who he can fill his house up with."

Younger women and men are starting to argue against the tradition of beauty meaning (fat). They are coming to terms with the fact that being thin is healthier and more attractive.

In other parts of the country though, young girls are taken to 'fat farms' where girls are force fed dates, and large amounts of couscous and other foods loaded down with calories. One owner of a 'fat facility' was expecting some young seven year old girls to fatten up. "They may cry and fight but we will succeed in making them beautiful. "They will be happy and find a good marriage despite their protests", claims the owner."They will be beautiful." The girls were expected to weigh between 60 and 100 Kilograms after treatment. That is around 150 to 220 pounds.

One woman complained about her husband telling her that after loosing her extra pregnancy weight, he no longer found her attractive. He told her if she didn't gain the weight back he would divorce her.