Paula Deen. Some rights reserved by Digitas Photos (cc-by-nc-nd)
Earlier this week, Paula Deen, the doyenne of southern cooking and comfort, announced what many had been suspecting — that she has Type 2 diabetes. When asked why she waited three years after her original diagnosis to announce that she had the disease, she responded that she “… had to figure things out in [her] own head.” (Here’s my translation: “Cough-wait-for-a-pharmaceutical-endorsement-contract-cough.“)
What she did not comment on was the elephant in the room: the role that her hunk-o-butter, cheese-lovin’, comfort food recipes, and subsequent lifestyle choices, played in her prognosis. Genetics is a factor in Type 2 diabetes, but diet and exercise can significantly influence when, if at all, the disease manifests and how far it progresses. Who knows how often Paula Deen eats the food she preaches on her show, but she is certainly overweight and no doubt this, at least in part, was responsible for her diabetes.
As somewhat of a health nut myself, I can appreciate how hard it is to try to maintain a healthy lifestyle in this day and age. Setting aside time to work out everyday is difficult, and it seems that exercise time is always the first thing to get cut on a busy day. Making the right food choices when faced with what seems like ever-growing temptation (new fast food restaurants on every corner, constant flow of snacks in the office break room, delicious but fattening items on restaurant menus, etc.), is a struggle.
Paula Deen had the perfect platform to address the American public, a population with a clear obesity epidemic and related diabetes outbreak, and comment on the importance of lifestyle choices. Instead, she told the Today show that diabetes “…[isn’t] a death sentence,” and shifted the discussion to the diabetes drug website she is promoting as a paid spokesperson.
This only confirms the notion that many Americans have; Who cares if I eat poorly, don’t exercise and get diabetes? There’s a pill for that. What Americans need to be hearing is that they can, at least in part, control their chances of getting this terrible disease and by doing so relieve their family of certain hardship, not to mention lift the burden that obesity-related diseases place on the American taxpayers.
Paula Deen strayed from her moral duty as I see it by blowing right over the role a healthy lifestyle plays in diabetes management. Instead of using her experience and influence as a teaching tool, she made a lucrative business decision. I guess it’s hard to turn down a big-bucks deal but her choice was still disappointing.
Anna Schroeder, a junior at Rice University, is an intern in the editorial department at the Baker Institute. She is majoring in mathematical economic analysis and Spanish.