Lexi Winnell, a 9-year-old girl with Native American ancestry, is insulin resistant. Her grandparents have gone all out to keep her from getting diabetes.
Three years ago, when West Virginia was leading the nation in diabetes, the American Diabetes Association shut down its West Virginia office.
Now, officials have decided to bring the organization back to West Virginia.
A federally-funded health center, Cabin Creek Health Systems accepts patients whether they can pay or not. Freida Smith is one of their 14,000 patients.
West Virginia is among the top five on just about every national chronic disease list. The state leads the nation in diabetes and obesity, according to the Gallup Healthways poll.
Surveys show that many West Virginians do not realize obesity is a leading cause of many chronic diseases. Many also feel those diseases are hereditary, and there is nothing a person can do to prevent them.
Think about this: More than 200,000 West Virginians have contracted a disease that kills people. About 69,000 of them don't know they have it.
Last August, Kanawha County school cooks were abruptly ordered to quit serving prepackaged food and cook instead, from scratch, with fresh ingredients, five days a week. With fewer students eating, Kanawha County's food program is projected to make about $350,000 less than it did the previous year.
West Virginia has the nation's worst statistics in 10 of 12 categories in the new 2011 Gallup Healthways ranking. More than one in three West Virginians -- 35.3 percent -- are now obese.
Until the 1980s, few West Virginians are overweight in archival photos. In the 1960s and 1970s, during the poverty war, Americans got used to seeing pictures of bone-thin West Virginians on the evening news. Only 13.4 percent of Americans were obese then.
In 2005, almost four out of 10 kids in the Kearney, Neb., schools were obese or overweight. Five years later, Kearney had chopped the obesity rate of their grade school kids by a stunning 13 percent.
One in four fifth-graders has high blood pressure and cholesterol. One in four eleven-year-olds is obese, a clear red flag for the future.
