As someone who lived in Mauritania, there's some stuff really wrong in the ariticle:

1) There's no freaking way these girls are eating 16k cal in one day (let alone everyday). Michael Phelps training for the freaking Olympics doesn't even come close to that.

2) It's deeply engrained in the culture that the larger a woman is, the better. Having a fat wife or fat daughters is good because it shows how wealthy you are.

3) Slavery is bad there, no doubt, but it is getting better. The fact that the rest of the world has found out has really embarrassed them. People would go waaay out of their way to make sure we knew that the guy serving tea wasn't a slave.

4) As far as I saw, there was no "force feeding" nor was anything "brutal" about it. They would definitely give the women more to eat and prod them to eat a lot, but nothing ever came close to "brutal" treatment. People would talk about it like - "man, that shits weird" rather than "man that shits horrifying" - ie like they would over the slavery business.