Steve Cuozzo, The Post’s restaurant critic, has Type 2 diabetes.
Come clean, Paula Deen!
The public has a right to know a lot more about the Food Network star’s Type 2 diabetes diagnosis, her treatment and new role as the “face” of a $500-a-month drug.
What’s the queen of trailer-park cuisine got to hide?
Deen refuses to divulge basic details of what’s wrong with her or whether she’s gotten better or worse since she started injecting herself with Victoza. Type 2 diabetes can range from a mere nuisance to life-threatening. Telling us she’s taking more strolls and cutting back on “sweet tea” doesn’t cut it.
She kept quiet about having diabetes for three years. Now, through her flacks, she declines to answer basic questions which occur to any diabetic and which we routinely share as easily as “see y’all” — her weight and blood sugar, for starters.
It’s reprehensible enough that Deen’s profiting from a dangerous condition her TV stardom, among other revenue streams, has likely helped spread. But hypocrisy isn’t the only indigestible aspect of her “Diabetes in a New Light” tango with drugmaker Novo Nordisk.
I’m no doctor, but Deen doesn’t look any healthier or thinner than she did a few years ago.
The stuff she’s taking might benefit her no more than a Great Books collection would boost a Kardashian’s brain.
The only way to know for sure is for Deen to say exactly how Victoza has helped her, if it has. Aren’t paid spokespeople usually paid to talk about what a product does for them?
These were the softballs her handlers ducked (although they conveyed that Paula “loved” that I review restaurants despite having diabetes and wanted to take me to dinner):
* Is your weight up, down or the same since you were diagnosed, and since you started daily Victoza injections?
* What about daily blood-glucose readings and A1C (a several-months’ average of blood sugar) since diagnosis and since you started using Victoza? At least, have they gone up or down on a percentage basis?
* Before using a ridiculously expensive medication whose long-term efficacy has yet to be established, did you try other cheaper, highly effective drugs — like metformin, which helped lower my own daily blood sugar from 350 to a healthy 90-110, and costs less than $20 a month?
Deen can hardly claim the details are too intimate to reveal. She “accidentally” dropped her pants at the South Beach Food & Wine Festival a few years ago and enthusiastically mooned the crowd.
Now she’s flashing her butt at millions of people with Type 2 who find her vagueness infuriating.
Deen selling Victoza isn’t like Donald Trump doing Domino’s pizza commercials. She’s playing with life and death.
Overeating fatty and sugary foods doesn’t cause diabetes, where body cells become resistant to insulin. But it can make a condition comparatively benign (as mine now is) lethal — as it did for my father.
If the pharmaceutical fat cats haven’t dumped Deen by next week, they’d better urge her to tell us what good their needle has done for her. Otherwise we’ll assume that shooting up with Victoza is no better than “taking a coupla more walks.”