I’m not sure I get that. I mean I don’t really support celebrities endorsing prescriptions drugs in the first place, but if it happens, I’d rather it be a celebrity that was actually using the drug.
I do believe she practices (if not counsels) moderation, because if she didn’t, based on the foods she shows off, she’d be enormous. Still, all that sugar must have been a factor in the diabetes, no?
Disclaimer: Paula charmed Peter and the panel as a guest on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, so that makes me predisposed to like her.
I’m not convinced Paula’s food directly caused her diabetes.
There’s other lifestyle factors too. Exercise being the most important. Moderation in what you eat is another. You can have the mashed potatoes and fried chicken once in awhile. Just not too often.
Heredity is another big factor with diabetes and there’s not a darn thing you can do except exercise and eat in moderation. Then hope for the best.
My Dad does - it runs on both sides of his family. He’s never been overweight in his life, and has always been big on exercise. He DID drink far too much in terms of sugared pop and fruit juice and eat far too much in terms of white flour pre-diagnosis.
He now gets MORE exercise and eats whole grains and skips the soda.
8 days since diagnosed with Type II. Still learning the ropes of what I can eat and not eat.
For me it appears to be all the pop I drink/drank. My blood sugar plummeted by over 50% in just two days of not drinking sugar water. I say that with great sadness, because I loves my soda (Cherry Coke Fiend) and diet soda just doesn’t taste as good.
Yesterday I had chili (both beef and turkey, black and red beans) with cheese over the top scooped up with corn chips for lunch, with diet pop and an Edy’s (no sugar added) fruit bar for desert and my blood sugar level was actually lower 3 hours afterward than when I woke up in the morning.
Of course, I’m still experimenting. Today I had a Taco Bell Grilled Stuffed Burrito with water to drink and it raised my blood sugar by 100 points 2 hours after eating.
Just to be clear, because I’ve seen a couple mentions in here of being diabetic because of eating sugar:
Eating excess sugar doesn’t cause diabetes. Excess sugar is the aftermath once diabetes has happened, and excess sugar in the body is what has to be controlled once a person is diabetic. The typical mechanism of Type 2 diabetes is - insulin resistance - caused, usually but not exclusively, by excess fat in the body. Whether that person got fat by eating too many calories from sugar or fat or both, doesn’t matter. Heredity can matter, because that can factor in to how the body handles fat stores and how much they cause insulin resistance. It’s the long-term fatness and/or the pancreas eventual inability to keep up with insulin production that causes Type 2. Of course there are exceptions, but that’s the majority.
OK, I just did an image search for her, and yes, she could stand to lose a few pounds, but she’s far from obese. In fact, she looks pretty typical for an American. Either she burns a ton of Calories, or she really doesn’t eat the things she shows on TV all the time.
Yeah, sugar doesn’t cause diabetes. However, excess calories of any source cause obesity. Obesity does increase the risk of diabetes and make it far harder to control. In addition to the obesity-diabetes links, it’s also worth noting that diabetics are at a significantly higher risk of cardiovascular disease, which is another reason that it is pretty irresponsible for Paula Deen to continue to advocate the unhealthy food she is famous for.
Some type 2 diabetics are able to control their disease purely by watching their diet. If she were to focus on eating healthier and losing weight she might not even NEED the diabetes medication she is now peddling. I don’t know if she’s just so clueless that she is in denial of that reality or choosing not to acknowledge it so she can keep making money.
Can I just take a moment to rage about something that irritates me? It’s bad enough when a video is someone pointing a camera at their TV, but for the love of something, could people please not interject their own comments over the top of the audio? Jesus, people piss me off.
Deen was pretty much a penniless single mom until well into middle age. Her fame only started in the late 1990s, and I think she was determined to rake in as much money as possible while the sun was shining.
I grew up on Deen-style cooking: if it stands still fry it, preferably in bacon grease- and I seriously doubt she converted anybody to that lifestyle but basically just gave the taste of childhood back for a few dishes. I’ll even go so far to say that if anybody out there doesn’t know that “fried in fat with lots of butter on top is bad for you” or if anybody says “Well Paula Deen says this is good and she’s the healthiest woman on TV and a doctor!” then I just can’t have much sympathy for them; they were probably on the fast track to be killed the first stranger to offer them jellybeans to get into their blacked out van anyway.
That said I’m not much of a fan of Deen because I think she’s as phony as a $6 Rolex and totally on the make. I’m guessing the Paula Deen Diabetic Cookbook will be announced within the next few weeks.
Of course, some people are going to want to believe that they can prevent diabetes with their diet, which is mostly under their own control. And some people will cackle with glee at the thought that someone they don’t like has developed an illness.
Having said that, if Paula Deen came out to shill for a drug company, yeah, that’s pretty tacky. Not as tacky as the people who are celebrating the fact that she developed a disease, but tacky.
I think that may have happened with us. As in, symptoms, which were laughably (Daughter: She never noticed? I told her YEARS ago!) obvious, disappeared.
James Beard and Marcella Hazan never put on overdone accents and shilled for companies while making burgers in glazed donut buns, deep-frying butter/cream cheese balls and lasagna squares (apparently these days, anything deep-fried counts as Southern home cooking to her), and writing cookbooks for kids that suggested cheesecake as breakfast food. When Barbara Walters interviewed her about the kids cookbook in 2009, she made her “moderation” claim again; she also seems to have known about her diagnosis then, and she should know well that once you get weight on, it’s hard to get off - so why write cookbooks full of fattening foods for kids and help start them early on that path like half the other things out there? My guess? It would have hurt her book sales to “come out” then as being diabetic, and she spent the last 3 years finishing up her old book contracts and maybe closing out her sponsorship deals with various companies.
She said, “I made the choice at the time to keep it close to me, to keep it close to my chest. I felt like I had nothing to offer anybody other than the announcement. I wasn’t armed with enough knowledge. I knew when it was time, it would be in God’s time,” or apparently, in Novo Nordisk’s time - the company paying her to promote their product.
She’s not writing or cooking from the heart. It’s from the wallet. It’d be like the Marlboro Man secretly shilling cigs for years after a lung cancer diagnosis (two of them did die of lung cancer, but the actors didn’t create the product). Sure, you can get lung cancer in other ways and not all smokers get it, but it sure doesn’t help. It smacks of hypocrisy (and worse, in the case of the kid cookbook) to be dishing up all that with a toothy smile.
Diabetes is a bitch of a disease, and I am not happy to hear this diagnosis, at all. People have criticized her over-the-top excesses for years, and it’s disappointing that it apparently took not an unfortunate illness but a promotional offer for her to start promoting better eating habits. She’s said she’s your cook, not your doctor, but I guess she might be your pharmacist if there’s money in it.