In Mauritania, a country crippled by food shortages, obesity is viewed as a sign of wealth and prestige in a woman. To attain Mauritanian standards of beauty, many women undergo the practice of gavage, or “fattening up.” While traditionally the practice of fattening includes chugging camel’s milk in a nomadic camp under a sweltering sun in the Sahara Desert, for a modern-day working Mauritanian woman, appetite-inducing pills have become the new way to pack on the pounds.
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