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diabetes

There's a lot of sugar in ketchup.

To say that Americans have a sweet tooth is an understatement. According to a study of 54 countries published by World Population Review, American sugar consumption is the highest in the world at 126 grams per day. That’s the equivalent of drinking three cans of Coca-Cola every day.

In comparison, the average person in China consumes just 7 grams of sugar daily.

Not surprisingly, this heavy sugar consumption has led to an obesity crisis. As of 2020, 42% of Americans were obese. The country’s obesity rate has increased by 26% since 2008.

The tricky thing about the American diet is that a lot of foods that don’t necessarily taste sweet to us are saturated with sugar.

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Katie Schieffer is a mom of a 9-year-old who was recently diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes after spending some time in the ICU. Diabetes is a nuisance of a disease on its own, requiring blood sugar checks and injections of insulin several times a day. It can also be expensive to maintain—especially as the cost of insulin (which is actually quite inexpensive to make) has risen exponentially.

Schieffer shared an emotional video on TikTok after she'd gone to the pharmacy to pick up her son's insulin and was smacked with a bill for $1000. "I couldn't pay for it," she says through tears in the video. "I now have to go in and tell my 9-year-old son I couldn't pay for it."

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Alan Levine / Flickr

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders led a group of Americans on a bus ride from Detroit, Michigan to Windsor, Ontario last month to call attention to one of America's biggest health issues: the out of control cost of insulin.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 10% of Americans have diabetes and 7.4 million of them must take insulin to survive.

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Cigna 2017

Mom and veteran Tamika Quinn thought she was untouchable in her 20s — until she had two strokes back-to-back.

The first occurred on the right side of her brain, initially paralyzing the left side of her body. The second hit her frontal lobe. As a result, Tamika spent three and a half weeks recovering in intensive care. While she did regain her motor functions, the experience was a huge wake-up call for her.

"And to think it could've been prevented," Tamika recounts in the video below.

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