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| Don't go off that diet! Posted by Barbara Branden on 1/01, 2:27pm | ||
The Middle East Explodes with Obesity Specialists on the Middle East have their own brand of gossip, and one staple of the genre is how Arab men appreciate rotund women, a fact pregnant with implications for Arab-Western social relations. Now, various organizations have issued facts and figures confirming this propensity, as reported by Gautam Naik in today's Wall Street Journal Europe. The article begins with a mildly horrific tale of gavage (French for force-feeding, the technique used to fatten geese for foie gras) applied to an 8-year-old girl in the western Sahara, Jidat Mint Ethmane. Ms. Ethmane says she was required to consume four liters of milk in the morning, plus couscous. She ate milk and porridge for lunch. She was awoken at midnight and given several more pints of milk, followed by a prebreakfast feeding at 6 a.m. If she threw up, she says, her mother forced her to eat the vomit. Stretch marks appeared on her body, and the skin on her upper arms and thighs tore under the pressure. If she balked at the feedings, her mother squeezed her toes between two wooden sticks until the pain was unbearable. "I would devour as much as possible," says Ms. Ethmane. "I resembled a mattress." … Force-feeding is usually done by girls' mothers or grandmothers; men play little direct role. The girls' stomachs are sometimes vigorously massaged in order to loosen the skin and make it easier to consume even greater quantities of food. … Local officials say some women are so fat they can barely move. In [a Mauritanian] survey, 15% of the women said their skin split as a result of overeating. One-fifth of women said one of their toes or fingers were broken to make them eat. Naik provides a groaning board of statistics indicating "an explosion of obesity," especially in the oil-rich states where food is aplenty. The International Obesity Task Force, a London think-tank, finds 83 percent of women obese or overweight in Bahrain, 74 percent in the United Arab Emirates, and 75 percent in Lebanon. (Trailing not far behind, some 62 percent of American women fit these categories). The Journal of Nutrition in a 2001 study found half the women in Tunisia and Morocco overweight or obese. Further, the rate of childhood obesity has risen rapidly. A 2001 survey estimated that 22 percent of Mauritanian women have been force-fed as girls. Governments are getting into the act because, the Obesity Task Force figures, being overweight brings on various illnesses (including diabetes, heart disease and gastric ailments); in all, these account for one-third of total health costs in the Middle East. One interesting ally in their campaign for slenderness is the Western notion of female beauty. A 19-year-old explains that "exposure to Western TV shows and magazines convinced her it is healthier to maintain a middling weight," Naik reports. It will be fascinating to watch if Arab cultural attitudes change with the perception of health, as for example they did in the West concerning sun tans. (December 29, 2004) Permalink | ||
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