Famecrawler
Paula Deen: I Won’t Give Up Butter!
Paula's adopting a more moderate lifestyle
No more sweet tea for Paula Deen – but don’t take away her butter!
Paula just revealed on the Today show that she’s had type 2 diabetes for the last 3 years. She chose to keep it secret for this long because “I had to figure things out in my own head,” she told Al Roker.
But now that she’s had time to adjust to the idea – not to mention nailing down a nice deal with a pharmaceutical company to promote their diabetes-management campaign – she’s coming forward to talk about her illness. “Now I have something to offer people,” she explains in this week’s Parade magazine.
The popular Food Network host credits her sons with helping her through the crisis. “They are the most precious things in my life. They have always been so supportive of their mother, and when times are hard, they’ve never left my side.”
But even though poor diet is a risk factor for this form of diabetes (along with age, weight and genetics), Paula is surprisingly unapologetic about the rich Southern cooking that made her famous.
For instance, she won’t be using margarine instead of butter. “Margarine is one molecule away from eating plastic,” she says. “There is a chance that I can cut down on the amount of butter now that I’m aware, but will I cut butter out of my life completely? No. I will take measures to manage it.”
Deprivation isn’t Paula’s thing. “If I have to think that for the rest of my life that I can never have a piece of cake, that would make me so sad. That would make me wanna cry!” she says. But she’s also quick to point out that she doesn’t cook her signature dishes for herself every day, and that she enjoys fresh veggies as much as she does fried chicken.
The one thing she did swear off for good was that Southern beverage of choice, sweet tea. She used to drink it from lunchtime to bedtime. “When you calculate how much empty calories and how much sugar I was consuming, it was staggering.”
Admirable as her new awareness campaign is, one can’t help being just a teensy bit cynical. Would she have done her fans more of a service by doing this back when she was first diagnosed, instead of subjecting them to pot pies and buttery pound cakes for three more years? Or made more of an effort to promote exercise?
Even one of her supportive sons seems to be trying to change the family rep for high-cal comfort foods. Bobby has a new show called Not My Mama’s Meals.
[Photo: Pacific Coast News]
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