Aw Ma, do I gotta?
Well, I guess I should behave as if I live in consensus reality. That includes occasional commentary on stuff that hits the news. And it beats the hell out of Jimmy’s interview with Nutty Anti-Low-Carb Person.
All righty then. For those of you who still think we’re at war with the Soviets because you have been living in an underground bunker for the last fifty years, we now have cable television and one of the channels available is about pretty much nothing but food. And they have cooking shows. And the star of one of those cooking shows is one Paula Deen from Savannah, Georgia, who has become notorious for cooking everything in butter–including, apparently, sticks of butter. (Or maybe that’s exaggeration. I haven’t been following her show, because I don’t give a sweet shit, despite the fact that she hails from one of my very favorite cities EVAR.) Now it transpires that she was diagnosed type 2 diabetic three years ago, and is just now going public about it because she has worked out some sort of endorsement deal with a pharmaceutical company to hawk diabetes meds.
Commence collective eyeball-rolling from all the animal-food-o-phobes who JUST KNEW all that butter-eating was going to make Ms. Deen sick one day. Examples:
Dr. Michael Smith of WebMD: “She never shies away from her love of all things fatty. Needs more butter, ya’ll!! Followed by that wonderful laugh. But in the back of my mind, I always feared that her story would take this all too common turn.”
Chris from Medad News: “Paula ‘put a burger and bacon and a fried egg between two donuts’ Deen rumored to have type 2 diabetes? It would have been more shocking if she didn’t.”
Joan Rivers: “Paula Deen and a stick of butter is kind of like Melissa and me. Sooner or later we’re going to kill each other.”
Steve Barnes of the Table Hopping column in the Albany, NY Times-Union (who, by the way, is very low down on my personal list of food writers whose personal habits I should emulate–check out his picture): “I am opposed to independently owned restaurants being required to print nutritional information on their menus… Still, I think it’s in their best interest to develop lower-calorie dishes that are also lower in fat and sodium, and to let their customers know such options exist.”
Karen Stabiner of the Los Angeles Times: “Paula Deen came out last week. The cookbook author and television personality, known for her enthusiasm for high-fat and fried foods, has been a closet diabetic for three years — and for the moment, she’s the chef we love to hate, having seduced us with unhealthful recipes on the one hand while she checked her blood sugar with the other… [snip] In the battle between healthcare reality and fantasy, Paula Deen is small potatoes (steamed, skins on, no butter)…”
Sarah O’Leary of HuffPo: “Marketing mixes and Type II Diabetes can’t be fixed, much to Ms. Deen’s chagrin, with a sweet smile and pound of butter.”
Some of these good souls have been intelligent enough to at least give Deen’s sugar intake equal press time with her fat intake. But over and over again I hear tired references to her butter intake being the chief element to blame for her disease.
I am not going to get into a big tirade here about how stupid people think you can raise your blood sugar by eating a stick of butter. I mean, IF you could finish the stick of butter in the first place (and you must eat it all by itself, no breading or added sugar allowed), this claim is so easy to test. Don’t eat past midnight the day you test this. Get up, don’t eat breakfast, don’t drink anything, and take a fasting blood sugar with a glucose meter. Eat that stick of butter. Shit, eat a tablespoon of it. Eat or drink nothing else for an hour afterward. Test your sugar again. I will be very, very, VERY surprised if your blood sugar has gone up at all. If it has gone up, it probably hasn’t gone up more than ten points, and then I’d be wondering what the hell your liver is doing. (The liver is known to dump sugar into your bloodstream from time to time. See item 8 here.)
But you get the idea. The claim that butter causes diabetes can be checked. If a food really contributes to diabetes then it should be sending your blood sugar all over the map because diabetes of either type is a disorder of blood sugar metabolism, either because you make no insulin (type 1/”juvenile”) or because you can’t respond to your insulin (type 2/”adult-onset”). Fat has nothing to do with this, because fat isn’t sugar.
Some folks in the low-carb community are leery of combining fat and sugar because they say that makes saturated fat dangerous in the body. I think sugar can aid in the storage of dietary saturated fat in your fat cells, so you could potentially gain more weight by combining the two. But at the end of the day you need saturated fat to be healthy, and your body likes you to eat more than it can produce. And you don’t need sugar. So to me the combination of the two isn’t an issue. Just don’t do it. See? Simple. (Didn’t say “easy,” said “simple.”)
And actually, I doubt that combining saturated fat and sugar is dangerous per se. Actually? I’m suspicious that the reason Paula Deen was diagnosed with diabetes at age sixty-one–instead of at forty, as my mother was, or all these poor kids getting it under the age of 20–was because she was eating all that fucking butter.
Let me elucidate a bit.
- Paula Deen was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, so we hear, around the age of sixty-one. Not fifteen, not twenty, not forty. Sixty-one. Bit more of a normal age for “adult onset” diabetes.
- We weren’t hearing a lot of stories about Deen getting sick before this. Believe you me, if she were having issues with her blood sugar, we’d have heard about them, because everyone was looking forward to that little trainwreck. Deen has been making enough money over the past decade to go to the doctor for annual checkups. Doctors are becoming quite a bit more vigilant about checking blood sugar, and they tend to be extra-careful with celebrities. So I think they caught this disease process in Deen right about the time she transitioned from pre-diabetic to diabetic, as opposed to her going ten years with diabetes and no diagnosis.
- Most people who get type 2 diabetes are not going around eating bacon cheeseburgers with Krispy Kreme (or whatever kind of) donuts as the bun. Or deep-fried sticks of butter. Or Oreo-stuffed chocolate-chip cookies. My mother certainly never ate things like that, and she went diabetic twenty years younger than Deen.
Something was keeping Deen from going diabetic at age ten. Something kept protecting her through all the excesses of her twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. That something, in fact, protected her despite her greater-than-average consumption of the worst sugary crap possible. And if doctors, scientists, and celebrity diet goo-roos had an honest bone in all their bodies put together, they’d be asking why this blatant dietary miscreant got away with her bullshit for so very long.
HMMMM.
Going back to my mother, also a Southerner and given to eating (her area’s version of) Southern cuisine: Mom has spent most of her adult life in poverty. Her personality’s even more difficult than mine to deal with and I’ve been poor most of my adult life as well, so I haven’t been able to help her. Can’t speak for my brothers and one of them has been dead for over a year now. So, that’s Mom’s situation. So Mom has never really been able to afford large amounts of butter. As with other poor Southern people, she resorts to margarine instead, and as far as most of the South is concerned, butter and margarine are pretty much the same thing. (My dad even argues that Country Crock tastes better than butter. I think Dad was born with his taste buds on backwards.)
Also, being poor, Mom eats some cheap cuts of meat, such as hamburger–but she can’t afford large amounts of it. As with other poor people generally, she stretches her food dollar with cheap starches like rice and pasta. On top of that, rice is an ethnic food in her area of the country, giving her even more reason to eat it.
On top of that, while Southerners have never completely bought in to all the “healthy food” notions the USDA tries to cram down this country’s collective throat, they did long ago substitute Crisco for lard. A few holdouts still use lard, but most have transitioned over. I don’t think I ever tasted lard til I’d grown up and left home, and if I did, I didn’t know I was eating it and I got it less frequently than once a year. I never saw it in the pantries of my mother, my grandparents, or any of my other relatives. My family also makes extensive use of soybean oil in their cooking, especially deep-frying.
Lots of starch, no butter, not enough meat, lots of trans fats and polyunsaturated oils. Does this sound familiar? It should, if you’re not a blind snobby classist twit. It’s how poor people eat all over the United States today. Now who has the highest rates of diabetes of all the social classes? I dunno… take a look.
In light of all this, I don’t think Paula Deen’s hawking of butter, lard, meat, and cheese is going to do the greatest damage to her fans. I think a combination of her hawking a diabetes drug (none of which are entirely safe–even metformin, recommended by Dr. Atkins when he was alive, depletes B12 and folate) and retconning her recipes to be “healthier” is going to be the real problem. Because in the end, what we’ll be looking at is a Paula Deen repertoire that is heavy on starch, lacking in butter, cutting back on the meat and upping the “vegetable” oil (or, just as bad, canola).
And when that happens, to whom will Southerners turn to help them out of their dietary tailspin?
Paula Deen is missing a tremendous opportunity here, and I’m sorry to see it.
