Help keep One Green Planet free and independent! Together we can ensure our platform remains a hub for empowering ideas committed to fighting for a sustainable, healthy, and compassionate world. Please support us in keeping our mission strong.
Paula Deen, known for her love for butter and heavy cream had diabetes for the past three years, but continued to dish up deep-fried cheesecake and other high-calorie, high-fat recipes on TV.
Deen finally came clean about her illness on the Today show, where she told Al Roker that she had teamed up with pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk on a new website to promote the company’s diabetes medication Victoza.
In response to Deen’s announcement, PETA wrote her a letter, asking Deen to trade in her pills for a healthy diet. PETA pointed out that numerous studies have found that adopting a vegan diet can reduce or even eliminate the need for diabetes medications and reduces the risk of developing the disease in the first place.
Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible was named one of the five worst cookbooks of 2011, in a report released by the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). Deen’s cookbook is full of high-fat recipes that can raise one’s risk for obesity, heart disease, and diabetes and includes nutrition bombs such as Hot Buffalo Wings: A single serving of three wings contains 910 calories and 85 grams of fat!
This could have been such an amazing opportunity for Paula Deen to educate the public about the importance of a healthy diet. Instead, she’s cashing in on her crisis by partnering with big pharma to promote drugs. Well, I suppose there’s no money in spreading the truth, right?
While I’m a vegan myself and I like what this website is promoting, I believe that Paula Deen’s health status was hers to ‘disclose’ whenever she chose. She did not have a responsibility to reveal it to the public. She was not required to ‘come clean’ about her health status to anyone. I also don’t recall seeing anywhere that she made claims that her food reduced cholesterol, cleared arteries, makes you a better sprinter, clears your pimples, or gives you shiny hair. Mostly she just says, “This is delicious, y’all.”
Furthermore, there is no proof that her diet is the cause of her diabetes. There are many potential causes for diabetes – its a complex issue. If you are truly interested in reading health research that doesn’t normally get promoted in mainstream media read Health at Every Size, by Linda Bacon.
People are responsible for their own food choices. If you don’t like what she’s serving up, move on to the next buffet tray, mind your own sweet business, and take care of your own body. The food police can leave me alone. I can choose for myself.
This is so disappointing to find out. A food icon like Paula Dean should be working to control her type II diabetes with dietary improvements. She could reach, and teach, a HUGE audience. Shame on you Paula Dean!