The Deen of “Diabetes-Friendly” Diets
By tristero
In responding to a previous post on Paula Deen, a commenter took me to task for assuming bad faith on Deen’s part, that maybe all she wanted to do was, you know, share these really great indulgent recipes with people like herself. I was – almost – prepared to consider the point a legitimate one (even if I disagreed), until Digby, via email, sent me a link to this alternet article. I have to confess that I didn’t quite understand it at first- not because it is difficult to read but because the behavior, on the part of Deen, on the part of the pharmaceutical company, is so breathtakingly cynical, so horrible, and so greedy it simply defies belief.
If this article is right – and Marion Nestle, to be sure, is a very reputable nutritionist – Type 2 diabetes can be reversed by diet. But drug companies wont make money “managing” diabetes if people simply eat with anything remotely resembling sanity and thereby reverse the course of the disease. Therefore, a drug company approached Deen – get this – before they knew she had diabetes because they believed her disgusting and unhealthy food was “diabetes-friendly” and therefore good for their business.
Like so many other truly despicable players in the American public discourse, Deen comes across as a likeable, charming person. If this article is true, her charm is as fake and as cynical as her pose as just one more middle-class Southern housewife.
In reality, she’s just one more rapacious, utterly repellent multi-millionaire without a clue about what it means to be part of the 99% who can’t afford the kind of medical care and other luxuries she takes for granted.