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Worrying About Paula Deen
©2009 Susan Fekety MSN CNM
I cancelled my cable subscription about 6 months ago, but even without ready access to television I have maintained contact with the people who teach cooking thereupon: Martha, Rachael Ray (Why does she spell it that way!?), Jimmy Flay (This guy is practically welded to his barbeque grill, and his name refers to an archaic form of torture involving the removal of skin from flesh. An inside joke? I’m just asking...), the Barefoot Contessa, Paula Deen, that crazy guy with the hair….
I am troubled today about Paula, after watching an episode of her show while on the treadmill at the gym. (That’s the only exposure I get now – and I think my life is the better for it, by the way. Though I don’t recognize the folks in People magazine anymore, I haven’t missed much in terms of news.)
Paula Deen is smart and funny – but oh my goodness, the meal she prepared! I’m SO worried her cardiovascular health. I would love to come help her learn some food substitutions and recipe modifications, and help her to imagine what to do with a green vegetable besides deep frying it. Particularly because she’s a role model of sorts; I walk in the supermarket and her smiling, shining happy face is everywhere, an icon of the good life, home cooking, and “comfort food.” Goodness knows that sugar, fat, and white foods are particularly attractive in times of economic meltdown: stress hormones go up, normal appetite hormones go out the window. There is a biochemistry behind it -- this is not about willpower. Folks are vulnerable.
Admittedly, the Paula episode in question offered a holiday menu but still – it’s one you’d prepare for a family you were trying to bump off. Are you ready?
We started with a deep fried ham. Paula took this big old pig leg and dropped it into a deep fryer. She and her guest-of-the-day scurried away across the kitchen in fear, it sizzled so robustly while cooking. The ham’s skin came out crusty black from the sugar it had absorbed from overnight brining in sweet water before it got fried. This was plated up elegantly and served with a pineapple brown sugar glaze.
I found myself imagining that this would be a good teaching tool for a class covering advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. AGEs are queer nasty waste-product molecules that form when sugars (as in high blood sugar) bind up with proteins (as in your tissues.) AGEs develop when you eat browned, crusty food (grilled, roasted, fried) or when, if your blood sugar is elevated, you sort of BECOME a brown crusty food, but on the inside. AGEs make cells and tissues turn sticky, gunky, and stiff – and organ damage from AGE’s cause things like cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, and the nerve, retinal, and kidney problems seen in folks with diabetes. I think of them as the sine qua non of the cellular havoc one can wreak via suboptimal food choices. Like sweet fried ham.
Next, Paula made mashed potatoes. OK, so I will accept potatoes as a vegetable, though not a terribly nutritious one (cheerleading from the potato growing industry notwithstanding.) White potatoes convert to sugar really quickly when you eat them, which is not a good thing metabolically, and they don’t have many vitamins even if you eat the skins. To her potatoes, Paula added a couple roasted lumps of garlic (yum!) – and THEN a big pile of bacon bits (a pound and a half of bacon!), a large container of sour cream, a heap of grated cheddar cheese, and a generous hunk of butter. Oh. My. God. I kicked the treadmill up a notch, just in case the visuals were affecting me metabolically.
As Paula addressed a lovely collection of beautiful asparagus stalks I found myself relaxing a bit. Antioxidants! Micronutrients! Perhaps this meal could be salvaged somewhat. (Maybe there might even be a salad!) But my hopes were dashed: those gorgeous asparagii were floured and breaded and deep fried, then dunked in a sour cream creole dip. Oops!
For dessert, it was red velvet cake bread pudding. If you are not familiar with it, red velvet cake is a traditional Southern delight involving shocking quantities of red food coloring (like, a couple ounces – whereas the little bottle in your cupboard most likely contains just a quarter ounce) in a butter-based cake batter. I think there’s some chocolate in there too. It is deep blood red and gorgeously festive. Anyway – chunks of this cake got baked in a sugar, egg and cream custard, and topped with ice cream. All that red, combined with the rather pedestrian but predictable sugar rush, well, I sure hope nobody in your house reacts to artificial coloring if you decide to serve this. (“Mommy, why is Johnny banging his head on the wall? We were just playing checkers!”)
By the way, researchers in the United Kingdom have recently demonstrated, in the prestigious medical journal Lancet, no less, that the link between food colorants and hyperactive child behavior isn’t one of those fringy junk science hippie notions after all. In fact, their version of the FDA has called for a “voluntary ban” on food coloring additives. Imagine! Over here -- well, coal-tar derived dyes are in lots of things people eat and feed their kids.
Don’t get me wrong – I think Paula Deen is the nuts. I mean, she built herself up from nothing: she is a real single-mother success story and more power to her! I love how much she obviously gets juice from cooking and eating and having fun – and I’ll take that over food phobia any day. But oh my goodness, I worry. I mean, you can’t eat all that saturated fat and sugar for long without paying a price – inflammation, obesity, heart disease, cancer, problems with blood sugar regulation….all the stuff a brilliant business-woman does not need.
I worry about the Barefoot Contessa, too – the northeastern version of Paula, who also relies heavily on lovely but health-negative ingredients like cream and butter and white sugar (though I would assert that Contessa has a much higher consciousness for veggies than Paula does, and I’ve never seen her deep fry anything.) Still, both of them are more apple- than pear-shaped women, and that is both predictable and troubling.
To both of them, I stand ready to offer thoughts and advice, should that prove helpful. Till then, I’ll take my asparagus, um, lightly steamed.
© 2009 Susan E. Fekety
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SUSAN FEKETY, RN, MSN, CNM is a Yale-educated advanced practice nurse with special expertise in nutrition and dietary therapies. She provides comprehensive women’s health care at True North Health Center in Falmouth, and coordinates True North’s First Line Therapy program (a clinically-proven, user-friendly program for improving health, weight, mood, and energy in men and women.) Her book of affirmations for pregnant women can be found at www.pocketmidwife.com.
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