My Letter to Paula Deen

 Please note: This letter is a satire. It is not intended to be taken literally, so please do not. This letter has a higher purpose and makes a point. Please do not take this letter literally. Thank you.

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Dear Paula,

I just wanted to send a quick note to congratulate you on your diabetes diagnosis. I'm so happy for you! Your choice to hide your diagnosis from the general public was absolutely brilliant from a business perspective. You obviously can't let those morons in the general public realize that the high-carb, high fat delights you create could be bad for them, right? Absolutely brilliant to hide your diagnosis until you could make a huge profit off of it. Let's face it, you were never in this business to help people, it's all about making money, right? Those idiots who think you should use this opportunity to be a "role model" must be insane. I mean, seriously ... changing your cooking style to include healthier ingredients would NEVER make as much money as you'll make being the spokesperson for a diabetes medication whose side effects are already causing concern, right? What the heck are they thinking?

I loved the interview you did where you said you won't change the way you cook and eat. Be a role model and potentially inspire the other 30 million diabetics in the US to make positive changes? Hell no, right? Embracing your type 2 diabetes instead of trying to reverse it as over 300,000 other suckers have just doesn't make sense. Why bother changing how you eat when you can shoot up instead?

It was also brilliant that you started with a medication that costs $500 dollars per month and is injectable instead of promoting less expensive medications with fewer side effects. Brilliant planning, because you'll soon be able to be a spokesperson for insulin shots and insulin pumps since the way you're eating and living pretty much guarantees you'll soon graduate to full-blown Type 1 Diabetes. Awesome planning on your part. Absolutely awesome. Why settle for being a spokesperson for a low-dollar oral med when you can easily promote a far more invasive medication that costs twenty times as much and was found to cause thyroid tumors and thyroid cancers during clinical trials?

Best of all, your choice to embrace diabetes instead of trying to reverse it will now provide ample opportunity to gain other lucrative celebrity endorsement contracts. Since you refuse to change your eating habits, exercise or stop to think about the fact your high-carb diet caused your disease, you will soon be able to get endorsements from dialysis centers, artificial limb companies, and groups that sponsor assistance dogs for the blind. It is another brilliant business move to turn kidney failure, amputation and blindness from diabetic retinopathy into a means of growing your huge financial empire. When the pain from diabetic neuropathy becomes too severe to allow you to stand in front of a camera, you can get even more endorsements for narcotic pain relievers since none work well enough to allow people with neuropathy to live pain-free. Absolutely brilliant! It would just be silly to use your wealth to hire a personal trainer or a personal chef who could teach you how to eat in a way that might eliminate your chance to get those endorsements. Your brilliant business acumen is a model of manipulative efficiency. Kudos.

Thanks so much for encouraging other people with type 2 diabetes to completely ignore what their doctors and diabetic educators are telling them. Screw that, right? Just do what you want and gain more endorsements! Well, all the "little people" will gain is loss of sight, kidney failure, intense pain and death, but you can't be bothered by that, can you? You have a business empire to run, after all.

Thanks for being such a great business role model to other women entrepreneurs. When we hear of your death a few short years from now, we promise to send gorgeous flowers while we shake our heads and say we knew it would happen. It's good to die rich, isn't it?

Sincerely,

A cynical but unsurprised non-fan

Note to readers: Before you start sending comments about how my letter to Paula lacks compassion, let me clarify that I've had Type 1 diabetes longer than most of you have been alive (almost 50 years), and I've personally helped 100s of people reverse diabetes and get off all meds. News of her diagnosis genuinely broke my heart. However, one thing I've learned in years of professional practice is that you can't help someone who won't help themselves. Paula had a chance to make lifestyle changes and greatly decrease her need for the injectable medication she's endorsing, but she instead chose to embrace the profit she could earn by being a pharmaceutical spokesperson. The medication she's endorsing has already caused issues during its clinical trials and was found to cause thyroid tumors and thyroid cancers. I won't apologize for my sarcasm. I feel Paula's choice to continue eating a horrible, high-carb diet may influence others to ignore the advice of their medical professional and eat the same way they see her cook. It could have devastating effects.