Yesterday was a pretty cool day. I got to sleep in, cook a good meal or two, watch some evening news, and got a slammin workout in. However, as you may allude due to the title of this post, I saw something on the evening news that kind of made me want to walk out into traffic in a blind incomprehensible stupor of unbelieving. A very popular comfort-food television cook, famous for making foods that would make your arteries cough just to see them, recently came out saying that she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. A big reason she made this announcement public (and after a 3 year period from being initially diagnosed) was the fact that she’s now a paid endorser of a specific diabetes medication by a pharmaceutical company.

Here’s the really funny thing: Anthony Bourdain tweeted that he was going to get into the leg breaking business so he could clean up on sales of crutches, which was a simply hilarious stab at Deen’s choice to not disclose this information after diagnosis and while she continued to market and sell foods that make people rediculously sick and obese.

Anthony Bourdain is officially awesome. That is one of my all-time favorite snarky tweets.

In a follow-up interview, when asked if she felt the dietary choices she made, such as deep-frying a store-bough cheesecake (Huh??) or making a burger out of 2 donuts for the buns (SERIOUSLY?!?!), may have contributed to her development of diabetes, she said that she didn’t believe so, claiming it was due to her genetics.

Now let me get this straight. After peddling foods that would even make endocrinologists want to hit things, foods that are all highly correlated to the development of diabetes, even if eaten only sporadically yet regularly, you’re not even willing to say that there is a possibility that your diet and lifestyle played a role in a disease that is directly related to the individuals’ diet and lifestyle?

But let’s say for a second that it IS actually due to her genes and not her diet. This would mean that she would have had to have a complete genetic workup to determine which of the dominant diabetic alleles (if any) she possessed. Of the 18 independent genotypic loci determined to have a direct linkage to type 2 diabetes and the 30 or so that are indirectly linked to the development, those with the greatest risk of developing the disease would have to have more than 24 alleles in order to have a higher chance of developing the disease compared to someone who had less than 10 alleles, and this rate is only found in around 1.8% of the population (based on a large research trial performed by the UK Type 2 Diabetes Genetic Consortium, and referenced HERE), or around the same percentage of people who feel Tracy Andersons’ future spawn will come out of the womb looking orange and have her mother call them fat.

When they looked at the risk of developing diabetes in correlation to age, gender, and body mass index, the inclusion of having more of the specific diabetic alleles on their individual genetic profile didn’t amount to much more than a 0.02 difference in area under the curve, meaning having the genetic pre-cursors for developing diabetes doesn’t mean jack.

So let’s say she went to the effort to have her entire genetic sequence mapped out (unlikely), found out she had a genetic predisposition to posessing more than 24 of the identified alleles linked to diabetes (less than 1.2% of the population would qualify for this), and also qualified as having genetic susceptibility to her hemoglobin A1C molecule being more fubar’d than an episode of Jersey Shore, I might be inclined to believe it was genetically based. Now, if she also had a monozygotic identical twin who exercised regularly and ate a well-balanced healthy diet and who was also diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, then I would actually believe that her genetics were the main influencer, not her environment. That being said, she is willing to cut back on her intake of sweet tea, so I guess that’s something right?

This kind of stuff ticks me off. I mean, here she is with a diagnosis that’s telling her she is doing something really wrong with her health, and she’s trying to play the victim and blame something that’s out of her control, meaning everyone can still like her and buy her recipe books because they’re not that bad for you!! Meanwhile, she can still sell you some of the medication that will help you stay alive after demolishing your pancreas and cellular insulin sensitivity, all the while not believing the evidence that the food she’s jamming down people’s throats is what may be causing the problems in the first place. Win Win!!!!

We as a society need to raise the bar of respect for ourselves by taking ownership of our actions. If you get sick, it’s because of something you did or didn’t do, not because of some latent feature that is only loosely related. If you get a cold, it’s typically because you either work in an environment that has a lot of cold bugs floating around, you’re eating like crap and not giving your body the nutrition it needs, and not getting enough sleep to help recover your immune system properly. If you’re gaining weight, it’s because you’re not eating well enough or not exercising properly. If you hate your job and don’t make enough money, it’s your business to find a new job you enjoy and that pays you well enough to do what you want to do.

I think the vast size of the shit-kicking she’s taking in the media right now is a combination of the acute irony of it all, as well as the fact that she’s not accepting responsibility for her disease while simultaneously hocking the pills she’s being paid to sell to help treat the disease. Even the Sham-Wow guy is looking at her and thinking “Wow, you’re an idiot if you think that’s going to be a good sales pitch lady.”

I’m sure from a PR standpoint, she would become a lot more popular if she had said something along the lines of “You know, maybe cooking all that crap was what got me here in the first place. I’m going to dedicate the rest of my career to showing you how you can still lead a decadent life without running the risk of developing diabetes by using different ingredients that still taste great.” Then she would go on to make things with fruits, veggies, herbs and spices, and different types of grains that would still make your mouth water and not make you piss Kool Aid at the same time.

But that would take some effort, and be mildly inconvenient to learn something different. Perish the thought.

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