Photo: Amanda Shepherd | Unsplash
When Karen Akins volunteered for a medical mission to Mexico in 2008, she had no idea that rates of type 2 diabetes had doubled between 2000 and 2006. Nor that Mexico's healthcare system was ill-equipped to handle chronic conditions, nor that for a time, diabetes was the leading cause of death. Travelling to remote villages where soda was cheaper than water, her team delivered the diagnosis over and over. When she learned that soda consumption doubled between 1999 and 2006among Mexican adolescents, mirroring diabetes rates, she got angry. Her recent documentary, El Susto (The Shock), tracks the role of soda in Mexico's type 2 diabetes public health crisis, looking at how and why the federal soda tax passed in 2013.
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