Celebrity chef Paula Deen has a secret. She’s been keeping the news she has Type 2 Diabetes a secret from the press for three years already. While news of her illness comes as no surprise to anybody who has ever watched the ingredients she uses while cooking (which are butter, sugar, salt, and bacon mostly), the latest admission she has made about having kept her health issue a secret has been really disconcerting to many. Why hide news that could have helped stop so many of her fans from making recipes she touts as being delicious but are so unhealthy all this time? Some are accusing her of hatching a plan to endorse a new diabetes treatment drug — and even though that claim appears to be false, Deen is not getting much sympathy from anybody (including her co-workers employed by the Food Network).
She hosts Paula’s Best Dishes on The Food Network, but when she shared the best dish about her own health with tabloid magazines (that she’s changing her celebrity diet to eat more healthy) her public reputation has suffered considerably. While it wasn’t a shock to most people familiar with celebrity chef Paula Deen, the star celeb herself was shocked by the lack of sympathy she’s been getting since revealing to friends and fans she now has Type 2 diabetes, reported the Huffington Post. Apparently Deen, renowned for The Lady’s Brunch Burger — a hamburger topped with egg and bacon and served on halves of a glazed donut — thinks people should be surprised that she has a disease associated with a high sugar intake, high fat diet, and obesity.
But really? Paula Deen admitted that she’s known about her Type 2 diabetes diagnosis for a full three years before she told anyone about it. That’s the biggest problem here in the eyes on many.
She says she is coming out about it only after understanding what it means in terms of her own health and fitness, supposedly. Now, the same woman who used to say she was unconcerned about her weight or her cooking lifestyle wants to educate people about Type 2 diabetes.
As a result of her promotion of the most unhealthy recipes she could possibly create, other celebrity chefs like Anthony Bourdain are being extremely critical of her since rumor is she’s been in talks for years to pitch a new diabetes drug for Novo Nordisk.
But before you get too hostile reacting to the claim that Deen and Novo Nordisk are courting [which was reported by Fox News early on when Daily Mail UK was pushing the news that the rumor Paula Deen is sick were true], it might be worth checking the facts.
According to Deen and the company, there are no truth to the rumors. The ideas she’d intentionally promote a cooking style and using ingredients in her famous Southern-style recipes that would make people (including herself) sick so she could sell more books and tout a new pill to fix the disease she helped instill are in and of themselves seem a bit twisted, we daresay SICK.
It also looks like Anthony Bourdain — known for being a hard partier and not always one to eat a healthy diet — look like he’s getting his own Food Network show some free press at Paula Deen’s emotional expense.
Knowing Paula Deen is a nice lady, she’s been shocked to receive such little moral support from the Food Network execs, staff, or other celebrity chefs since she made the announcement the rumors are true. She does have Type Two Diabetes and she’s have to change her diet if she wants to live. Her body has brought an end to her career that has been spend promoting food that ultimately can kill you.
So, she’s stuck in a terrible position that her own emotional denial about how bad butter, sugar, and a high cholesterol diet are for you has caused the otherwise charitable celeb and lovely grandmother.
It’s great that, as a humanitarian celebrity chef, Paula Deen supports programs like Blessings in a Backpack, to help feed hungry children. But she can’t be sending them anything out of her own cookbook. Recommending that children be allowed to eat cheesecake for breakfast is too much when she suggests treating oneself and your kids to far too many indulgent foods is a loving thing to do.
As for catching flack for being critical of Paula, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain weighed about her situation and defended his own remarks about her choice of cooking and lifestyle to ABC. He shared what most Americans who struggle to eat a healthy diet have been saying steadily since Paula Deen confirmed she has Diabetes (Type 2). He said:
“When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you’ve been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you’ve got Type 2 Diabetes. … It’s in bad taste if nothing else,” he told Eater Monday.
Since telling folks the truth about her health status, she reportedly has been changing up her recipes, but not by much. It’s probably not what son and co-owner of The Lady & Sons, Bobby Deen, had in mind. His show, Not My Mama’s Cooking, which premiered on The Cooking Channel earlier this month, preserves the taste of down home Southern cooking without all the sugar and fat. That is something Paula Deen needs to focus on now, not only for her own sake, but for the sake of her audience.
Although the American Diabetes Association says a person need not cut out rich foods entirely, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it’s clear that the types of recipes Paula Deen hawks should be limited to once a month — perhaps less for someone with a preexisting disposition toward Type 2 diabetes. Sweet as she is (and that’s no pun), the star celeb is no exception to the rule of a healthy diet.
To that end, we here at Green Celebrity Network all wish Paula Deen well.
We don’t think this human rights activist (she supports the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial) and pet friendly celebrity planned to market her own health crisis just so she could sell a wonder drug diabetes cure-all pill for Novo Nordisk. On the other hand, we also hope she will stop suggesting people eat copious amounts of fat and sugar as a side dish or main course for every meal of the day. At least folks shouldn’t eat garbage daily or after-dinner sweets as meal supplements during breakfast and lunch. Dessert happening was timed just fine the way it was.