The next time you decide to follow the cooking advice of southern chef Paula Deen you might want to consider that reports are now circulating in which the star has developed type 2 diabetes from her choice of high-fat, high-calorie cooking.
Back in April 2011 the National Enquirer reported that the Food Network star who has written five best-selling cookbooks has been trying to keep her condition a secret to keep sales of her products rolling in. Now sources close to the 64-year-old chef says she’s been working out a multimillion-dollar deal to be a spokeswoman for pharmaceutical company Novartis to endorse the diabetes drug she must now take.
According to a source at TheDaily:
“Paula Deen is going to have to reposition herself now that she has diabetes,” and “She’s going to have to start cooking healthier recipes. She can’t keep pushing mac and cheese and deep-fried Twinkies when she is hawking a diabetes drug.”
Such a realization would almost be poetic justice as critics for years have blasted her high fat, high salt, high sugar dishes. In a famous quuote following Deen’s cookbook for kids in 2009 Barbara Walters proclaimed:
“You tell kids to have cheesecake for breakfast. You tell them to have chocolate cake and meatloaf for lunch. And french fries. Doesn’t it bother you that you’re adding to this?”
Her cooking style hasn’t sat well with other celebrity chefs either including Anthony Bourdain who last August called Deen the “worst, most dangerous person to America” while adding that Deen should “think twice before telling an already obese nation that it’s OK to eat food that is killing us.”
Deen’s reply:
“You know, not everybody can afford to pay $58 for prime rib or $650 for a bottle of wine. My friends and I cook for regular families who worry about feeding their kids and paying the bills … It wasn’t that long ago that I was struggling to feed my family, too.”
If the Diabetes rumor is true it will be interesting to see if Paula Deen abandons some of the menu items at The Lady & Sons , the restaurant she owns in Savannah, GA. On the menu is “Paula’s Brunch Burger, a wonderfully fat burger topped with fried egg and bacon that sits between two glazed doughnuts in place of a bun.
How exactly is that burger good for regular families?
So from the outside looking in Paula Deen has made a nice little industry for herself, first she fattens up her fan base, then she turns around and sells them type 2 diabetes drugs while banking millions of dollars for her efforts.
Do you think Paula Deen should continue to profiteer off the very people she quite possibly gave Diabetes to in the first place if rumors of her own type 2 diabetes are true?